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Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#321

Post by [deleted] »

cratermoon wrote: post #291
filoleg wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of cows in a bride’s dowry is just a straightforward proxy for wealth, and that’s pretty universal. Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too. All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth…

Can you imagine a judge in the US letting someone convicted of sexual assault off with a light sentence because he has a lot of cows? The point is that the elitism is not just relative to other Americans, but to the rest of the world.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#322

Post by vasco »

gwright wrote: post #212
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help". As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.

> plebiscite

> the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question such as a change in the constitution.

> ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly.

saved you a click

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#323

Post by Ansil849 »

lmilcin wrote: post #270
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be. I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases…

I disagree. Let's take your example of Mark Z. What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects? A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device. I could think of a lot of peopl…

> unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't do it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account so it is not possible to log in the next time without the token.

This is a great point. AFAIK, Google is the only service which allows you to set mandatory U2F login requirements. Does any other service offer this functionality?

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#324

Post by anonymoushn »

nindalf wrote: post #200
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like h…

Maybe normal users also shouldn't be able to have their accounts destroyed by a hundred spurious reports.

Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#325

Post by munk-a »

otterley wrote: post #271
acoil wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people- its in the name . Who's face is prettier?

You’re thinking of HotOrNot. A “face book” has been a staple of US universities for decades to help new students identify each other. They were literally printed booklets with people’s faces in it.

I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#326

Post by wanderingstan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #305
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.

This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. Removing government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could finally be heard —anyone could have a blog or whatever and be heard. It wasn’t crazy to think that if only everyone in the world could finally talk to each other that we could work out differences and make friendships across political and geographical boundaries.

That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#327

Post by therealcamino »

nindalf wrote: post #200
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like h…

> It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be.

More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting revenge porn, his account still wasn't taken down. And that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate -- it is a double standard.

From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”'

(Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#328

Post by annadane »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #51
mtnGoat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once made fun of Justin Bieber(said he acts like a baby) on IG, and got a warning. Some guy threatened to Hunt me and my family, kill us and do bad things to our bodies and IG said it didn’t violate any rules, when I reported it. My account can now not even post the word “chump” without warnings. Talk about backwards. It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I…

I don't want to do victim blaming or shaming here but why would you use any fb product knowing well about their awful business practices like these?

Because they employ blitzkrieg tactics that nobody should be able to get away with and by the time we notice it's too late to change our consumption habits

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#329

Post by dralley »

hapless wrote: post #170

Facebook are infamous liars, but journalists keep covering Facebook as if their various PR statements are true This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, ever changes Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5CTxckRywg&t=2543s

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#330

Post by Ansil849 »

nindalf wrote: post #200
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like h…

> If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be.

Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the number of times this happens for normal users is significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of people annoyed.

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