Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#321

Post by azornathogron » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

askesum wrote: post #276

leetcrew wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the humans that designed the car? to be clear, computers don't intentionally do anything. if an engineer deliberately programs a car to hit pedestrians for no reason, they would be charged with murder. if the car hits a pedestrian as a result of an engineering mistake, the company would be liable for damages, and if particularly egregious, engineers might face manslaughter charges.

To be clear, that was my point. You can't punish the computer and good luck finding the one to punish for an accident ten years later. But maybe if it's free software...

Punishing bad driving is - I assume - intended to incentivise better driving.

If a company makes a self-driving car and that car then drives badly, surely the response needs to be to incentivise the company to improve their engineering practices, eg, spend more on testing, or require more levels of review of changes, or whatever other organisational changes they need to make safer cars. You don't need to find an individual person responsible to create that incentive. And if you really do want to find an individual responsible it can easily just be the executives of the company (and the executives are probably pretty easy to find even a decade later).

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#322

Post by BLKNSLVR » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

devjam wrote: post #259

quink wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One recent quote from the former prime minister when Australia was planning to introduce backdoors to end-to-end encryption: > "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"

That quote didn't do Malcolm Turnbull any favours. He was certainly one of the more forward-thinking, progressive PMs we've had. As just one example, he actually believes climate change is real.

But he changed his stripes on Climate Change to become Prime Minister, and then changed back once he got ousted from the position.

He had the opportunity to act on Climate Change and he stuck to Tony Abbott's script. Weak as piss.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#323

Post by not2b » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #218

Jonanin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.

As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in gener…

In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#324

Post by steve_taylor » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #285

jjcm wrote: post #232

I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.im…

"I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous." You're absolutely right and I'm also horrified by the implications, and I would be even more so if the circumstances were more normal. The trouble is tha…

Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Since about 1995, eyeballs have been shifting from all forms of media to the web. Newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, books, etc. have all been disrupted by the web.

Rupert Murdoch has been particularly salty about this and has worked with the coalition government for years to undermine the internet in Australia. News Ltd, with the help of the coalition, fucked the National Broadband Network and now they’re shaking down the most successful internet companies. I have zero sympathy for them.

The proposed law is crafted in such a way that Facebook’s only viable option is to block all news content in Australia and all Australian news content internationally.

News Ltd has failed to innovate on the web for 25+ years while internet startups have gone from idea to almost trillion dollar market caps. News bought MySpace for $580m then sold it for $35m because they are clueless idiots.

It makes me sick that people would side with our overtly corrupt federal government.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#325

Post by enneff » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

abiogenesis wrote: post #318

> Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content. On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue. This is technically not correct. Publishers can opt out from Google Search if they want to, so one may also argue that they willingly c…

It’s just straight up incorrect. They’re throwing google under the bus to distance themselves.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#326

Post by coffenjam » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #233

Wow they've blocked the Bureau of Meteorology page, no more weather warnings on fb. All of ABC too (our BBC equivalent), though they were not required to pay for ABC content, so it seems pretty bitchy.

They're banning emergency services as well ("by mistake").

They probably just want to increase the backlash. The emergency services Facebook pages will obviously be back within hours.

I live in Australia but I don't have a Facebook account and I don't read the fake news media, so I actually don't have a horse in this race. I hope they both mutually destruct each other.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#327

Post by not2b » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but I am still scared of racism.

> I agree with you but I am still scared of racism. My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put th…

No, the racism is a real issue, though a lot of it is caused by limited training data. Having an image recognition algorithm identify Africans and South Asians as gorillas doesn't happen because the designers intended it, but because their training data had only light-skinned human faces and dark-skinned primates. But the effect is racist even though this wasn't the intent.

Likewise, if the system is trained to duplicate human decision-making (like who gets loans), interesting things can happen: if the decision-makers unconsciously favored whites over blacks, the algorithm could wind up weighing skin color or stereotypically Black or Latino names negatively, meaning that the final model is explicitly racist, just because there is a correlation in the training data. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use deep learning, it means that it's not responsible to just fit the training data and ship without testing for such problems.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#328

Post by manfredo » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #285

jjcm wrote: post #232

I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.im…

"I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous." You're absolutely right and I'm also horrified by the implications, and I would be even more so if the circumstances were more normal. The trouble is tha…

Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic. Australia is imposing a tax on serving links to Australians, so Facebook is no longer serving those links. If the US imposes a tariff on BMWs and BMW stops selling cars in the US is it blackmail? This is the same deal with Google News in Spain. Spain imposed a tax, so Google stopped doing business there (at least insofar as Google News is concerned).

This isn't blackmail any more than I'm blackmailing my local coffee shop when I go elsewhere when they jack up the prices. Increase the cost of doing business and people are less likely to want to do business. What is surprising or nefarious about this?

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#329

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #273

CydeWeys wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you craft legislation that force Google and Facebook to do business with you under terms that you dictate? Ultimately how can you prevent said companies from pulling out of your country entirely if that's the better option for them?

Australia and Facebook did exactly what you described in your "impossible" hypothetical. I suspect the government's thinking was the Australia is too big a market for the victim companies to drop, i.e. they thought this was a deal they could not refuse.

No they didn't. Google isn't being forced to operate there; there's simply an additional cost of doing business being imposed. Clearly it's not in excess of income from Australia if they're continuing to choose to do business in the country.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#330

Post by worik » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

t0mas88 wrote: post #118

pochamago wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynical streak in me would suggest that now is a popular time to criticize major tech organs for their relationship to news, and the Australian government is hoping to use that to funnel money from US companies to Australian ones.

You could argue that taxes were designed before the "you are the product" age. If Apple sells a phone in Australia to a local customer, they pay Australian sales tax and possibly import dues to get the phone into the country. When Facebook sells data from an Australian user to a random advertiser, all tax is due in Ireland/Netherlands or some other tax haven and Australia makes nothing. So while this approach with ne…

Tax revenue, not profits, is a potential solution