Aren’t sites like LiveLeak better for this kind of content? Won’t this kind of content make it there anyway?
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Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
51–60 of 243 posts
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#52The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign…
Not a surprise. Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict.
The reality is our government has interests. Morality and interests are orthogonal, with the latter being influenced primarily by profits or some perceived direct or indirect threat to America’s elite.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#53Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
This. It is simply not possible to have these platforms host this kind of content and it boils down to money. If you want Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the likes you need ads. Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. If people were ready to pay for a platform with "raw" footage of others' lives there could be a place for it. So far the market has proven otherwise.
There is a market for a lot of kinds of content, but companies will gladly exchange some of their profit to push to silence certain kinds of messages and to keep competitors down.
There's clearly a market for an uncensored social media network, but Gab has been deplatformed from payment processors, web hosts, registrars... Companies that refuse service to Gab will gladly host degenerate pornography and turn a blind eye to illegal activity.
Much of this censorship cannot be chalked up to profit motive, and the only conclusion is ideological drive or collusion with other tech companies to help insure their respective monopolies and duopolies.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#54The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign…
Australia lacks safe harbour laws which the US has had for some time. This has a chilling effect on certain types of platforms. Even something like a photo hosting site is very risk heavy in Australia as the type of content on your servers is your responsibility. I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms…
> I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms start moderating more and more.
The way the US got the safe harbor to begin with was as follows.
There was a court decision that essentially said that you weren't liable if you were just carrying bits, but if you did moderation then you were.
The problem with this is obviously that you then either have to have no moderation at all or it has to be 100% perfect because you're liable for everything you get wrong, and getting everything 100% perfect isn't really possible. So the result would have been that nobody would do any moderation and everything would be overrun by trolls and spam. To prevent that, Congress passed a safe harbor that allowed platforms to do moderation without immediately ending up in court.
The problem now is that the constitution and jurisdictional issues make it difficult for governments in the US to do the kind of censorship that a lot of people now want somebody to do. So they're trying to get in the back door by creating laws that will force the tech companies to do it, because on the one hand the companies have minimal stake in hosting any given information and will execute just about every takedown no matter how ridiculous if it will reduce their liability, and on the other hand they're not bound by the First Amendment when they over-block protected speech. So imposing any kind of liability on them that will cause them to execute spurious takedown requests is basically the censor's birthday wish, and even better if you can get them to over-block things ahead of time.
But there are solid reasons for the First Amendment to be in effect, and "governments shouldn't be able to erase evidence of their crimes" is pretty far up there on the list. So this ploy to put the national censorship authority into the offices of Facebook and Twitter really needs to get shut down one way or another, or we're in for a bad future.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#55Social media have successfully created the illusion that they are (to some extent, at least) public spaces. This is another reminder that they are not.
OTOH, truly public spaces on the internet ... where reasonable speech can truly be free ... are in very short supply. By accident or intention, this is a crappy state of affairs.
This isn't a new topic. 20 years ago, Lessig wrote, "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear." https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/arts/adding-up-the-costs-...
If our free speech is limited only to the inside walls of walled gardens, that's not their fault.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#56I've noticed that myself as I'm analyzing influential public statements with regards to the Rohingya for my Bachelor thesis on their discrimination and genocide. Unfortunately, Facebook was one of the biggest channels for dehumanizing and incendiary content but this is all gone now. I think FB should at least provide researchers access to an archive of removed content.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#57Is this really a technology problem? Are we so naive that we believe these things were not happening in the past?
This problem cannot be solved in the consciousness we currently exist in.
The people running the world and those who ought to run it are entirely different.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#58Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
This. It is simply not possible to have these platforms host this kind of content and it boils down to money. If you want Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the likes you need ads. Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. If people were ready to pay for a platform with "raw" footage of others' lives there could be a place for it. So far the market has proven otherwise.
Not even that. Half of the people want heavy-handed moderation to save the children. The other half are yelling about censorship. Every decision ends with the messenger getting shot.
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes no sense. Pretty much all evidence starts out in some nonprofessional hands. By this logic you could also say that you shouldn't record evidence of war crimes on your Android smartphone, because Android footage "shouldn't be evidence of anything" and "Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage." Videos from Facebook or Twit…
> Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter... Money quote. Twitter is not the evidence store. Twitter is the place the evidence is gathered from. Along with numerous other sources. And no, they don't simply take your word that the footage on your platform was recorded at place X at time Y and is v…
It seems like you're implying that twitter posts cannot contain evidence of crimes?
Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
#60The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign…
Not a surprise. Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict. The reality is our government has interests. Morality and interests are orthogonal, with the latter being influenced primarily by profits or some perceived direct or indirect threat to America’s elite.
Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.