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Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

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

#351

Post by abiogenesis »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #187
Jonanin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. S…

I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane . All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!

We can't even explain all physical phenomena, so good luck with banning anything that depends on the gravity of earth to function, because we don't know what gravity is.

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

#352

Post by Barrin92 »

threeseed wrote: post #236
Barrin92 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand,…

You've just skipped over the early days of Google where they relied primarily on PageRank and bad actors manipulated it to death. It's trivial to generate webs of fake, inter-related content and use that specifically to feed incoming links to valuable pages. Or to comment-spam websites so aggressively it ruins them. Or all of the secret deals between high-ranking sites to feed links even though the sites weren't rela…

>There are countless examples of black-hat techniques to break PageRank

there are also countless of adversarial examples to trick ML algorithms. In fact this is in many ways worse because of the 'idiot savant' character of ML systems, which are almost always oblivious to context and can be tricked in ways that aren't apparent from the design of the system.

In contrast to systems that are legible or even formally verifiable ML systems are entirely unable to provide any guarantees. When someone breaks pagerank at least it's apparent how they broke it. When an ML system mistakes a turtle with a fractal pattern on its shell for a gun nobody knows how to fix the system in any reliable way, other than feed it more data and pray.

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

#353

Post by thisrod »

I think both sides are in the wrong here. One of them is Mark Zuckerberg and the other is the Morrison government, for a start. But not only because of that.

The Murdoch family's claim ... I mean, Australia's ... is ridiculous. Facebook are totally within their rights to stop using Australian content and not pay for it. If the law is so sloppily worded that it arguably defines the Health Department website as news, well, it wasn't Facebook who drafted it.

On the other hand, this does stuff around a lot of innocent bystanders, and Facebook could easily have given a month's notice that they were going to do it. Which is, ironically, one of the things that the law would require them to do. What ever else Facebook might have demonstrated by their irresponsible reaction, they have shown that this law isn't all wrong, rather some parts of it are urgently necessary.

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

#354

Post by abiogenesis »

askesum wrote: post #251
cabalamat wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?

Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?

Who do you charge when the brakes don't work on your car? When the airbags don't activate? When your rain sensor doesn't work?

Believe it or not, your car is not that primitive when compared to a self-driving one in terms of the number of things it does autonomously.

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

#355

Post by abiogenesis »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #262
askesum wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?

Well, you blame the black box algorithm that nobody can predict or understand, and you just call it an "accident".

Who would you blame if the algorithm could be printed on paper?

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

#356

Post by tedk-42 »

Sigh - another HN post/thread bashing the government and claiming they're basically puppets for Murdoch media.

The whole 'good on facebook for standing up to the government' is quite a funny stance, given how most people view facebook as a not-so-good entity on the web.

Fake news is a worse problem than Murdoch media and its sensationalist journalism.

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

#357

Post by abiogenesis »

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…

Blackmail is an exaggeration. The government is asking them to pay for news articles (that have been voluntarily shared) and what Facebook simply says is "we liked the articles when they were free, but thanks, we don't want to buy them".

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

#358

Post by sjy »

biztos wrote: post #307
catmanjan wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe we do, but I think the government may be thinking that now would be an excellent opportunity for someone to give it a go (our prime minister has a funny saying "if you have a go, you will get a go")

> if you have a go, you will get a go OT and I do understand the meaning, but as a matter of language isn’t this in the wrong order?

Yes, if you assume that both parts refer to the same “go.” But “have a go” here means something like “work hard and contribute to the economy.” It doesn’t refer to possessing the thing you “get” in exchange, ie. money.

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

#359

Post by manfredo »

hilbert42 wrote: post #346
manfredo wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

"Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic." It's interesting to note that none of the key points I made about these corporations' very dubious place in history penetrated. Therefore I'll have to assume their behavior is acceptable with you. It seems you also missed the point that Australian users like everyone else were cajoled from an open web to a closed system. The fact is they had no choice whatsoever and that Fac…

What is their dubious place in history? Google created the first effective programmatically curated search engine. Facebook created en extremely popular social network. These companies were founded when the internet was still relatively nascent, and norms over privacy were yet to be established and that led to subsequent controversy. But to compare these to the Dutch and British East India Companies is laughable. Those companies literally had standing armies and conducted colonial wars. Some even go as far as to say that they perpetrated genocide. The British East India company starved 2-10 million Bengalis. Facebook chat was used to coordinate the killing of 25,000 to 100,000 Rohyngi, by virtue of ineffectual moderation and lack of tooling and personnel to police Burmese language content. The notion that this has any level of equivalency of a company that actually had soldiers shooting people is absurd.

And users do indeed have a choice. I don't use Facebook, and I use duck duck go for search (and Bing for video search). These are not utilities. Alternatives exist, and the use of these services aren't even necessary in the first place.

I'm really not seeing justification for your characterization of the situation. A website is being charged for links to news articles. They don't want to pay for this content, so they aren't going to host this content.

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

#360

Post by King-Aaron »

tedk-42 wrote: post #356

Sigh - another HN post/thread bashing the government and claiming they're basically puppets for Murdoch media. The whole 'good on facebook for standing up to the government' is quite a funny stance, given how most people view facebook as a not-so-good entity on the web. Fake news is a worse problem than Murdoch media and its sensationalist journalism.

> claiming they're basically puppets for Murdoch media

Well, this is actually the case.

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