This is an interesting argument to me. It's basically conceding a shittier solution, because we "can't scale" the effective one. As we talk more and more about automation, I think this is similar to what we've seen in meat space with things like tools.
I've heard so many people complain about chinese hammers or socket wrenches (though I also know there are quality chinese tools out there) or many other examples. Things mass produced cheaply are lesser quality, but we're willing to make the trade off as a society because we get things for cheaper.
And now we see this in the information economy. Even though we know a human doing this work would be much more effective, we're not going to do it because the cost is too high.
2) With billions of accounts zero examples of error is an absurdity.
3) different communities drastically disagree on which things false positives and false negatives should be defined as.
4) More perceived effort to work on (1) increases the outrage, i.e. the perceived sense of moral betrayal from (1) and (3), despite (2).
5) human editors won't solve (1) + (2), and definitely not (3), and contribute to some degree to (4).
Where? I don't see any more comments from you in this thread...
0 -- The outrage caused by misidentified profiles is larger than the outrage or societal damage caused by the existence of fake profiles.
...which was an unstated assumption underpinning why that entire argument would be an objection to implementing account review, and in my estimation is incredibly incorrect. They're being forced into Senate hearings over the false profiles, constantly being harassed by merchants about possible ad fraud over them, and are losing the trust of their communities. By contrast, the storm in a teacup over a few misidentifications is nothing to Facebook. (There's numerous other unstated, highly subjective assumptions as well.)
I also object to:
1 -- This is true, but irrelevant. Facebook cares about the rates of outrage in communities, not the mere existence. Ironically, this person seems to have fallen into the trap they called out, by thinking Facebook cared about instances of outrage (as the poster would). They also care about the relative outrage -- how mad are people compared to another option we can try. This point very poorly frames the problem as being about trying to stop any outrage instead of trying to minimize outrage.
4 -- This is community specific and untrue of the bulk of people. Decreasing error increases the vitriol involved, but it seems to come from a decreasing number of people as the outrage evaporates in the face of better error rates. So I think they're outright wrong here: it's like water cooling as it evaporates. The water is going away, even though it's cooler in the area.
5 -- This one becomes irrelevant (and/or wrong) if you correct the mistakes in 1 and 4.
Overall, this argument is --
a) irrelevant because even if it was correct, it wouldn't matter as it fails to contextualize its point by comparing levels of outrage between sources
b) wrong internally, in that it's largely irrelevant to the problem at hand or just outright wrong.
And I'm not sure that the total outrage level will ever decrease the more responsibility for moderation they are seen as having.
I find this line of argument odd when it's about actual natural givens, like dangerous weather. I'm in a house right now, so it's not like technology to limit the effects of dangerous weather is unheard of. And a bit odder when it's about human inventions that have been around for generations, like guns and cars. But when it's used for something basically new in the world? I find it baffling.
If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themselves actively promote; it all should be held at arm's length.
There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.
You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.
That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:
1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"
2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.
I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.
You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.
I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from.
What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source.
This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.
Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept.
What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.
I do actually still disagree with you though:
> At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.
Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play.
Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life.
In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated.
To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world.
Again sorry for misunderstanding you.
I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them.
However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming.
But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.
If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall."
The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experience is. If Facebook were advertising themselves as the cloaca of the Internet, your vigorous user-blaming would have some merit. But they don't. They aim to be in daily use by every person in the world, a trusted intermediary. They either need to live up to that or quit.
It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some nobody posting from their account that they've slapped a logo on. There's no distinguishable difference between 100 nobodies throwing in their heartfelt opinion, and 100 bots repeating the opinion of 1 nobody.
Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.
Facebook knows with absolute certainty if an account is legit or not.
Cambridge Analytics, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint (oops, bought by Lexis/Nexus), Palantir, NSA, and others have all uniquely identitied every person, living or dead.
Facebook has even more data. Facebook even has phantom profiles for people without accounts. Of course they know who's legit. They can't not know.
Just like Facebook juices their ad numbers, they're lying here too.
Frankly, I'm shocked, shocked that Facebook would lie about their culpability here.
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Twitter might plausibly not know. So they can contract with any of the dozen of 3rd parties that provide demographic databases as a service.
Finally, if they act like real users since they are, it helps Facebook's bottom line. Booting them would hurt FB and piss off those people.
This is just one example of "fake accounts"
I do agree there are likely solutions like you're saying. Pages already work that way. Linked to a personal profile. Multiple can be.
Though I guess it likely isn't in Facebook's interest to do a feature like you propose if they can help it. If they can ban enough actual worthless or hurting fake accounts without messing with fake accounts that are being used legitimately enough. Since that boosts their numbers.
Limit total videos per website? How do you determine who gets to stay? Money? Clicks?
Moderating all the videos is hard, but if the videos go to a different platform, they still need that same moderation, right?
Sure, some videos may go to another platform. And for most things, that'd be fine. A lot of videos people post on YouTube are just accidentally hosted there, and would be just as good posted on, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or another personal account provider. But there's a whole class of garbage that YouTube has because one way or another it allows people to get paid. That garbage is a negative externality on the rest of us, and there's no particular reason for us to allow YouTube to profit from it.
Even if it is a human doing it, it still has to scale to many humans, and there are plenty of examples of things we have never manged to get right due to scale well outside of technological limitations.
Even if you could, my example from the article was one human, with one example case, and as another human I didn't see it as a cut-and-dry bot. Try doing that with 20,000. It's not that it would be "costly", it's that it would be an unavoidable train wreck
Problem is, from what I'm seeing, is that the market bifurcates into "shitty, but cheap" and "OMG, the price, but quality". I want the middle way: "reasonably priced, 'good enough' quality, and won't break the bank". Tools are a prime example. You had Snap-On/Matco/etc., Sears Craftsman, and "stamped steel sockets from China". Snap-On for the pros (and worth every dime if you're a pro), Craftsman for the guy with the '57 Chevy he works on regularly, and then the cheap shit for the person that needs to turn a 13mm nut once a year.
Now we "get things for cheaper", but those things (in the case of tools) are not something I'm going to let anywhere near a fastener I care to ever reuse. Craftsman is gone, so my option is to chase a Snap-On truck around town [0]. I don't need Snap-On quality, it's like buying a $100K CNC machine to turn a table leg when a lathe will do. I just need a decent socket that won't round the fastener.
Seems like the middle fell out of appliances, too. Only in this case, it looks to me like the high-end is shit, too. Every single person I've known that's had a Viking stove or SubZero fridge has had it worked on at least once. I think our Kenmore stove/fridge and LG washer/dryer are disappointingly not built for longevity, but at least nothing has broken after five years. But that washer isn't going to be washing clothes twenty years from now like old Kenmores.
About the only thing I can think of where the quality goes up and the prices down are cars. Man, it is amazing how long a car can go while doing practically nothing for maintenance. And they are much more complex systems, and live in much harsher conditions, than a washer.
To tie this back to the topic at hand, "we can't be bothered to take the time to make it nice" is a fine excuse if only they'd use that as the actual excuse. "Doesn't scale" just means "too much trouble to make it nice, so you'll have to settle with half-assed". If "that's just the way it is", then I don't want "it".
[0] When I bought Snap-On, it was from a truck that drove from auto shop to auto shop, selling tools out of the truck. They had no retail presence; IOW, you couldn't go down to the Snap-On store, it all came off the truck. Not a practical option for the home mechanic, though I've heard they sell online now.
Eg. Germany passed a law that fines Facebook if they don't comply with German hate speech laws.
Facebook responded on a couple of such reports but the accounts weren't altered.
If my account had sufficient standing then the action could have been automated. My accounts actions could then be meta-moderated by other accounts that are more trusted.
You make decisions using reports from trusted accounts, and verify them with multiple more-trusted accounts. Verified actions improve an accounts trust level.
Surely Facebook already use such a system? I imagine Google Maps are using such a trust network too?
Use the scale of the system to manage itself.
Facebook could afford a thousand fulltime account reviewers, they just don't want to.
That's about 1/2000th of FB's yearly revenue. They should be able to handle that.
I would hate to stand in Zuckerberg’s shoes here. It seems like they will lose this fight, no matter what. The solution might be more political than technical; that is, to teach people to be skeptical and use proper judgement when reading news articles.
But that’s most likely too much to ask.
He could just hire more and better people to do the moderation (or handle appeals). I kinda feel companies like Facebook take the attitude that things aren't worth doing unless they can be automated by an algorithm.
https://twitter.com/4chan/status/741452104112439296
(joking...)
Anecdotal, but my dog has had a Facebook account for a decade now. He makes appropriate comments and likes too. His profile picture and stats are accurate. Given that FB can detect faces and assign names to them, I assume they know this account is bullshit. There's got to be some aspects of avoidance of their part. Growth is more important than making sure accounts are real, unless people report it.
The solution seams akin to the neighbor stealing cable.
Send someone out to go look.
First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn't scale.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don't think simple hunches about fake accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that "originated in the Middle East" that now presents as an "attractive woman" is not really a clear-cut case for having your account terminated.
I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people who behave in "weird" ways and organized influence attempts, but I don't think we can get there. It's starting to sound like "bots" and "fake news" have disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.