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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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that moderation is not part of the business plan. FB was pretty much dragged kicking and screaming into that function.

I recall that their approach to that was outsourcing it because I read that article that was going into how some of the employees working for the company doing the moderation were losing their minds by being the mental sewage treatment facility of social media

Yeah... that's pretty late in the narrative.

Go back farther. The original plan was no moderation.

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

#542
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think that's the point that the parent is trying to make: the only sites that have "figured out" moderation have erred almost ridiculously on the side of rejecting a ton of content, often in biased ways. the sites that do this generally seem better for it, even if it's not really fair. moderation that works well is generally not very nice. content moderation that isn't somewhat cruel doesn't work very well.

Sounds a bit like the interviewing problem, eh? Maintaining a quality bar fundamentally seems to involve a high false negative rate.

Sort of, except the difference in scale is important. there's a lot fewer candidates in interviewing, so each false negative is more significant.

The false negatives in the content moderation process are essentially irrelevant to anybody other than the person being moderated because there's enough other content being generated, so there's very little downside to being overzeaous in content moderating. at anything other than the very largest companies, being overzealous in rejecting interviewees will severely limit your talent pool.

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

#543

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 >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 claim…

I really wonder if we read the same article. Large parts of it are about politics and the different ways their system affects different kinds of politics and politicians. I don't understand why you find this somehow irrelevant or compartmentalizable. If you don't care about politics then this whole article and thread about it probably just isn't for you, because the concerns are fundamentally political to their core.…

>Large parts of it are about politics and the different ways their system affects different kinds of politics and politicians

This again would be a side effect. Obviously it's not irrelevant but I have seen no reason to prioritize that over anything else.

>because the concerns are fundamentally political to their core

If by political you mean "needs to be solved with politics" then I can't necessarily agree, this is also a technical problem. To put it another way, it wouldn't just magically get fixed if you elect some new congresspeople or replace Zuckerburg, the new people still have to take additional technical steps to fix the problem. If the solution already exists and is being ignored then I would agree, but I have seen no solution offered in this thread. Instead of trying to present the solution, which I have asked you to do repeatedly, it seems you're still trying to make this a political argument, which I wish you wouldn't do. I don't know how many times I need to say that it's not convincing to me to come at it from that angle. I'm sorry if that seems rude but it's the truth of the matter. If your end goal is to campaign for me to vote for somebody, please stop, I'm not interested to hear it (again nothing personal).

On the rest of your comment: I honestly have no idea what your examples are supposed to mean, why you are making these assumptions or why the political motives or policies of some other parties matters. There will always be some users that take issue with any kind of filtering and it makes no sense to me to prioritize ones who happen to have adopted something as a political position at some arbitrary point in the past. If your issue is "unequal enforcement" then can you please elaborate on how a different kind of filtering would help with any of these examples? Why would a different system result in not needing to step in and reverse controversial decisions? I asked for proof of this a few posts ago and you didn't give any.

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

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try setting up multiple WebAuthn w/Facebook, and then disabling the phone based back door.

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

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prio…

‘ There have been very few cases in my lifetime.’ There ought not to be any cases in the ideal world. But of course given human nature, etc., a small rate, say a 0.1% insubordination rate seems quite reasonable. (which even still may be too ambitious unless the new recruits can maintain a very noble character)

There will always be people with less than virtuous intentions climbing up the ranks at any given point in time, at any given organization.

So the military certainly seems to be doing better at separating the wheat from the chaff than the federal bureaucracy or any private organization even 1/10 as large.

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

#546

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.

"Fact checking" causes more problems than it solves. One man's truth is another man's falsehood. One man's racism is another man's plain speaking. Best to apply any moderation as minimally as possible. Tag posts which cause arguments as "controversial" and leave it at that.

> One man's truth is another man's falsehood.

That's just silly. Some facts are incontrovertible. Do you really think there's any room for disagreement that the earth is round, or that water freezes at 0 degrees C?

> One man's racism is another man's plain speaking.

There's no room in this world for racism, and you shouldn't be trying to defend it here - or anywhere.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, legislation + policing + prosecution + courts of law with due process are precisely that - manual moderation of social behaviour at massive scale (admittedly not billions, but hundreds of millions of individuals). Yes, endlessly complicated, yes, costs a fortune, yes, riddled with flaws, yes, it becomes a political problem, yes can be very emotionally challenging (I know because my wife is a criminal public def…

I find it hard to disagree with any or that! Admittedly I was just thinking user experience, false positives and programming when I mulled it over in my head. I tried Locals, Gab (in their less controversial, earlier life while they still had an app store app), Parler, Bitchute, Rumble, Minds, MeWe. I generally found that the experience is the exact opposite of Big Tech where you often get lost in the information pre…

Thanks! Will have a look at those

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

#548
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would feel kinda silly asking for someone's email address over a chat messenger, but you are correct there's no attempt my side either. "nobody would go for it" is an assumption on my part I'll make a point to give it a go :)

Let us know how it goes. Our limbic system is more accurate than our perception abilities. The issue with email is partly a slight inconvenience. Unless you input large content, the UX time overhead is significant enough to prefer IM. EMails has not been designed for frequent back and forth on the same thread even if occasional. From there you loose most people. Email hasn't changed much, from the time we barely had…

I got a reply over FB messenger haha

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was special code in AOL's mail system to keep Steve Case's mail box index in memory all the time.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Case was CEO of AOL) That's interesting. Was this because of the volume of mail I/O, for scale/fanout-related performance reasons, or to simply keep responsiveness at p99 for that account "just because VIP"?

The latter.
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