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Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

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Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#151

Post by wil421 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #139

Facebook at least claims to be a leader in scanning for and detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their platform. As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornog…

> As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornography websites (e.g. MindGeek), 4chan, or snapchat.

Let the numbers speak:

4chan: 20 million visits.[1]

Pornhub: 2.8 billion visits.[2]

FB Monthly Traffic: 23 billion visits[2]

Just for fun, Netflix: 2.2 billion.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

[2]https://happymag.tv/turns-out-pornhub-gets-more-visitors-per...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#152

Post by Craighead »

ALittleLight wrote: post #144
mlindner wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post seems to imply that end to end encryption is bad and that we need a surveillance state run either by corporations or government in order to protect children. We need to not head down this path. Protecting children has always historically been led by their own parents and we should empower that. Improvements should always be about parental education (teaching parents to recognize the signs of abuse/grooming…

Facebook reports ~20 million instances of child sexual abuse materials a year. My understanding is that this material is largely transmitted by message (i.e. people aren't posting it on their wall, but sharing it in chat). Regardless of your ideological convictions, the fact remains that one trade off of end to end encryption is a reduction in ability to detect, track, and report CSAM. My intuition is that our curren…

Why do we allow fake corporate sponsored content like yours on HN?

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#153

Post by fleddr »

jessaustin wrote: post #149
fleddr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My point though is that it's increasingly clear that Facebook's audience is becoming just that, an aging niche, and that's not a great place to be for a social media platform" A few counter points can be made here. Yours is a very US centric view. As one example, in several Central and South American countries, Facebook is everything. It's where everybody is, and this weird western idea that mingling with old people…

Facebook has largely the same dominance in Philippines. However, this situation indicts the nations in question more than it credits Facebook. Facebook is like cigarettes or sugared soda. Yes lots of people like it; no it isn't good for them. There is no reason that social networks have to be run by firms as unethical as Facebook (i.e., there is no reason for social networks to be run as unethically as Facebook's is…

That's once again a US perspective. Here in the Netherlands, Facebook is used to look at pictures of your friend whom visited a zoo. It's not used as a public debate platform, and there's very little political activity at all.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#154

Post by ALittleLight »

wil421 wrote: post #151
ALittleLight wrote: post #139

Facebook at least claims to be a leader in scanning for and detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their platform. As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornog…

> As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornography websites (e.g. MindGeek), 4chan, or snapchat. Let the numbers speak: 4chan: 20 million visits.[1] Pornhub: 2.8 billi…

Interesting numbers. Thanks for finding them. I think they support my intuition. MindGeek, which owns Pornhub as well as RedTube, YouPorn, and others, reports only 13k instances to Facebook's 20 million. By traffic MindGeek has, we can call it, a tenth of Facebook's traffic, but they have 6 thousandths of Facebook's reports.

Of course maybe there is a different nature of the companies. Most visitors to MindGeek properties, presumably, are there to consume content rather than share it. Maybe Facebook's model enables users to connect to one another and that facilitates the exchange of CSAM.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#155

Post by [deleted] »

ALittleLight wrote: post #154
wil421 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornography websites (e.g. MindGeek), 4chan, or snapchat. Let the numbers speak: 4chan: 20 million visits.[1] Pornhub: 2.8 billi…

Interesting numbers. Thanks for finding them. I think they support my intuition. MindGeek, which owns Pornhub as well as RedTube, YouPorn, and others, reports only 13k instances to Facebook's 20 million. By traffic MindGeek has, we can call it, a tenth of Facebook's traffic, but they have 6 thousandths of Facebook's reports. Of course maybe there is a different nature of the companies. Most visitors to MindGeek prope…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#156

Post by kelnos »

AlexandrB wrote: post #69
thereisnospork wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on their 'moral value'? (An admittedly vague term) Trivially: someone who reads NRA's weekly newsletter religiously is more likely to be pro gun, pro republican, and pro 'life', for instance

This kind of thinking completely discards the concept of intent. People read things for all kinds of reasons. I have a family member who was an avid reader of the "Weekly World News", yet he did not believe in aliens, "Bat Boy", or the illuminati. I used to regularly read conservative blogs and listen to Fox News to keep up with what people I disagree with are doing/saying. So the problem is that you can make some st…

Right, but FB can figure out your intent much of the time as well. Simply clicking on a conservative news story might not indicate you're conservative, but if those are the only kind of stories you click on, that's a signal. And if 5 minutes after clicking that story, you reshare it, that's another signal. And if sentiment analysis done on whatever you wrote along side the reshare suggests a positive/agreeable reaction, then that's yet another signal. And the aggregation of these signals, especially if you do this often enough, can often correctly identify your political views.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#158

Post by civilized »

jonas21 wrote: post #138
cs702 wrote: post #21

It's not so much that the key people at the top of Facebook "see no evil," but that they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe there is no evil to be seen, or if there is any evil, they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe they can subdue it with great engineering and great management. They fail to see what every outsider, and many insiders, clearly see. Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get people to see…

> They fail to see what every outsider, and many insiders, clearly see. The problem is that half of those outsiders clearly see the evil as Facebook censoring too much. And the other half clearly see the evil as Facebook censoring too little.

Surely we can all agree that Facebook should do what outsiders tell it to do, regardless of whether different groups of outsiders want contradictory things.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#159

Post by sjg007 »

How would you solve this problem? Presumably the engagement algorithms look at posts people share more frequently, reshare, and share to large numbers of people. Maybe there is a rate (virality/time) metric involved as well. This gives them some priority in the news feed which causes more sharing in a positive viral feedback loop. That would have to be filtered by NLP or image recognition and possibly a source reputation score.

I imagine there are a host of bots that instantly reshare things..

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#160

Post by clcaev »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #157

Notice how everybody seems to have accepted that non-mainstream positions, sources, and interest-groups must be banned, and now they're simply arguing about who should be doing it and how? This is not OK.

The promotion of false things is very profitable; by contrast, true things are far less engaging. Worse, it is more expensive to dispel a mistruth than it is to create and spread misinformation.

How do we address this systems design challenge without censorship?

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