Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#141

Post by danso » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

mkgolden wrote: post #63

Simulacra wrote: post #13

People around the office were watching it. Shockingly easy to find.

Everyone keeps saying how easy it was to find. My experience was different, eventually came across a torrent of it but it took me surprisingly long, 30 minutes or so. Maybe im bad at googling?

It was very easy to find within the first hour or so of the news, at least. I googled the name of the shooter maybe half an hour after people started tweeting it, and the first Google results were YouTube videos containing some of the footage [0]. It actually surprised me that Google's search results would put YouTube videos at the very top of SERP for a term that had an anomalous spike (because of the shooter's uncommon name). I'm less surprised that they hadn't manually blacklisted it -- I don't remember when I first saw it on Twitter, but it wasn't from news stories or an official source.

0: https://i.imgur.com/rBZcdCa.png

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#142

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

x38iq84n wrote: post #62

OmarIsmail wrote: post #21

All the "free speech" advocates here, do you still stand by that when it comes to child porn, or specific threats against individuals? If you do, and publicly, well... at least you're consistent. If you don't then you're already ok with some kind of censorship, and the argument is just about where the line is drawn. I really don't like when people talk about "censorship in general" when they really mean "This is belo…

Yes. Go after the authors of said horrible crimes, not after those in possession of a video thereof.

Why do the perpetrators of such crimes put themselves at such extreme legal risk by distributing evidence of their criminal acts? Do you think those media end up on the internet by accident, or are they intended to be shared? Would you say the audience for such content is more or less likely to originate new content than and equivalent-sized pool of non-possessors?

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#143

Post by mic47 » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #58

40acres wrote: post #11

We have yet to have a real discussion about what we expect the largest platforms to do about content like this. The nature of online content is that once it's created it can be copied quite easily, if Facebook was able to block 80% of this content that should be commended. AI is not at the point where we can expect 100% of this content to be removed and if it was there would likely be some collateral damage that othe…

20% not being caught is surprisingly high to me. I would have assumed the majority of the upload attempts would be byte-for-byte identical, and that even if there were a dozen minor variations of the same content, they would be able to deal with >95% automatically.

Not really. There are 2 factors that play "against" FB having nice numbers.

It takes some time between unique (or in some similarity cluster or whatever they have) content is uploaded, reported and taken down. During this time, exactly same content is not being taken down, because it's not known to be bad. So even if all the content was byte to byte identical, if 20% of it is uploaded before it is reported, there is no chance to have >95% block rate automatically.

Once content is known to be bad, people (and bad actors) will usually stop uploading it (because it no longer works). Also people stop sharing it, because it's no longer possible (and FB delete all instances of such video from the platform anyways). If there is lame script kiddie that does not handle errors, then the number could be 95%, because it would continue with upload attempts. But normal people, or sophisticated actors will respond to errors and stop uploading exactly that video.

1 extreme example: with 1 sophisticated bad actor uploading exactly same video (through some fake/hacked accounts/pages, or whatever), the block rate will always look bad for Facebook: bad actor uploads N videos before being blocked. Once blocked (on video N+1), bad actor will stop. The block rate will be here 1/(N+1), which will be way less 80% (FB's current case) for any N > 0.

What did I try to say? Percentage of what is being blocked does not make sense, since it also depend on how fast is attacker detecting that is being blocked. If fast, the number will always look bad. If attacker does not give a shit, the number will look awesome.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#144

Post by jimjimjim » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #120

x38iq84n wrote: post #2

The shooting in Christchurch is a tragedy that should not have happened. That said, this massive wave of censorship across MSM, NZ ISPs, regardless of the motivation, is very disturbing. It will be inevitably used to suppress citizens' freedoms, it will cause more tension in society that will escalate into more tragical incidents. Also, the video may serve someone to study modus operandi of such an attacker to increa…

It is extremely telling to me that of all the comments here, most of them I've seen express concern not with the fact that 50 people were murdered by white supremacists (a number that seems to be rising year over year) but rather attempting to divert the topic into one about censorship and free speech. I have seen zero proposed solutions or ways of combating the rise of white supremacists because so far, the market p…

I had the same thought and it makes me sad.

No suggestions, or ways to help.

This is meant to be a meeting place of intelligent, creative, resourceful people.

Instead of just saying "it's too difficult, lets do nothing" why not think of answers.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#145

Post by huffmsa » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

seanwilson wrote: post #93

huffmsa wrote: post #3

The video of the 757s hitting the WTC isn't purged from the internet, why should this video be? The world is dark and full of terrors (but getting better every day), and sticking our heads in the sand doesn't change that.

For comparison, I can't think of anything close to this graphic being shown on the news. I'm not sure how honest you're being with your comment but there's clearly a line where news reporting jumps from showing something to communicate the facts to something that is gratuitous + glorifying the guilty + insulting to the victims + traumatising to family and friends. It's not easy to describe exactly where that line is…

It's not gratuitous, it's real life. If you really really want the public to be upset enough about this to take action, they need to see just how horrifying it was.

The video of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém in Vietnam was huge in turning opinion even harder against war.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#146

Post by XorNot » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

ilkkao wrote: post #39

warning26 wrote: post #9

I know people on here will disagree with this, but I think many of these events indicate that online censorship is needed. I believe it's becoming increasingly clear that merely allowing far-right dialogue online is essentially responsible for ease of radicalization, and that proactive censorship would be the best approach to forestall this.

I read that it was a live stream. Not sure how even technically those can be fully moderated. Probably one employee can watch up to ten streams at time but it still doesn't sound scalable enough. The cost would be too high.

No ones calling to block live streams in real time. But allowing the continued assault on the victims by rebroadcasting their last moments, without the consent of the families or the individuals is an assault.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#147

Post by Pharmakon » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

thepangolino wrote: post #139

Pharmakon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get people who seem to understand that it’s morally and legally sound to censor videos of children being raped, but when they’re being murdered it’s somehow a different story.

I’ve always understood the problem with those videos is that they are sold by producers or distributors and therefore finance those horrible acts.

“Oh but your honor, I wasn’t selling the child pornographry, I was just collecting it!”

There’s a reason that isn’t a defense, and I hope you already understand why that is.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#148

Post by jimjimjim » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #80

jimjimjim wrote: post #73

I am almost as saddened by some of the responses here as I was after hearing about the shooting. Have you all become so gradually desensitized to violence that absolutely nothing is beyond acceptable? Are YOU, personally, YOU, happy with how things are in the world?

I recommend re-reading the comments here. Nobody is saying that what happened is acceptable, every comment here has its own reasoning for why they viewed it or why they don't think it should be censored.

Wait, have you read the responses HERE?

most of them are 'how dare they try and censor us'.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#149

Post by bitxbit » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #3

The video of the 757s hitting the WTC isn't purged from the internet, why should this video be? The world is dark and full of terrors (but getting better every day), and sticking our heads in the sand doesn't change that.

That’s not logical at all. What if any of the victims in the video didn’t want the video to be disseminated? Who are you to stand in the way of their wishes and rights? So we are OK with corporate cease and desist letters on youtube but when it comes to people actually getting murdered it’s all of sudden not OK.

Re: Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos

#150

Post by 43920 » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

mic47 wrote: post #143

ben_w wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% not being caught is surprisingly high to me. I would have assumed the majority of the upload attempts would be byte-for-byte identical, and that even if there were a dozen minor variations of the same content, they would be able to deal with >95% automatically.

Not really. There are 2 factors that play "against" FB having nice numbers. It takes some time between unique (or in some similarity cluster or whatever they have) content is uploaded, reported and taken down. During this time, exactly same content is not being taken down, because it's not known to be bad. So even if all the content was byte to byte identical, if 20% of it is uploaded before it is reported, there is…

It seems like you could fix this (at least for exactly identical content) by generating a fingerprint for each file as it is uploaded. If a file with a given fingerprint is marked as bad, then all existing files with the same fingerprint would be removed (or maybe just recently-uploaded ones, in order to avoid removing too many legitimate files). That being said, it would probably be pretty simple to work around this by varying the content slightly on each upload.