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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

#191

Post by o10449366 »

DSingularity wrote: post #181
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?)?

The face that you would reduce my proposal to a brain dead, dumbest possible solution shows you aren’t really interested discussion. Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics? Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy? Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough conte…

> Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

What you're proposing is discrimination and isn't a solution.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

No, not really, but please provide some examples. I'm assuming you mean content category, not literal tagged category, in which case you can't really distinguish between someone livestreaming in their car vs. the Christchurch shooter driving up to the mosque.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

Sure, but they already have many thousands of moderators in addition to automated systems in place today. It's inevitable that unless every post is hand-reviewed by a human that some objectionable content will slip through.

I get that your point is that FB and the other big tech companies can certainly afford to be doing more than they currently are, but to the extent that we would almost certainly be in this exact same position even if they had hired your proposed 50,000 moderators there's not much substance to your proposal that I can even reduce.

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

#192

Post by NeedMoreTea »

o10449366 wrote: post #166
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take it to the absurd. I am NOT shifting any blame from the perpetrator. I am placing additional blame on a medium that isn't willing to exercise adequate restraint or control. A bank undoubtedly has security measures in place to prevent robbery, if they don't bother, they won't last long. Nonetheless, there are regulations on what may and may not be done for public spaces, how crowded they may be to pass fire…

> Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted. How is this any different from Facebook? A bank has security measures in place to prevent robbery, but a robbery could still take place in one and is more likely to occur in one because it's a high value target. Facebook has human and AI moderation in place that automatically processes anything you upload. U…

It isn't - if they were not providing a broadcast platform. The local bank branch broadcasts nada, if they do somehow broadcast your financial info they can be prosecuted for failing their duty of care, and you'll be eligible for compensation even without prosecution.

Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit have size and reach enough that turning a blind eye is no longer credible. We've seen countless issues crop up with regard to elections, election advertising, hate speech, and in this case broadcasting a slaughter. All of which serve to demonstrate they are unwilling to self-regulate taking them into territory where it's clear current regulation is not adequate.

Calling for adequate regulation to require moderation and oversight, and to require a duty of care to their users, viewers and listeners is not calling for them to be closed down. That comes if they prove unwilling to obey said regulation, as does any of the other measures brought to bear against habitual law breakers - fines, asset seizure, blocking etc. Regulation that will vary between different countries as they will choose differing limits.

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

#193

Post by tannhaeuser »

rndgermandude wrote: post #176
llukas wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, the idea that harsh penalties and regulations are going to prevent psychopaths from broadcasting their killing spree is ridiculous Nobody is broadcasting in TV or newspapers - they are actually liable for content that gets published on those platforms. Maybe we finally remove exception for internet?

The internet isn't exempted. You're just looking at the wrong party for liability. The people who actually put up those live streams are liable, and abusing facebook's service. Same as TV and newspapers; you don't sue Comcast or the guy who installed your satellite dish, you sue the TV station; You don't sue the paper boy, you sue the news paper.

Nope. FB gets billions for ads. They can't just shrug and say "we're just providing the platform".

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

#194

Post by afureta »

rndgermandude wrote: post #176
llukas wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, the idea that harsh penalties and regulations are going to prevent psychopaths from broadcasting their killing spree is ridiculous Nobody is broadcasting in TV or newspapers - they are actually liable for content that gets published on those platforms. Maybe we finally remove exception for internet?

The internet isn't exempted. You're just looking at the wrong party for liability. The people who actually put up those live streams are liable, and abusing facebook's service. Same as TV and newspapers; you don't sue Comcast or the guy who installed your satellite dish, you sue the TV station; You don't sue the paper boy, you sue the news paper.

Isn't this letting Facebook and Comcast have their cake and eat it, too? Giving them full authority to censor whatever they want, but still not holding them liable for what they host?

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

#195

Post by Macross8299 »

bArray wrote: post #156

> Zuckerberg said incidents like the live streaming of the > Christchurch mosque attacks were the result of “bad > actors”; not bad technology and a time delay would disrupt > the enjoyment of users who broadcast events like birthday > parties or group hangouts. In this case, he is 100% correct. Facebook, or social media in general, is a tool. A powerful tool, but a tool nevertheless. Knives for example aren't evil a…

O/T but I find the first link absolutely hilarious as a non-Brit. The stereotypes about binning that knife are real.

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

#196

Post by ynx »

DSingularity wrote: post #181
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?)?

The face that you would reduce my proposal to a brain dead, dumbest possible solution shows you aren’t really interested discussion. Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics? Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy? Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough conte…

> Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

Like rank/derank the feed based on contextual clues? No way this wasn't the first thing done.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

They've touted high accuracy in "using AI" for content moderation, like 95% or 99% or something. i.e. using machine learning to automatically tag content.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

So your proposal boils down to "hire more people so more content can be filtered faster". GP perhaps didn't steelman your argument for you but if your proposal were to be applied the only real delta would be workforce size. It follows that your proposal in effect reduces to "hire more people".

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

#197

Post by doldge »

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…

If you are a New Zealander, then you should know better. Freedom of speech is NOT an unalienable right in NZ, nor has it ever been.

The ridiculous scare-mongering by some of the sibling comments on this post about this being "the start of the end for NZ" is not representative of: A) New Zealand B) Most countries outside of the US.

(Because it's a continuation of existing policy; That not all speech is protected).

As a society, at some point we have to make the decision: Where do we draw the line with speech designed to incite hate and violence; and where do we draw the line on those that enable that speech to reach the masses?

In the US, the answer has been "We don't". In NZ, the answer has been "some speech is reprehensible and we will not tolerate it." This means there's an expectation that anyone of the scale and influence of Facebook should be able to moderate violent speech as it pertains to NZ (Keep in mind that something like 80% of the countries population is on FaceBook. That's an enormous amount of influence they have on the nation).

I'm also a New Zealander, and I work in tech; I agree with the Government here. Facebook will effectively benefit from this event in multiple instances:

1) It drives engagement with there platform (outrage -> views -> engagement) 2) It's more data for there technical god, which will in turn use it to better sell the people (political/fear-mongering?) adverts.

The easiest solution, and one that I think is entirely reasonable, is to not offer live videos in New Zealand. If they're unable or unwilling to moderate the content with regards to NZ law, and given the scale of there operations in NZ (even if that's small fry compared to facebook's scale in other nations) then it's reasonable for the government to impose restrictions on them.

(More generally, I feel government exists to ensure the collective safety and security of society. NZ's government serves the collective safety/security of the people of NZ; That's their role. If they feel the existence of facebook's live streaming threatens NZ's security, then bringing action against it is the reasonable response.)

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

#198

Post by prawn »

catmanjan wrote: post #20
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…

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

Vetting first puts legal responsibility strongly onto Facebook and it's not something they'd accept.

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

#199

Post by NeedMoreTea »

DuskStar wrote: post #150
Nextgrid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

At least a couple of newspaper comment sections, and forums have had pre-moderation for sensitive topics.

Nothing is visible until it's been validated. Guardian comments still do this for some topics.

With all the assorted profiling going on, I'm sure just as some users (like via Tor or VPN) are automatically given harder Google captchas, or some boards make you earn enough karma to perform certain actions, reactionary moderating could be something you have to earn, and sustain. Perhaps certain interests would trigger proactive moderating too.

Not perfect but certainly capable of taking much load off human moderators.

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

#200

Post by stale2002 »

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…

How about, instead of that, companies that want to moderate content, compete in the free market, and those that prefer to be the dumb pipe, do that as well.

That way users can choose which platform they prefer, the more censored version, or the less censored version.

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