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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Meta restored Lula's FB account hours after it got flagged for content that as posted on their page. That is a pretty weak basis for a conspiracy theory.

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Did they anticipate there would be large numbers of attempts to report the page and cause it to be automatically flagged and/or blocked?

I am sure the American president is target for such efforts as well and provides ample material for rules violations.

As the source article covers, they’ve been facing a number of complaints from human rights organizations that they are being insufficiently censorious regarding the Brazilian election, failing to swiftly take down some things which ethical standards and Brazilian law require. So that presumably influenced their policy. A lot of people seem to have an idea that Facebook’s election policy should quickly block all the bad ads with no risk of blocking any good ones, and that’s just not possible.

One paper that really hammers this point: Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness [1]

The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219634

Wake me up when the right wing guy in the corporations pockets is banned by mistake

Is there a betting market for that?

IIRC, profiles of public officials are (or should be) handled differently.

Only insofar as more careful review. Otherwise, no, they shouldn't. Exactly the same policies on content should be applied uniformly to everyone.

I agree with both of you.

They should be handled differently [than they are today]. They should not be handled differently [than any other persons]. Meta should be giving everyone careful review.

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