Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#91

Post by theknocker » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

drcongo wrote: post #32

stonecraftwolf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems overly glib. Facebook’s monopoly status means it’s necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere, this could be both financially and personally devastating. As it is, he’s only protected because he has other access to business and personal pages. One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.

I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is about as essential as essential oils.

Necessary in the sense mail is necessary, obviously, genius.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#92

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #20

I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code word…

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually

Oh hell no they aren't too big, they just don't want to reduce their profits from the current 18.5 billion US $ (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...).

If Facebook wanted, they could massively ramp up staffing, hire them themselves, and pay them a livable wage instead of outsourcing the cost that their business occurs on society (who has to pick up the slack from conspiracy myths, fascism and other shit), on the users who are mistakenly banned and lose their primary contact e.g. to overseas family, and on the moderation staff that is hired via third parties and exploited.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#93

Post by hntrader » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

anp wrote: post #58

root_axis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist because they're popular, you can't dictate what is popular among the masses without authoritarianism.

They exist because they’re popular and because the currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of their smaller meaningful competitors using investment capital and money from first mover advantages.

There's definitely an anti-trust dimension here, but it's not related to first mover advantage; Facebook wasn't nearly the first mover, or due to capital; Facebook was somewhat widely thought to have over-paid for Instgram, it was Zuck's foresight (or perhaps risk aversion) that gave him the conviction to proceed with the transaction.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#94

Post by ivalm » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #90

inglor_cz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.

Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

If meta moderators are at the same scale then that’s only 200 meta moderators and only 1 meta meta. The base of a log scaling pyramid is approximately as large as the entire pyramid.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#95

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #90

inglor_cz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.

Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

Where's the problem in that? FB makes 18.5 billion $ a year in profit. 250k employees @ 30k would work out to 7.5 billion $ in cost a year, it would hardly leave them bankrupt.

Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#96

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #90

inglor_cz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.

Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

To muse a bit: a city of 2 billion would need a lot more administrators than just 200 000.

Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that current user:moderator ratio is very obviously insufficient.

In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#97

Post by rektide » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

drcongo wrote: post #32

stonecraftwolf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems overly glib. Facebook’s monopoly status means it’s necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere, this could be both financially and personally devastating. As it is, he’s only protected because he has other access to business and personal pages. One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.

I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is about as essential as essential oils.

> I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable.

Facebook may not be necessary, but there is a very high probability it is the only social medium that the majority of your acquaintances & relatives use.

Being forcibly disconnected from humanity is extremely isolating & harsh.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#98

Post by samvher » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

g_p wrote: post #26

falcolas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 and 4 are easy - have a manual review of automatically flagged content. You get clear reasons, better resolution of false positives, and it’s not simple to game. And, in another plus, it can feed back into the AI training.

I think part of the problem at FB's scale is getting any level of consistency across human moderation. If you ask 10 good, experienced, human moderators whether a controversial post is allowed, you'll probably get at least 15 different answers and justifications. FB would probably find it harder to train from this, as each moderator will be using different justifications, and reaching different decisions. At FB's sca…

Any justice system also has a variety of different judges. Of course in an ideal world there would be perfect consistency, but imperfect consistency would still be a lot better than just letting an algorithm decide. Of course they want something cheap and straightforward, so that's where regulation should step in to make them go against their own interests, in the interest of population at large.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#99

Post by stonesweep » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #70

im3w1l wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you export contacts? Like many people will not list alternate methods of contact?

Ask for their email, then pen and paper. Or keyboard and a local, maybe synchronized contacts list. No, not sarcasm, no, not joking. I had decades old email addresses of friends I pinged when the lockdown started, and the vast majority of them got to the intended person. EDIT: yes, one by one. If they matter to you, they should worth the time.

What's sad / frustrating / predictable is that they had an open API until early 2016 to export contacts. No mistake they shut that down to lock folks to the platform I'm sure...

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#100

Post by AlphaWeaver » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

hartator wrote: post #89

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #63

Something particularly concerning about this incident is buried further down in the article. Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify suc…

That's interesting. The disgorzation produced by all the bans will probably impact votes for conservatives for a long time despite not censoring that many people indeed.

Maybe. The outcome of banning "connectors" typically reduces connectedness between cliques, rather than within cliques themselves. (In graph theory, when a group of people are well connected that share similar interests, we typically call that a clique.)

When people complain that people are increasingly finding themselves in echo chambers, and that "people don't talk to people from the other side," connectedness across the graph is dropping, while connectedness within cliques remains strong or increases.