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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

#311

Post by mcv »

jocoda wrote: post #225
rndgermandude wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The people who actually put up those live streams are liable Yet we insist on allowing anonymity on the net. Either you know exactly who is doing what and can then make them liable for any consequences that follow from their actions OR you allow anonymity and live with the consequences of that decision as dark as these may be.

One of the primary reasons anonymity is important, is to enable critics of oppressive regimes to voice their opinion.

However, enabling complete anonymity everywhere might not be necessary for that; if you can get someone else, in a different country, to take responsibility for it, that might work too. That's similar to how journalists keep their sources secret, or how wikileaks works.

Stuff that's important will still get published as long as you can get someone else to recognise its importance. But who's going to take responsibility to publish your child porn or snuff movie in their own name?

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

#312

Post by ttsda »

mcv wrote: post #310
ttsda wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've reported actual child pornography with hundreds of likes and comments and got that reply from Facebook. On the other hand, a Facebook group I created for my CS course with a few hundred members and just a bunch of helpful course material and questions vanished for a few months without any sort of warning or notification, and showed up like it had never been gone in the first place. I tried to contact Facebook, e…

If they consider childporn "not against their community standards", isn't that enough reason to report them to the police and make a huge public stink about this?

In theory, yes. In practice I haven't found a way to do so, especially with Facebook being a big American company and me living on the other side of the ocean... The best case I can imagine would probably be an e-mail from the police department arriving at Facebook a few months after and the content being removed, there isn't any real way to damage them without the effort and luck of a targeted PR attack.

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

#314

Post by boomlinde »

o10449366 wrote: post #111
DSingularity wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)?

If it is not viable to actively moderate all the content, there are two conflicting concerns here:

1. Online services should maintain an acceptable legal and moral standard of the content they serve. 2. Online services should be able to profitably facilitate the communication between millions and billions of users.

Which of these concerns seems more important to you, regardless of what you believe is an acceptable legal and moral standard?

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

#315

Post by mcv »

ttsda wrote: post #312
mcv wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they consider childporn "not against their community standards", isn't that enough reason to report them to the police and make a huge public stink about this?

In theory, yes. In practice I haven't found a way to do so, especially with Facebook being a big American company and me living on the other side of the ocean... The best case I can imagine would probably be an e-mail from the police department arriving at Facebook a few months after and the content being removed, there isn't any real way to damage them without the effort and luck of a targeted PR attack.

Aren't your national newspapers interested in this? It might not become an international scandal, but some newspaper attention will get noticed, and will likely get mentioned again and again in every political discussion about the impact Facebook has on our society.

Also, report it to the police with all the evidence and screenshots you've got and just let them handle it.

It might not bring down Facebook on its own, but it will add to all the other demands that Facebook needs to get a better handle on this sort of thing.

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

#316

Post by boomlinde »

profmonocle wrote: post #78
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…

> They have the money and profits to hire human moderators Do they? Most content posted to Facebook has very low reach. If I live stream something for my friends it’s not going to bring in enough revenue to pay a minimum wage employe to watch it in real time.

Perhaps enough for a minimum wage employee to service a report?

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

#317

Post by kaveh_h »

laughinghan wrote: post #187
kaveh_h wrote: post #180

I call bullshit on Zuckerbergs claim as birthday parties and group hangs streams are primarily with people you have direct relationship status with on Facebook and thus can be distingishued when distributed to users by Facebook as non-related users can have a delay added for review. This would at least greatly reduce the spread of said material to limited groups and if individuals within that groups choose to resubmi…

THIS. No one else has seem to have even brought up, as just a potential idea, a time delay only for the public stream but allow pre-confirmed friends to view the stream live. Or instead of pre-confirmed friends, people who were invited and responded to a Facebook event. Or something. That would solve the birthday use case while inhibiting the virality. That's not necessarily good! Maybe the ability to live-streaming…

Is it a necessary to have a ability to live stream of police brutaility? Would a delay of lets say 1/2 day and distribution after moderation or by regular media be that bad? As long as you can record a video and store it live on cloud storage hindering cops from destroying video. That should be enough of a deterrent for officers to avoid police brutality.

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

#318

Post by kaveh_h »

laughinghan wrote: post #187
kaveh_h wrote: post #180

I call bullshit on Zuckerbergs claim as birthday parties and group hangs streams are primarily with people you have direct relationship status with on Facebook and thus can be distingishued when distributed to users by Facebook as non-related users can have a delay added for review. This would at least greatly reduce the spread of said material to limited groups and if individuals within that groups choose to resubmi…

THIS. No one else has seem to have even brought up, as just a potential idea, a time delay only for the public stream but allow pre-confirmed friends to view the stream live. Or instead of pre-confirmed friends, people who were invited and responded to a Facebook event. Or something. That would solve the birthday use case while inhibiting the virality. That's not necessarily good! Maybe the ability to live-streaming…

Also in the era of deep fakes, the ability of free, live and broad distribution is even more fuel to the fire.

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

#319

Post by mcv »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #270

> [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 Sounds a bit like 'murder, arson and jaywalking'. Being 'hateful' is not the same as killing people on a stream.

If 'hate' means 'wanting people dead or gone', then it could be a step on the same path. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but from a Christian perspective, they're not so different.

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

#320

Post by boomlinde »

kerng wrote: post #92
mrep wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would AI be able to stop any of this? I doubt even humans could make the right decisions, why would computer be able to? The usage of AI as a magic silver bullet always frustrates me.

It seems like the only way to profitably scale this type of service to millions to a billion users, so it ends up being the go-to technical excuse for the people that think our moral standards should budge for the technical feasibility of maintaining these insanely large social media setups, like it's some sort of inherent right to be able to do that and turn a profit.

In a perfect world, where everyone is liable for the material they host on their own servers, services with this many users wouldn't exist in the first place.

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