I wish Facebook had the courage to say this themselves.
Facebook tries to get by with as few moderators as they can, with paying them as low as possible and generally trying to teflon away anything negative from their service (i.e. they negate being responsible for the fake news/hate speech on their platform).
I believe that there would certainly be a way to provide fair moderation - for example a ratio of 1 full time CSR (customer services representative) per 1000 users, not the 1 per 20k or worse they are currently trying to do.
Hey, that's the Mastodon model! Relatively small independent servers with own admin/moderator teams responsible only for their own servers. That's scalable moderation.
[1]: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/7f81350fe4fe...
That would require 2 million full-time CSRs, because Facebook has a little over 2 billion active users per month.
I'm sick and tired of Silicon Valley companies thinking they can save money on customer support and have societies pick up the tab.
And it's not like Facebook (or Twitter) couldn't get the money: 3€ per user and month should be enough to cover the cost of a properly salaried CSR - and at the same time create a barrier for bots and Nazi trolls.
What makes you say that ? Facebook barely makes $5/quarter (3 months) in revenue. They couldn't even afford $1/month/user. Meanwhile Twitter has never turned a profit ever.
Similar to how GDPR is going to gut the business model of firms who suck up all personal data and sell to the highest bidder.
Unless they're obliged to by law, they never will. These companies minimize customer support in order to improve the bottom line, and will keep these at a minimal level - just barely enough to get away with that. It's one of the elements of the so-called "disruption".
How dare they?!
I did. You should, it will improve your peace of mind. Also Facebook is a culture swallowing monster.
> No one owes you a business model
I don’t reslly care if FB doesn’t work at scale, if we put minimum responsibilities on them. They’re not owed that business model.
It's pretty understandable they're not able to moderate over 2 billion active users per month.
So that leaves two options: Either not have 2 billion active users, or not have any moderation. The latter is plainly unacceptable because, like others pointed out, it simply externalises the cost onto society. The first option, well I'm sure people will find other ways to communicate and plan events; It's not like their service is so unique, just the network effect and the size (which is way too big any way). We were long overdue for something better to come along any way.
There's no fundamental "right" Facebook has to do this, to keep existing and growing in the way they do, if all they want to do is grow but not take responsibility with the consequences of their size. Edit someone else said it better: No one owes you a business model. If a crucial bit appears impossible to "scale", then well tough luck I guess.
Are they, though? I feel that they are no more responsible than internet providers are for the illegal shit people do with their connections.
The fact is that society has always drawn lines about what speech and behavior is and isn't acceptable in different venues and circumstances. Facebook's choice to censor hate speech is no different from a bar, restaurant, or department store asking someone to leave for shouting the N-word at fellow shoppers. It's a private non-governmental entity making a choice about how they want their users to act on their platform.
Furthermore, free speech claims in favor of hate speech ignore the real material costs in human lives that facilitating hate speech incurs. While I greatly value free speech personally, I also greatly value human lives and the ability of all people to meaningfully participate in society without facing systemic oppression, violence, and hatred.
Tolerance must inevitably come face-to-face with intolerance, and if we don't act to stop the worst kinds of hatred and intolerance they fester and decay the ideals that allow tolerance to flourish at all.
> Furthermore, free speech claims in favor of hate speech ignore the real material costs in human lives that facilitating hate speech incurs.
What material cost? Censorship advocates continually assume that hate speech must have large and personal costs, but in my experience, present no evidence. The benefits of censorship are not apparent. The costs, however, are clear in the historical record: slowed scientific progress, emotional distress, and atrocities that might have been avoided through vigorous public discussion. And it's always been in the name of the public good, or saving souls, or protecting the innocent, or some other unassailable and noble good that people with power have forced others not to say certain words. The idea that no, this time, it's different suggests a certain historical hubris.
I'd wager that throughout history, there's never been a society that's made its people happier or better-off through censorship. I'd love to see a counterexample if you can find one.
For instance, the costs of censorship are, interestingly enough, also the costs of not censoring free speech. Slowed scientific progress (due to the rise of anti-intellectualism), emotional distress (pretty obvious how some types of free speech cause this), and atrocities (e.g. Charlotesville) could have been avoided through censorship. Those are the material costs of allowing unbridled, "hate group" free speech.
On a side note, I am very personally conflicted on this topic. It was strange to read your comment and strongly agree with some statements and then very strongly disagree other statements.
Free speech policies that would effectively harbor hate speech - also protect your speech from being labelled as such, and then censored, or worse. There are a disturbing number of places still left in this world, where controversial speech can get you jailed, or killed - with the blessing of, or by a government.
Humans can't be trusted, by and large, to be benevolent censors.
Speech promoting violence against some group of people, and not for defense purposes. No subjectivity there.
Of course, you may very well ask, isn't it trivial to construct an almost identical argument to justify violence against almost any particular category of people you'd care to name? Hopefully your interlocutor won't respond by punching you in the face.
Are they? Let's see the most important difference:
Is a public square privately owned? No. It is owned by the community, usually the council.
Is a restaurant privately owned? Yes. The proprietor has the option to evict people at will, as long as they do not discriminate against minorities in the process.
Do hate speech laws apply in a public place? Yes. If someone states racist things in public, they may be put in prison for hate speech.
Do hate speech laws apply in a private place? It depends on if this space is open to the public, and on the event being held. Generally, yes.
Is the owner allowed to evict any member at will from a public square? It depends. If the person is being harmful towards others, they may be removed from the square and detained, and sometimes even charged a crime.
Is the owner allowed to evict any member at will from a private square? Yes, as long as they do not discriminate against minorities when doing so.
As you can see, the attribute you have brought up does not matter. Facebook has the legal right to remove people for speech, as long as it does not discriminate against minorities in the process.
Many public squares are privately owned these days.
> Facebook has the legal right to remove people for speech
No-one is disputing that. Grandparent wrote "It’s a space where free speech should be defended," not "It's a space where free speech is protected by the law." The lack of legal protection for speech in this kind of space makes it all the more important that individuals stand up for it.
Let's not be disingenuous: democracies also want to limit the speech of authoritarians. And they probably should, because every idea that's broadcast will garner some following. It's human nature. Your knife doesn't only cut one way.
Then don't make it open. Make it auditable and tied to your public identity, not to an email address you can invent at any time. The OP is right, FB is making huge profits by punting the costs onto society.
Governments act like all tech problems are the latter, but I would like to know if this is like encryption that only friends can break (never), or like self driving cars (most people call it impossible until five years after it’s been demonstrated).
Especially in FB's case where it is quite obvious that various opposing "hate groups" have learned how to game the system, and also how to present results of that such that it supports their rhetoric.
No, it is merely extremely expensive. But that's something that you need to tackle head on when your business model is to provide a service for free to a large chunk of the planet's population. The 'free' bit doesn't absolve you from your responsibility as an operator.
Can you prove, or at least demonstrate strong evidence for, either of those two claims? “FB are noobs at propaganda” isn’t sufficient, IMO.
It's not a complete recipe, but I feel it's a necessary condition. This is a big part of why HN is a polite place, or why most niche subreddits are polite places.
It's only when you deliberately want to attract (and retain) as many eyeballs as possible, then the quality necessarily has to go out the window.
Try thinking about a real solution to the problem next time that isn't "let's not do this".
(I do think that if Facebook is employing people to do something that predictably harms those employees then it should bear the cost of protecting them from those harms, and treating and compensate them when it fails to protect them)
You seem to be venting incoherently. How does that follow from the statement you're replying to, at all?
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all—regardless of how bad another comment is.
You seem to have an almost hysterical reaction to this story. Why are you so sensitive? Did Nazis and violence and Red Brigade terrorists and Communists and racists and Islamic extremists not spread their messages effectively before Facebook? Has the rate of violence from these groups increased since Facebook?
I don’t have stats in front of me, but I would argue that violence, terrorism and hate has decreased since Facebook. Sure we hear more about it now, but that’s a result of media penetration and not an actual increase in incidents. I would invite data that suggests otherwise.
One might argue that awareness of hate groups has increased because of Facebook thus leading to increased marginalization of their ideas.
Blaming the medium for the message is fascinating. The disease of hate and totalitarianism spread quite effectively before Facebook. We might argue that Facebook has actually reduced such things because it provides a marketplace where ideas can be evaluated and either accepted or shunned much more efficiently.
Banning the communication of ideas doesn’t stop the communication of ideas. We learned that from Solzhenitsyn. We should encourage more openness, less censorship. Sunlight disinfects.
Your comment was downvoted a lot though. Must've hit a nerve :-)
No, but publishers should be, and they are. FB is a publisher, a distributor of content. They are not the creator of electrons or LED displays via which your content is distributed, which would be the closest analogy to your paper and ink manufacturer.
Fake news on social media is subject to none of these controls. Facebook is a multiplier of some of the worst tendencies of human beings, and it lacks the institutions that the rest of society has evolved over centuries to contain those tendencies.
Facebook is, in part, a tool for distributing misleading information on a massive scale. We control tools that cause harm even if those tools are inert or even beneficial if they're not used by malicious people. Facebook has no institutional or economic reason to reduce the harm it causes, and it's the role of government to reduce harm when the market has failed to do so.
I'd go one step further - that's just consequence of better communication. You can't have one without the other. If you make life easier for everyone, you're also making life easier for the crazies, and for the bad guys. Personally, I'd still say it's worth it.
> The crazies finding each other and organizing is entire FB's fault.
If it is entirely Facebook's fault, how come this phenomenon predates Facebook and exists outside of it?
Do you see the problem with this argument? FB was rapidly accelerated the organization of these types of extreme positions. My original comment follows from my last comment. What do you think the crazies do when they've gotten all outraged at some false proposition or other?
That's not the right analogy. This is closer to what you said:
Human epidemics are entirely the fault of the great flu pandemic of 1912.
An even closer analogy to what you said is:
Human epidemics are entirely the fault of widespread transportation networks. Ergo we ought to abolish such networks.
Do you have any empirical evidence to back this "pandemic" claim of yours? Or is that just a feeling you have?
Original comment: You can hire lots of humans to work at a normal pace and give them psychological counseling, and spend so much on their salaries that you'll go out of business, and even then they won't catch everything and will be frequently accused of bias.
Reply: Then you should not fucking be in the business at all! What FB does is externalizing the cost onto societies and skimming the profit!
I still fail to see how that is a coherent and relevant reply. It comes across as shouting and venting rather than substantive.
Consider the original comment to be the first clause in an 'if-then' sentence, i.e. "IF the cost of hiring lots of humans to work at a normal pace and giving them psychological counseling causes you to go out of business, THEN you should not fucking be in the business at all, BECAUSE otherwise you are externalizing the cost onto society and skimming the profit."
So if it turns out that their moderation policy creates big problems for their employees and the world, thought should be forced to shoulder a financial burden in the form of taxes/workers comp.
All economic activity produces externalities, positive and negative. That doesn't mean we should increase taxes and subsidies on everything.
Which it isn't. Pollution is a well-defined term; you can identify particular offending substances or disposal methods by their impact on humans and their environment. There are precise things that can be taxed to discourage their use. "Fake news", on the other hand, is a pretty uniform spectrum, from the most blatant falsehoods to the stuff CNN and NYT write. It's hard to even agree on where to draw the line (personally, I'd draw the line at "journalism should begin and end at stating verifiable facts + opinions on those facts clearly marked as opinion", but that's an extreme/minority position), and there's no way to start quantifying impact.
Then you should not fucking be in the business at all! What FB does is externalizing the cost onto societies and skimming the profit!
Cost here being two things: first the cost of mentally fucking up the moderators (so an extensive amount of psychological healthcare has to be shouldered by society) and second the cost to society that arises from letting Nazis and jihadists spread their propaganda (including the cost from real-world violence enabled by said propaganda).