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By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

nytimes.com

91–100 of 168 posts

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#91
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are much better able than others to deal with such content. Do YouTube, Facebook, etc, implement some sort of psychological screening? I would think we know enough about PTSD, depression, etc to be able to filter out many of those most likely to suffer significant trauma, even if the screening was crazy imprecise. Plus, I assume we have many decades of experience with handling psychological issues among p…

> Perhaps a large part of the issue is money; why bother with the expense if you can use ML, even if the false positive rate is abysmal. If I understand your position: you don't have any better ideas, and you're okay with using ML even if it means deleting evidence of human rights violations. Is that accurate?

Just thinking aloud. No position, as the article offers very little context and detail.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to the notion that YouTube should be obligated, either legally or ethically, to host content in perpetuity. OTOH, if rapid filtering results in such content being taken down so quickly that even archivists and reporters don't have a reasonable chance at identifying and saving it, then I do see that as a potential ethical (but not legal) dilemma, and an interesting technical challenge.

My initial thought upon reading the title was that this story--such as it is--was more a commentary on the unintended consequences of the censorship of terrorist-related propaganda videos. From that perspective, I don't think the distinction between ML and human filters is that important; the more interesting issue seems to be the scope and creep of censorship and how we can expect tech companies to draw equitable lines within modern political cultures that suffer from hyper-partisan political discourse. It's not hard to imagine a situation where simply permitting any atrocity videos will be seen as partisan--supporting one side or another by promoting particular narratives.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#92
post #35

YouTube could solve this problem by throwing money at it, i.e. investing much more heavily in human moderators. They are extremely unlikely to ever do so, as the market would punish them for it in the short term and Google is unlikely to prioritize human rights over revenue. This presents an opportunity for another Internet Archive-like repo as mentioned in earlier comments. Unfortunately the barrier to entry (just g…

Isn't it well documented that the human moderators who do exist at places like facebook and youtube end up having their mental health screwed after they watch so much disturbing content? Just throwing human moderators at the problem probably has more cost than just the salaries involved.

How does 4chan do it? Last I checked they have moderators (well "janitors"). They are volunteers, work for almost no recognition (still Anon), and probably do not have the mental health problems that regular people do.

There is also clearly an ability to follow direction or enforce appropriate (e.g. the janitors of /b/ /pol/ /g/ and /fit/ are clearly all operating on different sets of rules).

I am 100% in agreement that you cannot hire an army of temps off the street and tell them to moderate the internet, but it's clearly not something beyond human capability. You just have to be hiring in the right places.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#93
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heaven forbid I ever accidentally click on or get interested in some random talk show video, video roughly about video games or a big media news video. All of my normal engineering, business, programming, guns, history, and mechanics recommendations go right the fuck out the window. For the next week, half my recommendations are just filled with dogshit because of one accidental video. I stopped watching movie traile…

I think that's a problem on every platform; on Apple News, if I read an article that's actual news that involves a celebrity somehow ("Tom Hanks murders 12, dies in hail of gunfire") I get a deluge of celebrity gossip ("OMG you won't believe what Kylie Jenner's cousin's brother's hairstylist said")articles for weeks. I sort of feel like their recommendation AI is a bunch of if-then statements designed to funnel you i…

Oh there was a LegalEagle episode on Kim Kardashian studying to pass the bar. He goes over the history and process of taking the bar without going to law school. But the title of the video has her name.

Reality TV recommendations... Jersey shore... celebrity gossip...everywhere...it took 2 weeks to disappear. Strep throat is cured in less time than contracting celeb gossip videos.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#94
I think most of the reason we have history, is due to physical media, such as print. newspapers books diaries and scrap books would live for decades and centuries even, so investigators could elucidate the past and bring it to light.

internet media in the current form is subject to great purges of intentional and accidental nature. no matter the corporate intention, there is a great danger of major events being deleted from social memory, and the engineering attempts currently in play, will easily become best practice in gov parlance.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#95

Is this pure populism, or does the principle apply to the "little guy" as well? If I set up a machine under my desk at home with a domain (courtesy of dynamic DNS), and provide a few terabytes of free-of-charge storage to a small bunch of people, am I "erasing history" if I can't keep all their stuff forever? Or do I have to be a Youtube-sized corporate entity before I'm a fucking asshole?

Depends what you say to them.

If you say "hey guys, feel free to use this storage to host stuff" and then delete it, then yes, you're an asshole.

If you say "hey guys, I have some hard drive space, send me stuff you think I might like and if I like it I'll host it for a while before deleting it" then no, you're not an asshole.

If you say something that sounds like the first statement but is actually the second statement because of some obfuscated legalese attached to a footnote, and then delete it, then you're back to being an asshole.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#96
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You need something like Internet Archive or better that is archival quality, random internet vandalism-proof and FBI raid-proof.

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive…

Snopes kept quietly making politically-motivated changes, and they kept getting caught. Now they can get away with it.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#97
post #26

Go ahead and add reddit into the mix as well. It's starting to be really concerning only a few people control these important discussion and meeting places, and exercise (often) power abuse from such a position to push their agenda. History isn't pleasant, that doesn't mean reddit and YouTube should be white washing it.

The sheer amount of pro-Chinese government moderators on Reddit is absolutely insane. So much dissent being either erased or forced into "megathreads." This is not how we should be reacting to genocide.

Thanks for helping me think differently about megathreads. political containment and pruning is the result.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#98
They are editors by definition. Argue all you want. If they administer editorial control of any sort they are publishers. Do they administer their of content policy or do they strictly enforce jurisdictional statute? if their content moderation policies do anything other than or in addition to moderating based on jurisdictional statute they are editors. PERIOD DOT

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#99
> "Ogrish was a very serious site, it wasn't like a lot of the gore sites you might see now that are based off that model. It was tremendously serious, everything was researched, there was no laughing at dead people or anything like that"

...Just a bit undermined by the screenshot of Ogrish video titles in the article... https://media.businessinsider.com/images/54117ca9ecad04406f2...

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#100
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video. Liveleak, seriously? I'm not convinced that a site known for hosting gory and violent videos is really what these human rights activists are looking for. [Edit] Some context: https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-of-hayden-hewitt-fou...

It comes to mind for that very reason. The rules for uploading to it are less stringent than other services because it's there to provide a platform for things that don't fit on other video platforms on the web. If you're going to be hosting videos of the horrors of war, it's much more likely to stick on liveleak than any other platform.

I agree that it works from a technology perspective, but from the product/marketing perspective it's a non-starter.

People who want to watch violent videos != human rights activists. There's the "blood and gore" people, and the "social justice warrior" people, and not a ton of overlap.

In order to solve this use case there would really need to be a site that combines LiveLeak's content moderation policy with an activist ethos.

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