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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

#111

Post by o10449366 »

DSingularity wrote: post #102
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.

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.

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?)?

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

#112

Post by profmonocle »

maxaf wrote: post #39
catmanjan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't care about user experience and cost it's a pretty simple problem to solve - everything vetted before it gets posted

I challenge the premise that anything needs to be “posted”. What is it with this incessant drive to give everyone a voice? It turns out that the majority of “user-generated content” is either trivial or outright harmful. Perhaps the time has come for this experiment to end.

If we abandon the idea that everyone gets a voice, then who decides who does, and how do they do so?

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

#113

Post by justatdotin »

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's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve.

hard to solve; not hard to address. I read this as being an expression of frustration at fb's lack of concern rather than capacity

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

#114

Post by o10449366 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #80
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.

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.

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

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

#115

Post by axaxs »

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.

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

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

#116

Post by everdev »

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…

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

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

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

#117

Post by esalman »

blue6249 wrote: post #97
esalman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

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

#118

Post by AnonTechDrone »

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'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.

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

#119

Post by mr_toad »

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…

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?

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

#120

Post by NeedMoreTea »

o10449366 wrote: post #105
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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