This is the culture Tech VC encourages so this is the culture we all get. SSND no?
Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it. From the support response: > The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it. Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool…
> Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards. Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that would spend resources on that even though this is a well known pre-cursor to homicide. Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be able to literally torture animals and…
The problem with animal cruelty is that modern industrial animal farming is torture, and torture of the worst kind. So it's diffucult to draw the line without angering powerful groups and rich advertisers.
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#103>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
Microsoft was a serial liar for decades over its efforts to quash competition for DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and its "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Amazon's statements about working conditions in its warehouses and its treatment of workers trying to unionize directly contradict documented actions. Twitter says one thing regarding abusive and hateful users but does another. Google finessed its theft of Java.
Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#104How does this track against Section 230? Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Further, why do we continue to accept the fiction that rules and laws apply to the elite as for the masses? Even the not-so-elite, the Stanford swimmer who brutally raped and assaulted Chanel Miller, though convicted, was given light sentence because of his "bright future", according to the judge.
Is there anyone walking around that actually believes that rules and laws apply to the elite? Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.
Depends on the rules and laws. The system tends to be very good at punishing rich people that swindle money from other rich people.
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#106>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
In short, I'd guess that's because the companies reporting on them are owned by billionaires, and shareholders with bags of fossil fuel, war, banking, etc, stocks. For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable? Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, a…
Yeah, better to listen to someone with unknown credentials on Substack, or whatever I dig up on Facebook. That will put the MSM in their place.
By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it. From the support response: > The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it. Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool…
Yes. Precisely. I think it is because the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate. If we observe the trend, the pull down are proportionate to the strength of the retaliators. Being against say LGBT isn't the same as being anti christian. Hit a particular group of people or ideology, the bans are well automated at this point.
> the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate
Tell that to my garden.
(I don't condone messing with wildlife in any way. However, I would like my arugula to grow up not behind bars.)
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#108Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#109How does this track against Section 230? Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
No. All that s.230 does is declare that platforms are not the 'publisher or speaker' of content provided by another 'information content provider'. It isn't a common carrier provision, so platforms are allowed to make whatever decisions they like about which people they're willing to host, or what TOS/AUP they want to enforce. For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometime…
Many discussions are explicitly about what S230 ought to be though, not what it is. Most discussions I've seen start out by stating it was made for a 1996 bulletin board and is dated. It's long overdue to handle this blanket immunity that's being abused by social media behemoths.
You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.
Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
#110Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be.
I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over. Especially when it’s not a system owned and operated by a handful of people. Here’s an example - as far as I know it’s not possible for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now. There’s no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His inconvenience is an edge case.
With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there’s always room for improvement.
I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process for adding shields wasn’t policed internally very well in the past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would get a “Shielded-ID-Verified” tag applied to it. ID verification was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams that weren’t related to applying the tag would see the tag and assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more I realised no one really “owned” the tag or policed who could apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular loop hole.
In later years the XCheck system started being actively maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into problems like these and made it better.