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

#481

Post by stackbutterflow » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

otterley wrote: post #375

munk-a wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.

I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was only open to college students (and the domain name was thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe. There was no ranking of faces. You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.

So I searched and this is what Facebook looked like back then: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/facebook-pro...

I think it looks so much better than the current design.

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

#482

Post by 908B64B197 » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

wanderingstan wrote: post #407

zepto wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did people believe that?

It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. And even if you could somehow make a friend in a far-away land, phone calls and postal mail were expensive. (I'm still sad I lost touch with students I met in Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesi…

> It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper.

When you compare the profits of newspapers and TV stations to FB, it becomes obvious why so many media mogul billionaires are pushing for harsh regulations for Social Media...

> As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way.

It was fun to dream.

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

#483

Post by sub7 » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

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…

"I was only following orders"

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

#484

Post by reissbaker » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 4:58 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #411

vasco wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because brigading exists.

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

#485

Post by meowface » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #439

helen___keller wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not on Twitter, but I am pretty active on Reddit. I think the manipulation is particularly, egregiously bad on Facebook. For example, I'm not sure how I got bucketed in the "anti-masker" cohort, but over the past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm pushed a torrent of articles along the lines of "Look at this brave person serving the school board!", showing a person going on a rant about how masks are the work of…

>I kind of like it, because it's given me a window of "the other side" of my social media bubble. I think the thing Facebook is particularly nefarious at is that, the way the feed works, it makes it seem like of course everyone agrees with you, except that idiot crazy uncle who you eventually have to unfriend, because all you see are seemingly "random" posts that enforce your own viewpoints.

True, though I think the same thing applies to Twitter and YouTube. You see what seems like random things from a huge variety of random people that all happen to affirm your worldview.

I believe Jack Dorsey has mentioned some vague plans to try to address the bubble problem. And I believe I may have been temporarily placed into a YouTube beta test where they tried to include videos unrelated to things I've seen before (I seem to recall an explicit notice about this, and a request for me to give feedback). So, I think they're probably trying, kind of. (I don't use Facebook and never have, so can't comment, there.)

reddit, as far as I know, doesn't do user-specific recommendations in their submission sorting (besides what they choose to be default subreddits), so you have to go out of your way to form a little bubble for yourself. Which many people do, but at least they have some awareness that they're explicitly setting it up to be that way.

That said, especially as of the past 5 or so years, most sites out there have skewed pretty unilaterally right or left, and I believe all or nearly all of the default subreddits currently have a pretty homogeneous political stance. It's not as insidious as the recommendation-based per-user bubble formation other sites have, but it might have a similar effect, especially if someone mostly just looks at their front page and doesn't subscribe to more than a few subreddits besides the defaults.

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

#486

Post by lmm » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:38 AM UTC

lavabiopsy wrote: post #473

otterley wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you know how to build a bug-free system with content classification rules that are properly implemented for 2 billion people in every conceivable circumstance, I think Facebook (or any other big social media company) would pay you a lot of money to implement that. Like, an unbelievably large sum of money.

That's beside the point. If your classification system isn't good enough to use on celebrities, it's not good enough to use on regular people either - bans are just as annoying for them, even if they have less voice to complain.

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

#487

Post by stjohnswarts » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:47 AM UTC

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…

I would vote that whenever dang is on vacation that HN shutsdown. Everyone could probably use a HN vacation occasionally.

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

#488

Post by grapist420 » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

this is totally reasonable and arguably necessary for a platform. High profile users are going to be targeted for reporting much more, and the consequences of a false suspension are more visible for them. Think of it like how you might whitelist people who you trust from auto moderation or rate limits on Reddit or some other site if you trust them because the auto mod makes mistakes or you want to give them more options. Obviously FB and Twitters moderation sucks, but that isn’t related to this directly

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

#489

Post by fragmede » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

helen___keller wrote: post #374

bo1024 wrote: 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…

There's isn't a platonic ideal of social media to argue for/against though. Pandora's box has been opened and we can't unopen it. If Facebook magically disappeared tomorrow, people would still take their phone-computer out of their pockets and send messages, thoughts, pictures, videos to their friends and family. Socializing through multimedia technologies. Where there are platforms that don't have the same problems as Facebook, (but also don't have the same reach as Facebook), what is actually inherent to social media, and what is because it's built on top of late-stage capitalism? Hate speech and radicalization hit an inflection point in the 1940s, hopefully we can avoid the same in the 2040s.

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

#490

Post by grapist420 » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #439

helen___keller wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not on Twitter, but I am pretty active on Reddit. I think the manipulation is particularly, egregiously bad on Facebook. For example, I'm not sure how I got bucketed in the "anti-masker" cohort, but over the past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm pushed a torrent of articles along the lines of "Look at this brave person serving the school board!", showing a person going on a rant about how masks are the work of…

While I find antivax schoolboard patchy-blond-hairdye rage moms to be boring and dull, I’m quite happy for social media platforms to work like that and show you content you want from actual people posting that content. And I don’t think either the “Facebook and Twitter shows you a pure bubble” or “Facebook intentionally elevates internet rage and arguments to mine engagement” are exactly true, partially as they’re contradictory. If you want to see posts you disagree with, which many absolutely do (a significant number of top Reddit subs are r/screenshotsofpeopleidontlikebeingidiotslmao) you see it, and if you don’t you don’t, and if you just want random unmoderated unfiltered content you can have that too.