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Comment by BrainVirus | Hacker News Reader

That's all nice and well, but I no longer can tell the difference between Big Tech's "Abuse Prevention" and abuse. They need transparency not because it's going to make their job easier. They need transparency because literally millions of people hate their companies and don't have one iota of trust in their internal decision-making. Big Tech workers might think all those people are morons and can be ignored indefinitely. In reality, it simply doesn't work this way.

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You think you want transparency and that it’ll make you trust them, but it won’t. Even if you found out how those decisions are made, it won’t make a difference.

Here’s something I wrote a couple days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33224347). It’ll tell you how one component of Meta’s content moderation works. Read it and tell me if it made you suddenly increase the level of trust you have in them.

What will actually happen is that you’ll cherry pick the parts that confirm your biases. Happy to proven wrong here.

> You think you want transparency

It would be nice to know why the meme I posted got flagged because it didn't meet Facebook's vague 'Community Standards'. These platforms are enormous black boxes where their decision is final and there is no way to appeal, short of literally going into their building and asking to talk to the manager, which is outside of many people's scope, and not worth the effort. They would rather let content get censored than go out of their way to appeal.

It does look like they do tell you which part of the standards are violated and are pretty detailed / defined about what they are? Never really had that happen to me although since I barely use FB.

https://transparency.fb.com/en-gb/policies/community-standar...

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=community%20standar...

Transparency is the first step. The second step is forcing them to change their processes. After that finishes, that's when they will be trusted.

If it won't make a difference what's the harm in being transparent, then?

User trust doesn't increase. The ability of bad actors to craft malicious content that circumvents detection skyrockets.

We already have said actors. It sounds like you want ambiguity to punish your enemies.

Reading this article does, in fact, increase my trust that my Facebook account won't be randomly, irrevocably banned one day a la google.

The trouble is, that's not my primarily distrusted thing about facebook; I don't trust that the power they have to shape people's opinions by deciding what to show them, won't be abused to make people think things that are good for facebook but bad for society at large.

So while that article does increase my trust in facebook in general, the magnitude of that increase is miniscule, because what it addresses is not the reason for lack of trust.

But you're right that transparency wouldn't solve that. Because it's only the first step. If facebook were to transparently say "we are promoting far right conspiracy theories because it makes us more money", and provide a database of exactly which things they were boosting, while perhaps I would "trust" them, I certainly wouldn't "like" them.

I think one of the main benefits of transparency is disincentivizing shady behavior in the first place. Sunlight makes the cockroaches go away, etc.

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