101–110 of 112 posts
they are too busy cracking down on peaceful criticism of Islam in the west.
down votes to this are proof the peaceful discussion is futile.
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natural language processing is like one of the hardest problems that's left to crack, don't be so dismissive about it i.e: "get rid of all black people" "get rid of all black people unemployment problems" "get rid of all black people unemployment problems sending them back to Africa" this can be expanded almost infinitely in every direction, and we're not even beginning with the false positive problems. "I hate black…
> natural language processing is like one > of the hardest problems that's left to crack You don't need to "crack it" or come anywhere remotely near to a perfect solution. False positives are okay, providing you accept that some percent of your users won't tolerate the errors, and will leave your platform. And we're talking about social networks. So there's a wealth of additional information (ie: who you follow. prev…
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man
edit: holy crap people get with the most outlandish or unsubsantiated claims around here like that one in quote but point at the logical issue that basically sap the whole line of reasoning and you're the bad guy.
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> It's their responsibility to maintain order and prevent or punish crimes in their country, not Facebook's. Insofar as people are doing things on Facebook's platform that they themselves disagree with, it's absolutely their responsibility to stop it. How ridiculous does this sound: "Alice says she's going to buy this knife from me to stab Bob. I don't like stabbings, but I'm going to sell it to her anyway, because i…
Facebook isn't selling knives. The bits in Facebook's database are not killing anyone. The people doing the lynching are. Yes, it is ultimately the state's responsibility to uphold the freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that any private actor is prohibited from providing a platform that upholds freedom of speech, only that they are not obligated to do so. You can do something even if you're not legally obligated to…
The knife isn't killing Bob, Alice is! The point being, both the knife-seller in the analogy and Facebook in real life bear a nonzero amount of responsibility for known consequences of their actions.
We can actually make this analogy a little clearer: would you sell a knife to someone knowing they planned to stab you, because it's the government's job to prevent stabbings?
And obviously Facebook isn't prohibited from allowing these posts, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. The claim is that they have a moral obligation to take down this content, any legal obligations notwithstanding.
Regarding your Presidential campaigns analogy, it's not that Facebook (or any entity) should censor speech they disagree with. They should prevent behavior they disagree with, in a moral sense; those can be the same or different. It's not incoherent to believe that political discourse is valuable even when you disagree with the ideas, and that hate speech falls outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.
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I mean, they do some pretty distasteful stuff but saying that providing an international communications platform is imperialist is just beyond silly.
Actually it's very apt, whether the intention was imperialist or not the result inevitably is: a single company from a single culture/country controls an important communications channel globally. Besides, the intention is very much imperialist - to conquer the global markets. So much so that "world domination" is a standard part of business parlance.
It weakens the concept of imperialism to the point of almost meaninglessness - it essentially becomes the same concept as globalisation. The nasty element of old-school mercantilist imperialism was its subjugation of the native people of other countries. If you remove the harmful element from the equation but continue to use the word for effect, you're playing games with words to cast something as bad without due cause.
If you want to suggest that, say, oil companies moving operations into African nations (I forget exactly which ones, but read about it a few years ago), hiring military contractors, and reaping another country's natural resources is imperialism, then yes I totally agree. Putting something on the internet and letting people from other nations use it? Not even slightly.
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> I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. I think it's because they were given ample, clear warnings that their platform was being used to incite ethnic hatred and genocide, but chose to do nothing for years . I don't think they would be getting so nearly so much blame if they hadn't been so utterly negligent about the problem. They didn't…
If the lynch mobs were being organized over the telephone, would it be the telephone company's responsibility to intercept the communications and stop it? If not, what makes Facebook different? Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications?
If the cost and effectiveness was comparable, and the government showed no interest in stopping it, yes.
> Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications
If the alternative is genocide, I don't want Facebook to be a neutral carrier for communications.
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> This sentiment, which I read repeatedly, really irritates me. Most of us program here. It's not that hard a problem! What solution do you think would work?
A combination of things. There's a wealth of information available if you're running a social network. Start by just banning text like "n-----" and "(((". Then give users a reputation, and do a page rank style analysis. So if someone has a good reputation, and they report another user, a moderator doesn't need to be involved. Take account age into consideration... you can't post publicly the instant you get your acco…
First, because the use of the word can be in a positive or negative sentence, and thus can either agree or disagree with your "censorship rule". You need a deeper NLP analysis to disambiguate.
Second, because - if online fora with this kind of ban has taught us anything - it's pretty easy to work around it by using punctuation, replacement characters, or other style variations to write the word in a way that it won't be caught by the regex.
Third, this method ends up banning legit words. There was a forum where I couldn't write "booby trap". I don't need to explain.
WRT reputation, networks that allow "unlimited registrations" are easy targets for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack - One can use account age to mitigate of course, but given the amount of fake accounts that exist on the market (look at fiverr marketing offers) with long life and activity, I wouldn't expect age to be that big of a helper.
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Actually it's very apt, whether the intention was imperialist or not the result inevitably is: a single company from a single culture/country controls an important communications channel globally. Besides, the intention is very much imperialist - to conquer the global markets. So much so that "world domination" is a standard part of business parlance.
that's a pretty loose definition of imperialism. Conquering markets is not coercive, it's not an act of one group dominating another (beyond the realm of permissible competition that is the whole point of markets existing). Every company wants to reach the top of its market so at what point does the average company become "imperialist"? When it starts trading overseas? It weakens the concept of imperialism to the poi…
Well, conquering markets also imposes one group's values (e.g. FB censorship based on what Americans deem offensive) and national interests (e.g. surveillance) on others.
>It weakens the concept of imperialism to the point of almost meaninglessness - it essentially becomes the same concept as globalisation.
Well, globalization is a form of imperialism. It's not equal access to the global markets and influence for all countries: it's a few countries dominating.
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Facebook isn't selling knives. The bits in Facebook's database are not killing anyone. The people doing the lynching are. Yes, it is ultimately the state's responsibility to uphold the freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that any private actor is prohibited from providing a platform that upholds freedom of speech, only that they are not obligated to do so. You can do something even if you're not legally obligated to…
> Facebook isn't selling knives. The bits in Facebook's database are not killing anyone. The people doing the lynching are. The knife isn't killing Bob, Alice is! The point being, both the knife-seller in the analogy and Facebook in real life bear a nonzero amount of responsibility for known consequences of their actions. We can actually make this analogy a little clearer: would you sell a knife to someone knowing th…
> We can actually make this analogy a little clearer: would you sell a knife to someone knowing they planned to stab you
Absolutely. This would be an excellent opportunity to sell them a fake knife. Also, now I'm aware that someone is trying to kill me, so I can do something about it. Kind of a best case scenario for me.
> They should prevent behavior they disagree with
Voting for a particular candidate would be an example of behavior that Facebook might try to prevent. I find it highly disturbing that anyone would want to assign Facebook the power of controlling our behavior. That is a power we grant to governments, and then reluctantly, and only with appropriate checks and balances. Not something we should hand out to private companies with no accountability.
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I recently reported a post made in a regional language(language for which I'm sure Facebook doesn't have any translator/interpreter) as hate speech. I got a response from Facebook saying the said post doesn't violate Facebook's community guideline.
they only care if they can get sued for it: that's why for example anti-white hate speech is not actioned. people love to think it's a global conspiracy but the reality is much simpler, they don't define hate speech, laws do. unless they are at risk for litigation, they won't remove posts.
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that's a pretty loose definition of imperialism. Conquering markets is not coercive, it's not an act of one group dominating another (beyond the realm of permissible competition that is the whole point of markets existing). Every company wants to reach the top of its market so at what point does the average company become "imperialist"? When it starts trading overseas? It weakens the concept of imperialism to the poi…
> that's a pretty loose definition of imperialism. Conquering markets is not coercive, it's not an act of one group dominating another (beyond the realm of permissible competition that is the whole point of markets existing). Well, conquering markets also imposes one group's values (e.g. FB censorship based on what Americans deem offensive) and national interests (e.g. surveillance) on others. > It weakens the concep…
That's a great pro-free-speech and privacy argument. Certainly interacting within the framework of a company with different values will mean you have to abide by those values. But the thing is - you aren't forced to. The various peoples of colonies usually didn't have a choice to go back to living how they did before their foreign occupiers landed.
> Well, globalization is a form of imperialism. It's not equal access to the global markets and influence for all countries: it's a few countries dominating.
As far as I'm aware, the living standard of all nations is going up. Nigerians have access to a safer banking system because they can use modern phones. China is dominating the world's manufacturing. Sure, the US and Europe have an outsized impact on the market - do you think that is more the case now than in the 1800s? I'd much rather people in developing nations have access to the international markets, because trade is mutually beneficial. Big companies make money, their customers also gain something. That's not imperialist in any sense, that's just free exchange of goods and services. Or perhaps we should all stick to trading within our own borders? Because that sounds like protectionist nationalism, which certainly isn't going to give people living in poorer nations access to goods and services they may benefit from.