Now I have no doubt that facebrick and the evil-goog will try for regulatory capture and employ their vast army of Washington lobbyists in rent-seeking activities but that is a separate problem applicable in every industry where market failure means you have to regulate, not just this one. (And yes it does need solving, absolutely urgently). If you don't have to regulate because the market is working, great! Don't regulate! That's not what we have here, this is market failure but we haven't yet regulated. It will come because there are clearly externalities in this market, Well it will come unless we give up on democracy first. Something with which facebrick and evil-goog seem really comfortable as long as they supplant it.
I don't think it's a problem any more than weather is a "problem" that required the invention of the roof. As far as user-generated content goes, it's easy to invent the hose, but the faucet is much more complex.
It's irresponsible to provide only acceleration ("reach," "virality," etc.) for information without also implementing brakes. Moderation has been a known fix for decades, but people like Zuck -- in disposition and inexperience -- won't launch anything human-powered, and moderation requires a human eye. Fuck us, right?
Let's suppose Apple wants to make sure every game in their store gets at least 5 ratings. To do this they are going to pay people to play each game for 5 min and then assign a rating. In an hour a curator can get through 12 games. Over an 8 hour day thats 96 games. Apple would need to hire about 7 (iirc) full time employees just to give every game one rating. We wanted every game to have 5 ratings. Assuming that users on average provide one rating (but sometimes 0), we still need curators to provide the other 4. That means Apple would be employing 28 full time employees just to get their content minimally curated.
Let's use the salary from the article and say each curator costs 30k a year. That means this whole department of curation is going to cost about 900k a year.
Most of what they are sorting is going to be shovelware anyway. To justify the cost of this department, the curators need to find gems, content that's really good but would have otherwise been looked over. They need to find 900k of gems per year. Considering the average earning of an app, this is just barely plausible. If you want to do anything more advanced with your curation, like have the curators generate key words or figure out which demographic might like it, your budget is blown for sure.
IDK how the economics of comment curation works out, but I bet it's even worse. After all, no one is even paying for comments, and making a comment is way less effort than making an app.
I don't care how much it costs, though, and I don't think Zuck cares either. If FB remains unmoderated it will invariably turn in to a shithole and people will go elsewhere rather than wading through a bunch of racist anti-vax cartoons just to find out where their friends are meeting for lunch next week. FB has plenty of money to pay as many human moderators as it would take to stop complaints, in all languages, but they won't. Where FB might go bankrupt if they don't implement brakes on reach, they'd just as soon prefer to go bankrupt rather than hire humans to do the work.
The issue is that if you want to identify content as "fun", "offensive", "dramatic", "tense", "crass" or any other of the myriad of labels that haven't been machine learned, very quickly the labor to generate these labels will cost more than the value generated by these labels.
This is just Facebook being cheap.
The most important thing for moderators would be group and individual therapy sessions run at work with hired therapists. Group therapy is great because you can relate to other moderators struggles which helps process, and individual to help process the most traumatic events. This is what Kik has implemented and seems to be effective.
We can take a step backwards and eliminate Facebook, Insta, etc from our societies and enact legislation that will govern the second generation of social networks.
- Make social networks mandated reporters for suspected child abuse. Like teachers or little league coaches, reporting would absolve them of liability.
- Prohibit generation of profit from illegal activity.
- Require transparency in political advertising, with an accountable entity and individual listed and publicly available.
- Require reporting of funding source and material individuals for paid political advertising.
- Make the platform liable for false product claims in cases where the platform facilitates direct or implied endorsements for a product. (“Jedi72 likes this homeopathic cancer treatment!”
- Make the platform responsible for reasonable efforts to block and report on actions against fictitious users posing as people. Share liability for any claims, including libel, resulting from the actions of fictitious people.
A regulatory regime like this would either improve the signal/noise ratio or cause the company to abandon or prohibit certain actions or functions.
What I'm saying, seriously, is that we need a society-wide blameless post-mortem on social networks. It needs to be a slow, careful discussion, where all the stakeholders have their voices heard, and we decide what is good for us all. I don't know that we need them at all, I'm not sure they provide ANY value to ANYONE, but as a non-user I'd of course be open to persuasion by current victims. Erm, users. In the meantime, it should be illegal to operate a social network. Nobody needs to go to prison yet, even though I think it's horrifyingly clear at this point that the ethics are out the window.
One obvious one: advertising and public conversation must always be separated; the same way no public schoolteacher may read scripture in class, it should be illegal for an internet service that hosts public conversation (e.g. Twitter) to allow sponsored content.
We should also establish guidelines for addiction. After cigarettes, drugs, sugar, etc; we should as a society be prepared to understand the various forms that addictive products can take and regulate them aggressively before they become serious problems. UX patterns like infinite scroll, pull-to-refresh, and push notifications are particularly suspect.
I also think we should close the apparent loophole in COPPA that allows parents to post photos of their children on social networks.
> that they have to hire moderators (which they already do?) or do you want to make it illegal to post "bad things" on the internet?
I tend to come down on the "free speech" side of these issues as much as possible; I would prefer unregulated public fora that (perhaps by requiring identity verification) encouraged good-faith participation in substantial discussions. I think if you are just fooling around, maybe you should head down to the bar and get drunk with your friends and do your shit talking there.
Social networks aren't dead, so we can't have a post-mortem.
Also, you can't have a society-wide blameless analytical conversation about anything, especially if there are significant conflicting interests involved; that's not how people work. (It's perhaps noteworthy that even while suggesting this you offer no objective descriptions of impacts with reasoned analysis of contributing factors, instead jumping straight to blame and policy responses, with some labelled as “obvious”.)
So what about the countless number of people whose livelihoods depend on social media in some capacity? They're supposed to just be fine with being irrevocably fucked over until the moral panic about social media subsides? (or, in your words, "we decide what is good for us all")
Where does the small business owner who depends on a social network factor in as a "stakeholder"?
Drugs, sugar, cigarettes are measurably and objectively harmful to your health and that's why they are regulated (or should be).
There isn't similar comparable scientific evidence that social media is nearly as harmful except for questionable non-reproducible psychology studies, so I don't think it's comparable at all.
Social media has a lot of problems - even this article on just Facebook outlines a number of them [0] but I agree with the above poster in saying that you can't have a societal post-mortem analysis of the effects of social media given its very much _not dead_ state. Advocating that society just presses a 'shut down' button until "we collectively decide how we should proceed" is an entirely unrealistic scenario.
HN's posting frequency limits made that choice for me. The system is unfortunately biased towards drive-by comments and against engaging with feedback on your own comments.
Edit:
> Advocating that society just presses a 'shut down' button until "we collectively decide how we should proceed" is an entirely unrealistic scenario
But that's what I'm advocating. I don't think I'm obligated to respond to people who only came by to reject the premise of my argument. More interesting discussions are available to anyone who shows up with an open mind.
Second, you do better at automatically detecting duplicate content that’s already been banned.
They do this because acknowledging and dealing with bad users would also mean impacting fake users that make them money with ad fraud, growth metrics and ginning up engagement.
End of the day, if you operate a social platform, and you have people uploading child pornography and animal torture video, you should do everything in your power to make the user go away, for good.
Just saying.
I let you live your way, don't try to force others to live your way by using "scare tactics".
I have no bussiness solution, but the solution to the latter is to simply ignore/block people who post stuff you don't like.
This problem applies to other forms of sites and content as well. The app store gets hundreds of submissions in the game category per day. Hosting and distributing that content is easy. Only a tiny fraction of those games are going to be played and rated enough times to show up in a recommendation engine. The bulk of the incoming content stream isn't being matched to interested people at all (sorting by interesting is the same curation issue as filtering by offensive).
Literally every content platform is going to have some problem similar to Facebook. We can blame Facebook, but the reality is no one has a good solution. Not even me.