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Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

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Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#221

Post by galdosdi »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #218
galdosdi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Section 230 isn't some immutable force, so yes, political force is all that's needed, Exactly. Glad you agree. It's just an act of congress. We pass many every year, including far bigger ones. > you've got to define advertisement. I did in my post. I'll repeat myself for you: (1) the platform is profiting from it (2) the platform is pushing and selecting the content to the user at the platform's whim, not the user'…

That's a workable definition at least, but what you're proposing is effectively a nationwide ban on algorithmically recommended content. Or is that your whole point?

You've misunderstood me. I am happy to clarify.

The only algorithmic content that would be eliminated is that which is already illegal speech and/or that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK.

Who pays that can be decided by the market, but probably the poster could pay it and if they choose not to, the platform will algorithmically decide which "free" content seems worth moderating at the platform's expense.

I'm literally just actually requiring a modicum of moderation, not banning anything.

Or is it that you believe that the vast majority of the content on the platforms today is ultra low value and/or illegal content? Frankly, if you do believe that, that's even more damning for the platforms, isn't it?

However, I don't actually believe that. Most content I see appears to be legal and appears to already have thousands of views before I see it. Algorithmic content is already mostly stuff that is popular enough that the tiny expense of vetting it wouldn't quash it.

As for how a newbie gets their foot in the door, this actually makes it easier for them. Yes, now you might have to pay $2 to post your first video if you want any shot of anyone besides your friends seeing it -- but now you're only competing with others who were willing to do the same. All the ultra low effort AI generated videos suddenly become totally unviable. In fact, this generally biases a platform towards higher production effort content. If I spent 2 minutes concieving of and making a low effort video, posting it 4 minutes after having thought of the idea, shot it in one take and immediately publish it -- then $2 seems like a lot. But if I spent two days planning, shooting, editing, then suddenly $2 is nothing.

This will make everything better and nothing worse except for bad actors who are parasites one our once wonderful internet ecosystem.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#222

Post by rightbyte »

voxic11 wrote: post #220
rightbyte wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It isn't Facebook doing crimes, they're a company whose customers are doing crimes. Aiding and abetting is a thing.

Aiding and abetting requires intent. If I am a bus driver and a bank robber happens to ride on my bus on his way to rob a bank I am not aiding and abetting because I had no intent or knowledge of the crime. > To convict as a principal of aiding and abetting the commission of a crime, a jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly and intentionally aided and abetted the principal(s) in each es…

We are talking about a bank robber with the cartoon outfit with big bags with dollar signs on them boarding the bus to and from the bank repeatedly. But he pays for the ticket so I guess it is fine in this proto-dystopian "late stage capitalism".

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#223

Post by Ajedi32 »

galdosdi wrote: post #221
Ajedi32 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a workable definition at least, but what you're proposing is effectively a nationwide ban on algorithmically recommended content. Or is that your whole point?

You've misunderstood me. I am happy to clarify. The only algorithmic content that would be eliminated is that which is already illegal speech and/or that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK. Who pays that can be decided by the market, but probably the poster could pay it and if they choose not to, the pl…

> that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK

The problem is that's basically all user generated content. Who's going to spend $2 vetting this comment that I'm writing right now before approving it to be shown to users by the algorithm that ranks it based on upvotes?

Sure, there will still be some high-value content out that earns enough revenue to be worth the effort. But the vast, vast majority of user generated content doesn't fall under that category.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#224

Post by barbazoo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #216
barbazoo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also only been one people they've promoted genocide against, should still probably care about it. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

How did they promote it?

Check out the link it goes into it a little bit.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#225

Post by gessha »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #136
aeturnum wrote: post #42

This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook…

The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police. Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by conti…

> law enforcement subpoenas Facebook to find out who it was

See, here’s the catch - this requires law enforcement to be a functional organization. Judging on how widespread drug abuse and drug dealers are, I don’t think this would be a winning approach.

Also, I wonder how newspapers dealt with this approach? Human vet everything?

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#226

Post by pseudocomposer »

daredoes wrote: post #198
pseudocomposer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline , and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community). It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compa…

hi Jon! We've worked together before! Fun to see you randomly on the internet. Love the name "Jon-line"

Dare!!!! Yay!

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#227

Post by pseudocomposer »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #86
pseudocomposer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline , and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community). It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compa…

If I am self-hosting, while lightweight is good, what I really need is the ability to apt-get install yourpackage That's the only way somewhat non-software-engineers will use a self-hosted solution.

I appreciate the feedback! While I haven't had plans to ship binaries to platform-specific package managers, I'll certainly consider it. (I do have plans to publish it to Cargo, but have yet to get to that.) PRs for this would be very welcome, as I have no experience shipping things to apt/yum/etc. :)

In the meantime, it is available pre-packaged as a Docker image for both x86-64 and ARM64: https://hub.docker.com/r/jonlatane/jonline

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#228

Post by galdosdi »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #223
galdosdi wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood me. I am happy to clarify. The only algorithmic content that would be eliminated is that which is already illegal speech and/or that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK. Who pays that can be decided by the market, but probably the poster could pay it and if they choose not to, the pl…

> that which is too valueless to be worth spending the approximately $2 of time it costs for someone to look over a 10 second video and sign off that it's OK The problem is that's basically all user generated content. Who's going to spend $2 vetting this comment that I'm writing right now before approving it to be shown to users by the algorithm that ranks it based on upvotes? Sure, there will still be some high-valu…

There are details, but we can get them right if the political will is there. The big picture is that platforms should be responsible for their arbitrary and self-serving publishing and promoting decisions, while being shielded from liability when they act more like a simple common carrier.

For example, I think I'd be OK with some sort of exemption for pure-text content. Most of the problematic content out there isn't pure text.

And/or maybe trivial to describe rules like upvotes, linear historical feeds, etc need to count as an algorithm-- If it's obvious to a "reasonable person" with a high school education exactly how the content is being selected, it does not need to count as the platform making publication choices.

Focus on the big picture and the details will follow. It in no way is a takedown of a big idea to point out that implementation will require some attention to detail. The big picture of social security is "If you're too sick or old to work, we should pay you" but the details fill volumes and volumes. This is nothing new; it's how laws work.

Re: Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

#229

Post by reaperman »

dragontamer wrote: post #174
reaperman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLM embeddings all the time at my day job (and I work in a very, very low-tech "tech" job, basically an IT department). It's not even remotely difficult and works incredibly well for sifting through absurd amounts of data to filter it down to something that is easy to human-review. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGTegRvXg8 I think you may be commenting "confi…

> I think you may be commenting "confidently" on technologies that you're not very familiar with. It is something that we all struggle with sometimes. Your snarkiness aside, what I've said earlier I stand by. LLMs are a network of neurons / self-learning units that point towards the "next" word to be predicted". This is fundamental to the architecture of this entire system. I recognize that there's some kind of parsi…

I’m sorry that I came across so different from how I meant to. I was intending to evoke a tone more similar to one I had recently here[0]. That is my fault and I should work on my communication.

> I admit that I don't know what an embedding is but I know it's something that is created by a neural network's output layer (or the post-processing of the output layer).

The embedding layer comprises the first layers of a transformer model, definitely not the “output layer”. It is typically trivially easy to isolate the output of the embedding layer because it generates the “actual” input to the LLM. The LLM has a certain number of input parameters (typically 784) and some length of text usually won’t fit precisely into 784 parameters (it will be longer or shorter than that). All the embedding layer does is map arbitrary length text to a single 784-dimension vector, which actually can be passed to the input of the transformer.

Ever since the paper “Attention is all you need”, the embedding layers have always been the first layers of a transformer to act on the text input. Most of the output is also sent back to the embedder, but this is only so that it can be used as input again to the “attention” layers.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40878317

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