Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by Ekaros » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

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.

And this is why I believe law should be truly blind. Any details such as race, gender, sex, education, political leaning in cases should be hidden and only public prosecution and defenders be allowed. We could easily handle whole process via text.

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

#312

Post by Ekaros » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #229

colpabar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it funny how we use phrases like "Russian oligarchs" all the time without batting an eye, but we never use them when referring to the Bushes or the Clintons in the US.

The Clintons and Bushes are not really oligarchs. They represent a monarchy maybe of inherited wealth and status. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are better examples of oligarchs because they managed to create their own wealth and with that obtained political clout.

I take that politicians are more of useful tools. Not the people who have any real power or wealth.

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

#313

Post by bmhin » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

rosmax_1337 wrote: post #272

mox1 wrote: post #202

Is it really that bad that they apply slightly different sets of rules to accounts with more notoriety? For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers? Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some her…

The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.". It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person…

> The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".

This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.

And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.

I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.

Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.

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

#314

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #118

gilj wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself what you would use if you didn't want the general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just use direct messaging apps.

Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that uses the moniker “Pierre Delecto.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-del...

I liked that, you FINALLY got a taste of the Real Romney.

I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".

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

#315

Post by roughly » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

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."

That’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears like a profitable business.

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

#316

Post by aaroninsf » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

Another week, another detailed account of the hubristic sociopathic amoral culture that defines this firm.

If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them, you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you should find another mechanism to stay in touch.

Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war that is currently destroying the west.

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

#317

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

mannanj wrote: post #282

I got banned yesterday for quoting a nazi official on propaganda: “Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” - Joseph Goebbels Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks. Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in which another organiza…

I was banned from Facebook market place for selling a computer with a bad bitcoin joke in the description. Because the computer had an RTX3090 in it (surplus company PC) I wrote something like "Good for making dinosaurs launder money for you if you're into mining".

Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful who your target is, as per your quote.

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

#318

Post by vasco » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #306

q1w2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Popular users get lots of eyeballs on their content. If an average post will get 1 report per 10k views, a popular post with 10m views will get 1000 reports. It doesn't have to have a deeper meaning.

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

#319

Post by jjeaff » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

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 actually don't think it is that rare. Especially for smaller companies. I don't want 100% of the market. I want 10%, but I want the best 20% that can easily afford my product and doesn't complain, cancel, chargeback, or need unnecessary handholding to use my software. Beyond that it's mostly diminishing returns.

Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.

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

#320

Post by Ansil849 » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

> You might say that maybe 99.99% isn’t good enough and the engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.

Hire a large human moderation team. Facebook can afford to. They choose not to.