Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#241

Post by logicalmonster » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #34

The problem is that no automatic method we have now will catch context. There is a difference between "Jews were murdered by Germans during war" and "Jews destroyed German economy before the war" that will not be recognized by any machine we have nowadays. The first is true, the second is bullshit, how algorithm can now this? More, even if Facebook employees humans to do moderation still for some contractor from Asia…

> I was reading quite a lot recently about war in Angola and still I have doubts which side was "good" and which was "bad", besides that people who lived there were hurt in the history like almost no other nation.

Norm MacDonald (I didn't even know he was sick) is said to have made the following quote, which is an interesting filter to look at all you know about history through.

"It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?"

> will not be recognized by any machine we have nowadays. The first is true, the second is bullshit, how algorithm can now this?

Forget algorithms for a second, even humans can't adequately judge nuanced issues, particularly issues that they're unfamiliar with and lack the context around, and particularly with a definitive time limit to work against.

Now think about how social media giants operate. They have teams all over the world, say in Bangalore, trying to judge the nuanced political arguments of foreigners having discussions about their own country's history that they don't know intimately. Oh, and they probably have to judge most issues in less than 30 seconds or they'll be too slow to keep their job.

It's like asking an average American to intelligently weigh in on some complicated political argument around Kashmir with a few seconds to read a post and decide who's claim is right. It's absolutely ridiculous that this is the moderation standard that exists.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#242

Post by godelski » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

BrainVirus wrote: post #189

This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "d…

It is the inverse Blackstone Ratio!

But I think we must also look why they end up this way. My thoughts are that a small portion of the public reacts so strongly and loudly to any minor mistake that it turns into national conversations. Ironically through their very platforms and algorithms that optimize for engagement (fighting). So we then paint these small populations as representative populations and make mountains out of mole hills.

I actually do believe a better algorithm would alleviate some of the issues. But I do agree that it is not a cure-all. The problem appears to be quite complex and many aspects are driven from or coupled with factors outside the control of social media platforms.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#243

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

hatware wrote: post #191

Hackbraten wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German here. Not entirely sure what your comment is trying to convey. Germany doesn’t have that much of a free-speech history, at least compared to the US. So the fact that publicly denying or trivializing the holocaust has been illegal (since 1949, I figure) is not seen as dystopian at all. On the contrary, the ban is even widely accepted, and perceived as a good thing. Mind clarifying a bit as to what exactly you’r…

You can defend it all you want with "historical precedent," it's still quite dystopian whether or not conditioning for 70 years has any impact. My point is that any law against free speech probably has more sinister intentions than are presented. "Do you have any proof?" Read 1984 and try to understand how close laws against holocaust denial are to thought crimes. You really don't understand what part of the timeline…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#244

Post by z9znz » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

lvxferre wrote: post #74

prepend wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weirdest is the email message says they reviewed and upheld. Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time? Do they lie about the review? Is the reviewer so out of touch they don’t recognize real violence vs just the use of “beat?”

>Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time? Do they lie about the review? Yes, yes, and yes. There's a context-illiterate AI deciding what you can say or not, even if the later heavily depends on context. And just like it'll trigger a bazillion of false positives, it'll also trigger a bazillion of false negatives; someone can easily spread hate through Facebook, unimpeded, by si…

I think the algorithms are just minimum standard efforts which provide enough plausible deniability for FB to be able to argue that they provide safeguards on bad content.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#245

Post by z9znz » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #69

prepend wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weirdest is the email message says they reviewed and upheld. Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time? Do they lie about the review? Is the reviewer so out of touch they don’t recognize real violence vs just the use of “beat?”

It could well be that they are paid very little, the majority of reports are true positives, have a quota to make, and expect no consequence for false positives. If its outsourced they may have a bad grasp of the language as well.

> no consequence for false positives

This could be the key point. Penalties for letting something bad slip past, but no penalties for falsely flagging. It’s a pragmatic solution, but it is almost by definition inhuman.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#246

Post by yamtaddle » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #151

jscipione wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)

Yes that is part of the law, but it doesn't mean what you claimed. You're completely misinterpreting it. There is extensive case law in this area.

So what would it mean if Facebook were treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information they... well, publish?

This passage does something by preventing them from being so classified. Right?

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#247

Post by z9znz » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #5

bwb wrote: post #2

I was just talking to an author who published an ad on Facebook for their sci fi book. They had the word "beat" in the ad. The FB algo said that words intills people to violence, banned her account for 2 months, and kept all the ad money. Funny enough, her book is about the dangers of an algorithm-based AI supersystem... Facebook is the worst.

How come they get to keep money for the service not provided? Should be strictly illegal.

Terms of service probably have a clause which says that if you violate their policies you forfeit your expenditures.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#248

Post by origin_path » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #242

BrainVirus wrote: post #189

This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "d…

It is the inverse Blackstone Ratio! But I think we must also look why they end up this way. My thoughts are that a small portion of the public reacts so strongly and loudly to any minor mistake that it turns into national conversations. Ironically through their very platforms and algorithms that optimize for engagement (fighting). So we then paint these small populations as representative populations and make mountai…

A small portion of the public will react to almost anything in any way. The censorship regime here must surely have been created by more complex factors, like maybe:

- Dependence on advertising, exposure to advertisers who feel like their brands appearing next to anything controversial or upsetting will negative-halo upon their brand.

- Ideological uniformity amongst journalists, who highlight certain kinds of outrage and sink others.

- A need for moral validation amongst tech company employees.

And we could think of many others. Trying to distill a root cause is hard but it looks like the everything-is-connected-to-everything mentality appears frequently. Is it really the case that an advert appearing next to something objectionable makes people think less of the brand? Probably not but it seems to be a common belief. Is it really the case that Facebook is to blame for any video posted on its platform? Probably not but it's a common belief. In a thread just a few days ago there was a former Twitter employee arguing that Facebook was somehow complicit or at fault in the Rohingya genocide, which is a good example of this mentality.

You could go even deeper and ask, is this everyone-is-culpable-for-everything mentality a genuine belief, or is it a possibly sub-conscious cover for some other agenda? That is, this argument seems to work on people sometimes, so it is deployed a useful tool to advance one ideology or another? Who can really say.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#249

Post by arcbyte » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #203

Beltalowda wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war". I think the "reddit model" where you have smaller communities with community mods works much better than the Facebook or Twitter model where there's one "global community". Not that…

Seconding reddit being very extremely, explicitly antisemitic. It's really just /pol/ with slightly bigger words much of the time.

You miss his point completely. Whatever problems "reddit" has, they're limited to small communities. As much as I think reddit has a huge left bias, there are huge, huge numbers of right leaning communities as well.

I don't read /pol, /publicfreakout or any of these other communities and that means I am completely unaffected by whatever nonsense they have going on.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#250

Post by knodi123 » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

knightofmars wrote: post #112

bwb wrote: post #2

I was just talking to an author who published an ad on Facebook for their sci fi book. They had the word "beat" in the ad. The FB algo said that words intills people to violence, banned her account for 2 months, and kept all the ad money. Funny enough, her book is about the dangers of an algorithm-based AI supersystem... Facebook is the worst.

This reminds me of the short story "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon D Dickson. The format is a series of correspondence between individuals regarding a book. The plot starts with a man attempting to deal with the situation of having been mailed the wrong book by an online retailer. It then proceeds to take a turn into the dark. https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133

Yeesh, that's horrifying. Written 1965?!?!? Prophetic.

I once had a similar deal when I lived in a house with several guys for a year in college. We divvied up the utilities, and I was in charge of the phone bill. I set up automatic payment, and never had a problem. But 5 years later, the phone company accused me of skipping my June payment, and carefully deducting that amount from the "total owed" amount in every subsequent month. It's insane, and every human I spoke to agreed with me, but no one had the power to do anything about it. I could either travel cross country to go to court, with no evidence other than common sense, or just pay the $30 bill plus another $40 in penalties.