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Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

theatlantic.com

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Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, for one, all the major movies and tv series are American, so they will present any war, conflict, etc, under American viewpoints, to an international audience (including politically naive, historically ignorant and impressionable young ones).

Even when the plot will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the conflict and the actions of the heroes, those will still be the protagonists (and with the humanizing superiority of at least being able to be morally conflicted about their actions), whereas the nuances of the other side are either hidden altogether, or obscured by some "we're all human after all/both sides are equally at fault" message.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#82
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I think it's just simpler than that, it's risk. Some content has a known level of "bad" risk associated with it, legal pornography for instance, but other content potentially has a massive and unquantifiable downside almost to the point of being an existential threat to a platforms business.

You can't force people to host content or be associated with hosting content which they fear will blow up in their faces.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#83
This is a very serious issue by far not limited to facebook and youtube. The problem goes much further then private companies not wanting the content on their site. Its very much motivated by a push of governments to purge terrorism propaganda and stuff that could be used to radicalize people.

The best example is, or better was, reddits /r/syriancivilwar. The subreddit collected all and every information available on the conflict, from every side. This brought them in direct conflict with reddit admins, who banned multiple users for linking to terrorism propaganda, namely ISIS videos and AMAQ statements, the ISIS news agency. The subbredit is now a shell of its former self because its reduced to a propaganda platform for factions which are socially acceptable, instead of a place to document the war and its atrocities.

It however doesnt stop there. The content wasnt hosted at reddit but literally anywhere where there is a hope it might not be immediately taken down. From piracy favored streaming services to archiv.org mirrors. Which all get taken down for distributing terrorism propaganda instead of violating the TOS.

When you hear about terrorism propaganda, there is a good chance we are talking about not just evidence of warcrimes, but also material that is important to understand how people can get radicalized. And how to counter that propaganda. People at risk of radicalization can still access the material while the public as a whole looses the insight into the mind of those people entirely. And the people at risk drift off into echo chambers. And for a lack of information we are doing nothing to counter that propaganda, quite the opposite. I doubt the media at large could have done ISIS a bigger favor by their coverage of focusing simply on the barbarism of the videos. They missed the point entirely, the barbarism was very much a part of ISIS propaganda. The reporting was great for getting views, but only reenforced the people who already entered the echochambers. And hoping on a purely military solution sounds absolutely naive to me. Its very much a task for society as a whole to watch out that people dont drop into those echo chambers and get radicalized.

Framing this issue as "AI gone wrong" misses the point entirely. The content would also have been deleted by a human. And with the given political development, its not overly pessimistic to assume that people publicly hosting content will be forced to remove any such content immediately or face prosecution. Which only helps with getting reelected for signaling to combat terrorism instead of actually doing anything against terrorism.

Not to sound overly pessimistic, but the situation looks really dire to me. I had hoped that we as a society had learned our lesson about book burning. And the issue is not a new one. Mein Kampf is still not readily available in Germany for the "fear that it might turn people into nazis". Serdar Sommuncu made the only reasonable thing here and started touring Germany reading from Mein Kampf as well as famous propaganda speeches to show how ridiculous they are. There is nothing special about them. There isnt some hidden insight in those books that turn people into Nazis. But our treatment of them might convince people at risk that there has to be something about them, or they wouldnt be banned in the first place. I fear very much the same development from the array of far right terrorists with their manifests. Instead of the rambling of lunatics they are it gets treated as something that is dangerous as it apparently might convince people.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience being from and growing in Poland. I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world.

This is very deliberate. From 1911 to 2017, 800+ films and 1100+ television shows have received backing from the Pentagon and the CIA [1]. Several films received major script changes, primarily to create a certain perception of the US military and intelligence agencies. [1] https://theconversation.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-s...

As did Jackson Pollock [1] and other artists ...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#85

The 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…

Things are much more simple I'd say. Those "algorithms" I'd say are very dumb, nor human flaggers that are better.

Even very innocent family videos are being flagged all the time, you just have to speak a foreign language and look like a middle easterner.

Some say that just speaking in elevated tone in Arabic and having a beard is enough to be flagged on big dotcoms.

And if you are openly are a member of just any social organisation, your account deletion is pretty much a matter of time if you are a middle easterner, no matter if you are pro-regime, anti-regime, or have nothing to do with that. The Egyptian national symphonic orchestra was once banned by Facebook as a "terrorist organisation"

This is ironic given that all big social networks including Facebook outsource content censorship to companies in obscure countries like Algeria or in Balkans.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#86
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Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#87
So, here's an idea. Let's take the case of YouTube, instead of its algorithm deleting this content, how about it is marked with a flag. Normal users are completely unable to view, or even know of the existence of content marked with this flag. It doesn't come up in searches and even a direct link will just show some "content unavailable" message.

Human rights groups and the like can request permission for a designated user to have a "special administrator" permission. Anyone with that permission will see a permission toggle when they look at someone's user account. That toggle will allow them to give or revoke permission to view these "forbidden" videos.

That will then allows these organisations to give access to anyone they deem suitable to help them police these videos. There would need to be some sort of safeguards to make sure that permission is not accidentally given to a minor or something.

This should solve a lot of the problems I reckon. Thoughts?

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#88
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>The problem with this is obviously that you then either have to have no moderation at all or it has to be 100% perfect

I'm not sure. You can let the users moderate themselves, then you're still just carrying bits. That's where a pluralistic organisation of the platform comes in handy. Things like Reddit or image boards are not just one community, but a plurality of communities. None of those suit you? Go ahead and open your own subreddit, splitter! Then you can moderate there as you please. The problem is of course, the bit carrier cannot expect an advertiser to agree with all the subcommunities. But that's a different, and solvable problem. You need better targeting for ads and you need to accept that some subcommunities will just not be attractive for any advertisers at all.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#89
Number looks very little, if compared to Russia backing. Russia has whole TV channels backed by FSB, whole troll fabrics, and their own agents even in major Western media.

Why few orders of magnitude greater effort cannot help Russia, while much smaller effort helps USA a lot?

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#90
post #38

The podcast episode "post no evil" about Facebooks moderation problems, covers something very similar where during the Mexican border drug wars people were posting images of dead bodies hung from overpassed and shootouts. Facebook had internal debates over whether this counted as news or breached content guidelines I recommend the podcast greatly. But perhaps we need a simpler approach - a funded "journalism" archive…

Something like the Internet Archive?

Except nobody goes to the Internet Archive unless they're looking for something extremely specific. The benefit of Facebook as a platform is that you can reach a wide audience in a place where often going to the authorities means either jack squat or your incarceration or worse.
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