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

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#251

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

etchalon wrote: post #174

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: stop moderating. Just allow everything.

"Crime sure is hard to stop." "Well, just make everything legal."

Well, but that is literally one of the arguments for legalizing drugs.

The issue here is more like defining what crime is, though, not stopping it. Stopping stuff on FB is easy. Figuring out what to stop, is hard. Figuring out if a disputed case should have been stopped is hard. For the 'real world' we have parliaments and courts, but there's FB has only the equivalent of police, not the other parts of the system. It is, in effect, a police state.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#252

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:18 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…

> The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN

Even here, where you would think people would know better, you still see people insist that it's not censorship because it's not the government doing it.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#253

Post by etchalon » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #251

etchalon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crime sure is hard to stop." "Well, just make everything legal."

Well, but that is literally one of the arguments for legalizing drugs. The issue here is more like defining what crime is, though, not stopping it. Stopping stuff on FB is easy. Figuring out what to stop, is hard. Figuring out if a disputed case should have been stopped is hard. For the 'real world' we have parliaments and courts, but there's FB has only the equivalent of police, not the other parts of the system. It…

Yes, some things are hard and impossible to get right 100% of the time.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#254

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #212

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #172

Here we are, deep down in the dystopia of Automatic Content Classification by robots. Far less important of an example, but I was just put in "Facebook jail" for 24 hours for posting a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit with no shirt. Y'know, as one does at the beach. I can only assume it's because my son has long hair and the Convolutional Neural Network or whatever decided he was a girl and therefor…

If you are only using Facebook for its original purpose of keeping up with old friends and family, then it doesn't actually have the scaling problem: if one of your friends or someone in your family starts posting a ton of racist bullshit you either confront them about it or drop them as a friend (preferably bilaterally), and either result is actually better for society than having Facebook attempt to present a skewe…

> using Facebook for its original purpose of keeping up with old friends and family

Not that Facebook lets you do that any more. I was off of FB for a while and recently rejoined because my community and my kid's schools only use FB for communications now. I'm connected to a very small circle of actual friends and family, but I still get daily political memes in my feed (politics I vehemently disagree with as well) no matter how many times I try to block them.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#255

Post by origin_path » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #157

darthrupert wrote: post #6

Recently Farcebook has started recommending incredibly toxic anti-SJW shit to me for no apparent reason. Either they turned the "let's incite toxicity" knob to 11 or somebody is seriously abusing them.

Just yesterday, Facebook started including in-stream ads for Creation Research. I'm a scientist who's work on evolution. i also see several other ridiculous ads that have no relevance to me. I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core prod…

Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldview. You probably don't remember the ones that are merely useless, though.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#256

Post by tl » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #252

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…

> The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN Even here, where you would think people would know better, you still see people insist that it's not censorship because it's not the government doing it.

Facebook is the government. PRISM [1] makes it explicit in Facebook's case, but any corporation beholden to a government for its continued operation is a policy arm of that government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#257

Post by dekhn » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #255

dekhn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday, Facebook started including in-stream ads for Creation Research. I'm a scientist who's work on evolution. i also see several other ridiculous ads that have no relevance to me. I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core prod…

Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldv…

I do expect that recommendation engines should pick up on, and not show me, advertising content that is fundamentally nonscientific (and show those ads to other folks whose profiles are more consistent). It demonstrates that the recommendation algorithm can't differentiate between two clusters that use similar words, but different concept vectors.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#258

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

Veserv wrote: post #176

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…

You are presupposing that for some reason Facebook must do this. If they can not moderate then their service is defective. The fact that they want to make huge gobs of money does not “force” them to offer a defective service, they can just not offer it. If a construction company said: “The only projects we can make a profit on are skyscrapers, but we do not know how to make a skyscraper without having it fall down an…

> If they can not moderate then their service is defective

Well wait a minute, couldn't you say the same about the ISPs that host websites in the first place? Isn't the standard pro-big-tech-censorship position "if you don't like it, make your own website"? If Facebook has to moderate content (according to any standard) in order to exists, why don't hosting providers also have to moderate? (FWIW I'm anti-censorship)

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#259

Post by hatzalam » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

Myself and at least one of my friends have been harassed by an Instagram account whose name is "white_soupremacy". They seemingly have no content, and the sole purpose is to harass/troll other accounts. I reported this account to IG, but since the spelling is cheeky itself, it wasn't flagged as hate speech. Furthermore, IG didn't even give me an option to have a manual review of the account. I DMed someone I know that works at Meta, gave them all of the relevant information, but the account is STILL up even after a PM at Meta submitted an internal report. Something is deeply broken in that system.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#260

Post by origin_path » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #257

origin_path wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldv…

I do expect that recommendation engines should pick up on, and not show me, advertising content that is fundamentally nonscientific (and show those ads to other folks whose profiles are more consistent). It demonstrates that the recommendation algorithm can't differentiate between two clusters that use similar words, but different concept vectors.

Well, you don't know how it was targeted. Maybe they don't want to sing to the choir so such ads might be targeted at people who are interested in evolution. Still it seems unlikely that the scientific-ness of something can be determined by an AI model at all, let alone just word vectors. What is and isn't science can be hard to rigorously pin down, that's why pseudoscience is problematic in the first place.