Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

hahaha, welcome to feeling what it's like living in "the rest of the world".

Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban!

Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves.

If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves.

An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service.

Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world.

Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.

"Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce."

I mean, it seems like China does a pretty good (not perfect) job of censoring things. Not too long ago[1] Cisco (IIRC) and other companies were taking heat because they were providing China with tools that could be used for the "Great Firewall." Now we want to make it self-service...

The kick in the teeth about letting other countries censor / require censorship by U.S.-based companies is that we have been told over and over again that free trade and globalism was going to lead to a freer society.

Basically - full steam ahead on capitalism and trading with oppressive regimes, we'll have a good influence on them and wear down censorship, etc.

The opposite has happened. U.S.-based companies have become reliant on trade with those regimes to the point that they'll generally bow to censorship instead of pushing human rights.

(I'm very well aware that "American culture standards" are deeply imperfect, particularly as implemented by Facebook, et al. I'm not in favor of bowing to the most puritanical and hypocritical forces in the U.S., either...)

[1] https://archive.is/1ube2

I think what you’re missing is that to many of us in the rest of the world, the US is the oppressive regime violating human rights and forcing other countries to bow down.

Or just stop banning content entirely.

That wasn't even viable for 4chan.

But why not? They weren't threatened with legal action (and if they were, the correct solution would be to undo the law that they were threatened with). They were attacked by the same moral busybodies who have been clutching their pearls over violent video games since at least I was a kid. The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.

Ah, yes, 4chan, notably terrified of "moral busybodies".

It turns out even 4channers largely don't want to see some categories of shitty things.

Easy solution - give the users tools to filter what they don't want to see individually rather than decide for them.

You and I have different definitions of "easy" solutions.

Then you're left with two scenarios:

1. Users themselves have to see the stuff to filter it. This kind of work has burned out scores of classifiers. There's some really, really horrible stuff out there

2. The job will be left to people to make content filters. And those people would need to look at the stuff to filter it. And face legal consequence to doing so. And probably not get much compensation

Who or what group would fill #2? It would either be a group that sought to profit from it, or a group funded by governments, or a group that wanted to be at the node point for the spread of such material, or a group that wanted to influence society (e.g. for spam, or a foreign government seeking to mess with a society, etc)

It is hard to fathom the sheer volume of horrible content our filters deal with unless you've done any sort of moderation. And usually if you're doing moderation you're well downstream of the worst bits.

That's already available. Turns out, admin moderation is still necessary to make the website tolerable.

Besides, boards generally have just 150 threads running at once. If the majority of the live threads are just spammed crap, that makes everything worse. If there are 100 topics with lively discussion and 10 or so spam threads that haven't been culled yet, no problem. If there are 80 spam threads, then there's going to be a ton of churn as everyone competes for the other 70 threads. Each new one bumps another off the site. There'll be discussions started anew, with the same crap filling it up because people think they have to say it every time. This is what happens on fast-moving boards.

And one could ask "Why not change the number of live threads? Or never retire threads?" To which I'd respond, "If you have to keep recommending changes to fix what your other changes cause, maybe the original change wasn't good."

Filtering is a game of constant whack a mole. That's why mods and janitors are used to do it, because it would be overwhelming if it was on each and every user and, you'd spend the bulk of your time online seeing egregious content and updating your filters, as well as dealing with the stress of actually seeing that graphic stuff.

It takes one mildly determined person and 30 dollars to rent a server farm to post 150 threads of garbage, and there goes everything else on the catalog.

edit: actually, in the world where there's _zero_ moderation then you probably wouldn't even need the server farm since there wouldn't be any risk of being IP flagged.

You don't need to be threatened with legal action for the law to be a threat.

If they allowed so much sexual assault material to continue to be shared on their platform they would inevitably run into trouble.

> run into trouble

By what law? Because that law does violate the first amendment, and that can be addressed when it becomes an issue.

Images of child pornography are not protected under First Amendment rights, and are illegal contraband under federal law. Section 2256 of Title 18, United States Code, defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...

>The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.

Until they attack you with the law. You'll quickly find out that ignoring judges leads to bad outcomes.

Now, whatever they say could be total bullshit, and you could defend yourself and get paid damages, but not defending yourself at all is how you end up in deep debt or prison.

Or, govern this stuff under international treaty. Internet traffic _is not_ like truck traffic. It's more like radio (in some places it is radio). It's the Ross Sea, not I-95. What gives any one nation (or subdivision, like a certain US state known for its leading position at the Darwin Awards) the right to meddle with a global resource like that? Well, as a practical matter, they rarely do. Instead, they usually let the oligarchs who own the ruling elites (as well as the infrastructure) in each country do it: except when it's more convenient to use government as a hammer.

The radio spectrum is a finite resource that can only be (reasonably) consumed locally. The internet is for all intents and purposes infinite.

One of the purposes of government is to oversee the distribution of scarce resources in a way that avoids the tragedy of the commons.

This use case clearly applies to the EM spectrum allocation and clearly doesn't apply to the internet so I think comparing the internet and radio is a flawed analogy.

If we'd stop mixing up private communication with global-scope broadcast "platforms", that'd probably help.

Not that it's the users' fault—it's that these platforms have structured themselves that way.

This. With all of this AI/image recognition stuff, it'd be relatively easy to allow people to maintain a list of filters and when someone posts nudity, profanity, etc., just obscure it in their feed and present a "this is something you asked us to filter out <keyword>, proceed with caution" or just hide it entirely. Put the individual in control, and force them to create a list (if they wish) on next app open with a timestamp of if/when they declined to set something.

As for the concern about disinformation, ignore the content and watch the action. If some guy in the hills of Arkansas wants to think "them dems are lizard people" but doesn't show any signs of taking action, who cares (rhetorical)? If they show signs of action, follow the usual path of legal recourse/escalate to the proper authority.

> This. With all of this AI/image recognition stuff, it'd be relatively easy to allow people to maintain a list of filters and when someone posts nudity, profanity, etc., just obscure it in their feed and present a "this is something you asked us to filter out <keyword>, proceed with caution" or just hide it entirely. Put the individual in control, and force them to create a list (if they wish) on next app open with a timestamp of if/when they declined to set something.

Or even without AI tools. All this stuff is a complete non-issue on my extended-friend-group WhatsApps and my family text message threads. It was never a problem when I ran a private forum for people I knew, years and years ago. Mixing private communication with people you know with a global broadcast system seems to be what causes the problem to exist in the first place. Ordinary actual-humans-you-know communication channels don't need some 3rd-party censor, and for the most part don't even call for end-user-tunable censorship tools, beyond being able to leave & form groups or maybe set images to click/tap-to-view or something. Nothing sophisticated, certainly.

Facebook is based in the US, so of course it'll go by US standards. The tech companies in the article aren't based in India or China.

As an aside, I don't know if there's any US law against showing adult nudity on a website. Maybe there's a rule about users being over 18.

Meta are dominant in their sector across the globe. Of course they follow American standards, but their dominance insures the rest of the world goes by American standards.

Indeed there's no laws in the US that protect violent images whole covering the body, but that is the cultural standard which has been exported around the world.

I get that you're making a point that, why give control abroad to governments when I'm the US companies self censor?

First, what goes into the hands of companies versus the state also various culturally, and the US does have content laws other than the one you highlighted.

About the cultural standards, what would be normal in some other parts of the world? At least in the US, parents don't want porn showing up on kids' social media, and a sizeable number of adults at least don't want other people to see it on their screen. Big social media site like FB probably has to encode this as a "no nudity" rule.

I'm not sure about the violent images. There are definitely rules against showing bodily harm on FB, but I have no idea where the line is.

Breastfeeding is not porn

What would be normal? Like the poster above said, if my family goes to the beach and we take our shirts off, my girlfriend would be censored on Meta services but I wouldn't.

Notice that your comment equates nudity with pornography. Where I'm from it's not normal to do that.

I didn't equate nudity and pornography, and Americans don't do that. I'm asking if porn is normal elsewhere (answer was no) and saying FB moderation board might be lumping them together because there aren't fair ways to designate porn vs not.

If there's a social media site in some other country that doesn't have those rules, that'd be a good example.

The cultural component is that the female body is deemed as pornographic while the male body is not.

Nah the difference is that our governments use the language that works for us.

And they know that language because otherwise they wouldn't be in government.

So the US wants Tiktok to change and uses the language that will resonate with Americans to ban it when Tiktok doesn't fold.

China does the same with the companies it wants to change. That they listen is purely a financial decision.

I don't agree with the proposed TikTok ban. It's straight up protectionism, or govt censorship.

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