Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

161–168 of 168 posts

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

#161
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.

Bigger problem with human moderators is that the companies often keep them at arms length.

i.e. they will typically use contractors or contract houses for moderation work. Why? Because it allows for opportunities to minimize the cost of counseling (If you're doing serious moderation, they must provide mental health support services. But fixed-term contracts make this easier to contain/control, at the cost of the employee.)

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

#162
post #3

Youtube and Facebook, while convenient, aren't really appropriate mediums for them to share this sort of footage. Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video. Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim. Likely for this sort of thing a diligent archivist will need to put in the effort of storing…

> 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...

> I'm not convinced that a site known for hosting gory and violent videos is really what these human rights activists are looking for

You mean gory and violent videos like war crimes and human rights violations? Sounds like exactly the right site.

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

#163
post #47

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.

Archive.is has constantly faced harassment from people filing DMCA claims and having domain names taken away for bullshit copyright claims. I'm sure if they started doing this the Twitter outrage warriors wouldn't be happy about it and add to the difficulty of their job.

Just in case there's confusion, the Internet Archive isn't Archive.is but Archive.org. They are 2 differents organizations.

Internet Archive seems to be handling this kind of trouble quite well.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

They've recently made the process intentionally more annoying. You used to be able to exclude a site you control via a robots.txt file. That wouldn't actually delete archived content and would merely hide it from viewing. They no longer honor that approach. You now have to send them an email and specifically request content removal.

That approach allowed domain spammers to (unintentionally?) disable access to content that predates their ownership of the domain, so it was a garbage approach. In the current situation, a content owner can still achieve removal, but a subsequent owner of the domain cannot. That's how it should be. If I buy domain x, I should not be able to request the removal of content that was present on domain x before I owned it.

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

#165
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution is another platform that respects creators, has sane/straightforward policies and doesn't permit rampant scams and extortions. What is that alternate platform? For many people, web video is YouTube.

You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and you need to get out more. A not-yet-existent, co-op-owned platform where creators share in monetization and have straight-forward/transparent content policies and processes, not secret ones, and not shady algorithms that curate user filter-bubbles without telling them how they're being shown recommendations. YT isn't the only web address on th…

> You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and you need to get out more.

Ask 100 random people on any city street where they'd find videos on the web and I am betting 0 of them will come up with any answer resembling yours.

> A not-yet-existent, co-op-owned platform where

Yes, so "not-yet-existent" answers the question. The alternative does not exist.

But you seem like you have an idea fleshed out, so why don't you build this alternate video platform?

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and you need to get out more. A not-yet-existent, co-op-owned platform where creators share in monetization and have straight-forward/transparent content policies and processes, not secret ones, and not shady algorithms that curate user filter-bubbles without telling them how they're being shown recommendations. YT isn't the only web address on th…

>You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and you need to get out more Millions upon millions of people watching YT, but GP "needs to get out more" in order to experience your fantasy platform that doesn't exist. Ok.

You know the type, we've all worked with them before.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding. I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever, drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business flow. It makes sen…

> The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding. I'll bet it's dwarfed by the number of times I get useful results from Google and total garbage from DDG. Earlier today I searched for "CADT syndrome" to figure out what another HN comment meant by it. Both engines automatically correct that…

searching for "CADT" syndrome yields better results in both search engines.

As of now, the best resource (https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) is avaiable on both search engines as the first result for this query, and somewhere in the first ten or so results for "CADT Syndrome". The best set of results (for my Google history) is in Google's verbatim mode searching for "CADT syndrome" (the link under the search bar with the autocorrected version) which includes mailing lists and release notes from various opensource projects

interestingly there is also another meaning of CADT (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4610895/) which is less favored in google, but shows second place in ddg. Perhaps if we were into medicine papers this would show up higher in google.

Only ddg results include this (Hacker News) page and the comment you referenced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337404)

Bottom line, both gave me useful results, ddg needs a better verbatim mode, google tracks me

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup, another classic tactic is a moderator stepping in and doing some variation of "This thread has gone out of control! Locked." This has become very common in Hong Kong threads. I strongly believe that TenCent needs to be rooted out of U.S. tech and media, and fast.

I'm starting to come around to the idea of rejecting Chinese investment. They clearly have a negative influence. See Hollywood, political coverage, historical programming, video games, current affairs... If nothing is done, in a few decades they'll have manipulated the entire social political landscape of the West. All of us will be using the Social Credit system. Worse, we'll defend it, too.

Future is bleak if we do nothing.

Post reply on HN