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Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#231

Post by bdowling »

crackercrews wrote: post #203
cratermoon wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the judge was following the recommendation of the probation department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own. 1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...

Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good outrage.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#232

Post by jmwilson »

Strong opsec that the supporting documents are actual photos of a computer screen from the visible moire (or somehow altered to look that way).

After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).

Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring everything down to the system call level, and practically every access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ... congratulations, you're caught.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#233

Post by throwaway91321 »

cratermoon wrote: post #80
dogleash wrote: post #21

>“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?

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.

This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown at them.

I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#234

Post by clairity »

crackercrews wrote: post #203
cratermoon wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the judge was following the recommendation of the probation department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own. 1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...

as the principal adjudicator, the judge can't be absolved of his responsibility by pointing to advisories. that the probationers were biased in their recommendation doesn't absolve him of his own biased judgment, and whether he's actually biased or not is a matter of the totality of his judicial record, not just this case.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#235

Post by filoleg »

cratermoon wrote: post #209
SamBam wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in this case we're comparing the treatment (by courts, etc) of the elite vs non-elite in America.

There are peculiarities of eliteness in America that matter here. Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society and don't have the legal framework of a caste system, what counts as elite in America affects how the world views American elites, and how Americans view elites in other cultures. We don't for example, care how many cows in a bride's dowry.

The number of cows in a bride’s dowry is just a straightforward proxy for wealth, and that’s pretty universal.

Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.

All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#237

Post by q1w2 »

smsm42 wrote: post #191
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, 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…

I think people that work on this feature mean well - or at least they think that they mean well. But as a result, we have a two-tier system where the peasants have one set of rules and the nobility has an entirely different one. It may have started as a hack to correct the obvious inadequacies of the moderation system, but it grew into something much more sinister and alien to the spirit of free speech, and is ripe f…

You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work.

Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team.

If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.

Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#238

Post by q1w2 »

otterley wrote: post #177
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, 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…

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

The real underlying issue is that high profile accounts are targeted by groups of users who "report abuse" simply because they don't like that sports team/politician/etc...

High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#239

Post by q1w2 »

gkop wrote: post #154
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, 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…

Your analogy relating to Zuckerberg is absurdly tone deaf.

The accusation of being "tone deaf" is one of those "it doesn't matter if you're technically right - you're arguing for the wrong team" comments.

If you have a substantive criticism to make, you should articulate it.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#240

Post by cblconfederate »

pmyteh wrote: post #45
caseysoftware wrote: post #37

How 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…

that article 230 flies in the face of all reason nowadays. why it still exists is an american mystery
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