Even if I have own opinions on the subject, I think the whole "fake news" thingy seems to politicaly motivated. Doesn't mean they are wrong by doing this, but it's hard to be claiming they are still somehow neutral.
Climate Change is by no means a 'settled' science, one of the most important questions scientists must answer is what the Climate Sensitivity is to CO2. There's a wide range of answers to this question by scientists, depending on which climate model you use, as well as many other factors.
You'll be at the mercy of whichever out of 3,000 moderators ends up passing judgment on your post, whether they are liberal or conservative, whether they are having a good day or not, etc.
I don't see this going well for Facebook.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
So what exactly is this one side that 99% of experts agree upon?
I don't. They will, of course, push a particular agenda. In the worst possible way.
As we've seen with Twitter and other organizations, the ToS don't matter. Or at least, don't matter for the right people. The "bad people" get punished even if they don't violate the ToS. The "good people" don't get punished even if they do violate the ToS.
I'd be OK with even egregious ToS, if they were applied evenly. But as we've seen too often, they're not.
Whatever agenda FB and friends are peddling, it's hidden in the guise of "safety", and "fairness", and "community standards".
There is obviously false, and then there is everything else. I guess the best facebook can do is weed out the obviously false. If they do that, it is a guarantee that they will get attacked for being biased, because with the shifting of the political winds usually one party or the other spreads more misinformation.
Sure, branding real news as fake news is politically motivated, whereas labeling what is the clearly the equivalent of the most absurd supermarket tabloids as "fake news" is accurate and appropriate.
It is curious that many people are somehow oblivious to tabloid headlines when they appear on the internet, whereas nearly everyone discards the supermarket checkout stand "The Pope is a space alien!" stories.
I was listening to a podcast on my commute today, and the person mentioned a book called Think Twice that was about decision making. How we make decisions with these different biases. I think I even remember a great post on HN about all the most popular biases.
I guess what I am getting at is its no at all clear cut how someone's post will be judged given all the baggage each one of us carries with us.
We democrats tend to stick to tech pretty hard, and we buy things. Billy joe bob will post his pro-trump rants on Facebook all day, but will still go to a walk in store to buy things.
Of course I'm generalizing and oversimplifying it, but the leadership at FB is strongly left leaning, and they know how to cater to their audience, keep them happy and make money from them.
The issue is of course branding everything that might help the right "fake news". Sure, there's a lot of it (from both sides really) but the idea that they have the power to shape people's opinions in a political direction, and are willing to do it is dangerous for all of us.
I don't ask if it is economically viable, I guess he knows what he is doing. Facebook is not losing money anytime soon.
What a funny way our economy has evolved. 100 years ago many of these people might have worked in farms, 50 years ago they might have worked in factories. Today they sit in an office looking at ostensibly offensive material that facebook deems the rest of society should not be exposed to.
>We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
Factory worker or a farmer would never produce anything for so many people.
However, the actual number of people reviewing is unlikely to be 7500. A decent percentage of that headcount will be dedicated management, HR, analytics and administrative staff.
Also 2 million isn't "the smallest number that counts as plural millions" - anything over 1 million is considered "millions".
Lastly you seem to be assuming that this is 100% manual and that each report needs to be treated as seriously as each other report. I'd imagine that at the very least these reports will be prioritized and if something is reported once by a user who reports 100 things a week, it will probably be ignored - giving more time for higher priority things.
(Not sure about the specific example–"stupid" may be too weak an insult)
They also devoted a surprising amount of pages for when to delete pictures of people urinating. Must be a much bigger problem than I would have thought.
I won't be a bit surprised if there's a systematic effort to encourage applications from within socially conservative entities such as religious groups, and going to be carefully monitoring their corner of the web for such.
Especially with this approach of manual monitoring which will probably just result in more questionable deletions Facebook is already known for.
I've yet to hear of a way that this is solved without hiring thousands of people in what are horrible jobs (see Adrian Chen's excellent reporting on the issue[0][1])
I have no doubt that this will eventually be solves or assisted with ML, and that the solution is likely to come out of FB or G
[0] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-pro...
That experience really makes me feel bad for the 3,000 new hires, honestly. I couldn't imagine moderating the human condition, which one could argue Facebook basically is. They'd better not clean out Adecco, and actually pay those people with the long-term damage of the job in mind, but that won't happen. Would actually make for a good union...
Yes, they do - even when the post has nothing wrong.
Perfectly legitimate accounts writing reasonable posts, without any "fake news" content, or any "hate", are reported, and accounts are blocked.
This is a result of political activism by users. A very hard thing to solve for someone like Facebook.
Facebook is approaching 2B users. Let's say that every 1/1,000 users per day posts something that somebody else flags or which the system flags because of the words used. Then it's some 2M posts or comments that are flagged.
Facebook currently has 4,500 in the community operations departments ("moderators"). Each moderator then has to screen around 450 posts, which is difficult in an 8 hour shift. So obviously, that's not the way it works. They surely have algorithms that sort flagged posts with higher priority; more people flagging means it's more urgent, certain profiles are more urgent, for example people who have used violent language before, users with certain friends are more urgent, users at a certain age are more urgent, certain hours of the day are more urgent, post with certain words associated with violence or suicide are more urgent than posts with racist or sexist slurs or nude material etc.
But even if they correctly identify a threatening suicide or hate crime, how do they prevent it? Shutting down a live video is one way, but contacting authorities would probably also be necessary. How do you do that when your users are spread over 100,000 different jurisdictions? It's a big task.
If you count also their sister properties including FB Chat and WhatsApp and Instagram. But Facebook the social network hasn't 2B monthly active user, as many left or rarely return.
The marketing campaign will be against murderers, the implementation will be against people who voted for Trump.
Lack of physical proximity to what is happen might lessen the urge to act. Pressing 'report abuse' is really easy, but calling the police based on online material is a lot harder.
Then wouldn't it make sense to add more people whose job specifically is to report criminal acts instead of relying on the users to do it?
Will they watch private streams and read private messages? That sounds like a privacy disaster even Facebook would prefer to avoid.
Which leaves them with reports from users. Basically, reviewing millions of "hate speech" reports and either effectively instituting a very strict speech code or ignoring vast majority of them leading to further complaints.
Google's ML for rich snippets thinks a quarter is worth 50 cents. http://imgur.com/1nNreR2
Really parsing language for meaning is hard. Sentiment analysis, which seems simpler than this problem, still has relatively poor accuracy.
I could see it perhaps thinning out how much has to be done manually, but I don't see it removing that need entirely.
Plus, the picture is a standing liberty quarter that is nearly 90 years old and pretty much completely out of general circulation.
The workers aren't there to be a basis for machine learning (though that is a nice benefit). They are there to communicate with local community groups / law enforcement on an ongoing basis.
I mean, the GAFAs are already not known for their stellar customer service, but if we get rid of all humans in the process, it's going to be Brazil on steroid pretty soon.
We seem to have a serious problem resulting from people living in bubbles of information sources that only confirm their own viewpoint.
How can the solution to that problem be to have a single corporation design the bubble for everyone?
(Note: I know he's taking about actual videos of violence taking place. However my point is that violence is already happening, and hiding that from public view is 'out of sight, out of mind')
Any rule that limits speech can be twisted into censorship of worthy causes. And the restrictions on speech always hurt the weaker sides.
(not talking about first amendment which is about who has the right to limit it and in what conditions, just the effects of said limitations)
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-man-films-...
The phone and telegraph companies started out as "optional" services. If you didn't like the telegraph company arbitrarily blocking journalists that criticized them, you were free to not use telegraphs.
Facebook is being tied to credit worthiness, and job applications, whether we like it or not.
And in some parts of the developing world, it is more important than a phone number. It is recognized as being so vital, that providing Facebook access is subsidized.
We can no longer pretend that Facebook is some sort of toy, and dismiss criticism by saying that if you don't like it you shouldn't use it.
There is, however, a push within educational institutions to redefine terms like "violence" as part of a wider "social justice" programme. The crux of it is that offending someone else is a very bad thing to do, regardless of whether it's intentional or your words are true.
If they are making this move they must see some large liability looming on the horizon.
Just yesterday we read about how Facebook 'helps' marketers 'track when people were feeling overwhelmed, worthless or insecure' [1]. Focusing on people that exhibit this frequently, particularly if they're being bullied, would catch a bunch of these online suicide cases without squandering labor on everyone else.
Then all you need to do is invent enough euphemisms to enable a degree of profiling; the rape streams that go unreported for days are almost always gangbangers. Should be a trivial job to factor that group out, by their grammar alone.
There you go; the chronically depressed types and the gangbangers account for probably 95% of the headline making cases Facebook has to worry about. Focus a small workforce on those two groups (and possibly a few others; extremists, etc.) and Bob's your uncle.
[1] http://www.moneyandmentalhealth.org/facebook-mental-health/
See also: Uber drivers.
I am thinking of exiting Facebook for at least a couple of months because my posts/shares (which tend to have a political slant or at least broader perspective to them) don't seem to get any reaction or be shared anymore. Neither do music, alternative culture, or sustainability/environmental posts.
If Facebook is unable to give people the dignity to fail at debating one another and be challenged by new ideas, then that may not be compatible with democracy. I hope they fix whatever is going on with their feed algorithm, and maybe 3000 people training AIs will help, but I wonder if the problem isn't technology.
Living streaming scene in China has already went through this entire discussion and various forms of implementations on moderations of offensive and inappropriate contents sometime last year when it was rapidly growing.
Again with government intervention, it is so much faster and easier to enforce standards of moderations for private companies to follow.
I totally agree. We have the NSA so the total information awareness network is there, but we've really fallen behind China on using it to address suicide intervention.
I'm not talking about secret operations, but rather some transparent guidelines or laws issued by the government (legislative branch in the case of US? I'm not sure.) that are enforceable by private entities like Facebook.
Also, those seriously affect the attractiveness of ad campains. I dipped my toes into it once, but it looks like a large percentage of gained "users" are just fake ones...
My guess is that they only block fake accounts if they are manually reported by someone.
Users could pay $ to change their gamertag (~$10).
It was fairly common to see people publically asking "please report my name as offensive" as it was known that if you got enough reports, you would be "forced" to change your name for free. People who wanted to change their name anyway would solicit reports against themselves to avoid a $10 fee.
Clearly no human was reviewing these reports... and that was a paid service!
Really, what's needed is a decentralized approach where no central authority exists, only mutual reinforcements. I have found a marvellous solution for the next generation of social and informational networking but alas this comment field is too small to contain it.
People always figure out a way around the latest attempt to control - and these measures will be overcome by bad intenders.
So if FB admits it has a community safety and fake news problem - by hiring 3000 additional enforcement agents, why would one stay with FB if there is an alternative. Which there isn't.
I would like a FB lite. Photo sharing and comments and discovery of old friends. No news. No menu of features.
I wish there could be an alternative. ("Its just like. fB but without the news and crap)
Maybe it's just infeasible to properly monitor such a massive social network? I don't know for sure, but I left Facebook long ago and have not regretted it at all.
"Upvote/Downvote" is not nearly as useful for ranking as the range of, say "+1 Funny, +1 Insightful, +1 Agree, -1 Disagree, -1 Spam, -1 Flamebait/Troll" (I've forgotten exactly what set /. uses)
I can only see this as a good thing if they manage to catch people before the act and intervene. Is this a primary goal of the program?
I'm not sure that we really need to stop people from publishing videos of themselves executing old men at random. It certainly seems to lead to a speedy resolution and really heightens the impact over the impersonal "Another shooting today..." on the evening news. It's virtually the same as walking yourself into the police station, with the added bonus that the whole country now hates you and is looking for you.
Community Operations
The horrible reality of trying to keep offensive materials from appearing online.
1.86 billion FB active users divided by 3000 thought police equals 620k accounts per clean up team operative...
If Mark Zuckerberg and his product teams could travel back in time a decade or so, would they still have built everything the way they did?
Besides, do app developers even understand statistical quality control? I tend to think this kind of software grew up on a very black/white, functional/broken, bug trackers, etc., a very narrow view on quality as a concept.
Facebook is rolling in cash and this has clearly hurt their brand. Hiring moderators to take out the worse of Facebook could help a lot to dealing with the utter bullshit that goes on.
Reddit and Twitter have similar problems, they want to either farm out moderation to volunteer users (Reddit) or automate everything and only step in when the NY Times gets a hold of something (Twitter).
Either way, their moderation leaves a lot to be desired.
Reddit is particularly strange. I don't know how this could be true, but they claim that without the volunteer mods, they couldn't exist. Either they are lying or are just awful at running a business, neither would surprise me.
Does anyone know if Reddit actually makes money? And if they do, how? Ads seem sparse and selling "gold" just doesn't seem like much.
Now, if they add all those jobs in SF, it's another thing entirely.
I've reported countless spammy comments like "free ladies!" and "free $50 per click!" But FB replies are 100%: "...but our community deemed that comment to be ok with FB guidelines"
FB should definitely see what Korean FB is like recently...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-google...
It's great that Facebook is increasing it's moderation numbers, but it's unclear if this was already planned and simply used (successfully) as a PR response to recent events.
This is a sore point for me as an artist. It's tedious when posts are removed because they depict or seem to depict nudity and you have to go through and assure some anonymous and wholly unaccountable person that they're not. One of my friends teaches art history at UCLA and - surprise - he posts lots of fine art on his wall. He has to have 8 or 10 accounts because he is constantly getting temp banned for posting famous paintings of people with no clothes.
It also bothers me on a more general level, eg it's fine if I take a picture of myself with my shirt off but if one of my female friends does the same thing she risks being restricted from posting or having her account terminated because her breasts are apparently a worse thing than extreme gory graphic violence that comes with a warning but is nevertheless acceptable to post.
That's sexist bullshit that turns women into second class citizens. I utterly fail to understand how it's OK to share pictures of just about any violent subject matter, but any kind of nudity, sexual or not, is grounds for having your account terminated.
Here's a list of some of the things I've seen on FB over the last year, some with an automatic clickthrough content warning (which is a good idea and mostly well implemented) and some not. As far as I'm aware none of these have resulted in account terminations for people who posted them:
Beheadings (video, multiple examples); hanging; people being shot/have been shot; serial killers and their refrigerators stuffed with human meat; disembowelments; autopsy photos. In each of these cases I don't mean grimy thumbnails where you can sort of imagine what was going on, but photos and video of sufficient clarity to be used in a news broadcast if not for the disturbing nature of their subject matter.
I'm leaving out other stuff that I found sufficiently disturbing that I prefer not to even describe it. I'm not into gore, beyond watching a few horror movies in a given year. But I'm pretty open with my friends list and allow people to join me to groups, so I'm exposed to a certain amount from trolls and of course there are episodes of violence in the real world that are newsworthy, and I prefer my news without censorship of any kind.
You'll notice that I'm not calling for this stuff to be removed or banned from FB. I think the 'graphic content, are you sure?' warning strikes a sensible balance between protecting people's sensibilities and allowing free discussion and information. We live in a world that is often violent and I believe that concealing the ugliness of violence often allows it to proceed unchecked. It's also true that some people become obsessed with or celebrate violence, and that admitting it as cultural currency risks desensitization or normalization of violence. Those are tricky questions to which I do not believe any one person, firm, or society has a perfect answer, but given that the instinct of criminal persons and regimes is generally to conceal rather than reveal transgressions, exposure and condemnation is probably a more effective response than obscurity and censorship.
After that unpleasant detour into the pits of human awfulness, I really want to hear from someone at Facebook:
a) why it's OK to engage with the reality of people inflicting horrible violence on others, but it's not OK to let people engage with the reality of sexual or aesthetic expression, and
b) why the 51% female majority of the population are subject to tighter restrictions than the male minority, and
c) why the 'community standards' don't offer any formal mechanism for community input and decision-making.
Think about it, Folks. A picture of a healthy naked body is grounds for account suspension or a ban, but it's totally OK to show that same body hacked to pieces? That's some grade A bullshit, and platitudes about how 'we try to reflect the prevailing standards of society' isn't going to cut it.
Automation intensifies whatever process you choose to automate, and if you automate a standard whereby erotic desire and self-expression are constrained but extreme violence and interpersonal aggression are less constrained, guess which you'll end up with more of? Likewise if men are allowed freedoms that are systematically withheld from women, guess whose freedoms are going to be expanded and whose are going to be reduced?
I demand answers on this. Facebook is one of the most powerful political entities on the planet and those who own it need to explain why, within Facebook, there is greater tolerance for violence than nudity or sexuality, and why one half of the population is subject to greater restrictions than the other half.
edit - that was quick, thanks!
