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Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

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211–220 of 407 posts

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#211

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 is even more astounding. After reading some of the comments here you're absolutely right :(

Use two line breaks to put your content on a new line. If you use one, it will all be under the same line like happened to your comment here.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#212

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 skewed view of them that tries to just pretend they aren't posting all of the horrible stuff in the first place (whether by blocking it from being posted, quickly removing it once posted, or running some complex ranking algorithm that does a good job of hiding it).

It is only when you start having strangers talking to strangers that you run into a need for moderation, and even there you should be able to scale by sharding and punting the problem to others: if you have a group--similar to a real-world club--the moderation is on you, as the issues in your community shouldn't leak to people who haven't joined your community (and if people leave your community because you fail, all the better). The only real issue is that Facebook wants to--for the increased engagement, and thereby ad revenue--run a ton of recommendation algorithms that shove content from people you have no affiliation to in your face constantly (which one might notice should already be considered antithetical to the design of a social network) which leads to a ton of stranger-to-stranger interactions that are entirely "on Facebook" to ensure are clean.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#213
post #212

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…

And yet here I was, posting a picture of my kids at the beach so my mom and friends could see them, and I ended up banned from participating on Facebook for 24 hours and accused of violating community decency.

They're f*cked.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#214

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

I suppose if your country has just perpetrated a genocide, one might have unusual moral responsibilities.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#215

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…

> 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.

Unless they pay for their publications (aka ads), in that case FB has a history of letting the most horrible shit slip "regrettably through their screening team". Bollocks.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#216
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…

If anything you’re understating the problem. The problem with “Jews destroyed German economy before the war” is that it’s extremely vague and difficult to verify. There’s no good basis for the claim, but it’s not even a historical detail that could be easily verified; it’s more of an overarching theoretical opinion. As for “Jews were murdered by Germans during the war”, sure. That’s an extremely well documented fact.…

>> As for “Jews were murdered by Germans during the war”, sure. That’s an extremely well documented fact.

It’s sad that you’re blind to the fact that that statement is just as ‘racist’ and untrue as the original.

Jews were not murdered by Germans.

Rather, Some Jews were murderer by Some members of a political party that was primarily — but not exclusively — German.

The overwhelming majority of Germans never murdered anyone.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#218
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…

From my (very) limited understanding the Angolan Civil War had no good sides.

It was a plain power struggle where two superpowers decided to invest their resources to deny the other a base in Africa. The local proxies were fine with this since they wanted nothing but to kill each other. The result was a bloodbath that went on for decades.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#219
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't FB have the right to not do business with you? What is the basis for the suit? Anyway I do remember FB's "a cool "open source" way to do front-end development, feel "free" to use it, you can't sue us though". So maybe there is some shitty clause like that when you sign up.

Was it not a clause in the react js or so, that you lose the right to use the framework if you sued Facebook?

React is MIT licensed, so no.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#220

This is like the modern day version of not being able to search for Moby Dick on my high school's library computer.

Except you probably didn't get permanently banned from using the library when you tried to search for that.

Reminds me of how ignorant people used to be about computers 25 years ago. That could totally still happen in some areas.
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