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by cscotti 2971 days ago
Restaurant accused of feeding criminals?
1 comments

Yeah, in some sense this is the system working as expected.
As intended? Because intentionally introducing terrorists to each other is a serious criminal offence in a lot of places.

I can see how this kind of thing comes about; it's very silicon valley to assume that 'murder' and, say 'gardening' are just rows in a database and it would be inappropriate bias to declare one to be better than the other.

Intended and expected are two different things. A person may intend to be a good person, but others may expect them to fail.
More interesting is how Facebook classifies these traits automatically? I can see someone specifying gardening as an interest but even one of those asswipes presumably have enough intelligence not to specify terrorism as a hobby
It'll be like the Netflix tens of thousands of micro-genres. A statistical clustering of words and liked pages.

(Also, if it's anything like western rightwing extremism, it's surprising how little euphemism a page needs to evade banning)

It seems highly unlikely that there's a person at Facebook that's intentionally recruiting terrorists by linking them to other radicalized folks.

This is almost certainly just blind algorithm that links people found dawdling in the same corners of the social graph.