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Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

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Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#201

Post by Dylan16807 »

the_optimist wrote: post #183
Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point you're just arguing semantics about the term "moral value". But that wasn't even the original term. The first comment in the thread was about whether people are "stupid and superstitious". So pretend the question was "Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on how stupid and superstitious they are?"

There are many different ways to be stupid and many to be superstitious. Not one of those attaches to a prerogative to ban reading material or assign cognitive attributes to swaths of humanity.

There's a lot of ways to get lung cancer too, but that doesn't stop smoking from being a powerful predictor.

Prediction isn't assigning.

And nobody in this comment chain said anything about banning. In fact the OP specifically said "I don't see a solution to that any time soon."

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#202

Post by programmarchy »

sellyme wrote: post #194
programmarchy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but filtering spam is different than the censorship being done by social media platforms. I can easily opt in to calls and messages from a person or group by adding them to my contacts. However, if my contact is deplatformed, then that removes my ability to opt in. So the locus of agency shifts from me to some corporate or governmental authority, which is what people actually have a problem with.

You're confusing a protocol (email) with a platform (e.g., Twitter). You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that. This is similar to how you can't force bob@example.org to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own p…

Doesn’t it boil down to the same problem, though?

Maybe bob@example.com says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to censor information on a massive scale, even on decentralized protocols like email.

So yes, at that point, you could argue that the locus of agency falls on Bob to start his own tech empire or whatever, but that becomes absurd. We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There’s always a middle man on the Internet, or any peer to peer system with more than two edges for that matter. The problem arises when that middle man grows into a giant leviathan hell bent on manipulating the conversation of parties between itself.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#203

Post by Dylan16807 »

biggc wrote: post #196
Sophistifunk wrote: post #157

Notice how everybody seems to have accepted that non-mainstream positions, sources, and interest-groups must be banned, and now they're simply arguing about who should be doing it and how? This is not OK.

Notice how whenever someone talks about holding Facebook for its algorithm spreading and promoting outright lies and falsehoods, e.g. active antivax propaganda, people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”?

To quote an all-time top tweet:

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no...no not those views

Me: So....deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#204

Post by the_optimist »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #177
the_optimist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly do you propose this intersects with the concepts of “stupidity” and “superstition”?

The hell is this question? You're the one who equated stupidity and superstition with "moral value"!

Pray tell, which group of people do you think are stupid? Please also subsequently elaborate on how your judgment is objective, and detached from an appraisal that might be interpreted as mere goodness and badness.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#205

Post by windowojji »

peytn wrote: post #164
clcaev wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promotion of false things is very profitable; by contrast, true things are far less engaging. Worse, it is more expensive to dispel a mistruth than it is to create and spread misinformation. How do we address this systems design challenge without censorship?

James Madison figured it was better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.” What makes you think now, 250 years into the most prosperous society in human history, is the right time to revisit this position?

What makes you think that everyone who wrote the Constitution and relevant documents 250 years ago was infallible?

The founding fathers got plenty of things wrong, knowing they were designing an imperfect system.

For example, first past the post voting. Washington cautioned against the rise of political parties knowing full well that they were an inevitable consequence of the system he was complicit in engendering.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#206

Post by windowojji »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #63
Hokusai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is the evil that Facebook is supposedly trying to not see? I see that you are new here, this is not Reddit. You should read the linked article before posting, there you can find the answer to this question and others. Be informed, be polite.

> I see that you are new here, this is not Reddit. It seemed like an honest question; this response may have been a bit harsh to a newbie. (if it even really is a newbie and not just a new account.) "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not just that:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

the_optimist wrote: post #204
Dylan16807 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hell is this question? You're the one who equated stupidity and superstition with "moral value"!

Pray tell, which group of people do you think are stupid? Please also subsequently elaborate on how your judgment is objective, and detached from an appraisal that might be interpreted as mere goodness and badness.

I didn't have any particular groups in mind here, because those weren't my comments. And even if I pick a group, it's irrelevant to your "where do you propose this intersects" question because the intersection of those two phrases in this comment thread was set up by you. You tell me where they intersect, if the intent was something more complex than treating them as synonyms.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#208

Post by sellyme »

programmarchy wrote: post #202
sellyme wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing a protocol (email) with a platform (e.g., Twitter). You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that. This is similar to how you can't force bob@example.org to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own p…

Doesn’t it boil down to the same problem, though? Maybe bob@example.com says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience. Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to cens…

> Maybe bob@example.com says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

If these people continue to use Gmail rather than more open alternatives, does that not indicate that they don't want to hear what Bob has to say?

> We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote (replicated below for convenience):

> it is better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.”

There is a lot of validity to the quote. I largely agree with it. But the second part is important - it cannot be interpreted as "we better make it illegal for Twitter to ban people calling for genocide".

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#209

Post by lmm »

the_optimist wrote: post #66
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are (perhaps intentionally) confusing correlation and causation. You're also trying to transform a conversation about predicting stupidity, gullibility, and superstition into a conversation about whether some people are more valuable than others because the latter argument is easier to win.

What's causal? Can you predict "stupidity," for example, based on telemetry data? Perhaps ______ skin-color, ______ descendent property owners who own 5-6 acres southwest of the city in the _____ zone, a couple of cows, read the _____, and are hesitant allies of the revolution are "stupid"? Are you aware that efforts to characterize the thoughts and minds of individuals based on their "telemetry data" are associated…

The largest crime against humanity in human history (the cultural revolution) is associated with the anti-intellectual position you're advocating. So I don't think that's any kind of convincing argument to stop doing our best to figure out the facts and follow where they lead.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#210

Post by TeeMassive »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #203
biggc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how whenever someone talks about holding Facebook for its algorithm spreading and promoting outright lies and falsehoods, e.g. active antivax propaganda, people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”?

To quote an all-time top tweet: Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones

There are multiple misconceptions and straw man arguments in your post.

First of all algorithmic censorship is real and has been exposed quite a few times with whistleblowers, undercover journalists and just banning people for things mainstream media organizations do routinely (like filming someone's house). The bar for repercussions is set lower for anti-establishment and "right-wing" content creators, although it is beginning to affect radical leftists too and they are beginning to wake up to this fact (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censors...)

And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.

Talking about cutting social programs, which is the counterpart of cutting taxes, will draw criticism, especially if it affects the favored minority of the time in some way in some percentage, will get you demonetized and demonized which usually means lynch mobs, mass reporting and worse.

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