With that in mind, consider that this "failure" of scale may be less of a bug and more of a feature as far as the platforms are concerned. All the big players HATE the Internet as it originally existed. All those independent voices talking all over the place were difficult or impossible to monetize, and the legal hazard of trying to do business near anything resembling a truly free discussion forum is a nightmare. Far better to do away with all that pesky multi-directional communication and go back to the good old days: big company make product, big company market product, little people buy product. No need for discussion or community. That just gets in the way.

Maybe, if your lords are feeling generous, they'll give you a comment section where you can talk about how great product is. Any other posts will of course be scrubbed.

There was a story on here yesterday I don't think many people saw, about a book being rejected from Apple Books because it contained the word "Leanpub"! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205541

It's a cycle that's been going on since at least the 19th century (via pamphlets), and I don't see it stopping any time soon.

[1] https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/mp-fears...

You don't want anyone else actually reading the great unwashed's comments, though!

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, my opinions are my own, yadda yadda.

Remember when a bunch of people (and Googlers) threw a fit about Project Dragonfly, Google's "aborted" attempt at a censored search engine for China?

Now that it is widely known and accepted that Google routinely manipulates and censors search results in Western countries for political and anti-competitive ends, where is the outrage now? Where are the walkouts at Google campus?

If Google ever did "love the Internet as it originally existed", the people who lent that air to the company are long gone, replaced by new people who look at the Great Firewall of China with envy.

I don't think that's obvious at all.

You're saying that it's more important not to remove videos that aren't in violation of the platform's terms, eg false positives in the automated removal process, than it is to remove videos that are, eg actual content that should be removed. Why is it more important that someone's video remains on Facebook than Facebook removes illegal or toxic content? If acceptable videos are removed by mistake is that actually a problem that means the automated process isn't fit for purpose?

... social networks for their ad-hoc censorship...

Facebook removing a video is not censorship. They're not saying "no one can see this video". They're saying "we don't want to host this video". Those are absolutely not the same thing.

This is a straw-man; that's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I'm arguing that you can probably have both -- by using human moderators.

> Facebook removing a video is not censorship.

It is censorship. They're saying "no one can see this video on our platform." Do you really want to get in some silly semantic debate when you know full well what I meant? It seems you're being purposefully uncharitable.

Reminder: humans lack telepathy and so they depend on body language, tone, and word semantics to communicate.

That's a very extreme point of view.

You skipped right past calling the thing for what it is (censorship), past admitting it's a problem, and you're now arguing against a hypothetical extreme solution no-one has yet proposed.

Can we assume that you now agree it's censorship, and that it's a problem, and it's only the solution you proposed that bothers you?

unishark posted that they believe it's censorship, so I asked whether or not it'd be OK for any content to be removed if that's the case. Does unishark think that Facebook 'censoring' some content is actually OK?

I don't think it's censorship, and I think Facebook removing content is fine explicitly because it isn't censorious. So no, you can't assume that I now agree it's censorship, because it's not and I don't.

The idea that Facebook has a monopoly on video is weird. If someone wanted to grow an audience around their video content would you suggest they post the videos to Facebook to do it?

Maybe if your idea of censorship hinged on govt involvement it might fit a bit better. Though I'd still say we need to be able to talk about censorship by other organizations besides govt, and that the dictionary definition of the word covers this.

I thus generally view an attempt to refute an argument with some pedantic gotcha as a bad-faith responsse.

I would like to propose to not treat the pedantry counter as a sin. Instead think of it as a weak signal: the counter does not rank high on the hierarchy of disagreement. <https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-to-disagree-well-7-of-t...> If a strong counter could be made, we would use that one instead of the pedantry counter.

For the same reason that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

> Facebook removing a video is not censorship. They're not saying "no one can see this video". They're saying "we don't want to host this video". Those are absolutely not the same thing.

Facebook has so much market share that they're uncomfortably close to the same thing.

That would require someone to believe Facebook taking down a video is equivalent to someone being found guilty of a crime they didn't commit. No one believes that.

If Facebook deletes your video that's annoying. It might even affect your livelihood if you've decided to Facebook videos is your chosen career. It isn't the same as being found guilty of a crime you didn't commit.

"No false positives at all" is a good and proper goal for the justice system. Facebook's moderation system doesn't need to be held to the same, or even a similar, bar. False positives in video content removal are a very minor problem.

Except it does? For people who make their living from Youtube or whatever video platform, removing a video (usually without an appeals process) is basically a punishment regardless of guilt.

Arguing that Facebook has a near-monopoly on online video is also nonsense - the guy we're talking about posted on YouTube about this. Clearly he has other options.

The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish, and that they're being censored and punished if Facebook chooses not to, makes me hope that HN readers never choose to start video hosting platforms. They'd be completely awful.

By that token, if your government decides to deport you, you are not being punished because you have no claim on citizenship you haven't lived yet. It's just the end of a citizenship relationship.

Hopefully you can see how that argument isn't helpful or useful. Would it be any more true if the Government delegated citizenship management to a corporation? Or three?

In an online-only world, where speech (and such livelihood being contingent on access) is controlled by companies, and nation states have no requirement to provide a different mechanism, it could be reasonably argued that a company giving everyone else a platform but denying you a platform has free-speech consequences.

The fact that it isn't managed that way, and that the law doesn't currently see it that way, doesn't change whether we should change our thinking as society changes.

Being a citizen of a country isn't a business relationship. You're not simply doing something and receiving payment in return. So it can be a punishment - the government is taking something away that you've earned through previous actions (eg applying for citizenship or asylum or winning a green card).

If Facebook were to demand an author return the money they'd been paid for videos when they're deleted then it would be a punishment. But they don't do that.

Couldn't the same argument justify segregated businesses e.g. restaurants with "No blacks or Irish".

You might thing racial lines make it a different thing, but TBH, if there is unacceptable harms in discriminating on race, I can't see how it can't also exist discriminating on opinion/speech, which is also important (as Freedom of Speech is considered important, at least in the US).

If private business can be regulated on one topic, why not another? Plus the argument can be flipped: Yes, that is their business, so they can choose who they do business with; but this is our country, so we can choose who is allowed to do business, and how.

> The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish

But people do have the right to speak freely. If all public domains where private, they would effectively lose that right. The issue here isn't just that facebook determines who can "speak", but that facebook and only a few other tech giants dominate the "cyber" public domain - and alternatives like parler disallowed one similar ground "why should private hosting not be allowed to choose who they host"; at some point if you allow private companies to monopolize something, and without regulations on how, they end up dictating how people are allowed to use anything in that domain.

Why not? I don't see a practical difference between Facebook wrongfully labelling a video as abusive and city wrongfully labelling your car as illegally parked. Former might even be more financially damaging.

There's the actual problem. Let's work on that, and preserve the freedom of association.

That sounds great until the scandals of the type "Someone reposted SFW segments of this girl's revenge porn video and Facebook is taking days to remove them every time; since they're reposted every 24h they stay up forever" roll in.

Every so often we get another scandal on HN of the type "This horribly harmful content was posted on PLATFORM and PLATFORM didn't remove it fast enough". Augmenting the false-negative rate would make the problem worse.

Attackers can use automation to post their harmful content. There's no way defenders can keep up unless they use automation as well, no matter how decentralized they are.

This line of argument seems uncomfortably similar to "we need to ban encryption because terrorists and pedophiles can use it". The fact that bad people can occasionally benefit from something isn't a reason to not give it to the rest of us.

It actually can be. There's a continuum.

At one extreme are things like plans for nuclear or biological weapons. Nobody distributes those because terrorists really want them for horrible ends and they're of low utility, so we do without them.

At the other extreme are things like junk mail - we all just put up with that minor abuse of the system because having a cheap, flexible mail system is way better than not having junk mail.

Like I said, it's a spectrum, and sometimes bad people being able to abuse something is a good reason for everyone to forgo it.

My understanding is that how to build nuclear weapons is relatively well-known, and the only reason that terrorist groups don't have them is that they can't get their hands on the required raw materials.

In practice we want to pick the course of action that minimizes harm. Having your video demonetized is one kind of harm, having videos of harassment or revenge porn posted online is another.

The kind of people who say "we should never have false positives, ever" are never the people who will have to defend these positions once somebody gets harmed by them and kicks up a scandal.

Not even justice system uses that rule.

I'm not saying which is the case here, but certainly that the argument could be made.

I don't see the value of this distinction. Creating a system where it is more likely that guilty go free is the practical equivalent of creating a system where more guilty go free.

I wasn't commenting on how well the analogy fits censorship. Though I would note that the criminal justice system doesn't set all people free, just that it adopts a more slanted standard of proof than the laxer standard used in some other judicial situations like civil and immigration courts. The discussion over allowable levels of false positives fits better than a dichotomy comparing a world with traffic laws to anarchy or something.

Unfortunately, that is not a mantra that will keep your platform DMCA compliant.

Also, how exactly does it apply to an internet mob calling for someone's head? Do we apply this mantra to protect the mob's behaviour, or to protect the person the mob is targeting?

The platforms do just that, by removing the content in question.

Sorry...market share has nothing to do with their first amendment right to not host content that goes against their policies.

Fox News is the most watched cable news network. I wouldn't want the government forcing them to host people they don't want to host.

I think the only difference is that politicians don't even pretend to care about the complaints of moderators on small forums.

But this isn't working as well as it should because the platform / advertising oligopoly is eating up everyone's revenue and using those funds to vertically and horizontally integrate everything under a handful of megacorp brands.

For as long as this consolidation (aka "scale") continues, content moderation will remain "unsolvable".

The thing is, you still have the scale problem even if you break up Youtube into a hundred different video streaming sites.

Say that Google would need to hire a million full-time moderators (in practice it's probably more) to ensure quality moderation for every video uploaded. If it's not sustainable for them to do that, then it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies to hire ten thousand moderators each to do the job.

This is especially bad because bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically. Unless platforms start pooling their moderation resources (in which case you're back to square one), having lots of small-scale platforms means that attackers can just upload the same thing on as many platforms as they can and hope it slip through the net in a few cases.

The only way we can stop that, as a society, is if we decide that any platform for content diffusion needs to factor in and charge the price of filtering that content from the get go. That means no more free uploads on Youtube; if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.

I think that would be a viable way for the ecosystem to go, but it would make it harder for small independent creators with no budget to get started.

You can't use made-up numbers to prove your point. Approx 800,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every day. Watching all of those in full at normal speed would require only 100,000 full time mods, but that's just about the dumbest way to go about it, so in reality it will be much less.

> it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies

> bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically

You'll have to reconcile this fatalism with the myriad of smaller communities managing spam and moderation just fine. Millions (not "hundreds") of topical forums (incl. independent ones, and on platforms like reddit) are doing fine, often without full time or paid moderators.

> if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.

Since no one will opt-in to that willingly while free alternatives exist, you're essentially proposing state-mandated censorship. No thanks. I'd rather Facebook / Youtube just die if their consolidated asses can't keep up with what they created.

No, PeerTube is a decentralized video platform with independent servers, which can work together.

EDIT: A quick search shows that I was asking the wrong question; in practice, there are servers dedicated to exclusively these kinds of videos.

e.g. Imagine the argument was "Disposing of chemicals safely is a no-go at scale"

Businesses don't get to ignore negative externalities just because it's unprofitable

Is it? I'd have imagined there's some ratio of 1 mod per N people for N not too small that would make things work. It might be more like 1:1K instead of the 1:1M (or whatever) that companies prefer, but is that genuinely unaffordable or is it just that companies don't like to pay for moderators?

I think mass media has some fundamental flaws that we havent accepted yet.

Edit: take out advertising in intellectual property and you would get rid of a bunch of bad actors and cobra effects.

However i see this as being a bit like the BBC problem: beleiving there is such a thing as being objective, there just isnt.

You can have a group of likeminded people who mostly agree and need a bit of moderation for when someones external bad day leaks into their interactions on the plaform. However if there is an underlying fundamental difference of opinion or goals then the moderators become just another weapon.

We need leaders not moderators. Moderators in difference of opinion just end up punishing the weak one way or another. Leaders show by example what we can aspire to, which in turn guides moderators in how to apply the rules.

If you have global platforms who are the leaders? What direction should they lead that works for china and the US?

126,000 workers actually seems reasonable to find, the 2 million you'd need at a 1:1k ratio would be hard, I think. The pay is going to be bad, and the garbage you have to watch won't be worth it for most, but you still need a reasonably analytical person to decide if things definitely follow the rules, definitely don't follow the rules, or need to be escalated. And they need to be attentive, because videos can be totally normal and fine and then get abusive later.

[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-at-15-my-person...

I think the intent is to have better humans in the loop and to have a human appeal process.

Currently it seems like the human approved removal has no recourse and you’re just hosed.

Not sure the exact process at YouTube though.

And when you consider only flagged videos should *need* to be watched by a human.

What exactly is the problem you're pointing to? Are you saying Facebook couldn't afford to pay that many mods? Note that they don't have to be employees or in Facebook offices...

Yeah, I concede this is a very hard problem (especially when advertisers are involved). And even worse, maybe it's not even worth it to solve. After all, if a minority x% of your creators are expendable to false DMCA takedowns because your market share is so huge, who cares?

Your ISP doesn't moderate for you either.

I regularly hang out in several different communities of thousands of people, including this one. All of them, except the really small ones, have one or a few people who moderate the forums, and ways to report things that are posted. If someone posts a link to disturbing video to HN, it's going to disappear right quick; even if the source lives on. If I try out a community where there's a lot of disturbing videos posted, I'm going to stop going there; but other people might go there specifically because of those video links. If the videos are legal, that's their business and none of mine; I don't want to see it, and by avoiding their community, I won't.

New accounts are easy to create, but new communities are harder because you have to wait for members. Plus most of your moderators are free. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit only pays for people to moderate the default subs since advertisers and new users are more likely to see them.

You could employ a little common sense when designing your product. Is it really wise for platforms like Facebook to allow anyone to start livestreaming unrestricted? I would argue no, at the very least they should be taking measures to minimise the blast radius should someone decide to walk outside and start shooting people.

Exactly, Slashdot works because of its transparency; the user can see, what was moderated down, and thus whether the moderation was done to something he doesn't want to see, or whether it is something that someone else doesn't want him to see.

User moderation via "flag as inappropriate" might work though.

I'm not sure about this. I believe there are automated systems and shadow bans on HN (not entirely sure how they work). There's certainly community moderation via flagging and downvoting, which is essentially how the FB video was removed as well.

> I'm arguing that you can probably have both -- by using human moderators.

I don't think human moderators can review 720K hours of video per day. (on YouTube) You would need to hire >100,000 moderators to continuously watch videos all day and have some redundancy in reviews, then 1,000s of supervisors to make sure moderators are doing their job correctly. (almost impossible when you review videos all day with no break) Let's not even get into comment moderation...

My bet is his voice triggered the system.