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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

acdc4life wrote: post #69
HNthrow22 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by DSingularity »

acdc4life wrote: post #69
HNthrow22 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#103

Post by maksimum »

o10449366 wrote: post #68
maksimum wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 det…

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.

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

#104

Post by FakeComments »

zapzupnz wrote: post #71
FakeComments wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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”.

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

#105

Post by o10449366 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #100
acdc4life wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 cann…

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.

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

#106

Post by fapjacks »

techdragon wrote: post #65
tenpies wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simple. No streaming allowed.

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

#107

Post by m0zg »

jjeaff wrote: post #86
m0zg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

  >> 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.

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

#108

Post by o10449366 »

esalman wrote: post #85
acdc4life wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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.

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

#109

Post by Taniwha »

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…

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

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

#110

Post by TheChaplain »

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…

It is a hard problem to solve, yes, but the solution has to be initiated from somewhere because it won't happen by itself.

And Facebook is not targeted because who they are, but because Facebook+WhatsApp+Instagram covers a ridiculous large part of the online communication spectrum today.

It's a channel where more and more diseased trash is shared unhindered, and if the owner doesn't do enough to stop it, then the government has to force them by any means necessary.

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