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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

#301

Post by zepto »

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.

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.

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

#302

Post by mschuster91 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #290
docmars wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and curate absolutely everything that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by their political partners, and their team of fact checkers complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme partisan players who won the Elite Olympics™…

It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."

I can't blame them though. Networks of any kind have the particular effect of working the better, the more people are on it. What use is a messenger (cough Signal, Threema) if none of your contacts use them and can be persuaded to install yet-another-network app?

The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...

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

#303

Post by otterley »

nindalf wrote: post #275
otterley wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if hundreds of people reported the content posted by a celebrity, or if a classifier misfired on the content posted by a celebrity, there shouldn’t be any protection for the content?

The content should be evaluated according to the same set of the rules that apply to everyone else. If the content classification rules are properly implemented, no amount of button-smashing should result in a different outcome.

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

#304

Post by YossarianFrPrez »

nindalf wrote: post #274
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…

Let me try to explain it again. Suppose an integrity system has a true positive rate of 99.99%. That would be good enough to deploy right? Except that when applied to millions of accounts, 0.01% is still a massive number of people. This is even worse when those people are unusual in some way. For example they might open conversations with hundreds of strangers a day for good reasons. But their behaviour is so similar…

>"After all, there's no reason for accounts in good standing to lie, right?" No reason is different from no good reason.

Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida (~300,000 people).

Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts, the edge cases can be caught and/or anticipated, creative solutions can be applied, etc.

If history teaches us anything, it's that all public facing systems will be exploited. Those who design them should anticipate this.

(Thanks, by the way, for posting about your perspective. It looks very different to those of us on the outside.)

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

#305

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.

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

#306

Post by cratermoon »

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…

> high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports

Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring this "mass downvote" is the essence of the structural elitism?

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

#307

Post by gkop »

q1w2 wrote: post #239
gkop wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

absurdly tone deaf, as in, does not warrant good faith engagement, “don’t feed the trolls”.

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

#309

Post by frumper »

nindalf wrote: post #275
otterley wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if hundreds of people reported the content posted by a celebrity, or if a classifier misfired on the content posted by a celebrity, there shouldn’t be any protection for the content?

A person spending a minute looking at something that has garnered a high number of reports is reasonable instead of just ignoring reports because it's a celebrity. It doesn't have to be automated. Edge cases can be expensive

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

#310

Post by YossarianFrPrez »

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…

In addition, maybe a better system would also increase the effort needed to file a report. Calling in and leaving a voicemail message in response to specific questions, for example.
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