If I said "we don't allow murder", but gave everyone 17 free murders, would you find that contradictory?
It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
I think you're confused. Facebook does neither. Facebook makes and enforces their own policies, not laws.
> It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
They should staff a human review/appeals process again, then. They used COVID as the excuse to discard that cost center.
But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?
[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...
> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook
Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.
I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
> 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
(Emphasis mine). I think the parent article is repeatedly lying about the facts, that’s super annoying. I’m not at all surprised that Facebook and Instagram have the lions share of social-media victims, because they also have the lions share of social media users.
Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.
(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)
Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.
I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.
A witch hunt that finds actual witches everywhere isn't really a "witch hunt" in the sense the term is usually used.
We don't have the years of analysis of what actually happened for things happening right now.
While a lot of people feel a lot of certainty about all manner of social media harms, the scientific consensus is much less clear. Sure you can pull up studies showing something that looks pretty bad, but you can also find ones that say that climate change is not occurring. The best we have to go on is scientific consensus. The consensus, is not there yet. How do you tell if Jonathan Haidt is another Andrew Wakefield?
I'm genuinely curious how you keep your own epistemic house in order.
That's how I know.
I also don't go around talking about race based differences in IQ, but that's just Haidt.
I am prepared to go with scientific consensus.
"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."
Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.
17 is a weird number but having a number is perfectly reasonable to me.
Requiring N distinct reports of a suspension reason would seem to reduce misuses of the reporting system.
The 17-reports threshold might have been found to balance type-1 and type-2 errors, as account removals are costly actions when made in error or as a result of reporting-system misuse.
Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.
Seventeen is a "yeah sure it's not allowed wink wink" policy. Especially when they'll just go make another account afterwards.
I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.