Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @03:23PM
(#19504913)
The problem is that, for a paper or a TV network, control scales. You can pump your network TV signal out twice as many antennas, and still control every frame of video.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.