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Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

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Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#211

Post by the_optimist »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #201
the_optimist wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I introduced morality to demonstrate, with argument left to the reader, how the question you are trying to compel is misguided. Adjacent threads provide context for doing so.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#212

Post by gumby »

TeeMassive wrote: post #210
Dylan16807 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

> 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.

I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#213

Post by the_optimist »

lmm wrote: post #209
the_optimist wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Refusing this line of inquiry is itself a principled intellectual position. The structure of such questions invariably confirm the biases of the interrogators. The “evidence” is then typically levied against groups without respect to the individual, as it was in my understanding of the CR. There is only false intellectualism in this manner of social pseudoscience.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#214

Post by gonehome »

ALittleLight wrote: post #139

Facebook at least claims to be a leader in scanning for and detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their platform. As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornog…

FB's move to e2e encryption explicitly discusses how they still will have reporting of content so users can report CSAM and send the plaintext back to FB.

Your framing of their motives here is both cynical and wrong.

Novel CSAM gets caught primarily because of users reporting it - not because of outside detection (with known stuff there are some digital fingerprinting ways to block content). They already operate WhatsApp which is e2e encryption and have to apply a lot of these strategies anyway.

Weirdly LinkedIn is apparently a hotbed for CSAM too and they also have people tasked with this. This problem is widespread: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#215

Post by programmarchy »

sellyme wrote: post #208
programmarchy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

There will always be some moral veil put forth by censors to justify their actions. A good example is banning discussion on Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. Some consider that a noxious branch — quackery endangering public health — but if it’s immediately pruned we won’t be able to see if it yields proper fruits.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#216

Post by programmarchy »

biggc wrote: post #197
programmarchy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to spread information, therefore the ability to spread information should be restricted?

s/information/misinformation, then yes, yes it should be

You are begging the question of how to differentiate information from misinformation. Truth cannot be decided by a central authority.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#217

Post by sellyme »

programmarchy wrote: post #215
sellyme wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith. There will always be some moral veil put forth by ce…

> How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

Because that quote fundamentally discusses cases where pruning said noxious branch is a risk to non-noxious branches.

Sometimes you can just prune a noxious branch and that's that.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#218

Post by helloworld11 »

cfjgvjh wrote: post #170
peytn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For one, now mistruths can be made much more quickly than truths - hello GPT-3 - and can be delivered in a far more convincing way than any other time. I have a hard time telling AI generated video apart sometimes, which will only improve as time goes on. Nor was there an existence of platforms that not only enable but encourage the creation of echo chambers that reinforce preexisting views and actively attempt to in…

Bullshit. If anything, widespread misinformed beliefs were ever more common and deeply rooted prior to the modern digital age. Today many people do indeed pick up stupid concepts and begin to believe them, but the very same system of rapid digital communication of ideas, and evidence, that you seem to think worthy of censorship today also rapidly allows people to convince others of how false their more foolish ideas are. Truthful information may indeed travel more slowly than misinformation (though I'd love to see a citation for this constantly repeated claim) but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find. This is a direct result of open, free expression of ideas in the digital sphere with fewer restrictions than at any time in history. I can't think of an easier way to crush such a good basic thing than some idiotic, misguided and emotionally driven crusade against "misinformation", or fake news.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#219

Post by TeeMassive »

gumby wrote: post #212
TeeMassive wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. > 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, Israe…

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent example. Also outside debating naive socialist college students, he's not really an intellectual powerhouse outside variations of "it's a free market, they can do what they want and it will turn out fine; here's my cherry-picked facts", which is a narrative Facebook has a direct interest to promote. Anyway I digress.

> I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

Your personal anecdotes are irrelevant. Also I never said they were outright banned, I said algorithmically manipulated. For instance Facebook is actively suppressing topics that are discussing vaccines in a negative light, such as discussion on long term effects which we obviously don't know since they just came out.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#220

Post by lmm »

the_optimist wrote: post #213
lmm wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Refusing this line of inquiry is itself a principled intellectual position. The structure of such questions invariably confirm the biases of the interrogators. The “evidence” is then typically levied against groups without respect to the individual, as it was in my understanding of the CR. There is only false intellectualism in this manner of social pseudoscience.

Refusing all inquiries into group statistics might be a principled intellectual position. Collecting data about some metrics at the group level (salaries, college admissions, ...) and then refusing to inquire about other attributes that might reasonably affect those metrics certainly isn't, for all the reasons you've just given.
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