Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by jamal-kumar » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #367

bo1024 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

Note that moderation is not part of the business plan. FB was pretty much dragged kicking and screaming into that function.

I recall that their approach to that was outsourcing it because I read that article that was going into how some of the employees working for the company doing the moderation were losing their minds by being the mental sewage treatment facility of social media

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

#432

Post by YossarianFrPrez » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #391

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"After all, there's no reason for accounts in good standing to lie, right?" No reason is different from no good reason. Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida (~300,000 peopl…

> Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts And I worked for 4 years on one such small part (internally called UFAC), trying to help potential false positives of such a system. As for classifier with a true positive rate of 99.99999%, I don't know much but I don't t…

No classification system can be perfect; we are in agreement there.

From the outside, it doesn't seem like a strictly data science problem. Instead, it seems like a design / product / brand expectation issue as well.

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

#433

Post by bo1024 » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

helen___keller wrote: post #374

bo1024 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

> It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left. Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general. Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twi…

Yeah, I generally agree with you. Youtube and Twitter have the same issues, and I think Reddit too. (Does TikTok?) I don't know if the extent is as broad. Or how possible it is to use each platform for its purpose without running into those problems.

added: I remember when Facebook switched from showing a chronological timeline to "the algorithm". That turned out to be a monumental paradigm shift.

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

#434

Post by Sunspark » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #88

donatj wrote: post #18

I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.

My wife (an American) also got flagged for saying "Americans are selfish". She then made a post about our RV (camper) asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground and was flagged for posting what looked like a sex ad. We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".

I got warned for hate speech on FB for saying in a comment that Americans have the memory of a goldfish. I appealed it, the appeal was declined and my hate speech warning remains on my permanent FB record as being against community standards.

Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.

No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.

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

#435

Post by scythe » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:46 PM UTC

helen___keller wrote: post #374

bo1024 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

> It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left. Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general. Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twi…

>I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general.

I think that a lot of people who had the privilege to be on the Internet before the age of engagement-maximizing algorithms feel that the overall mood was less inflammatory and the prevalence of intentional misinformation much lower. Because these algorithms can reward people who are willing to be misleading or abusive to attract attention, there is a concern that these kinds of misbehavior are encouraged by the application of engagement-maximizing sorting to user-generated content.

Facebook participated in the arms race to develop these algorithms much as the Turks and Hungarians developed the use of single-user firearms (arquebus/matchlock) in warfare, by necessity of competition, but are no less responsible than anyone else. The fundamental challenge is whether these algorithms must be fundamentally modified or restricted to prevent their tendency to support bad actors or whether, as the platform operators seem to be insisting, the problem can be managed by post hoc content moderation without limiting the behavior of the algorithm.

Because there is a wall of trade secrets and a sense of geopolitical competition, regulators have not been able to manage this situation in a manner that yields satisfactory results. So we lament this situation where Facebook appears to be chasing profits at the expense of the political stability of modern democracies, and while Google/Reddit/Twitter may be similarly responsible, this article happens to be about Facebook.

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

#436

Post by exikyut » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #376

lakis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. What if Trump or Biden could not login to Facebook due to too many failed attempts ? Would they scream that Facebook is blocking them and FB MUST unblock them. Should FB just tell them, "Tough, you can't use Facebook, deal with it?" What if it was Ronaldo or Brad Pitt. A company will make exemptions for very famous people. In every case, when something grows too big, you will find that are special cases…

There was special code in AOL's mail system to keep Steve Case's mail box index in memory all the time.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Case was CEO of AOL)

That's interesting. Was this because of the volume of mail I/O, for scale/fanout-related performance reasons, or to simply keep responsiveness at p99 for that account "just because VIP"?

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

#437

Post by exikyut » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 12:04 AM UTC

literallyaduck wrote: post #5

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" Animal Farm - George Orwell

Hmmm. That got me thinking a bit.

So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.

But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.

Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?

Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.

I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.

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

#438

Post by qweqwweqwe-90i » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #284

q1w2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work. Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team. If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply…

This is exactly the solution. IF tons of people are reporting Steve Newscaster because he posted a status about how his team won, then he shouldn't become immune to criticism, those people should lose the privilege of having their voice heard. Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if…

Write me a sentence that won't get 1000 reports if viewed by 60 million people.

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

#439

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 12:11 AM UTC

helen___keller wrote: post #374

bo1024 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

> It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left. Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general. Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twi…

I'm not on Twitter, but I am pretty active on Reddit. I think the manipulation is particularly, egregiously bad on Facebook.

For example, I'm not sure how I got bucketed in the "anti-masker" cohort, but over the past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm pushed a torrent of articles along the lines of "Look at this brave person serving the school board!", showing a person going on a rant about how masks are the work of the devil and how great that is.

I kind of like it, because it's given me a window of "the other side" of my social media bubble. I think the thing Facebook is particularly nefarious at is that, the way the feed works, it makes it seem like of course everyone agrees with you, except that idiot crazy uncle who you eventually have to unfriend, because all you see are seemingly "random" posts that enforce your own viewpoints.

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

#440

Post by cratermoon » Tue, Sep 14, 2021, 12:12 AM UTC

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #406

cratermoon wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is already doing that. It just happens to be making choices about how to do it that maximize its profits while ignoring the voices of most of its users.

I would rather them maximize profits rather than decide to actually take a stance in manipulating society. At least I know where I stand with a greedy corporation.

> rather them maximize profits rather than decide to actually take a stance in manipulating society

That is manipulating society.