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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

#391

Post by nindalf »

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #304
nindalf wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

> 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

And I worked for 4 years on one such small part (internally called UFAC), trying to help potential false positives of such a system.

As for classifier with a true positive rate of 99.99999%, I don't know much but I don't think it's possible. But if there's someone out there who might know, then they should say so.

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

#392

Post by dataflow »

nindalf wrote: post #387
Jasper_ wrote: post #264

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no ot…

> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that. > I can't feel pity No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less. I feel like you really wante…

>> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

> Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.

Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:

>> "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."

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

#393

Post by ErikVandeWater »

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…

> 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.

You would think with the literal legion of geniuses Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling reports than simply counting them and taking down content that receives over X reports.

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

#394

Post by nindalf »

Ansil849 wrote: post #320
nindalf wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a large human moderation team

You're not the only person who has suggested this. Let's think about that for a second. Let's say it takes 6 minutes for a moderation team to review an older account. There's 2 billion accounts, so it'd be good to review all of those. It would take about 200 million hours. Presumably you'd want to re-review positive cases so no moderator has too much power. Additional time. Even if Facebook literally doubled the number of employees, and hired 50000 people overnight, they would still take 2 years to complete the review. But in that time it's possible that previously benign accounts turn abusive.

And then think about the 20 million odd new accounts that are created every day. How long before each of those are reviewed? And what signals will you use to review them? These are mostly empty accounts, so there's not much to go on.

And that's just the problem of aged fake accounts. How about bullying, harassment, nudity, terrorism, CEI and all the other problems?

It's interesting talking to people who say "oh that problem is easy to solve, just do X" without realising that the problem is more complicated than it looks.

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

#395

Post by ErikVandeWater »

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…

Reddit could change their TOS tomorrow to prevent users from moderating more than 2 subreddits if they wanted; others would take their place. But the mods of subreddits that have not been banned are advertiser friendly.

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

#396

Post by Jasper_ »

nindalf wrote: post #387
Jasper_ wrote: post #264

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no ot…

> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that. > I can't feel pity No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less. I feel like you really wante…

I read your comment a bit like a defense of Facebook, saying "you know, when you scale to millions of people, it's really hard and expensive! Cut them a bit of slack"

I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their moderation systems were ready.

For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping to fix the system.

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

#397

Post by specialist »

chongli wrote: post #347
shadowgovt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not true at all. Plenty of people run lifestyle businesses whose goal is to support themselves and their families, friends, and employees. One example is Aquarium Co-Op [1] who is into promoting the aquarium hobby in all its facets. Cory, the owner, is very frank about the costs of running his business and how he often sells products at or below cost because he believes they're important to the community. A fa…

VC-funded corporations are more inclined towards world domination than co-ops.

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

#398

Post by zepto »

wanderingstan wrote: post #352
zepto wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This was a common belief in the early history of blogging. Facebook was a later manifestation of social media.

Why did people believe that?

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

#399

Post by specialist »

nindalf wrote: post #394
Ansil849 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> a large human moderation team You're not the only person who has suggested this. Let's think about that for a second. Let's say it takes 6 minutes for a moderation team to review an older account. There's 2 billion accounts, so it'd be good to review all of those. It would take about 200 million hours. Presumably you'd want to re-review positive cases so no moderator has too much power. Additional time. Even if Fac…

Facebook shouldn't be expected to clean up the messes they create because it's hard?

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

#400

Post by beezischillin »

Outside of the Facebook issue, can you ever really automate solutions for managing society-scale interactions while still being fair to people?

If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into corporate budgetary restrictions (you’re not worth it but the celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social and societal consequences of this?

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