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

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#261

Post by benj111 » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

philippejara wrote: post #109

benj111 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't shut down the idea. I just raised the counterpoint. If Europe decided to say that you can't take down things arbitrarily. What would Facebook do about that? At this point in time a geographically splintered internet with freedom of speech seems better than what we've got at the moment.

I do believe the counterpoint kills the idea, is what I meant. A geographically splintered internet(or rather, geographically splintered "social medias") would just lead to a service showing up that is international and will grow a majority again and the whole cycle begins anew. The only way I can see this happening would be different instances for each country, as in things would get moderated based on the country l…

Well presumably moderators need to speak the various local languages. So I don't see why you can't extend that to don't ban people in territory X for mentioning blue eyes.

I understand they don't put enough effort into moderating, because obviously mentioning blue eyes isn't anything. But they should be held accountable for that, not getting away with it, as is the situation we have now.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#262

Post by saurik » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #254

saurik wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) n…

Yeah sorry, I meant something more like "if you look at the goal of the original use case of Facebook" not "if you as a user simply use some subset of the website". The greed to maintain and grow the valuation of a publicly-traded company--and thereby to optimize the entire thing for explicitly only maximal revenue (and thereby maximal engagement)--has so universally destroyed the dream of social networking that we simply don't actually have a large social network anymore.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#263

Post by dekhn » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #260

dekhn wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are all reasonable points, but since I have lots of experience building recommendation systems at places like google, I have a pretty good understanding of what the embeddings are capable of learning (even so, Google News still does the same thing occasionally).

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#264

Post by end_of_line » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #254

saurik wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) n…

The biggest spam I get from Facebook ads itself. I live in Switzerland and I am BOMBARDED with financial frauds, scams and ponzi like schemes served directly from their ads. I checked why in their system and got answer "primary location: Switzerland and male 25 - 35 years old". I tried to report, block them all but facebook support always if replied at all, it was saying all in line with their policies. So, I deactivated facebook account and now using only messanger

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#265

Post by root_axis » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

dotnet00 wrote: post #235

root_axis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only control what we voluntarily give them. Social media controls nothing of importance in my life.

Unless you don't interact with anyone, that's a completely untenable position due to network effects. eg My family (spread around the world) uses WhatsApp for communicating with each other, which I'm not much of a fan of but it's pretty much impossible to get them over to another platform given that I don't live anywhere near them anymore to teach them and they have to use it anyway for communicating within their res…

WhatsApp isn't social media, it's a messaging app, but more critically it's based on phone numbers, so WhatsApp really has no control over access to your contacts.

> Unless you don't interact with anyone, that's a completely untenable position due to network effects

It doesn't have to be this way though. Between sms, email, telegram, signal, and discord I have communication channels to every person I actually care about, and it's trivial to bridge additional layers of communication if needed.

> it's pretty much impossible to get them over to another platform

I hear where you're coming from, but in my view this is an intentionally defeatist attitude. We're throwing up our hands and saying "social media owns us and there's nothing we can do, it's just too hard to install another app". In reality, if it's important, it's not that hard. There's no disputing that social media is convenient, but it isn't vital.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#266

Post by triceratops » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #258

Veserv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Because Facebook and the hosting provider are at different levels of the networking stack?

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#267

Post by fnovd » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

arcbyte wrote: post #249

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, minority issues are often limited to minority communities. I don't read r/publicfreakout either, but as a moderator of r/Jewish I can see the impact it and many other subs have on our community. You have your standard malicious crossposting and trolls, which we have good enough ways to deal with. Antisemitism from other subs leaks and grows and we often get brigades of intactivists, conspiracy theorists, BHI-sympathizers, you name it. Reddit's new Crowd Control system helps but it's not perfect. Good luck if anything happens in Israel (which it frequently does), you may as well just shut the sub down for a day.

Reddit shuts down other kinds of hate, the double standard is glaring. The fact that it doesn't impact you personally is so not the point.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#268

Post by triceratops » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #241

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 tha…

> It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time.

Is that really true?

The conquest of the Americas is near-universally seen as "evil" defeating at least "innocent" if not "good". Leaving aside the people who say "The Aztecs had it coming".

The Roman empire did some pretty shitty things, that most people would recognize as evil (slavery, Celtic genocide) but is still regarded warmly today as the ancestor of modern Western society, morality, and culture. That counts as a "win".

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#269

Post by nradov » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

yamtaddle wrote: post #246

nradov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a meaningless question because it's tangential to the Communications Decency Act. Censoring content or changing a social media feed algorithm isn't classified that way. You might not like the law but that's how it works based on the plain language of the statute and confirmed through extensive case law.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#270

Post by root_axis » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #227

root_axis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only control what we voluntarily give them. Social media controls nothing of importance in my life.

Emphasis 'we', not 'my'. These guys are already making shadow profiles out of info given by friends, corporations, etc. Not participating is also causing red flags in certain circles. Withstanding peer pressure is one thing, having your identity made up or flagged out of your control is another. This is a slippery slope that should be tackled before it gets to that. The only people not affected indirectly, are the pe…

> These guys are already making shadow profiles out of info given by friends, corporations, etc.

True, it's a shady practice indeed, but signing up and giving them even more information directly from the source is obviously far worse than the fraction of signals they can extract from your friends.

> Not participating is also causing red flags in certain circles.

There's no accounting for the peculiarities of social groups, you could say the same thing about refusing to smoke weed or drink alcohol, it doesn't mean those vices are vital, and social media is no different.