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Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#331

Post by ben_w »

javagram wrote: post #325
ben_w wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year. Agreed. Let’s require them to do that.

Should all online platforms be required to do that? I can post here on HN right now and no moderator is pre-approving my content. I could go find the shooter’s illegal manifesto and post it here, I might be banned after some period of time but just like on Facebook it would have had time for other people to see it. Applied consistently this standard would kill most online forums and that type of thing.

It’s a matter of scale. Even before they became larger than the largest single nation on Earth, Facebook used to get in the news for stories like “1000 people show up to birthday party after teen accidentally forgets privacy settings”. Hacker News can #ahem# slashdot servers it links to, so it’s not exactly small, but it’s still peanuts compared to Facebook.

Just as software engineering practices need to change for the big names compared to everyone else, so do social practices.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#332

Post by rchaud »

acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm." I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. Th…

If it’s posted on Facebook, Facebook bears responsibility. If you own a restaurant, and fail a sanitation check, you don’t get to argue that it’s not possible for you to catch every single rat.

The Marilyn Manson analogy is confusing. Did Manson own the website where the Columbine killers downloaded bomb plans? The computers where they wrote their murderous fantasies? The gun store from which they sourced their arsenal?

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#333

Post by ivanhoe »

boomlinde wrote: post #286
factsaresacred wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reform a billion-person platform to detect a suicide attempt in real-time? There's much wrong with Facebook but blaming them for not preventing the actions of their users at the moment those actions take place is moronic.

Frankly, that should be their problem. Maybe billion-person platforms are altogether not morally scalable?

If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment. You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today. And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#334

Post by mcv »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #324
mcv wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 'hate' means 'wanting people dead or gone', then it could be a step on the same path. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but from a Christian perspective, they're not so different.

Sure, but if we're going to redefine words to just mean anything, a discussion will get nowhere. Hate just means a strong dislike of something. Someone can be hateful of a presidential candidate without wanting them dead or gone. Is that hateful speech, or is this acceptable? Furthermore, do we really trust governments to decide what is?* *: note that I'm not saying that I do trust FAANGs to make this decision either…

But is hate just a strong dislike? The notion that it means you wish them dead or gone seems to be at least 2000 years old. Not to mention that in recent memory, genocide tends to be preceded by hate speech.

And there's rather a big difference between disagreeing with a particular politician's policies and claiming that a particular demographic group is the reason for whatever ails society.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#335

Post by boomlinde »

ivanhoe wrote: post #333
boomlinde wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, that should be their problem. Maybe billion-person platforms are altogether not morally scalable?

If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment. You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today. And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face co…

> If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment.

Should we let the technical infeasibility of them profitably solving a problem that they themselves have created be our moral compass?

> You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today.

The point IMO is not to assign blame. It's to create legislation for the betterment of society. You can agree or disagree that it would be better, but don't reduce it to a blame game.

> And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?

As I said, as far as I'm concerned, that's their problem. You implement the legal framework necessary to uphold a desirable moral standard and let that have its effect on the market. In those terms it's irrelevant how Facebook fares.

And no, this is not fundamentally a problem of human nature. Millions-to-billion user social networks have only been a problem for a brief moment of human history. Much like other problems throughout history it might go away some day. Not by itself, but by systematically working on improving the human condition.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#336

Post by AnimalMuppet »

forgotmyhnacc wrote: post #170
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who (other than you) mentioned Jews? Do you think being Jews makes them immune to criticism for things completely unrelated? It would be a problem if someone dragged in their Jewishness as part of the criticism, but as far as I can see, nobody did.

It's in the article, 5th paragraph. It would be nice to know why my original post was downvoted, did people assume I was racist? I referenced a sentence in the article and stated a fact about Facebook that contradicts what was said.

For me, it went like this: I read the article, missed the reference to the Jews, thought it was a racist comment, made my reply, downvoted your comment, and flagged your comment.

Then I saw siphor's reply to me, went back to the article, found the reference to Jews (control-F works better than I do, apparently), un-downvoted your comment, and un-flagged it. And I admitted my mistake in a reply to siphor, and I admit it to you as well.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#337

Post by drderidder »

flexie wrote: post #241
acdc4life wrote: post #35

"[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm." I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. Th…

Facebook has "no clue what kind of stuff gets posted" because they conveniently have decided to have no clue. Facebook enjoys the protection of its IPR and the right to sell advertisement overseas in places like New Zealand or Europe. Why should New Zealand or Europe allow their business model of close to zero oversight of content? Facebook is not a startup. It's a huge company making billions showing ads to billions…

Exactly. At the very least, they shouldn't be monetizing content they haven't vetted.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#338

Post by stale2002 »

timomax wrote: post #250
flexie wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has "no clue what kind of stuff gets posted" because they conveniently have decided to have no clue. Facebook enjoys the protection of its IPR and the right to sell advertisement overseas in places like New Zealand or Europe. Why should New Zealand or Europe allow their business model of close to zero oversight of content? Facebook is not a startup. It's a huge company making billions showing ads to billions…

Exactly. There is no cult of "free speech" in Europe. We will just block such sites if they don't reform.

Well hopefully other internet services will engage in the same behavior against Europe.

I wonder how many billions of dollars in damages would be done to them, if Google, or Wikipedia, or GitHub started blocking traffic to their.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#339

Post by xupybd »

doldge wrote: post #197
xupybd wrote: post #6

I'm a New Zealander. I think our privacy commissioner is so totally wrong here. It's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve. Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that? Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone? I d…

If you are a New Zealander, then you should know better. Freedom of speech is NOT an unalienable right in NZ, nor has it ever been. The ridiculous scare-mongering by some of the sibling comments on this post about this being "the start of the end for NZ" is not representative of: A) New Zealand B) Most countries outside of the US. (Because it's a continuation of existing policy; That not all speech is protected). As…

“If you are a New Zealander, then you should know better. Freedom of speech is NOT an unalienable right in NZ, nor has it ever been”

I do know better. It should be an inalienable right. We probably will pass these hate speech laws. We will suffer for it. The founding fathers of the USA got this one right. Trying to engineer society is not a good idea.

It’s not the governments job to descide what speech is okay and what speech is not.

Re: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

#340

Post by claudiawerner »

xupybd wrote: post #50
djsumdog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and why the focus of Facebook? This could have happened to Twitch.tv or a self-hosted platform (and who do you go after then? Vultr? Amazon? DigitalOcean?) Live streams are a game changer in helping people get out content. If you try to force more providers to vet material, it breaks down the massive availability. Sure it might foster a growth in self-hosted solutions like PeerTube, and help increase more tooling for…

Yeah we are looking at introducing hate speech laws after the attack. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/04/08/524142/what-will-happe... Many people here don't value free speech even a little bit. I fear where this will lead us.

Why is free speech a good in itself, as opposed to other forms of action which are not good in themselves? Why is a law against hate speech objectionable?
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