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By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

nytimes.com

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Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

kazinator wrote: post #21

Is this pure populism, or does the principle apply to the "little guy" as well? If I set up a machine under my desk at home with a domain (courtesy of dynamic DNS), and provide a few terabytes of free-of-charge storage to a small bunch of people, am I "erasing history" if I can't keep all their stuff forever? Or do I have to be a Youtube-sized corporate entity before I'm a fucking asshole?

If you just say "Haha, suckers, you trusted me but I'm deleting your stuff, you lose", then yes, you're a colossal jerk. On the other hand, if you can't do it forever, and you give them warning so they have time to find alternate places to store their stuff, then I don't see any problem.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#72

Post by mdszy »

munk-a wrote: post #22
mdszy wrote: post #10

Why would you trust a for-profit company to archive anything and care? They don't. It's unreasonable to expect anything different. If you want things archived, non-profit solutions exist, or you should be doing it yourself and making sure the content is shared among people who are also able to archive it.

> They don't. It's unreasonable to expect anything different. This is modern day cynicism. I fully understand and am unsurprised by their lack of good storage, but we shouldn't help companies lower the bar of their own existence to be purely profit driven entities.

I don't see why you would think they're anything but profit driven entities. That's literally what a corporation is. If they didn't make a profit, they wouldn't exist. It's not cynicism, it's reality.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#73

Post by [deleted] »

mdszy wrote: post #64
archgoon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible" Because they claimed they cared about this sort of thing. For a while, it seemed as if they meant it.

Again, why would you believe them? Use a couple of brain cells and realize that maybe, just maybe, the things that corporations say aren't exactly true most of the time.

[deleted]

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#74

Post by [deleted] »

thinkingkong wrote: post #20
least wrote: post #3

Youtube and Facebook, while convenient, aren't really appropriate mediums for them to share this sort of footage. Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video. Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim. Likely for this sort of thing a diligent archivist will need to put in the effort of storing…

Been wondering about this phenomenon for awhile. Spotify can delete music history. Youtube can delete video history. If it's on a streaming service it may as well not exist. We're at this strange point where convenience may as well be access, because the same service you used for discovery is the one for consumption. I don't know if this phenomenon has a name.

[deleted]

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#76

Post by ravenstine »

nl wrote: post #49
jedmeyers wrote: post #24

While NYT themselves just shadow-edited the article about HRC calling Tulsi a Russian asset to a Republican asset. Video from Tim Pool about it: https://youtu.be/tzTod38VS8c

For those who don't want to sit though 16 minutes of ranting.. At [1] the quote is: Hillary Clinton waded into the Democratic primary on Friday by suggesting that Russia was “grooming” Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii as a third-party candidate for president. By the next day at [2] it had changed to: Hillary Clinton waded into the Democratic primary on Friday by suggesting that Russia was backing Representative…

> Conclusion: The NY Times did the correct thing in updating their reporting, and in publishing the correction.

No, the correct thing would have been to not publish fake news in the first place. Oh, but they said whoops, so I guess all's well that ends well?

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#77

Post by CommieBobDole »

corodra wrote: post #62
corndoge wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, exact title searches will usually not turn up videos with that title unless you use quotes. YouTube will return clickbait and Jimmy Kimmel, entirely unrelated to the search, for exact title searches of videos with only a few tens of views.

Heaven forbid I ever accidentally click on or get interested in some random talk show video, video roughly about video games or a big media news video. All of my normal engineering, business, programming, guns, history, and mechanics recommendations go right the fuck out the window. For the next week, half my recommendations are just filled with dogshit because of one accidental video. I stopped watching movie traile…

I think that's a problem on every platform; on Apple News, if I read an article that's actual news that involves a celebrity somehow ("Tom Hanks murders 12, dies in hail of gunfire") I get a deluge of celebrity gossip ("OMG you won't believe what Kylie Jenner's cousin's brother's hairstylist said")articles for weeks.

I sort of feel like their recommendation AI is a bunch of if-then statements designed to funnel you into more heavily-monetized content if they think you display any interest at all.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#78

Post by [deleted] »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #32
codingslave wrote: post #12

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding. I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever, drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business flow. It makes sen…

[deleted]

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#79

Post by mindgam3 »

wahern wrote: post #68
mindgam3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am well aware that human moderators are currently treated like crap by Big Tech, and that their mental health is suffering as a result. When I say "throw more money at the problem", I mean, hire a lot more of them, and treat them all better. The alternatives are 1. Algorithms, which always going to fail in human rights type "edge cases" like the ones described in the article, and which really shouldn't be seen as e…

Some people are much better able than others to deal with such content. Do YouTube, Facebook, etc, implement some sort of psychological screening? I would think we know enough about PTSD, depression, etc to be able to filter out many of those most likely to suffer significant trauma, even if the screening was crazy imprecise. Plus, I assume we have many decades of experience with handling psychological issues among p…

> Perhaps a large part of the issue is money; why bother with the expense if you can use ML, even if the false positive rate is abysmal.

If I understand your position: you don't have any better ideas, and you're okay with using ML even if it means deleting evidence of human rights violations. Is that accurate?

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#80

Post by TJSomething »

chongli wrote: post #57
lucasmullens wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it! I feel like we’re in the…

This policy was actually changed in 2017 to completely ignore robots.txt.

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

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