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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

#251

Post by geebee »

JadeNB wrote: post #199
Aunche wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brock Turner wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into Stanford, which had been revoked. His father was an electrical engineer and his mom was a nurse. Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.

> Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired. Just as a matter of terminology, I think one doesn't usually speak of judges being fired. He lost his seat in a recall election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Persky#Repercussions_to_...

My understanding is that he also had a history of giving light sentences, not just to upper middle class defendants, and that his banishment has gone well beyond losing his job.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/recalled-ju...

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

#252

Post by solveit »

msteffen wrote: post #77

It seems like no one has figured out a good system for moderation on the internet. IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases, and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs. Reddit tried to federate mod…

The only systems that have figured out moderation at scale are Wikipedia and StackExchange. But see what HN thinks about that.

Nobody wants to admit that the only type of moderation that actually works at scale is an entrenched group of somewhat-expert overly-attached users gatekeeping contributions with (what looks like to the novice and sometimes even to the established user) extreme prejudice on a website with intentionally highly limited scope.

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

#253

Post by dboreham »

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?

Whenever I see such a corporate communication, my mental process is to immediately imagine the meeting that led to its creation, having attended many such meetings.

Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."

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

#254

Post by otterley »

q1w2 wrote: post #237
smsm42 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody is complaining that Facebook has exceptions for automatically suspending accounts just because people are misreporting them as abusive. The issue is, and has always been, exceptions to the content-based rules which are supposed to apply equally to everyone.

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

#255

Post by Closi »

SamBam wrote: post #244
nindalf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s valid because it’s an example of a system not working for a small minority while still working well for others. And more pertinently, there’s no plans to fix it for him specifically just because he’s the CEO. It’s better to spend time making the account compromise system better for the vast majority of users instead.

It is tone-deaf. You seem to be regaling it as an inconvenience or problem that Zuckerburg has. It's not an inconvenience, it's a personal bodyguard that he alone has. If he changes devices, he has a team to allow him to log into it. How is that relevant? The rest of us don't get that. If someone hacks our account and changes our password, the majority of us have little hope of really getting FB's attention to help u…

It's relevant because it's an example of where an account needs special rules/treatment because of the status.

It's saying "Do we all agree that some accounts, such as Zuck's, might need different treatment?"

Because once you have established that, it's clear why some other accounts might need different/special treatment compared to the typical user.

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

#256

Post by LocalPCGuy »

mandmandam wrote: post #87
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?

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…

You can't just say "cut them out" without some replacement way of disseminating similar knowledge around. The media has plenty of issues, but as a whole, they are still the best way we have of doing that. At least with media we have a good sense of where their bias is from outfit to outfit and can take in additional information or get it from multiple sources to combat those biases.

So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).

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

#257

Post by dundermuffl1n »

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…

Most of your response treats the service and its flaws as an engineering problem, whereas the ramifications in the real world aren't something Facebook gets to absolve itself from. They need to own the problem completely. If they can't solve the issue through engineering, it is their responsibility to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators.

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

#259

Post by dado3212 »

SamBam wrote: post #244
nindalf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s valid because it’s an example of a system not working for a small minority while still working well for others. And more pertinently, there’s no plans to fix it for him specifically just because he’s the CEO. It’s better to spend time making the account compromise system better for the vast majority of users instead.

It is tone-deaf. You seem to be regaling it as an inconvenience or problem that Zuckerburg has. It's not an inconvenience, it's a personal bodyguard that he alone has. If he changes devices, he has a team to allow him to log into it. How is that relevant? The rest of us don't get that. If someone hacks our account and changes our password, the majority of us have little hope of really getting FB's attention to help u…

The point isn’t that he gets special protection for logging on on new devices, it’s that he receives thousands of fake login attempts a day. It’s basically the same point: 10000x the number of abuse reports be 10000x the number of login attempts.

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

#260

Post by acoil »

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.

Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people- its in the name. Who's face is prettier?
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