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Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

nytimes.com

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Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#211

Post by _cs2017_ »

MarkMc wrote: post #177
_cs2017_ wrote: post #40

What should be the rule about what videos are banned? We don't want to ban parodies I suppose? What if the author of the Pelosi video claims it's a parody? It would be great if we could allow parodies and jokes as long as a reasonable person can tell that this is indeed a joke. But that won't work since people disagree about what's "reasonable". I guess we can require that parodies and jokes are tagged as such, so pe…

My preferred solution is for Facebook to assess whether a video is presented as accurate but has been altered with intent to deceive. If so, it is tagged "This video has been flagged as deceptive. Click here for details". Yes, from time to time I might disagree with Facebook about the accuracy or intent of a video, but it would be an improvement on the status quo.

Then what would prevent people whose videos were banned from suing Facebook because Facebook didn't get their intent correctly? And similarly, people appearing in videos that aren't banned could sue because Facebook didn't see the evil intent.

Such lawsuits can be numerous and costly enough to kill the entire concept of hosting user uploaded videos. How to avoid this?

Maybe it's better to drop the intent thing and just ban any videos that look real but aren't? Even if it means banning some parodies such as this https://youtu.be/cQ54GDm1eL0 Even then we'll need to figure out how do it at scale, since a human reviewer will often not know if it's real.

I don't think we can limit the ban to videos where you can see people's faces; you can create quite bad misinformation by showing a military boat of some country sinking a civilian ship etc.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#212

Post by Barrin92 »

mynameishere wrote: post #189
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't prefer he become the arbiter of speech. I'd prefer the government would regulate his business and hold him accountable for the damage that lies and misinformation cause on his platform. Given that he recently called for more regulation, surely he'll agree.

Man, I'd prefer the government would regulate you. See how easy that is?

I already work in a heavily regulated industry because my job has security implications, I have absolutely no issue with it.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#213

Post by StanislavPetrov »

Thousands and thousands of videos and pictures are edited and altered to mock famous people and politicians every day, why is this suddenly an issue? Its astounding to me that anyone would support having overseers like Facebook (and their government partners at the Atlantic Council and elsewhere) deciding what is okay for people to post and view.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#214

Post by davidw »

nailer wrote: post #192
davidw wrote: post #27

I think several things can be true at the same time: * It's pretty worrying that our fascist-adjacent president is spreading doctored videos with essentially no repercussions. * Asking FB/Twitter/etc to police videos could be quite a mess in its own right. * This is a pressing problem for democracies around the world. (Note: I don't use the 'f word' lightly. Too many on the left use it freely with "people on the righ…

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for.

I generally agree strongly with that, but FB is caught up in this - and social media is in general.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#215

Post by AmericanChopper »

chillacy wrote: post #197
AmericanChopper wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you’re criminally responsible if you use your personal Wordpress site to host illegal content, or use it to facilitate a crime. Facebook would say they aren’t criminally responsible for how their users use their site, because they’re just a common carrier. However they also want to exert a huge amount of editorial control over the content, which could be described as having your cake and eating it too.

By “you are criminally responsible” you mean “Wordpress is criminally responsible”? I don’t think the analogy makes sense the other way.

If you host your own Wordpress site, and use it to publish illegal content, then you are criminally responsible. Facebook have immunity from being held liable for the content published on their platform granted by the telecommunications decency act:

>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The party who publishes the content is liable, not the service that distributes it.

Often not discussed when this law comes up, is that it has a Good Samaritan clause:

>any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected

The question is whether Facebook, etc... are publishers of content, or mere distributors of content that others publish. Facebook will tell you that they are distributors of content. Their opponents will tell you that the editorial control they exert over their platforms is beyond the scope of the Good Samaritan clause of the law.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#216

Post by kneel »

sgt101 wrote: post #100
Macross8299 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Facebook obligated to play the role of referee in games of political fact?

Because that is the role they have chosen by becoming a non neutral information distributor.

The medium is the message, study the medium and it's effects on how information is distributed.

The genie is out of the bottle. Unless you want a 1984 style propaganda you have to accept that media is different from 10 years ago and it'll never be the same.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#217

Post by drilldrive »

makomk wrote: post #150
zaroth wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how hard it is to get someone to believe something counter to their baseline assumption. People “know” Trump spread the video, even though it’s simple irrefutable fact that he did not. The media is often responsible for amplifying and distorting an act to the point where the original act and actor are indistinguishable. Kind of exactly like what happened in the doctored video. This is perhaps an incredib…

It's worth thinking, too, about the role this New York Times opinion piece played in convincing people so strongly of something that isn't true that the untruth was upvoted whilst the comment pointing it out is greyed out. They make it sound like the perception she was "drunk or perhaps crazy" was entirely the result of the deliberately and maliciously doctored video. Clearly it wasn't. Anyone who didn't investigate…

Currently my comment is +4, so I wouldn't be so quick to say it is greyed out. Regardless, claims based on vote totals are not useful and distract from discussion: vote totals consider only the subset of the population willing to participate in site-based voting, which will pull from the polemics much more than the moderates. And besides, the structured refutation comment format of mine above is rife for false corrections, in that frequently such comments are only be a distortion or a deflection of the truth. People learn to blind themselves of the content of the message over time, furthering the partisan lock on their minds.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#218

Post by JetSpiegel »

mises wrote: post #183
fragmede wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't message my friends on Snapchat from Instagram, but I can call my friends on T-Mobile and ATT from Verizon. Phone companies shenanigans go back a long way, so there are more than a few lawsuits involved, in order to get to our current state for calling.

That's a nonsensical comparison. Phones all have one purpose and mechanism: voice calling. Instagram is based around a public photo-blog. Snapchat is ephemeral photo-mesaging. You would be requiring social media sites to replicate each other's functionality. If I want to send a message to a twitter user, can it be longer than 140 characters? What if I am john.doe one one platform but you have the same name on another…

> Instagram is based around a public photo-blog. Snapchat is ephemeral photo-mesaging.

> you would be requiring social media sites to replicate each other's functionality.

This is ironic, considering Facebook's Instagram has already copied Snapchat's funcionality wholesale without government intervention!

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#219

Post by mises »

mindslight wrote: post #204
mises wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nonsensical comparison. Phones all have one purpose and mechanism: voice calling. Instagram is based around a public photo-blog. Snapchat is ephemeral photo-mesaging. You would be requiring social media sites to replicate each other's functionality. If I want to send a message to a twitter user, can it be longer than 140 characters? What if I am john.doe one one platform but you have the same name on another…

It's quite amazing how the purported "free market" viewpoint has an unwavering faith in companies for getting things right, except for when imagining having to comply with any sort of mandate. A good faith interpretation of interoperability is that any service simply has to publish an equivalent API that allows interacting with "its" users in the service's own data model/paradigm. The market of competitors will then…

> "free market"

Why the "scare quotes"? I know you weren't quoting me since I didn't use those words.

I don't trust a free market to get everything perfectly right. I simply trust a government even less and believe they will screw it up even more.

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