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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

#141

Post by drewmol »

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…

As you stopped reading at that point, I assume the "big claim to make without quantitative evidence" is the part of the article you quoted.

I'd entertain some debate over the definition of publish, as well as whether or not Facebook refuses to accept any responsibility... but outside that nuance it's a fairly objective claim of Facebook's capability and behavior.

I see it as a quite reasonable position to assume that playing violent video games can ease people's inhibition to engage in IRL violence. I personally believe the liberty infringement, and ultimately, violence, that is necessary to ban them is worse than the violent behavior they can influence.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by drdeca »

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.

The government in general shouldn’t be trying to prevent people from being able to see violent or disturbing content.

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

#144

Post by mr_toad »

xupybd wrote: post #98
ineedasername wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree these are hard problems to solve, and don't fault facebook for not having come up with a solution. I still think the "morally bankrupt liars" label isn't too far off the mark though. All of the negative stories that have emerged this past year, their denials and ham-handed cover ups, and perhaps finally the fact that they are actually asking some people to give them passwords for 3rd party services... I can't…

You are correct, but this is one of the few cases where it's unjustified. We have moved to online discourse more and more. Do we really want super powerful AI and armies of moderators combing through all of that?

Indeed, Facebook has probably been in violation of existing New Zealand privacy laws since it started, but there hasn’t been a peep out of the Privacy Commissioner, or anyone else in Government.

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

#145

Post by dylan604 »

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.

What's the internet version of the fire marshall? If the people that feel the club is unsafe, a simple call to the authorities will have the marshall come out and declare it unsafe and shut it down. Can we get Fire Marshall Bill to do it?

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

#146

Post by manfredo »

maksimum wrote: post #103
o10449366 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes they can identify themes, but not nearly with enough accuracy to make policy enforcement decisions. IIRC the preemptive video blocks were based on fingerprinting previous video uploads. They're still a long way away from being able to automate policy enforcement dynamically.

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

#147

Post by manfredo »

imichael wrote: post #134
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…

> Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Make it live but with a time delay (say 1 hour). Allow .1% of all users to see it immediately. Add a Flag This Content button. Depending on how many people flag it, triage as safe to show/don't show/ask a human to decide. I'm sure this could be refined. Maybe an hour is too much or too little. Maybe .1% is to many or too few. Also, over time you should be able…

How would that work for the NZ attack? Apparently only 12 people were streaming the video, and nobody reported it until after the attack was streamed in its completion. Effectively nothing could have stopped this stream save for magically accurate and effective filtering mechanisms, or manual intervention.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

LanceH wrote: post #84
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

The more 1984 process is that laws are put into place where all video can be tracked back and we can punish people for their speech.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by zapzupnz »

FakeComments wrote: post #104
zapzupnz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trillion…

> Your vision for society is one in which private companies moderate civic discourse?

> None of what you wrote is a response to what I said

My post was that there are alternatives to Facebook and Twitter having the monopoly on public discourse, proved it by demonstrating alternative methods by which no one (or two) entities have any such monopoly.

You spoke about a "vision for society". Typically when people talk about a vision, they're talking about the future. I gave a vision of the future.

> 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 didn't say any of that. I mean, I agree with you. But you were talking about a vision for society. I gave mine.

I think you've decided I said something quite different from what I actually said.

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

#150

Post by DuskStar »

Nextgrid wrote: post #136
o10449366 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)?

I actually think that’s perfectly realistic, and in fact how forums have worked for ages. There are also automated measures such as user trust levels where an account has to earn trust before they can do certain things like post links, embed pictures, etc. Being on the platform isn’t a right either and it would be perfectly fair for them to rate-limit the amount of public posts someone can make to an amount that’s ma…

> and in fact how forums have worked for ages.

What forums are those? Because this isn't the case with the forums I frequent. The boards I read / participate in tend to operate on the principle of "don't make me come over there", and everything is reactive, not proactive. I'm not sure how you'd get things like "user was banned for this post" etc otherwise...

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