I'm no Facebook fan or apologist, but I do think there's a distinction between failing to moderate perfectly (or even well) and refusing to even attempt to moderate.
Yes. Targeted advertisement, and the resulting money, is the entire purpose of Facebook. Automation just makes the process faster. And cheaper; you know, that whole money thing.
I abhor both Parler and Facebook. In the context of these threads, I don't think either has done anything illegal, which is what passes for "ethics" in our economy. Of course IANAL.
I don't think Apple, Google and Amazon did anything illegal to Parler. And until these kinds of companies are legally and explicitly made into utilities, I don't think we can expect them to do anything except whatever they want.
They want to target their ads in general, but they don't actually want to sell military gear to insurrectionists. It was just the AI working too well. Once they noticed, they have now blanket banned such ads until after the inauguration:
Parler had a moderation process. It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution days before the crowd took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!").
> How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.
Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.
And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.
But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.
Parler had deleted several of Wood's posts, and a number of users had used the "report" function to raise the flag to Parler management. I think he was close to being banned.
That particular post was still up when the site went down, I believe. I mean, sure, it's possible they would have gotten better. But this wasn't an abstract issue, we'd just had an attack on congress and there was (and remains) serious worry that something similar or worse would happen at the inauguration. Certainly the rhetoric on the site had not significantly moderated in the few days between the capitol riot and their ban.
Clearly Facebook's systems are able to associate correct ads based on the semantics of the content. Since this is true, why can't those systems moderate said content?
If I assume that they are operating in good faith, false positives versus false negatives. Showing the wrong advert loses you a few pennies each time, incorrectly blocking legitimate content has a power-law distribution of cost in political capital, depending on whose stuff you block.
I don’t trust FB enough to want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this would still be true if I did.
Parler’s chief policy officer contends that they were (1) actively hiring content moderators (to augment their jury system) and (2) working with Amazon to get AWS AI facilities so they could implement automated moderation. These programs were in progress right up until the site went down.
Incitement to terrorism isn't something where failing to moderate perfectly should be tolerated.
There is already a zero-tolerance approach to numerous extremist groups, regardless of whether they are active on American soil or not. Why should this be treated any differently?
Twitter can claim to make a good-faith effort to reduce misinformation, and threats of violence and incitements to terrorism are taken down quickly.
Parler's raison d'etre is that it makes no such efforts. From the AWS team's motion to dismiss:
"There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature. AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so. AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content, including plans for violence to disrupt the impending Presidential transition."
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. But the answer is an elephant-in-the room kind of thing so I think it needs to be said:
The reason is that the overlap between "extremism" and our (now) minority political party is so large as to have muddled the distinction. Per one poll, 45% of Trump voters approve of the sacking of the capitol. It's really not possible to distinguish people who merely post angry political speech and the ones who stray into extremist rhetoric about revolution and violence. The same people are doing all of it.
So right now, "moderating communities with extreme content" simply looks a lot like "censoring republicans". But... I don't see how that gets better by outlawing the moderation. Republicans need to fix their rhetoric first.