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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

#521

Post by native_samples »

otterley wrote: post #518
native_samples wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam filters don't only apply to emails and Facebook already has one, of course, to stop fake account signups and posting of commercial spam. Nonetheless spam filters are a form of content classification. Yes, I'm saying that Facebook should just "give up" and stop trying to do political moderation on top of their pre-existing spam classification. This is not radical. For years they didn't do things like fact check p…

> For years they didn't do things like fact check posts or try to auto-classify racism, the site was fine. I’m not sure that I would consider any site that contains virally-spreading racism and falsehoods to be “fine,” but that’s just me, I guess. Even HN is full of BS, but at least it’s contained to comments and can’t be republished with the click of a button.

Yes, but I'm a classical tech libertarian so my definition of fine is "it made lots of users happy". If you think Facebook is filled with bad content you could just not go there, obviously.

Facebook's problem is that it has given in to the activist class that feels simply not going there is insufficient. Instead they feel a deep need to try and control people through communication and content platforms. This was historically understood to be a bad idea, exactly because the demands of such people are limitless. "Virally spreading falsehoods" is no different to the Chinese government's ban on "rumours", it's a category so vague that Facebook could spend every last cent they have on human moderators and you'd still consider the site to be filled with it. Especially because it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false: that's the root cause of this WSJ story! Their moderators keep disagreeing with each other and making embarrassing decisions, which is why they have a two-tier system where they try and protect famous people who could make a big noise from the worst of their random "falsehood detecting machine".

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

#522

Post by randomswede »

colinmhayes wrote: post #453
nindalf wrote: post #394

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 can afford to hire 100,000 moderators. That would let them review every account every year. 100,000 * 2000 hours a year is 200 million hours. They don' actually need to do that, so they can have multiple moderators review some accounts instead.

That is (approximately) accounting for two weeks of annual leave, but not budgeting for illness or other factors, I normally go with "roughly 200 work-days" (socialist Europe, here, so I start from a base-line of five weeks of annual leave), that gives 1600 worked hours per person, taking it to 160 million hours. Still, plenty.

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

#523

Post by iammisc »

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…

That's all well and great, but your comment as an insider directly implicates Facebook CEO of perjury by lying to congress. During a hearing he claimed all users were treated equally. This is clearly not the case.

Perjury before congress can result in jail time and I hope he's made an example of.

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

#524

Post by lavabiopsy »

native_samples wrote: post #515
lavabiopsy wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I am having a really hard time understanding this comment. You're suggesting they just apply a email spam filter and that will fix everything? Can you explain how this would work, considering that Facebook is not an email service, and any spam filter would likely face the same issues with abuse that have already been mentioned anyway? Also I really don't follow how your last two paragraphs have anything to…

Spam filters don't only apply to emails and Facebook already has one, of course, to stop fake account signups and posting of commercial spam. Nonetheless spam filters are a form of content classification. Yes, I'm saying that Facebook should just "give up" and stop trying to do political moderation on top of their pre-existing spam classification. This is not radical. For years they didn't do things like fact check p…

>For years they didn't do things like fact check posts or try to auto-classify racism, the site was fine

>Gmail spam filtering [...] works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics

>an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left

This is more of what I meant: I find these arguments to be unconvincing, if you're going to make these claims convincingly then you need to show proof of this. Remember we're talking about two billion users here. Your post does not read like an actual attempt to solve the problem but instead an attempt to attack "activists on the left" and "the NYT set" which I don't even know who you're talking about or what that's supposed to mean in this context, I would advise against making these type of statements. It would be more convincing to mention a specific person or persons, what their claims are, and what you disagree with and why.

>Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments".

This is false, there's no personal attack, I'm saying your comments are unrelated to the argument and are not convincing to me. If you're confused about this, a personal attack would be something along the lines of "X person is a bad person because they follow Y political persuasion" which your comments could be construed as doing about Facebook's employees. So please make sure not to do that. This is again why I highly suggest against making this a political argument, usually it results in someone getting defensive, when there's no reason to do that.

If you want me to put this more frankly: I don't care about your politics or facebook's politics, that's not an interesting subject to me. It's nothing personal against you or facebook. Just talk about the problem please, otherwise I don't want to continue this discussion.

>A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents.

This also seems not really related to the argument. Sure it affects politicians but as has been established, that's a side effect of the way the system has been designed. I don't think it makes a difference whether the side effect was intentional or not.

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

#525

Post by lavabiopsy »

native_samples wrote: post #521
otterley wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For years they didn't do things like fact check posts or try to auto-classify racism, the site was fine. I’m not sure that I would consider any site that contains virally-spreading racism and falsehoods to be “fine,” but that’s just me, I guess. Even HN is full of BS, but at least it’s contained to comments and can’t be republished with the click of a button.

Yes, but I'm a classical tech libertarian so my definition of fine is "it made lots of users happy". If you think Facebook is filled with bad content you could just not go there, obviously. Facebook's problem is that it has given in to the activist class that feels simply not going there is insufficient. Instead they feel a deep need to try and control people through communication and content platforms. This was hist…

I'm also baffled by this comment. Wouldn't that same reasoning also apply to moderation, i.e. if you think Facebook's moderation is bad, you should just not go there? How are they "controlling people" if you acknowledge that going there is voluntary? Also what if their moderation is what is making a lot of people happy? I really don't get what your complaint is, please be more clear.

Edit:

>it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false

I can't agree with this, all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't, otherwise they have nothing to act on. It would be more convincing if you could suggest ways their moderators could resolve these disputes and determine what is actually true, because what you're suggesting sounds to me like they should just decide that everything is false all the time.

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

#526

Post by dang »

btbuildem wrote: post #28

How naive do you have to be to believe them at face value? Of course they're opportunistic liars. The best thing to do with Facebook is to nuke their data centres and incarcerate the execs and board members.

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly please don't fulminate or post flamebait. It's all against the site guidelines, and not what this site is for. You can make your substantive points without that.

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

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

#527

Post by iamstupidsimple »

cratermoon wrote: post #440
iamstupidsimple wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather them maximize profits rather than decide to actually take a stance in manipulating society. At least I know where I stand with a greedy corporation.

> rather them maximize profits rather than decide to actually take a stance in manipulating society That is manipulating society.

Sure, but at least they're being money grubbing than having hidden political agendas. I think Facebook could be much more evil if it decided to forego advertising profit.

Think literally selling elections to foreign governments as a business model, but in the open.

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

#528

Post by MichaelZuo »

notacoward wrote: post #429
MichaelZuo wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

Thanks for the links. For your first link, I’m not sure how that’s considered infiltration if the ‘infiltrators’ are proudly announcing their beliefs and intentions, and from what I understand as a group have doing so since the 19th century.

If there are actually folks that, for example, pretended to be atheist/agnostic, climbed up the ranks, and suddenly became an evangelical then your worries are more understandable, though I’m not sure if that’s happened.

The info in the second link does seem worrying if true.

For the last link, considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands (?) of Lt. Cols, and equivalent ranks, in the US military, it’s somewhat surprising but not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.

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

#529

Post by notacoward »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #528
notacoward wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

Thanks for the links. For your first link, I’m not sure how that’s considered infiltration if the ‘infiltrators’ are proudly announcing their beliefs and intentions, and from what I understand as a group have doing so since the 19th century. If there are actually folks that, for example, pretended to be atheist/agnostic, climbed up the ranks, and suddenly became an evangelical then your worries are more understandabl…

> proudly announcing their beliefs and intentions

They're not hiding their beliefs, but they are hiding their intentions. When they join the military they take oaths to defend the constitution, which includes separation of church and state. They are strictly forbidden from allowing their religion to affect performance of their duties. When religious groups are actively recruiting people to join the military with prior intent to violate their oaths and regulations, that's still a Very Bad Thing. The fact that the secrecy is not total seems like exactly the kind of sea-lioning quibble I predicted.

> considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands

A little research shows that there are just over 10,000 LTCs in the Army, which is the largest branch so probably fewer in each of the others. But this has gone much higher than that. Another example is Stanley McChrystal, a four star general (there are only 43 of those in the army right now) and director of Special Forces Command, who resigned to avoid being formally charged with insubordination. Do you think his example helped or hurt wrt other officers committing similar acts of insubordination? That it was good or bad for military discipline and national security?

> not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.

That's insane. The military runs on discipline. It's one of its most important, almost defining, features. Yes, this is surprising. There have been very few cases in my lifetime. Yes, it's worrying for a senior officer not only to be insubordinate but to incite others to follow them into mutiny/insurrection. Dismissing it as though military service were no different than being in a chess club is absurd.

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

#530

Post by smsm42 »

reissbaker wrote: post #484
paulmd wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brigading is likely a detectable pattern with enough data. Sure, it'd be hard to distinguish between residents of some chan brigading their enemy and somebody being a target of public shaming due to cancel campaign, but in my eyes it's a feature.
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