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Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

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Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#301

Post by hatware »

HideousKojima wrote: post #231
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…

>Germany doesn’t have that much of a free-speech history "We've always suppressed freedom of thought and expression, so why should we start now,?"

"What are rights? Haha silly American"

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#302

Post by bwb »

protomolecule wrote: post #205
bwb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it is 5 Stars by Louise Blackwick: https://www.amazon.com/5-Stars-Louise-Blackwick-ebook/dp/B09... Really cool author out of the Netherlands, I highly recommend the book. It is dark sci fi, and she calls it "Neon Science Fiction". Which sums the story up nicely (dark and gritty with a flippant attitude) I believe the line she got hit with was "Can You Beat The Neon God's Algorithm?" She also did a list on my sit…

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Interesting site, btw.

thanks, it's a really fun project! I launched it on HN in April 2021 :)

All the topics are hooked into Wikidata on the ML side, eventually I want to build knowledge graphs using the Wikidata info and play with historical timelines etc and see what I can do...

I am working on adding individual book pages and then genres and age group data is next.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#303

Post by nomel »

matrix_overload wrote: post #230
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 platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage. So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms). And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have o…

> trying to appease the angry mob

I think this is half correct. They do it to prevent the angry mob from reaching out to advertisers. I don't think they care about angry mobs, themselves.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#304

Post by fallingknife »

etchalon wrote: post #293
kbelder wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow legal things. Block illegal things. It seems crazy that it's impossible to find a major platform that has this policy.

Pornography is legal. If Facebook allowed pornography, it would quickly overwhelm the platform due to engagement metrics. It would make the platform unusable. Vile hate speech? Completely legal. But its mere presence would turn away huge numbers of users. It would make the platform unattractive and hurt the business. It is in the platform's best interest to block otherwise legal things.

But this isn't true. Social media was pretty much a free for all (except for porn) until 2015ish and it was growing rapidly the whole time. The whole argument that this type of content will drive away users is completely contradicted by history.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#305

Post by atchoo »

matrix_overload wrote: post #230
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 platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage. So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms). And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have o…

There is more to it than that.

Look up the use of Facebook in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. I see multiple comments in this thread about snowflakes and cancel culture but they miss that social media is a profoundly powerful instigator of race hate and violence.

This is no defence of Facebook's actions here but any suggestion that a hands off approach without policing racial language needs to be conscious of the harm it has already lead to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#306

Post by gretch »

atchoo wrote: post #305
matrix_overload wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage. So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms). And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have o…

There is more to it than that. Look up the use of Facebook in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. I see multiple comments in this thread about snowflakes and cancel culture but they miss that social media is a profoundly powerful instigator of race hate and violence. This is no defence of Facebook's actions here but any suggestion that a hands off approach without policing racial language needs to be conscious of th…

Paywalled, so I can’t directly address the points in the article.

Do humans not have thousands of years of genocide each other long before Facebook? It’s hard for me to believe that if only Facebook did not exist, everything would be fine in Myanmar. No, almost certainly they would have found a way to kill the other tribe.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#307

Post by logicalmonster »

triceratops wrote: post #297
logicalmonster wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that really true? That's sort of the joke. It's another way of saying "the victors write the history books"

I understand the joke and I know the victors write the history books, by virtue of being alive. But they don't always make themselves look like the good guys in those history books.

> they don't always make themselves look like the good guys in those history books

I think judging past history reasonably from our current perspective isn't quite so easy.

From the perspective of today, virtually every human that ever lived in the past had views that could be considered some kind of racist, sexist, homophobe, religious extremist, etc even if they were very decent humans by the standards of their day. Even the great abolitionists, philosophers, people considered to be saints, or other humans that tried to be wholesome in their time likely had some views that would be considered totally repugnant to many today or committed actions that were considered reasonable then, but akin to war crimes now.

From the perspective of 100 or 200 years from now, I'm sure everybody living today around 2022 will be considered to have committed gross and obvious crimes against decent human morality and will be considered to have had totally backwards thoughts on something or another. I'd hope proper context is taken into account when they look back at us, so I think it's fair to try and do the same when we judge the past.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#308

Post by etchalon »

fallingknife wrote: post #304
etchalon wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornography is legal. If Facebook allowed pornography, it would quickly overwhelm the platform due to engagement metrics. It would make the platform unusable. Vile hate speech? Completely legal. But its mere presence would turn away huge numbers of users. It would make the platform unattractive and hurt the business. It is in the platform's best interest to block otherwise legal things.

But this isn't true. Social media was pretty much a free for all (except for porn) until 2015ish and it was growing rapidly the whole time. The whole argument that this type of content will drive away users is completely contradicted by history.

Social media was not a free for all before 2015. I … don't know why you think that is true.

This story is from 2013: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/2013/06/facebook-and-...

Maybe super early it was a free for all, but it had a lot less users then. The impacts mattered less.

These interventions became important as the companies grew, and needed to attract the largest possible number of users.

There are places with VERY open content policies. You can join them today.

Those places attract a niche audience and I'd wager always will.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#309

Post by htrp »

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…

Compositionality issues in AI

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#310

Post by tomohawk »

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…

That's life under the Techiban
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