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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

#411
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

well, in that case, why not make the metric reports-per-view? if you make the metric a rate then it doesn't matter whether it gets 10k views or 10m views, the question becomes "what % of viewers thought this was worth a report".

The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they're on my "wouldn't work for them if they wee the last tech company in the entire world" list. That list isn't long, but, FB is near the top of it.

what other companies are on your list?

Any company that is mainly paid for by advertising, especially if they seem to have big data/ML chops.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

They didn’t say that: none of their comments seem to be defending Facebook. They are giving their opinion that human moderation is not a simple solution. I super appreciate nindalf’s comments here. It is a shame that an ex-developer who knows the problem space and is clearly explaining some if the issues is getting flamed by association.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Let's take your example of Mark Z. What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects? A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device. I could think of a lot of peopl…

The never allowing multiple tokens things drives me nuts.

People do bring this up on HN a lot. For WebAuthn / U2F the only actual example anybody has is AWS. So that's not an industry problem that's specifically an AWS problem. Unless you have an actual example which isn't AWS?

As to TOTP it's a shared secret, so just clone it. If they allow you to set multiple secrets it would just reduce your overall security because more random guesses work. Also, get WebAuthn instead.

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

#415
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

> It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left. Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general. Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twi…

You are totally right. I have seen some posts on some networks that brand themselves as the guardian of free speech. Well if we took them to a Facebook Twitter proportion the same problems will arise very soon. So just may be the problem is with the people too.

If those current big techs were to disappear, would people stop their nonsense and sometimes hated behavior?

I am starting to believe that is not just bad company management or moderation, we definitely have bad actors on those networks too.

The problem is complex

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

#416
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but it's wrong.

Then the fact anything is would be wrong, which if believed truly leads the only reasonable behavior to be the most destructive behavior (what is, existence, is bad, so destroying it is good). Luckily, its good.

That's nonsense

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

#418

I will jump on this bandwagon and say color me not surprised. The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military. That is not a good state of…

> the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military Only in certain quarters. The US military has been subject to deliberate infiltration by both evangelicals (especially Air Force), white supremacists, and proto-insurrectionists for decades. More recently, there has been a seemingly endless parade of officers committing public acts of insubordination, or even incitement to mutiny/sedition. At this point, tr…

That is quite the claim, do you have proof?

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

#419
post #63
post #18

I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.

Yeah I gave up reporting. I’ve reported some people being extremely racist in comments, no action in either case. It’s either moderated by racist people, some poor AI or “rand()%2==0”

why does it bother you so much

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

#420

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…

> 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.

At no point did I state that the solution was easy. My response was to your claim that you do not know of any possible solution, not an easy solution; to wit, you invited input:

> Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.

I also don't follow your examples. Why are you tasking this hypothetical team to review all two billion accounts? The main issue at hand seems to be lack of sufficient staffing to review reported accounts. Why not start there?

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