[acdc4life]

"[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm."

I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous. It's a big claim to make with no quantitative evidence. It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine, or GTA/violent video games got blamed for making kids violent.

Facebook is morally bankrupt, but not for these sensationalist reason.

[flexie]

Facebook has "no clue what kind of stuff gets posted" because they conveniently have decided to have no clue.

Facebook enjoys the protection of its IPR and the right to sell advertisement overseas in places like New Zealand or Europe. Why should New Zealand or Europe allow their business model of close to zero oversight of content? Facebook is not a startup. It's a huge company making billions showing ads to billions.

[timomax]

Exactly. There is no cult of "free speech" in Europe. We will just block such sites if they don't reform.

[raxxorrax]

Mabe this is a reason it isn't popular?

Edit: nor competative. For that matter.

[orf]

Europe as a whole is neither competitive nor popular (?) because they don't ascribe to the USA's view on free speech?

[raxxorrax]

In the market of digital services, Europe is as good as non-existent. Maybe I can come up with one or two names in the top 20 of the most successful software enterprises.

And those are probably already dinosaurs compared to most recent developments on that market.

Europe is exceptionally bad at creating their own services. Maybe because it is just too convenient to use American ones or that there isn't really any venture capital available here. But the fact remains.

Subjectively, it seems we often also lack the openness for new ideas compared to America, especially around older generations.

Europe doesn't even know the significance of freedom right know. Not taking the right decision is often less important than owning it yourself. Americans seem to get that. Most of the time at least.

[thefounder]

You forget that Europe has been ruined by WW2. It's dependence of US(military and technologically) has always been part of the plan.

Europe is also very fragmented and there was hope the EU could fix that but Brexit and other internal and external factors(i.e Russia, China, Tump's policy etc) seem oppose a cohesive, united Europe for obvious reasons.

It has little to nothing to do with "openness" for new ideas. It's more about a chain of unfortunate events.

What does Huawei dominance in 5G and its ban has to do with "openness" or new ideas?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/15/trump-nat...

[robbick]

*Or more likely, heavily fine

[Meekro]

New Zealand has a senior government position non-ironically named "Chief Censor." They don't even pretend to have free speech, and certainly don't get to lecture anyone on moral bankruptcy.

[stale2002]

Well hopefully other internet services will engage in the same behavior against Europe.

I wonder how many billions of dollars in damages would be done to them, if Google, or Wikipedia, or GitHub started blocking traffic to their.

[factsaresacred]

How do you reform a billion-person platform to detect a suicide attempt in real-time?

There's much wrong with Facebook but blaming them for not preventing the actions of their users at the moment those actions take place is moronic.

[boomlinde]

Frankly, that should be their problem. Maybe billion-person platforms are altogether not morally scalable?

[ivanhoe]

If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment. You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today. And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

[boomlinde]

> If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment.

Should we let the technical infeasibility of them profitably solving a problem that they themselves have created be our moral compass?

> You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today.

The point IMO is not to assign blame. It's to create legislation for the betterment of society. You can agree or disagree that it would be better, but don't reduce it to a blame game.

> And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

As I said, as far as I'm concerned, that's their problem. You implement the legal framework necessary to uphold a desirable moral standard and let that have its effect on the market. In those terms it's irrelevant how Facebook fares.

And no, this is not fundamentally a problem of human nature. Millions-to-billion user social networks have only been a problem for a brief moment of human history. Much like other problems throughout history it might go away some day. Not by itself, but by systematically working on improving the human condition.

[drderidder]

Exactly. At the very least, they shouldn't be monetizing content they haven't vetted.

[djaychela]

If they don't know what's being posted, maybe they should change how their platform works? If a normal business behaved like this and then just shrugged their shoulders, no one would stand for it. A traditional broadcaster would have their licence revoked. A print publisher would be in serious trouble. But when it happens online, somehow it's someone else's problem. This seems odd to me.

[ukoki]

> If a normal business behaved like this and then just shrugged their shoulders, no one would stand for it

That's not quite true. No one blames the US postal service for death threats sent in the mail. Facebook is not the USPS, but it's not a traditional publisher either — and just like the USPS it simply couldn't work if you wanted the same level of editorial oversight as a publisher.

edit: typo

[andyjpb]

The thing that makes Facebook different from the postal service is that Facebook provides an amplifier.

You can send one message and it'll be received by many.

Facebook may not have to take responsibility for users' content or wrangling with issues such as free speech but they must take responsibility for what and how they choose to amplify and recommend that content to others.

Traditionally this is a power that has only been held by broadcasters. Broadcasters have things like time delays and "dump switches" when they are conducting live shows. The time delays are mostly used to insert the "bleeps" for bad language. The "dump switch" is a more brutal approach that allows them to avoid broadcasting something that is going terribly wrong.

Broadcasters also have "watersheds" that place time constraints on when certain types of things can be broadcast and broadly define who the expected audiences are.

In this case, Facebook are acting more like a broadcaster than a publisher or message conveyer. Because the audience can be more tightly controlled than a regular broadcaster, there is a case to be made for making the responsibility bar higher, not lower, so that inappropriate content cannot be deliberately targeted at vulnerable people.

[bigiain]

<stupid pushing the analogy too far reply> If US Post opened and scanned all the letters, and offered to sell targeted firearm advertising to people who send death threats, nobody would say "That's OK, they're just 'The Platform'"...

[groby_b]

> but it's not a traditional publisher either

Then maybe it shouldn't behave like one. FB actively selects articles to show on your feed - via algorithm, instead via human, but the effect is the same.

That is a choice they could easily undo. It is also a choice a large number of people would be happy to see. ("I just want my feed ordered by date, no filtering" is a very common request). The only reason that doesn't happen is that the enragement metrics go up if you select what you present to people.

So FB is deliberately choosing articles to show you, and it is making that selection for monetary gain. How is that not a publisher?

[pjc50]

> No one blames the US postal service for death threats sent in the mail

Mailing death threats is illegal: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/876 (so much for "free speech", eh?)

It doesn't appear to be illegal to post them on Facebook?

[j16sdiz]

It is illegal to post on facebook too.

The question is: who should be enforcing the law....

[negamax]

So yeah, change the law. Hold the posters accountable. Why Facebook? That's absurd

[JumpCrisscross]

> No one blames the US postal service for death threats sent in the mail

If people were regularly mass mailing death threats to large fractions of the population, it would sure as hell get regulated.

[djaychela]

I'm not sure that the USPS parallel works completely, but I do get your point.

I agree that it couldn't work in the way it currently does, but that's what I'm getting at - that maybe it shouldn't be able to work in the way that it does presently. I think that it is much more like a broadcaster than a 'platform', but I know not everyone agrees with that.

[boomlinde]

On the other hand the USPS doesn't turn your letters into public announcements. They don't decide which letters you see and which you don't. They don't decide what ads go with it. The analogy is fundamentally flawed.

[tjpnz]

Exactly this. I work in C2C e-commerce which in my jurisdiction has very strict laws around ensuring we do due diligence on the people we allow onto our platform. If we didn't we would be finished. The only way to get Facebook to start taking this more seriously is through more regulation.

[bigiain]

I partly agree.

It'd also be nice if individuals were held responsible for death threats and rape threats they post on-line.

Facebook are morally corrupt because they aid and abet morally corrupt individuals. Both Facebook and those individuals should be held to account for that.

[jackvalentine]

Not saying you personally do this, but it seems every time Europe prosecutes someone for threats of violence on twitter there are the usual fools here shouting "it's just free speech!"

[bigiain]

Yeah. Most people shouting "free speech" are fully aware that shouting "Fire! Fire!" in a cinema might be "free speech" but is certainly not free of consequences.

I'm pretty sure "the usual fools" turn out to be complete hypocrites when it's their girlfriend/sister/mother getting rape threats too...

And there's no "1st Amendment to the US constitution" right to "free speech" in most of the world. If your Nazi hate speech ends up in Germany, both you and Facebook will be held to account for that no matter how many Ayn Rand books you've read or how dedicated to ethics in video game journalism you are.

[jackvalentine]

As much as the mainstream on here/reddit is afraid of Europe 'breaking' the internet I'm kinda excited. The interesting stuff will remain underground/out of the mainstream and these 'scale monsters' in US social media might not be able to operate in the way they have been pushing all the negative externalities on to society even if we don't use them.

For those of us outside the U.S. that don't subscribe to their view on free speech... it's not a negative.

[jeltz]

In Sweden the a bunch of publishers are using the same defence as FB right now. They are being investigate for automatically republishing slander originating from a company similar to AP.

If they win their case I do not see why FB should be held to a higher standard.

[HNthrow22]

> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous.

I contend as a society we should hold these massive tech orgs (who have more power than most governments) to the standard of moderating the content that's posted to their platforms. They have the money and profits to hire human moderators, the 'dumb pipe' defense doesn't fly for me anymore.

Twitter/Reddit should face harsh penalties for failing to moderate and remove content that encourages and indoctrinates extremists. I'm not talking about anything that's borderline, I'm talking about pure unfiltered hate speech that directly encourages violence.

The question then becomes who decides what's acceptable content, the only answer is regulations and legislation for this otherwise for-profit tech giants will be the ones who decide and they're more concerned with user-engagement than far reaching detached societal implications.

[o10449366]

Why are you implying that Facebook isn't actively moderating their platforms or that governments would be able to do a better job? Facebook has hired thousands of human moderators in the past few years, significantly more than Google and Twitter. They've also invested significantly in improving their AI detection systems. That doesn't mean there isn't work to do still, but you're insinuating that they aren't actively moderating their platforms and that simply isn't true. Furthermore, the idea that harsh penalties and regulations are going to prevent psychopaths from broadcasting their killing spree is ridiculous. Facebook doesn't need an incentive to prevent mass shootings from being broadcast on its platform, and punishing them with monetary fines or regulations would only hurt their ability to do so.

[llukas]

> Furthermore, the idea that harsh penalties and regulations are going to prevent psychopaths from broadcasting their killing spree is ridiculous

Nobody is broadcasting in TV or newspapers - they are actually liable for content that gets published on those platforms.

Maybe we finally remove exception for internet?

[o10449366]

Haha, psychopaths don't have to publish in TV or newspapers because they do it for them. Go back a decade or two before Facebook was a big deal and you'd see CNN, NYTimes, NBC, etc. all feverishly covering Columbine, spending weeks profiling the shooters and every detail of their lives, broadcasting bar graphs and rankings of mass murders like it's a video game scoreboard and openly publishing their manifestos and names for all to read and be influenced by. This is despite the well-studied phenomenon of media coverage inspiring copycat killers and terrorists and yet none of these publishing companies are held liable for their part in encouraging and incentivizing these horrible events.

All of this still happens today. Just two weeks ago I read an article in the NYTimes reporting on how NZ's prime minister asked people not to use or spread the shooter's name. In the same article NYTimes revealed it multiple times. The only frames from the video I've seen are the ones the Washington Post used--The shooters face blown up as the huge cover photo for the story. It just happens that now the internet is the biggest publication platform instead of television or print, so it naturally attracts psychopaths that are seeking the greatest impact.

The reality is that none of these publishing platforms are held liable and the media and HN don't want the internet to be held liable, either--they want FB to be held liable because they don't like FB. No one here is screaming for YouTube's heads after they failed to prevent millions of copies of the videos from being uploaded in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

[HNthrow22]

There's a huge difference between covering terrible events as a news story and providing the platform for content engineered to divide and radicalize to proliferate to millions. Also yes YouTube should be liable, not for the video of the NZ shooting being re-uploaded, but for the thousands of hours of hateful violent propaganda they allow to spread on their platform even facilitating it by suggesting it to users with their algorithm.

Drawing parallels between mediums like TV/Film is problematic because there's never been anything like the internet in human history, that being said a TV example of the kind of content that shouldn't be legal: 30 minute produced broadcast dedicated to sharing fake crime stats about Muslims and encouraging viewers to organize violent attacks on their local mosques - this is what goes on the internet. Users from 8chan were (and still are) encouraging and validating the NZ shooter. We have specific incidents and shooters we can point to now. Elliot Rodgers (Santa Barbara shooter) was an active redditor and incel and had his extreme beliefs were both validated and enforced by that community before he took action, ending innocent lives. One could make a case that without the wide ranging communal support these psychotic individuals wouldn't have been emboldened to act on their hateful beliefs. Nothing even close to this is broadcast to a wide audience anywhere but the internet and it shouldn't be permitted on the internet either.

Relevant comment from HN in 2017: taurath on July 19, 2017 [-]

If 20 people were to stand up on a soapbox with a megaphone in times square screaming about /r/redpill, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc concepts they would be removed if legal, and if not legal a huge countermovement would appear to try to force them out. On Reddit you get both the megaphone and the safe space, but are still just as easily accessible to the public as anywhere.

Its "real" freedom of information, without many of the mechanisms that larger society uses to fight back against it. Instead it is just ignored and left to fester and grow until it pops into the public forum at the point where huge efforts are required to fight it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806974

[pjc50]

> 20 people were to stand up on a soapbox with a megaphone in times square screaming about /r/redpill, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc concepts they would be removed if legal, and if not legal a huge countermovement would appear to try to force them out

I think you badly underestimate the apathy towards this stuff. Perhaps a better comparison would be the anti-abortion protestors, who can be pretty extreme.

> 30 minute produced broadcast dedicated to sharing fake crime stats about Muslims

This is absolutely routine in the regular media.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-the-british-media-i... / https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/27/islamo...

The Times is today running a series of highly misleading selectively quoted articles about gender identity services, presumably with the intent of causing violence against and suicide among trans people.

[ryanlol]

>If 20 people were to stand up on a soapbox with a megaphone in times square screaming about /r/redpill, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc concepts they would be removed if legal, and if not legal a huge countermovement would appear to try to force them out. On Reddit you get both the megaphone and the safe space, but are still just as easily accessible to the public as anywhere.

I wouldn't be so sure. People would probably just disregard the crazy screaming r/redpill or r/fatpeoplehate preachers, just like they disregard the Black Hebrew Israelites.

It's not terribly unusual to see people preaching about crazy hateful shit on the street, it is unusual for anyone to actually care though.

[rndgermandude]

The internet isn't exempted. You're just looking at the wrong party for liability. The people who actually put up those live streams are liable, and abusing facebook's service.

Same as TV and newspapers; you don't sue Comcast or the guy who installed your satellite dish, you sue the TV station; You don't sue the paper boy, you sue the news paper.

[jocoda]

>The people who actually put up those live streams are liable

Yet we insist on allowing anonymity on the net.

Either you know exactly who is doing what and can then make them liable for any consequences that follow from their actions OR you allow anonymity and live with the consequences of that decision as dark as these may be.

[mcv]

One of the primary reasons anonymity is important, is to enable critics of oppressive regimes to voice their opinion.

However, enabling complete anonymity everywhere might not be necessary for that; if you can get someone else, in a different country, to take responsibility for it, that might work too. That's similar to how journalists keep their sources secret, or how wikileaks works.

Stuff that's important will still get published as long as you can get someone else to recognise its importance. But who's going to take responsibility to publish your child porn or snuff movie in their own name?

[NeedMoreTea]

Facebook, Youtube or whichever platform is the broadcaster in this instance.

If they're not, why do we sue the TV station rather than the production company of the programme? CBS can yell "don't look at us, we didn't make Game of Thrones".

It's their exception that is looking increasingly absurd.

[onion2k]

We don't sue the company who owns the radio tower if it's terrestrial TV, or the hosting company if it's on-demand, or the bandwidth provider if it's cable. The important bit is who makes the decision to broadcast something; in the case of a TV show it's CBS, and in the case of a live stream on Facebook that's the user.

I think a potential solution would be to delay livestreams by 20 minutes for anyone who isn't doesn't have a direct and established connection (eg following for more than 24 hours) to the broadcaster to give platforms time to censor the worst stuff. Obviously this would make platforms responsible for effective and fast moderation though...

[afureta]

Isn't this letting Facebook and Comcast have their cake and eat it, too? Giving them full authority to censor whatever they want, but still not holding them liable for what they host?

[llukas]

Not true: https://www.fastcompany.com/90273352/maybe-its-time-to-take-...

(c) (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

[tannhaeuser]

Nope. FB gets billions for ads. They can't just shrug and say "we're just providing the platform".

[rndgermandude]

I am not shrugging. I am saying, with conviction: They are just providing the platform.

[miluge]

TV is usually not user generated content though...

[ben_w]

And when it is, the TV programs (where I grew up) need a delay in the loop so they can beep-out rude words if it’s before 21:00. Even mere expletives, let alone directed personal threats of violence, get censored on TV and radio.

[acdc4life]

None of these tech companies have the ability to do that. What you are suggesting would mean the death of every social media company.

[NeedMoreTea]

If you don't have the ability to control your premises, or employ enough security, perhaps you should not be permitted to operate those premises. Unsafe clubs get closed down.

They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist. If societies around the world conclude they do more harm than good as they currently operate, it's perfectly reasonable to require them to moderate adequately. If they cannot they can close, or withdraw from that region, and someone else may wish to try. Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit. Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far, looks like it's not going to be tenable for much longer.

Not only am I fine with that, I think it long overdue.

[WillPostForFood]

If you don't have the ability to control your premises, or employ enough security, perhaps you should not be permitted to operate those premises.

So we should shut down the mosques in New Zealand because they didn't control their premises and keep the shooter out? Should we shut down banks because they didn't have enough security to keep a bank robber out? You are shifting the blame away from the perpetrator. Every crime ever could be blamed on the victim for lack of security.

[ethbro]

Those other businesses aren't running 40% profit margins.

It's a fair question to ask, "If a company is that profitable and having toxic effects, then why shouldn't it pay some of the cost of addressing its toxic effects?"

The tendency on HN is to say exploitive governments want to tax technology startups.

But we're not talking about technology startups. We're talking about the new old-old ATT.

[zimpenfish]

> "If a company is that profitable and having toxic effects, then why shouldn't it pay some of the cost of addressing its toxic effects?"

cf oil or chemical companies polluting via spills, etc.

[DSingularity]

I would argue that unlike your examples — the bank that got robbed; the mosque that got shot up — Facebook perpetrated and facilitated the crime.

A better question would be, should a bank be held liable after being robbed if it failed its duties by designing cheap systems to save money — yes. Should a mosque/church be held liable if they received a threat and they ignored causing large loss of life — yes.

Facebook is culpable. They know the kind of garbage that floats in their platform. They continue to develop their platform and they continue to improve their ad systems. Why won’t they dedicate as much engineering effort to gain an advantage on racism/hate speech/fascism? I’ll tell you why.

Because Zuckerberg simply does not care. He owns the platform that dominates information flows and public discourse. Why would he undermine that?

[NeedMoreTea]

Let's take it to the absurd. I am NOT shifting any blame from the perpetrator.

I am placing additional blame on a medium that isn't willing to exercise adequate restraint or control.

A bank undoubtedly has security measures in place to prevent robbery, if they don't bother, they won't last long. Nonetheless, there are regulations on what may and may not be done for public spaces, how crowded they may be to pass fire regulation and so forth. Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.

[o10449366]

> Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.

How is this any different from Facebook? A bank has security measures in place to prevent robbery, but a robbery could still take place in one and is more likely to occur in one because it's a high value target. Facebook has human and AI moderation in place that automatically processes anything you upload. Users are also able to report content. However, just like sometimes banks are robbed, sometimes objectionable content slips through their filters. By your own logic Facebook shouldn't be closed down because mass shootings cannot be reasonably predicted. The basis for your argument is fundamentally flawed and if you extrapolate it to your own examples you'll quickly see how ridiculous and illogical it is.

[thoughtfunction]

We can apply the same argument to governments with their lack of censorship of bad words as people walk the streets. We don't because it's ridiculous on it's face, and we don't want a blatant surveillance society such as that.

[raxxorrax]

adequate restraint or control is a subjective impression most users probably do not agree with.

[o10449366]

Well as much as HN or the news media would like you to believe, societies around the world have definitely not concluded that FB does more harm than good and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You may think the club is unsafe, but a billion people are still attending all night and they feel perfectly comfortable.

[NeedMoreTea]

Attendance proves nothing at all. We've no idea if they are comfortable or not. Many appear to have come to think of it as a necessary evil.

Millions of people were eating adulterated food every meal prior to food regulations. Political process and advertising was rife with corruption prior to attempts to instil a semblance of fairness limiting what was allowed and when. Yet people attempted to vote before this.

[o10449366]

You're claiming simultaneously that we have no idea whether these users are comfortable or not and that most of them think of it as a necessary evil.

Attendance absolutely proves something when it comes to social media. You can't make a comparison between social media and food because one is necessary for survival and one isn't (I'm sure I'm going to invite a ton of comments here on how 'Facebook has become so ubiquitous and powerful it's now synonymous with survival!') If the negatives really outweighed the positives people would be leaving Facebook by the droves. It's only on HN and in the news media that this narrative is being spun.

[kylecazar]

Exactly. Generally speaking, the onus is on the userbase to react to perceived (or real) immorality by refraining from using Facebook.

However, it remains the office of government to introduce enforceable regulation in this (or any) space to protect their constituents, and hold those in violation accountable. I don't suspect it's an easy task, as the problems are broad and can be a grey area. I.e, some of the problems with Facebook stem from mischievous users -- exactly how accountable the platform is for their behavior isn't universally agreed upon.

I think if rules of engagement happen, people will have less problems with just letting the market decide.

[dylan604]

What's the internet version of the fire marshall? If the people that feel the club is unsafe, a simple call to the authorities will have the marshall come out and declare it unsafe and shut it down. Can we get Fire Marshall Bill to do it?

[pjc50]

The presence of a lot of people doesn't tell you whether it's safe, only how many people are at risk if a fire does start. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire

[smallgovt]

>> Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit

You're underestimating the scale of this problem.

Facebook users create billions of new posts a day. And, tens of millions of these posts get reported for moderation per day.

"Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.

>> Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far

You must be joking. Facebook has already made massive investments into moderation. It's their top priority for 2019. In many ways, they are doing the opposite of pretending this problem doesn't exist.

>> They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist.

Nobody is arguing that FB has an inherent right to exist. The only point GP made was that (as made evident by your comment) many people are underestimating the associated costs with manual moderation of content.

[ben_w]

> "Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.

Agreed. Let’s require them to do that.

[javagram]

Should all online platforms be required to do that? I can post here on HN right now and no moderator is pre-approving my content.

I could go find the shooter’s illegal manifesto and post it here, I might be banned after some period of time but just like on Facebook it would have had time for other people to see it.

Applied consistently this standard would kill most online forums and that type of thing.

[xupybd]

So why not fault the ISPs for allowing this?

[Nextgrid]

If you host a hateful or illegal website and someone complains to your ISP they’ll cut you off immediately.

No reason Shitbook shouldn’t be held to the same standard.

[xupybd]

They do the same thing. They worked all night to prevent the video from propagating. What they are calling for here is preventing it from being published. So this would require your ISP to prevent the content before people complain.

[antpls]

> The question then becomes who decides what's acceptable content, the only answer is regulations and legislation for this otherwise for-profit tech giants will be the ones who decide and they're more concerned with user-engagement than far reaching detached societal implications.

What about this : all content is potential knowledge and should be made available. That way no one get to decide what is "acceptable content". At the end of the day, the laws still forbid anyone to kill people, content or not.

A good read is : https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018...

[DCoder]

When RIAA/MPAA/etc. came with astronomical fines, those same companies suddenly created the capabilities to block things that even smelled like copyrighted material. Whatever your opinion of MAFIAA is, it would seem this sort of detection can be done when a large enough stick is presented.

[salgernon]

I think “social” is the key. If you are using a carrier to facilitate private conversations then I feel you should have a right to privacy. But a forum or online group is by its nature and intent a public platform and the provider should be responsible for policing that space.

[rodgerd]

Set your location to Germany when you use Twitter.

You'll almost never see far-right content any more.

I'm sorry you've internalized their bullshit, but that's what it is: bullshit. They can do it when it sells ads or stops someone senior going to jail.

[axaxs]

Then change the model. It wouldn't be terrible if it came with a cost.

[JumpCrisscross]

> None of these tech companies have the ability to do that

Yet they can attach an ad to it in a millisecond. They’re incentivised to do one and not the other. These bills are about rebalancing those incentives.

[gafferongames]

What's the downside?

[DSingularity]

Are you serious? You expect us to believe that Facebook and Youtube can’t afford to hire 50,000 content regulators each? 30,000 of them would probably be paid less than 5000$ a year.

[o10449366]

Facebook already employs tens of thousands of human moderators. What you're really proposing is that every piece of content that's uploaded to any internet website should be manually reviewed and approved by another human. You don't think that's a ridiculous and unrealistic proposition that could be turned into a weapon by bad actors (just like a livestream feature?)?

[DSingularity]

The face that you would reduce my proposal to a brain dead, dumbest possible solution shows you aren’t really interested discussion.

Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

Do you really think I am proposing that they review every video in FIFO order? Or did you want to reduce my proposal to that so you can easily dismiss it.

[o10449366]

> Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

What you're proposing is discrimination and isn't a solution.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

No, not really, but please provide some examples. I'm assuming you mean content category, not literal tagged category, in which case you can't really distinguish between someone livestreaming in their car vs. the Christchurch shooter driving up to the mosque.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

Sure, but they already have many thousands of moderators in addition to automated systems in place today. It's inevitable that unless every post is hand-reviewed by a human that some objectionable content will slip through.

I get that your point is that FB and the other big tech companies can certainly afford to be doing more than they currently are, but to the extent that we would almost certainly be in this exact same position even if they had hired your proposed 50,000 moderators there's not much substance to your proposal that I can even reduce.

[ynx]

> Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

Like rank/derank the feed based on contextual clues? No way this wasn't the first thing done.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

They've touted high accuracy in "using AI" for content moderation, like 95% or 99% or something. i.e. using machine learning to automatically tag content.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

So your proposal boils down to "hire more people so more content can be filtered faster". GP perhaps didn't steelman your argument for you but if your proposal were to be applied the only real delta would be workforce size. It follows that your proposal in effect reduces to "hire more people".

[djpilot]

This is flat out not true. FB doesn't employ 10s of thousands of human moderators.

According to a 3-month old article, $FB supposedly employs 7,500 moderators [0], though it's unclear what constitutes "employment" in this case. Probably a salary of less than $5k/yr. Are there really thouhsands of content moderators pulling up to FBHQ in Menlo Park 5 days a week? I don't think so, no.

[0] https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/facebook-content-moder...

[o10449366]

"By the end of 2018, in response to criticism of the prevalence of violent and exploitative content on the social network, Facebook had more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content moderators." [0]

That number has only increased in recent months and will likely continue to increase in the near future. Not all of them are designated content moderators, it's true, so technically they likely only employ one or two "10s of thousands", but I'm mainly addressing the misconception in the thread that Facebook is "doing nothing." That's a significant amount of moderators. Is it enough? No, but to claim or pretend that they aren't actively doing anything is facetious and something I've been seeing more and more of on HN lately.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

[boomlinde]

If it is not viable to actively moderate all the content, there are two conflicting concerns here:

1. Online services should maintain an acceptable legal and moral standard of the content they serve. 2. Online services should be able to profitably facilitate the communication between millions and billions of users.

Which of these concerns seems more important to you, regardless of what you believe is an acceptable legal and moral standard?

[Nextgrid]

I actually think that’s perfectly realistic, and in fact how forums have worked for ages. There are also automated measures such as user trust levels where an account has to earn trust before they can do certain things like post links, embed pictures, etc. Being on the platform isn’t a right either and it would be perfectly fair for them to rate-limit the amount of public posts someone can make to an amount that’s manageable by their current moderation capacity.

Forums have managed to keep undesirable content at bay with often no budget at all, so anyone claiming Facebook can’t do the same is false. They don’t want to do it, because abusive content still brings them clicks and ad impressions (remember that for every nasty piece of content that turns into a PR disaster there are thousands that go unnoticed but still generate money for them).

[DuskStar]

> and in fact how forums have worked for ages.

What forums are those? Because this isn't the case with the forums I frequent. The boards I read / participate in tend to operate on the principle of "don't make me come over there", and everything is reactive, not proactive. I'm not sure how you'd get things like "user was banned for this post" etc otherwise...

[esalman]

If a car manufacturer is faced with a problem so that it loses the ability to prevent accidents, would you let that manufacturer continue its business?

[blue6249]

We do allow car companies to continue to build cars that cannot prevent accidents. Even beyond preventing accidents we as a society also allow the car companies to build cars with varying levels of safety and have a rating system for them.

[esalman]

We do. However, car manufacturers usually try to downplay reports of issues with the cars to the point when they can't do anymore. That's when something like a recall happens, which results in a substantial financial loss for them. Obviously not every affected vehicle owner can or may afford to have their vehicle serviced, so many keep using them despite the risk- like the people who are using social media knowing its weaknesses.

I think social media are at a point when they are forcefully downplaying the social issues which they are actually responsible for. We've already seen state and other actors exploit the social media and cause mass epidemics; anti-vaxx, white nationalism, Rohingya issue etc. to name a few. Let's see how far it goes before the damage is too much.

[o10449366]

Oh please, this is as ridiculous as blaming the manufacturer of the truck for the psychopath that used it to run people over in France. As far as I know Facebook doesn't released public numbers on this kind of information, but their automated systems and human moderators have undoubtedly caught millions of objectionable content streams, you just don't hear about them. If we're making car analogies they would probably be the safest vehicle on the road.

[chrisseaton]

> it loses the ability to prevent accidents

Car manufacturers can't prevent accidents - what do you mean?

[username223]

That sounds fine. They bought it, so they own it. If they make money from someone's work, then they are responsible for at least as much money as they made.

[TAForObvReasons]

If social media companies exist because they are not held responsible for negative externalities, and actually recognizing the externalities would result in the death of said companies, then maybe they don't deserve to exist. We as a society have a real serious problem contending with companies that have massive negative externalities

[AndrewKemendo]

Which I think may be the appropriate answer. It's unclear that the net benefit to society is greater with these social media companies than without them. If anything, the data we have so far is that it is a net negative.

[o10449366]

What data are you referencing exactly? I would love to see it.

[AndrewKemendo]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181108164316.h...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/06/gse-phones-st...

[profmonocle]

> They have the money and profits to hire human moderators

Do they? Most content posted to Facebook has very low reach. If I live stream something for my friends it’s not going to bring in enough revenue to pay a minimum wage employe to watch it in real time.

[boomlinde]

Perhaps enough for a minimum wage employee to service a report?

[chrisseaton]

> They have the money and profits to hire human moderators

How many people do you think it would take to proactively moderate all the video uploaded to YouTube? Back in 2017 it was apparently 300 hours a minute. Do the Fermi estimate on that. That's not a productive use of humanity.

[mr_toad]

Why draw the line at social media companies? Why not include AWS and Gmail? Why not force data-centres to moderate as well. Hell, why not force anyone proving egress of data to moderate it all?

[stale2002]

How about, instead of that, companies that want to moderate content, compete in the free market, and those that prefer to be the dumb pipe, do that as well.

That way users can choose which platform they prefer, the more censored version, or the less censored version.

[underwater]

You're not wrong, but holding social media companies responsible to that level is a relatively new idea. That Facebook is doing that yet doesn't make them unequivocally evil.

[everdev]

300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute...

https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/

[m0zg]

What you're asking for also leads to total, Chinese-style censorship, as the government finds more and more content on these network it doesn't particularly like and therefore considers "extremist". Fun fact: Russia has recently passed a set of laws under which you can go to jail for simply "disrespecting" a government official. This "disrespect" can take the form, for example, of pointing out that their spending is several orders of magnitude more than their official salary would allow.

It boggles my mind that people can be simultaneously against the Chinese censorship and in favor of NZ censorship. It's the same exact thing, just cranked to a different degree. How do you live with both points of view in your head at the same time?

And lest I be deliberately "misinterpreted", I don't think that this shooting video should be on FB or that removing it from there represents "censorship". I also don't think we should go much beyond removing mass shooting livestreams however. Nor should anyone go to prison for 14 years for redistributing it.

[fapjacks]

The amount of vocal support for censorship in here is frankly unbelievable, bordering on comically absurd.

[spaginal]

It is an uncomfortable trend.

I’ve largely ducked out of these conversations on HN anymore, trying to explain why basic free speech is important, and hitting resistance, shows the obvious failings (success?) of public modern schooling.

We have a new young generation that seems to unquestionably look to government for all answers, and demand to be silenced by biased censors and it’s shocking.

[m0zg]

  >> We have a new young generation that seems to 
  >> unquestionably look to government for all answers

This is especially weird given that the very same people consider the current US government to be incompetent (for the record, I disagree, based on the results in a number of areas).

The very same people seem to suggest that we abolish the 1st and 2nd amendment, and in the same breath suggest that "our democracy is dying" and we're on our way to "totalitarianism". How these things can be suggested at the same time, I don't know. Seems like utter and complete lack of critical thinking skills to me.

[raxxorrax]

Failed education and experience in my opinion. And it is true that something outrageous is easily found on the net.

[jjeaff]

You don't see any difference here? One government is trying to keep their people from seeing violent and disturbing content. The other is trying to keep their people from learning about violent and disturbing things that very government is commiting themselves to its own people.

I don't think the NZ government is scooping up and murdering political disedents.

[drdeca]

The government in general shouldn’t be trying to prevent people from being able to see violent or disturbing content.

[AnonTechDrone]

I'm an ex-USSR resident and I see a good bit of difference between a liberal society where free speech is seen as a basic human right and a budding Communist nation with a "Chief Censor" who gets to dictate the bounds of acceptable discourse.

[m0zg]

  >> I don't think the NZ government is scooping 
  >> up and murdering political disedents [sic].

That's because the Overton window isn't quite there yet. Continue down this path and eventually it will shift. The basic truth of the matter is: it's much, much easier to rule if there's no freedom of speech. That's why it's the typically the first thing to go before the rest of the personal rights. Makes things super comfy for the ruling class: someone says something you don't like? Just throw them in jail, it's for their own good. The UK is much further down this path already: there you can end up in jail for posting wrongthink on your Facebook page or filming _outside_ the court during grooming gang proceedings.

[antidesitter]

> One government is trying to keep their people from seeing violent and disturbing content.

That should be up to the people, not the government.

[raxxorrax]

My country does employ active discrimination so I think this idea is terrible.

[FakeComments]

Your vision for society is one in which private companies moderate civic discourse?

Sounds hellish — and very likely to be practiced disequitably, compounded with the power to silence critics of the system as extremists.

[CJefferson]

Private companies already moderate civic discourse, by shoving the extreme views into our faces, every day.

If thry were "dumb pipes" I would have more sympathy, but they are spending yens of millions on AI to tune exactly what to shove in front of us, to keep us engaged.

[zapzupnz]

You make it sound as though private companies are the only means through which communication occurs. T'was a time when companies had their own means marketing, people ran their own blogs, and there were no huge private companies controlling the majority of online discourse.

Anybody else remember email?

We'll never go back to it, but don't act like the social media-driven scenario we have today is all there will ever be. If things like Twitter and Facebook became moderated, and people became dissatisfied, they'll do the same as they ever did with social media: go elsewhere. (By the way, let's take a moment to remember Digg)

And maybe, just maybe, we can go back to a saner time where we don't have to defend the status quo, hideous as it is.

[FakeComments]

Okay.

None of what you wrote is a response to what I said, beside “well, if it gets bad enough, society will adapt”.

You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can’t change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate.

I think “hellish” is an apt description of “would reshape hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of economic activity in response to the social disfunction it caused”.

[zapzupnz]

> Your vision for society is one in which private companies moderate civic discourse?

> None of what you wrote is a response to what I said

My post was that there are alternatives to Facebook and Twitter having the monopoly on public discourse, proved it by demonstrating alternative methods by which no one (or two) entities have any such monopoly.

You spoke about a "vision for society". Typically when people talk about a vision, they're talking about the future. I gave a vision of the future.

> You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can't change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate

I didn't say any of that. I mean, I agree with you. But you were talking about a vision for society. I gave mine.

I think you've decided I said something quite different from what I actually said.

[FakeComments]

You have a second vision that had nothing to do with what we were talking about before, which was changing the current system to one where entrenched private interests would be censors — the envisioned change I was responding to.

Your non-sequitur other wishes have nothing to do with that being a hellish vision.

[dmoy]

Reddit moderators aren't even part of the company. It's literally just random volunteers. (Not random as in random selection /.)

[Tomte]

> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform

Of course they do. People report.

And in my personal experience, Facebook always(!) replies "not against community standards", even when clear-cut crimes like rape threats.

[ttsda]

I've reported actual child pornography with hundreds of likes and comments and got that reply from Facebook.

On the other hand, a Facebook group I created for my CS course with a few hundred members and just a bunch of helpful course material and questions vanished for a few months without any sort of warning or notification, and showed up like it had never been gone in the first place. I tried to contact Facebook, even finding a form specifically for groups that vanish, and got no reply whatsoever. I still don't know what the hell happened there.

[mcv]

If they consider childporn "not against their community standards", isn't that enough reason to report them to the police and make a huge public stink about this?

[ttsda]

In theory, yes. In practice I haven't found a way to do so, especially with Facebook being a big American company and me living on the other side of the ocean... The best case I can imagine would probably be an e-mail from the police department arriving at Facebook a few months after and the content being removed, there isn't any real way to damage them without the effort and luck of a targeted PR attack.

[mcv]

Aren't your national newspapers interested in this? It might not become an international scandal, but some newspaper attention will get noticed, and will likely get mentioned again and again in every political discussion about the impact Facebook has on our society.

Also, report it to the police with all the evidence and screenshots you've got and just let them handle it.

It might not bring down Facebook on its own, but it will add to all the other demands that Facebook needs to get a better handle on this sort of thing.

[Thiez]

Depending on the jurisdiction taking screenshots might be a crime in itself. And I doubt that this would make a good news item, it's not like the newspapers can reprint the material in question or the url, so it's unlikely that anyone who likes Facebook would find the article convincing.

A criminal conviction of a Facebook employee would make a good story, but that is much harder.

[bksenior]

I guess heres my bigger question. If some individual where to have knowledge of a murder or rape and it came to light that they were intentionally with holding the evidence of the crime, would this individual be committing a crime themselves?

I just imagine if someone found a snuff video on my basement that I would be in violation of a law.

[shard972]

Consider who the person is reviewing these things. Imagine all the horrible fucked up shit they see on a daily basis.

I wouldn't be surprised if after seeing videos of babies being killed, people being beheaded and hung, that some sperm yelling at women might not even register to them as a bad thing.

[nilskidoo]

And "horrible fucked up shit" amounts to clicks. People don't stream Lawrence Welk for their modern entertainment needs. I say the company knows damn well what content it leaves untouched. It caters to enablers.

[drcross]

Well, to play devil's advocate to your point, it's barely Facebook's fault that the public has an appetite for such heinous material. People want to watch these things, why do we blame Facebook for that and not ourselves?

[boomlinde]

People seem to have an appetite for all kinds of heinous acts, and if you don't actively maintain a social standard that condemns and punishes such behavior, you're left with the law of the jungle.

Social networks already make it harder to maintain these standards because they dissociate their subjects from one another. It's easier for me to send you a death threat if, to me, you're just a bunch of words I disagree with under a profile picture.

They also facilitate the mobilization of like-minded people at an awesome scale, however widely unaccepted their behavior is. If you can get your sense of social belonging satisfied by 100000 other pedophiles from all over the world on a social network, why should you conform to any widely recognized social standard? Why should you work on your problems when thousands of rape apologists are patting your back and reinforcing your delusions?

Finally, social networks exploit these weaknesses, exploit our sense of pride and our ideas of what is right and wrong. More polarized and controversial information leads to more discussion. More discussion leads to more social data. More social data leads to better ads. There is an incentive for social networks to push objectionable and worthless information. The relationship is perhaps indirect in that it just happens to be the best way to turn a profit, but we shouldn't let our social standards budge for a system that is designed to maximize a profit margin.

[kevingadd]

Multiple parties can be to blame for a problem, friend.

[nilskidoo]

Whether the unwashed are hopeless or not, victim-shaming to protect a corporation is never a good look.

[cbluth]

Don't swing too far.

Facebook needs some blame too.

[helloindia]

This has also been my experience. For most of posts/comments I report(which I think shouldn't be on Facebook), I get the default reply "not against communist standards".

[gsich]

>Of course they do. People report.

Yes, but the damage has been done then. Parent is right. Facebook doesn't know what is being posted, only afterwards, when people tell them, then they know.

[raxxorrax]

This is just a form of the child pornography scare that resonates with contemporary politics.

There isn't a significant portion of users that condone these threats. I will still be held against anyone not wanting to give facebook more control over content.

[boomlinde]

> I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it.

The question isn't whether it's currently technically viable for Facebook to monitor the content their users post, but that since they're hosting it, maybe they should have a clue and design the service accordingly. If they are held liable for it and can't solve the problem technically, just let them (and services like it) die off. It wouldn't be a great loss to society as far as I'm concerned.

> It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine

What was Marilyn Manson's connection to the Columbine shooting? What is Facebook's connection to hosting morally repulsive content on their service? In my opinion these answers are different enough to merit the question on which grounds you make this comparison.

[senthil_rajasek]

They have power to reach everyone in the world. They don't have the capability to decide what content deserves this wide reach. To compensate and out of greed they encouraged sharing and spreading all types of content without merit. I am not asking for facebook to be a police of content... Users don't even have the capability to flag content.

They promoted a culture of greed over morality. It's a curse on humanity.

[jseliger]

Facebook makes a handy scapegoat: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo....

[bamboozled]

Actually they should not allow live content posts, just like TV broadcasting corporations are required to have a delay in case something harmful or disturbing were to be broadcast.

They're 100% responsible for building a platform which allows for this kind of content to be posted and broadcast en-masse with zero responsibility or accountability.

It amazes me people think that making a profit from this kind of "platform" is acceptable.

[raxxorrax]

But TV is dead and the social appeal for networks like this isn't filtered or delayed content.

[bamboozled]

TV isn't dead, it just changed, just ask Netflix.

[raxxorrax]

Netflix can be seen as TV except for that relevant part of choosing the content you consume yourself.

[bamboozled]

Yes, that's my point, it's TV and it isn't dead?

[drewmol]

As you stopped reading at that point, I assume the "big claim to make without quantitative evidence" is the part of the article you quoted.

I'd entertain some debate over the definition of publish, as well as whether or not Facebook refuses to accept any responsibility... but outside that nuance it's a fairly objective claim of Facebook's capability and behavior.

I see it as a quite reasonable position to assume that playing violent video games can ease people's inhibition to engage in IRL violence. I personally believe the liberty infringement, and ultimately, violence, that is necessary to ban them is worse than the violent behavior they can influence.

[3xblah]

Further down in this thread you claim that if Facebook were to delay live streams made to "Public" it would mean "the death of every social media company".

That seems a bit "sensationalist".

I think that really what you mean to say is that regulation of "broadcasting" user-generated content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay), especially sensationalist content that appeals to people's emotions^1, could mean the end of social media's lucrative profit margins. Social media could still exist even if it were not very profitable.

Facebook does have a clue what is posted. For example, a recent docuentary on public television showed teams of people in the Phillipines reviewing individual posts.

1. Sensationalism, appealing to people's emotions. The same tactic that caused you to stop reading is also what caused you to start reading. It is the same tactic Facebook must use to attract and keep people's attention. The non-sensationalist (boring, non-controversial) personal content that is posted to Facebook -- what makes the website useful for so many people -- is not helping Zuckerberg's business. In the face of endless competition for people's attention on the internet, it stands to reason that he has an incentive to allow and even promote sensationalist content.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> I stopped reading after this point.

Slightly off topic, but if you make this a habit, i.e. stop reading after the first sentence you disagree with/sounds like bs to you, there is no chance of getting out of the filter bubble as you're building it yourself. Of course this applies equally to me and all other participants of global information exchange.

[Taniwha]

Of course they can monitor everything on their platform, they are just unwilling to pay enough people to do it ... This is really about money and Facebook being extremely cheap-ass

[andrei_says_]

They monetize people’s attention. Well guess what, that’s not free and not without repercussions.

[wukerplank]

They are doing a great job in the war on the nipple, though. And containing viral content with negative publicity against them.

I don't know about AI, but they have an army of moderators with a strict set of rules. Yet, content that many people would consider hate speech, racism, etc. does not get blocked, even after being reported several times. Are the moderators to lax in interpreting the rules? Or are the rules not strict enough.

(To give context: I believe that hate speech is protected by free speech. And should FB block white supremacists it would not be cencorship.)

[bigiain]

I'm told, but have not confirmed it myself, that Facebook do a fine job of censoring Nazi hate speech in Germany. But somehow they cannot do it elsewhere or for other sorts of hate speech. Which is 100% nothing to do with maximising advertising revenue by allowing and enabling hate speech elsewhere...

[sametmax]

Besides, I honestly prefer to have a platform censoring nothing, and letting through the occasional idiot, than starting the slippery slopes of drawing an arbitrary line that will get moved when the wind change.

Plus, facebook is full of tracking, so it's very nice to have place to create a full graph of all data of the haters. If you need an investigation, it's easier to find people IRL. Win-win.

[jaabe]

The city isn’t responsible for what gets thrown on its streets, we still sweep them.

I think the time for platforms and major tech companies to dodge their responsibility has passed. At least in large parts of the western world and I personally welcome it. I’m European though, we (at least some of us) tend to like regulating companies.

[freediver]

Ad-driven business models ultimately lead to intelligence insulting outcomes.

Whether you look at Google or Facebook, you can notice that these platforms have been highly optimized to produce and stimulate user experiences that are far from sensible or pleasant.

The main product for both companies are ads. One uses massive distribution channel in terms of free internet search the other one in terms of free content. There is a sensible way to balance the delivery of the product (unlike other products like bread or transport, this one is in most cases an unwanted one - close to 1B ad blockers have been deployed on devices world wide) that assumes certain profit-negating levers to be pulled. Control of these levers is in full control of these companies.

By choosing not to pull the lever these companies have created an environment in which common intelligence is insulted every day, and because this has gradually happened over a period of many years, we've grown oblivious to it for the most part.

FB could (theoretically) hire 1 million workers to curate the platform at $50k/year.

[kristianc]

> It could (theoretically) hire 1 million workers to curate the platform at $50k/year.

Theoretically, no, Facebook could not spend nearly its entire annual revenue on content moderators and still have a platform to speak of.

[noja]

> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform

Well there is your problem. Why is Facebook held to a different standard than other media? ("Because they want to earn more money" is not a good answer)

[raxxorrax]

Because the platform offers user content without any claims of correctness.

Education about handling media is the better approach to banning. It is naive to think politically charged content would be exempt from ambitions to ban it.

[xg15]

> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform

> The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous

Those two points are not related to each other.

[rchaud]

If it’s posted on Facebook, Facebook bears responsibility. If you own a restaurant, and fail a sanitation check, you don’t get to argue that it’s not possible for you to catch every single rat.

The Marilyn Manson analogy is confusing. Did Manson own the website where the Columbine killers downloaded bomb plans? The computers where they wrote their murderous fantasies? The gun store from which they sourced their arsenal?

[kaveh_h]

It’s not the same thing at all, Facebook is a social media platform that enables distribution of material to a broad public. Terrorists clearly use social media hopping it will reach as many as possible. Remove the non-moderated access to distribution to a broad public and the incentive is lowered.

[lordfrikk]

This is not correct. Roger McNamee, who was Zuckerberg's mentor and also helped recruit Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg, said they simply do not want to do it. He tried to push them in that direction but was met with resistance.

[phs318u]

Yes, the claim is sensational but not entirely without merit.

Zuckerberg has written that, “live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook—in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.” [0]. Live streams are far more valuable to Facebook due to the more "meaningful" interactions they generate. When coupled with their ability to identify and target quite specific demographics (see 'detailed targeting' [1],[2] ), they absolutely have the power to better target any AI and human moderators. If they were to couple this with a built-in live-stream delay (allowing say for some level of video content analysis prior to display) then I contend they could score 'harmful' material reasonably accurately - perhaps accurately enough to pipe into a queue for human vetting before publication (of course, unless they try, we'll never know for sure, so arguments on this are kind of moot). However, each of these elements come at a cost to FB's business model. MZ has already spoken out against delays in live streaming.

Also, your rebuttal is disingenuous. The claim that they "have no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform", doesn't jibe with their self-described abilities (as pitched to their advertiser customers as "detailed targetting"). I agree that they can't identify with 100% accuracy, but that's not required. If they can get the accuracy high enough that a higher-scrutiny vetting process can be imposed (wether AI or human), then that's sufficient. As for the claim their AI "isn't powerful enough to detect it", can you provide anything to back up that statement?

The real question is: are Facebook and the other social-media and tech content publishers responsible for the content they publish (irrespective of where it's sourced)? My belief is 'yes'. When someone posts on Facebook they are not pubhlishing. They are contributing. Facebook are publishing. Hence, Facebook should be held to the same standards as other publishers.

Arguments that "censoring Facebook means the end of free discourse", are pretty weak when there are still many alternatives (e.g. Mastodon and others) that are more user-centric and resistant to both censorship and abuse (through higher rates of group-local self-moderation).

People have a right to free speech. They don't have a right to impose speech on others. They don't have a right to voilate other's freedoms (as hate speech and trolling often does). Similarlly, companies don't have a right to operate without any kind of regulation at all. Regulation exists to ensure a balance between the good of the market and the good of the commons.

[0] https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/717368264947302

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182371508761821

[maksimum]

> Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it.

Almost certainly Facebook's ML can identify the themes of almost all content on their platform with high accuracy. That's a pretty easy problem at their scale.

[o10449366]

What makes you say it's an easy problem? They were able to block 1.2 million copycat videos of the shooting, but 0.3 million still got through. YouTube also struggled to remove them and even went so far to disable uploads entirely for a period because their AI was insufficient. The difference is they just declined to release specific numbers so they took less flack.

When you literally have thousands of humans all determined to bypass these detection systems by modifying the video and disguising it in various ways some of them are inevitably going to slip through. Is that really an issue with the detection system, or is there something wrong with the people who repeatedly try and upload and share videos of mass shootings?

[drewmol]

>is there something wrong with the people who repeatedly try and upload and share videos of mass shootings?

Yes. A detection system can be used to limit occurrences of this issue.

In this case, an issue with the detection system used on Facebook was demonstrated by a 20% failure rate.

[maksimum]

Facebook (and Google and others) can easily identify themes in natural language both written and spoken. They're really good at those problems because they're used as inputs for ad sales.

Identifying themes in video is harder than natural language. But fundamentally it requires the same kind of ML tools as natural language, which these companies have already mastered. I think the bigger issue is that Facebook doesn't have a business purpose for understanding video as compelling as it has for understanding natural language. They also don't have a business purpose for building scalable content censoring workflows since there's no serious regulation.

[o10449366]

I don't know how you came to these conclusions, but they're fundamentally incorrect. Video has been one of Facebook's fastest growing advertisement categories in recent years, particularly after their acquisition of Instagram. They absolutely have a business purpose for understanding video and if they didn't they wouldn't have invested so heavily in it with features like livestreaming. Furthermore, I don't know where the idea of government regulation as an incentive came from in this thread, but it's illogical and ridiculous. Facebook doesn't need an incentive to try and prevent objectionable content like mass murders from appearing on their platform because they're well-aware of the damage they can cause their brand. That's incentive enough.

[manfredo]

Yes they can identify themes, but not nearly with enough accuracy to make policy enforcement decisions. IIRC the preemptive video blocks were based on fingerprinting previous video uploads. They're still a long way away from being able to automate policy enforcement dynamically.

[profmonocle]

Would sample size be an issue? An algorithm can recognize that a video is about someone discussing the latest Marvel movie because there are a lot of those types of videos.

But can an algorithm recognize that a video is of someone committing a real-life atrocity? Those are comparatively rare.

[antidesitter]

It’s clear you have very little understanding of what is feasible with our current state of knowledge.

[mrep]

Google pretty much undeniably has the best ML people in the world and I see nonstop hate at YouTube for their automated filters false-positives so I don't think it is an easy problem.

[kerng]

Why would AI be able to stop any of this? I doubt even humans could make the right decisions, why would computer be able to?

The usage of AI as a magic silver bullet always frustrates me.

[boomlinde]

It seems like the only way to profitably scale this type of service to millions to a billion users, so it ends up being the go-to technical excuse for the people that think our moral standards should budge for the technical feasibility of maintaining these insanely large social media setups, like it's some sort of inherent right to be able to do that and turn a profit.

In a perfect world, where everyone is liable for the material they host on their own servers, services with this many users wouldn't exist in the first place.

[ta1234567890]

This is really interesting. Did you know that child porn is legally a very special case that makes sites liable for hosting the content?

This is because somehow as a society we decided that child porn is so bad, that there are no excuses to providing any resources for it.

All companies need to make sure that no child porn is posted on their sites, or if it is, then it's taken down immediately and reported to the proper authorities. Failure to do that will get sites blocked by their ISPs, or any of their tech providers if they detect it first (which usually happens within hours or even minutes).

Politics aside, technically, all large enough sites (which allow users to post content) already have the resources and processes in place to monitor and filter all their content. And they are making a conscious decision about what they filter.