[tejaswiy]

Yeah I don't buy that part either. The problem is inherently hard and pushing the responsibility for policing content to a corporation is not okay. As a specific example, I was listening to a podcast I was listening to earlier that was dealing with how Facebook filters content (I think radiolab). I'm para-phrasing heavily since it's been a while since I heard the show, but I think I got the gist of it right.

- There was a violet attack in Mexico against a journalist by some drug cartel and a random body part (leg or an arm or a head or whatever) was chopped off and posted on social media by the cartel. The people protesting cartel violence picked this image up and were using this image as a part of their protest. Facebook's censors allowed it until the image popped up on some school kid's feed in America / England and all sorts of outcry later, it was removed from the site as a violet image.

- The boston marathon bombing happened and gruesome images of people lying on the floor with limbs strewn about started getting shared on the site. Facebook's policy at this point specifically said no violent images on the site so they got blocked by the censors. Media picked this up and raised an outcry on how facebook was censoring these images and basically someone high up said 'leave it up or else' and the images were allowed on the site.

This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here. Traumatizing school children with violent imagery they didn't even want to see is not great while the Boston marathon bombing was a significant political event in America and those images didn't deserve to get silenced.

This ends up being a question of free-speech and what sorts of content Americans were okay with. There are no right answers and I believe the govt. definitely should step in and provide guidelines here.

The disingenuous thing is using this as an example of how Facebook is okay with govt regulation while resisting any regulation around things that can hurt them like any number of their privacy mishaps, shady 3p data markets and ad tech in general.

[daphreak]

This was a good episode and really showcased how the standards were forced to evolve by various stakeholders (protestors, execs, govt, etc).

I think I recall one them pointing out that a lot of challenges came from Facebook trying to be everything for everybody.

Moderating content so people don't get pictures of Boston Marathon gore next to their grandkids' photos is problem they made for themselves.

[colllectorof]

>This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here.

There is a lot of hypocrisy going on, but this doesn't mean there is no right answer or that the right answer is to invite government fucking censors to control everything.

There are pretty obvious things platforms can do:

1. Instead of opaque algorithms, give people control over what they see.

2. Either do bare legal minimum of moderation or create clear, exhaustive, stable and unambiguous rules for which content is and is not allowed on the platform. Once the rules are set, take a stand and abide by them in all cases.