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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

#421

Post by greenyoda »

anigbrowl wrote: post #401
greenyoda wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has addressed this problem by not granting new users flagging privileges - you need a certain karma threshold to flag an article or comment. And flagging/vouching privileges can be removed for HN users who abuse them.

Yeah but you can just buy warmed-up verified accounts on SEO marketplaces, often several years old and patiently curated to be blandly inoffensive and ready to be turned into whatever you need.

Still, having to do that greatly reduces the problem. The average person who wants to censor a politician they hate isn't going to spend money to buy an account.

Another potential mitigation might be to put a limit on the number of posts that a single user can flag in a day. At some point, the cost of large-scale content manipulation could be made to exceed the expected gains.

It may even be profitable for Facebook to crack down on this. Every celebrity post that gets illegitimately taken down has potential for showing ads to millions of people.

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

#422

Post by narrator »

I have been better trying to understand how the world will change under China's hegemony. To that end, I have been studying Neo-Confucianism. That being adaptations of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese philosophy of governance, to the 21st century. Facebook's policy seems very neo-Confucian.

"Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point of view, people are unequal—as they differ in virtue, intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible to give everyone equal rights without considering their standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal rights or obligations."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing_(Confucian)

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

#423

Post by IggleSniggle »

josefresco wrote: post #168
shadowgovt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially after Jan 6, there are a couple of things you can say in an ordinary spirited political debate that will cop you a ban on FB. One is several flavors of "Americans are X," another is variants on "Kill the filibuster" (which I assume is pattern-matching to '[violence-word] the [congress-word], which they probably up-sampled in the threat modeling for, uh, obvious reasons).

The worse part is that in her eagerness to close the "prompt" on her phone she "agreed" she had posted this content (instead of appeal), which probably put some sort of permanent mark on her record. One can only hope she gets kicked off for good one of these days!

wtf?? I haven't been on FB for about 10 years now and every now and then a comment like this comes along which makes me realize just how out of touch with the global bureaucracy I've become

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

#424

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't fulminate on HN or take threads on generic-indignant tangents. Those are much less interesting and usually turn nasty. Substantive critique is welcome, but if you reply to a comment you should really be replying to something specific in that comment, and you definitely shouldn't be blasting the other user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.

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

#425

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#426

Post by EamonnMR »

brodouevencode wrote: post #186
EamonnMR wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It got replaced by social media

It did, but did it ever _have_ to be?

If you where sent into the year 2000 with a mission to prevent the adoption of social media and instead maintain Email's dominance, what would you do?

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

#427

Post by shadowgovt »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #423
josefresco wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worse part is that in her eagerness to close the "prompt" on her phone she "agreed" she had posted this content (instead of appeal), which probably put some sort of permanent mark on her record. One can only hope she gets kicked off for good one of these days!

wtf?? I haven't been on FB for about 10 years now and every now and then a comment like this comes along which makes me realize just how out of touch with the global bureaucracy I've become

So Facebook now has an independent review board to determine whether their decisions to ban somebody follow their own policies. You can flag a decision to suspend your account for review by that board, but most decisions so flagged will not be reviewed.

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

#428

Post by PoignardAzur »

danudey wrote: post #284
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…

This is exactly the solution. IF tons of people are reporting Steve Newscaster because he posted a status about how his team won, then he shouldn't become immune to criticism, those people should lose the privilege of having their voice heard. Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if…

Here's the thing: I can think of multiple ways this could be abused or controversial, in less than 30 seconds. You can probably too.

Actual hostile actors will have years to find ways to use the rules to create controversy and shut down dissenting posts.

If people learn they get flagged after N spurious reports, they'll start rationing their reports so they don't meet the treshhold; they'll start making inflammatory posts that technically respect the rules to bait false reports. They'll create scandals, eg "Person X said awful thing Y, but when I tried to report them Facebook told me I wasn't allowed to report people anymore. Why does Facebook support Y?"

That's not to say your idea is bad. Just, you're making it sound really easy, when it's a problem Facebook has poured millions into without finding many solutions.

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

#429

Post by notacoward »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #418
notacoward wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Which claim do you find surprising? The infiltration has been documented so many times I'd consider it obvious. Here is just one example of the evangelical flavor for you to follow up on.

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2018/3/29/christian-take...

Likewise for white supremacists.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/02/11/splc-testifies-con...

Here is just the latest example of an active duty military officer committing very public acts of insubordination.

https://www.stripes.com/branches/marine_corps/2021-08-27/mar...

I'll let you look up the examples of military personnel participating in January 6 yourself. I'm a little wary TBH of being "sea-lioned" about things that are super well known and documented. It's an argument-by-exhaustion tactic I learned to recognize at least twenty years ago.

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

#430

Post by camdat »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #393
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…

> 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.

They do. In the linked article it discusses high-risk accounts requiring less reports to take down a post, down to as little as one.
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