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Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#61

Post by vermilingua »

djsumdog wrote: post #46
xupybd wrote: post #6

I'm a New Zealander. I think our privacy commissioner is so totally wrong here. It's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve. Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that? Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone? I d…

and why the focus of Facebook? This could have happened to Twitch.tv or a self-hosted platform (and who do you go after then? Vultr? Amazon? DigitalOcean?) Live streams are a game changer in helping people get out content. If you try to force more providers to vet material, it breaks down the massive availability. Sure it might foster a growth in self-hosted solutions like PeerTube, and help increase more tooling for…

I don’t know if I agree that this could have happened on any platform. Facebook’s core functionality is sharing; unlike twitch.tv, and self hosted services which by their nature have terrible discovery.

Only on Facebook could this have spread like it did.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#62

Post by acdc4life »

angott wrote: post #44
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[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. Th…

> their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it Nothing is impossible, especially when you are a multi-billion tech company. FB loves to justify their lack of action with technical limitations that often do not really exist.

No one has that kind of AI. It doesn't matter if you are a billion dollar company, the scientific innovation is nowhere close in the present day and age. Facebook is relying on deeplearning and machine learning, which is the current paradigm in computer science. This paradigm won't get us anywhere close to such a sophisticated object recognition for this kind of task, it performs abysmally at best.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#63

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

justinclift wrote: post #45
zhaso wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing this at Facebook's scale is very much not "pretty simple".

Do you reckon "de-scaling" Facebook would make the problem more manageable?

No, but it's more intuitive that it's unmanageable at smaller scales. Nobody thinks Reddit or HN could start pre-vetting all submissions in the first place.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#64

Post by ineedasername »

toufiqbarhamov wrote: post #17
yellow_lead wrote: post #2

Of course they are. Facebook is a public company, it has a financial duty to its shareholders to take as much as society will give it.

Why does that bit of nonsense get repeated so often? It’s a myth. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... Debunking the Shareholder Value Myth: History Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the twentieth century, large public companies follow…

All you've demonstrated is that a person made some very cogent arguments for why Sharholder Value became a dominant driving force after the 70's and why it shouldn't be that way. However, many companies are now run in that fashion. And shareholder lawsuits against corporations when they feel the leadership has not acted in their best interests are exceedingly common. So, you have a "shouldn't be like this", but the reality is it nonetheless "is like this."

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#65

Post by techdragon »

tenpies wrote: post #33
xupybd wrote: post #6

I'm a New Zealander. I think our privacy commissioner is so totally wrong here. It's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve. Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that? Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone? I d…

Let's be honest, it's fairly simple. You submit all content to the Office of Film and Literature Classification and allow the Chief Censor to make the decisions. That's ultimately what the government wants. As one Kiwi told me recently: "I have never heard anyone complain about our Censor".

And how does this handle the streaming of real time content? The traditional submission would be a complete “video” with a start and end, not an “unpredictable” live feed that is ongoing.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#66

Post by FakeComments »

HNthrow22 wrote: post #56
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[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. Th…

> 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 hum…

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.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#67

Post by [deleted] »

product50 wrote: post #16
hannasanarion wrote: post #11

Facebook deserves to become a tech pariah. People should have turned against them during the predatory racial ad targeting scandal, or the depression scandal, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If broadcasting live murder is what it takes, so be it. When America finally gets some good regulators and trust busting politicians, Facebook will get its commupance and its going to feel good.

No one has turned against them except for media narrative. People still continue to use them as much as and many times more than before. Hacker news crowd is not representative of general populace. These stories which are being upvoted here - normal people don't even care about them. If Facebook is morally bankrupt, so is Twitter, Snapchat and all other social apps. Facebook represents what humans are - and humans ar…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#68

Post by o10449366 »

maksimum wrote: post #49
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[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. Th…

> 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.

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?

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#69

Post by acdc4life »

HNthrow22 wrote: post #56
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[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. Th…

> 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 hum…

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

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#70

Post by mrep »

maksimum wrote: post #49
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[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. Th…

> 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.

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.
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