Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353

by tysone • 5 years ago

1021 482 5 years ago

wsj.com

sdrawkcabmai3• 5 years ago

Paywalled unfortunately. found this summary one:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...

acdha• 5 years ago

Somewhat ironically, changing the domain to fullwsj.com will redirect you to wsj.com stories via Facebook's redirector and that's currently not paywalled.

markstos• 5 years ago

Tried it, got paywalled anyway. I was not logged into Facebook at the time, if that matters.

actually_a_dog3• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/K5yv5

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" Animal Farm - George Orwell

sdrawkcabmai3• 5 years ago

Facebook is the most explicitly duplicitious sociopathic company in the tech sector. Many companies are sociopathic, especially as you get into pure finance companies like PE firms, but few are as duplicitous as Facebook.

actually_a_dog3• 5 years ago

That's why they're on my "wouldn't work for them if they wee the last tech company in the entire world" list. That list isn't long, but, FB is near the top of it.

exikyut• 5 years ago

Hmmm. That got me thinking a bit.

So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.

But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.

Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?

Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.

I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.

CiPHPerCoder2• 5 years ago

This tracks with their other choices and behaviors, unfortunately.

8b16380d• 5 years ago

Is this really surprising? I have always assumed bad faith.

jmnicolas• 5 years ago

No but now we have proof.

rejectedandsad• 5 years ago

Those included in the XCheck program, according to Facebook documents, include, in top row: Neymar, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg, and in bottom row, Elizabeth Warren, Dan Scavino, Candace Owens and Doug the Pug.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Unfortunately Facebook has no choice. If you do not make your platform appealing for popular people you will have a hard time attracting their followers there.

spywaregorilla• 5 years ago

That is a textbook example of a choice.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

And of a false dichotomy.

pnemonic• 5 years ago

How unfortunate it is that such a thing is seen as a "rock and a hard place". Making less money might just be the worst thing possible for a corporation like Facebook.

yann2• 5 years ago

The elite use facebook?

napolux• 5 years ago

This is a very good question. What if I'm an Hollywood superstar or an NBA player or a billionaire and I want to chat and share stuff privately with my "colleagues".

Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?

gilj• 5 years ago

Ask yourself what you would use if you didn't want the general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just use direct messaging apps.

vorpalhex2• 5 years ago

They use aliases and keep a small friends list. They don't typically post photos.

I still suspect that method is imperfect since your account may be locked and you may need to associate a burner number to it.

qualudeheart• 5 years ago

Signal or custom forks for personal communications.

nradov4• 5 years ago

The elite have personal assistants and social media managers who use Facebook on their behalf for brand building and PR.

SV_BubbleTime4• 5 years ago

Elite in the title might make you think they mean a politician or celebrity. It’s really Facebook outsourcing to “XCheck” who has 5.8 million memebers and somehow avoids Facebook’s “moderation”.

donatj2• 5 years ago

I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

I suspect it is automated. A computer can easily flag calling someone a loser. Not sure if FB has burning animals as a automated flag yet.

donatj2• 5 years ago

I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it.

From the support response:

The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.

Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.

datavirtue• 5 years ago

Why can't users moderate the post so that Facebook does know about the animal torture? -5 Animal Torture

chefandy• 5 years ago

Some of the actions are automated based on some NN algorithm score, and then the appeals are human-powered. They have large third party content review offices that are operated like call centers in which humans review these things. I understand they're real meat grinders to work in.

I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.

radu_floricica• 5 years ago

This is actually discouraging non-brigades from reporting. I reported obviously spam accounts and got the same feedback after a few weeks. Now I don't bother.

Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the numbers.

mtnGoat3• 5 years ago

I once made fun of Justin Bieber(said he acts like a baby) on IG, and got a warning. Some guy threatened to Hunt me and my family, kill us and do bad things to our bodies and IG said it didn’t violate any rules, when I reported it. My account can now not even post the word “chump” without warnings. Talk about backwards.

It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until they get the whip from some governments.

gordon_freeman• 5 years ago

I don't want to do victim blaming or shaming here but why would you use any fb product knowing well about their awful business practices like these?

vernie• 5 years ago

And Bieber himself said "I was like baby, baby, baby oh", so it's not like your were saying anything controversial.

smcl• 5 years ago

Yeah I gave up reporting. I’ve reported some people being extremely racist in comments, no action in either case. It’s either moderated by racist people, some poor AI or “rand()%2==0”

tonfreed• 5 years ago

Same, I've reported a ton of death threats only to be told they're not in violation. Only for my mum to cop an autoban for calling someone a spring chicken.

Their moderation is a complete joke.

josefresco3• 5 years ago

My wife (an American) also got flagged for saying "Americans are selfish". She then made a post about our RV (camper) asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground and was flagged for posting what looked like a sex ad.

We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".

adolph6• 5 years ago

asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground

No lie, that is dirty talk.

bambax5• 5 years ago

We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".

Hook-up mom would be better.

shadowgovt7• 5 years ago

Especially after Jan 6, there are a couple of things you can say in an ordinary spirited political debate that will cop you a ban on FB. One is several flavors of "Americans are X," another is variants on "Kill the filibuster" (which I assume is pattern-matching to '[violence-word] the [congress-word], which they probably up-sampled in the threat modeling for, uh, obvious reasons).

q1w23• 5 years ago

"hate speech" has become so watered down.

Sunspark• 5 years ago

I got warned for hate speech on FB for saying in a comment that Americans have the memory of a goldfish. I appealed it, the appeal was declined and my hate speech warning remains on my permanent FB record as being against community standards.

Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.

No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.

KaiserPro3• 5 years ago

simple: if you are important, then you get a moderator.

If you are a pleb, its up to the AI. so unless that video has been fingerprinted, then it'll be approved.

if the sentiment analysis AI says you were being abusive: ban. if you appeal (if you can) it might, perhaps 1/100,00 times be looked at by a human

himinlomax• 5 years ago

I got a 48h ban for calling the Japanese military "the japs" in the context of the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to offend the group that raped and murdered millions now, would we?

A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a century ago.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

This is also the same company that allowed a terrorist to livestream a killing spree for 17 minutes despite it being reported over and over again. To add insult to injury they allowed copies of the same footage to proliferate across their platform for weeks.

Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”

Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.

dado3212• 5 years ago

This kind of makes sense. For every high profile person posting an ML-flagged “Napalm Girl” in the context of discussion around the Vietnam war, there’s thousands of instances of real child porn.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

it cuts both ways. for every high profile person posting real porn (eg Neymar's revenge porn in the article) there are thousands of instances of regular users with ML flagged 'napalm girls'

antonzabirko2• 5 years ago

Well of course. Why wouldn't they? Money and friends aside, they have to do it for people who wield power like China's upper echelon or the NSA. If they say no, they will be shut down in those markets.

cycrutchfield• 5 years ago

Facebook is already shut down in China, I’m not sure what you mean.

antonzabirko2• 5 years ago

Then to put it more simply, large companies must tow to influential requests because that influence determines the flow of money. Govt, private, or individual -- doesn't matter.

And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.

dogleash• 5 years ago

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review.

Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

Every FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not only do they likely profit off the success of Facebook, there are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it's wrapped up with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.

sdrawkcabmai3• 5 years ago

Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

castis• 5 years ago

I dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

I recall Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to have lied a ton.

throwawayboise• 5 years ago

I put all of the companies you name in pretty much the same basket, and avoid them as much as I can. I don't shop on Amazon, I don't use Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter. I don't use Apple products. I do use Android and Google Docs/Drive/Mail but my next phone will probably be an open one and I could drop the GSuite stuff without too much pain, mostly laziness that I haven't already.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

In this particular case, it's only Facebook and Twitter that are significant social networks and they are responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation. Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).

I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.

Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.

Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.

TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.

cratermoon15• 5 years ago

Microsoft was a serial liar for decades over its efforts to quash competition for DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and its "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Amazon's statements about working conditions in its warehouses and its treatment of workers trying to unionize directly contradict documented actions. Twitter says one thing regarding abusive and hateful users but does another. Google finessed its theft of Java.

Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable

logicalmonster• 5 years ago

Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.

Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.

cratermoon15• 5 years ago

Further, why do we continue to accept the fiction that rules and laws apply to the elite as for the masses? Even the not-so-elite, the Stanford swimmer who brutally raped and assaulted Chanel Miller, though convicted, was given light sentence because of his "bright future", according to the judge.

metalliqaz2• 5 years ago

Is there anyone walking around that actually believes that rules and laws apply to the elite?

Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.

Aunche• 5 years ago

Brock Turner wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into Stanford, which had been revoked. His father was an electrical engineer and his mom was a nurse.

Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.

crackercrews• 5 years ago

He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the judge was following the recommendation of the probation department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own.

1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...

throwaway91321• 5 years ago

This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown at them.

I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.

Cullinet• 5 years ago

replying to cratermoon as a English born nearly retired child of a now almost entirely American family, whose parents totalled 100 years of life and was taught to program and think by my uncle who would be 121 years old if alive and who worked intimately with with the American war command, I have no answer to your question other than that is the defining of the American Way to believe that the rules apply for all of us equally. The definition of 20th century British nature is to be the inbred product of generations of ancestors who never doubted the rules for the privileged are not even comparable to those for the populace.

I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.

fhars• 5 years ago

But it is illegal for the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges and to beg in the streets.

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

And this is why I believe law should be truly blind. Any details such as race, gender, sex, education, political leaning in cases should be hidden and only public prosecution and defenders be allowed. We could easily handle whole process via text.

mandmandam• 5 years ago

In short, I'd guess that's because the companies reporting on them are owned by billionaires, and shareholders with bags of fossil fuel, war, banking, etc, stocks.

For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?

Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.

metalliqaz2• 5 years ago

Yeah, better to listen to someone with unknown credentials on Substack, or whatever I dig up on Facebook. That will put the MSM in their place.

By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

WSJ is respected because of its reporting track record, compared to other sources.

That's really all you can go on.

LocalPCGuy• 5 years ago

You can't just say "cut them out" without some replacement way of disseminating similar knowledge around. The media has plenty of issues, but as a whole, they are still the best way we have of doing that. At least with media we have a good sense of where their bias is from outfit to outfit and can take in additional information or get it from multiple sources to combat those biases.

So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).

SpicyLemonZest• 5 years ago

Do we have that collective fiction? I don't personally know anyone who thought that Facebook applied its rules to all equally, and certainly nobody here in the HN comments seems to be surprised.

tomc1985• 5 years ago

Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies

linuxftw• 5 years ago

Clearly we need to setup the Social Media Agency and regulate them. We'll staff the agency with high level political appointments comprised entirely of Twitter and Facebook executives.

Works for the FDA, anyway.

edoceo• 5 years ago

We can call the the Ministry of Truth.

smsm426• 5 years ago

The scary thing is now this is one step from the government policy. And in some countries, it's already becoming the government policy.

WriterGuy2021• 5 years ago

That's not the only collective fiction that's problematic. At this point, the lies are the only thing keeping everything going.

huijzer• 5 years ago

I can only guess why, but I do know that it’s not new. For example, around 1920, journalists were praising Hershey town as a town without crime even though the town had many incidents (Michael D‘Antonio).

bdowling2• 5 years ago

For some journalists, idealism trumps integrity.

dboreham• 5 years ago

Whenever I see such a corporate communication, my mental process is to immediately imagine the meeting that led to its creation, having attended many such meetings.

Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."

de6u99er• 5 years ago

Today I asked the public transportation company here to either enforce their mask mandate, or to let it completely be so people who actually care can decide for themselves how big of a risk they are willing to take. By having a mask mandate which is not being enforced many customers might get a false feel of security.

Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

ah, but you are assuming that the inconsistent enforcement is an accident. "for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

seph-reed• 5 years ago

My personal pet theory is that -- whether we admit it or not -- most people are somewhat... spiritual? Humans tend to see and believe in meaning where none exists.

Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:

1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or

2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.

Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

Apple says privacy is a human right, too. Companies failing to put their money where their mouth is has become par for the course.

aquir• 5 years ago

Facebook should be banned on DNS level…

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

I will jump on this bandwagon and say color me not surprised.

The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military.

That is not a good state of affairs.

ep103• 5 years ago

Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them. From neonics and bees to misinformation and facebook. But our political class has adopted a policy that demands no action be taken, as that is the official policy position on all free-market related issues for one of the two major political parties.

So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops.

Which means societal trust drops.

And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.

rajin444• 5 years ago

Giving more power to those abusing it is not going to create trust.

Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.

rektide• 5 years ago

Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them.

in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network.

we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition.

personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.

maccolgan2• 5 years ago

policy that demands no action be taken

If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.

Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone, pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.

jackfoxy• 5 years ago

And the military is the pawn of a corrupt State Department, national security elite, and military industrial complex, which renders moot the mostly honorable conduct of people in the military.

Camillo• 5 years ago

So it's like the bluecheck on Twitter, but not visible to users?

adolph6• 5 years ago

We all live in Jenny Holzer's world, "Abuse of power should come as no surprise" edition:

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

I suspect you would find the same of Twitter.

caseysoftware3• 5 years ago

How does this track against Section 230?

Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?

runako2• 5 years ago

IANAL, but Section 230 reads pretty clearly to me. Which part of 230 do you think might apply here?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

owl_troupe• 5 years ago

The distinction lies in whether the service provider has rendered themselves a "publisher" under 230. The protection has historically been broadly interpreted but, in theory, Facebook could lose the protection if it chose, selectively, what content to promote or remove in violation of its own public TOS. Generally:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306

caseysoftware3• 5 years ago

I have some theories but was hoping someone better informed than me would comment so I could learn more first and come to a more thoughtful position even if it's "not applicable".

But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.

pmyteh4• 5 years ago

No. All that s.230 does is declare that platforms are not the 'publisher or speaker' of content provided by another 'information content provider'. It isn't a common carrier provision, so platforms are allowed to make whatever decisions they like about which people they're willing to host, or what TOS/AUP they want to enforce.

For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts.

hunterb123• 5 years ago

Many discussions are explicitly about what S230 ought to be though, not what it is. Most discussions I've seen start out by stating it was made for a 1996 bulletin board and is dated. It's long overdue to handle this blanket immunity that's being abused by social media behemoths.

You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.

adolph6• 5 years ago

confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts

To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then what form of law would be needed?

criddell2• 5 years ago

In what sense is Facebook not a publisher? Their algorithm acts as an editor, choosing what to show me. If they had a simple chronological feed, then the platform argument would make sense.

If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

that article 230 flies in the face of all reason nowadays. why it still exists is an american mystery

egberts1• 5 years ago

my Facebook account got closed because they’re demanding my phone number and i won’t supply it.

GDC7• 5 years ago

Facebook is used by 3B people.

When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services.

In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.

Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can.

It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.

nullstyle2• 5 years ago

It is, but it's wrong.

vokep• 5 years ago

Then the fact anything is would be wrong, which if believed truly leads the only reasonable behavior to be the most destructive behavior (what is, existence, is bad, so destroying it is good).

Luckily, its good.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

In society not everybody is equal, however in societies with rule of law, the idea is that everybody is at least deemed equal under the law. That this unfortunately often fails in practice is very different from explicitly and intentionally having separate rules

CreateAccntAgn• 5 years ago

If these are known misleading public statements then can SEC prosecute them? I'd think these statements can affect the stock price and this is securities fraud.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

They would likely raise a "mere puffery" defense. Our legal system recognizes that in the course of business people will inevitably lie. At least a little. And so puffery, as a matter of law, is immaterial.

The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud.

Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes' defense: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...

hajile• 5 years ago

I'm guessing you have just met "prosecutorial discretion" for the first time. Prosecutors have to power to never bring charges against their friends and allies with basically zero risk.

Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.

It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job.

Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked.

Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.

A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).

nradov4• 5 years ago

The SEC doesn't conduct criminal prosecutions. They can only bring civil actions for securities law violations. If they do find evidence of criminality they pass it to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

actually_a_dog3• 5 years ago

In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents.

[...]

While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.

[...]

In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show.

[...]

In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout.

This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations, the past several years have shown us the extreme power of misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole.

Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on elections by selectively including candidates is a huge disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs to be held accountable.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...

13years• 5 years ago

It is exactly what you would expect from such concentration of power and influence.

What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.

msteffen• 5 years ago

It seems like no one has figured out a good system for moderation on the internet.

IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases, and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs. Reddit tried to federate moderation, but it's since become clear that all top subreddits are moderated by the same people. Even HN only works because dang busts ass to keep it good, and that has obvious limits (what happens when dang goes on vacation or retires?)

maccolgan2• 5 years ago

I fear the day when dang retires.

bambax5• 5 years ago

I think part of the problem of "moderation" is exposition, and incentives to maximize user engagement. Posts that nibody sees don't need to be moderated. The problem comes from the fact that platforms offer the most visibility to the worst content, because getting users riled up, excited or upset is the core of their business. It's their only business.

Maybe moderation could be solved by regulating the number of likes or reposts a given user can make or a givzn post can receive. Seems a little far-fetched but worth thinking about.

nradov4• 5 years ago

HN only works because YC doesn't sell ads and explicitly treats it as a loss leader to support their investing business.

asdff3• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprise if they turn a profit on YC running sentiment analysis. The website seems like it isn't the most expensive to host either.

vorpalhex2• 5 years ago

I don't think universal moderation (a moderation standard across all users) is possible or even desirable.

Different users want different things. There are users who never want a single even mildly insulting word. There are users who want unlimited freedom.

The best you can do is to break down moderation and let people opt into a level and form of moderation. Tell them upfront what they are getting and let them pick (or let them make their own moderation rules that apply clientside).

10000truths• 5 years ago

The common denominator in platforms going to shit is scale.

Most social media platforms get their initial users by targeting a specific niche or demographic. Forums of olde typically revolved around some specific subject matter (e.g a particular game, or band, or subculture). Facebook targeted college students. Reddit targeted techies. But once the platform reaches some critical threshold of popularity, the platform strays from its vision to realize some commercial potential. The admins and moderators, in the interest of growth, try to appeal to a lowest common denominator, which ends up alienating the now-veterans, and the original purpose of the platform is diluted into obscurity.

solveit2• 5 years ago

The only systems that have figured out moderation at scale are Wikipedia and StackExchange. But see what HN thinks about that.

Nobody wants to admit that the only type of moderation that actually works at scale is an entrenched group of somewhat-expert overly-attached users gatekeeping contributions with (what looks like to the novice and sometimes even to the established user) extreme prejudice on a website with intentionally highly limited scope.

anshumankmr• 5 years ago

StackExchange’s moderators have a huge bias issue against newcomers to the field (some can say it is justified) and sometimes, (though I have only personally noticed this), there is a huge bias against those who can’t speak English well. I have noticed at times, people with high rep make rude remarks as they misunderstand what the original author had to say.

For me, I take time to edit questions with poor grammar and help people solve their problems from time to time.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

If the moderation is extremely prejudiced, then it doesn't work.

Though I don't disagree that lots of well-intentioned humans could be a path to moderation that works.

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

The only systems that have figured out moderation at scale are Wikipedia and StackExchange.

Some edit wars on Wikipedia suggest the opposite.

Akronymus• 5 years ago

I don't think that the wiki moderation is good at all for anything where opinions really matter. (Politics, certain movements and such)

h0nd• 5 years ago

Wikipedia is horrible regarding moderation. Trust is mostly gone.

idrios• 5 years ago

Ironically, HN's great moderation caused it to become very popular, which has made the task of moderating it all much more difficult, which is having a noticeable effect on discussions and which articles make it to the front page.

ErikVandeWater3• 5 years ago

Reddit could change their TOS tomorrow to prevent users from moderating more than 2 subreddits if they wanted; others would take their place. But the mods of subreddits that have not been banned are advertiser friendly.

TeeMassive• 5 years ago

It seems like no one has figured out a good system for moderation on the internet.

I use locals.com; lots of small disjointed communities, where posters have to pay (or not) a small fee per month (1$ to 5$). which keep the trolls and influence campaigners away.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

I would vote that whenever dang is on vacation that HN shutsdown. Everyone could probably use a HN vacation occasionally.

hcrisp• 5 years ago

At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter.

The story-within-the-story here is that there is a FB whistleblower who wanted to bring this to light, not unlike other high-profile cases involving government surveillance. It amazes me that one person can wield more power than scores of seasoned journalists.

toddmorey• 5 years ago

Am I right to think of it more as a partnership? It does take at least one person with insider knowledge and access. Otherwise, the reporting would lack the backing documents that brings it credibility. And companies seem to be rather opaque to purely outside sources.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it's not just that. A few years ago a friend reached out to a few investigative journalists with documents about wrongdoing at a big co. No response. This was at the time of the Mossack Fonseca hack when many of those same publications were calling out individuals who owned offshore companies, even when it was perfectly legal for them to do so. Maybe she was unlucky, but my anecdotal takeaway was that perhaps it simply required less work, and got more clicks than real investigative journalism.

KaiserPro3• 5 years ago

This should have been obvious during the election when trump clearly violated the "don't mislead the public about how elections work" when he claimed that postal votes are what ever it is he said it was.

That is a clear ban. It says so in the "community guidelines"

(side note, you should really read the community guidelines, they are a great set of rules for keeping a community vibrant and happy, assuming they are enforced....)

I can see why facebook did it, you don't want to obviously piss off a capricious party with the power to fuck with your bottom line. It doesn't make it any better.

disgruntledphd25• 5 years ago

Trump should have been banned after his Mexican speech, in 2016.

Not sure how you can ban a candidate for the Presidency of the US from a US-based service, though.

varelse• 5 years ago

This is the culture Tech VC encourages so this is the culture we all get. SSND no?

nindalf10• 5 years ago

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be.

I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over. Especially when it’s not a system owned and operated by a handful of people. Here’s an example - as far as I know it’s not possible for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now. There’s no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His inconvenience is an edge case.

With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there’s always room for improvement.

I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process for adding shields wasn’t policed internally very well in the past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would get a “Shielded-ID-Verified” tag applied to it. ID verification was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams that weren’t related to applying the tag would see the tag and assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more I realised no one really “owned” the tag or policed who could apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular loop hole.

In later years the XCheck system started being actively maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into problems like these and made it better.

annadane2• 5 years ago

The problem seems to be though, that while the company may have tools to detect abuse, if they're choosing selectively when to enforce things it defeats the entire point

Edit: downvotes from shills

nindalf10• 5 years ago

That wasn’t my experience over several years. Whenever we found a new vector of abuse or detected systems misfiring we would take it seriously.

otterley14• 5 years ago

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

nindalf10• 5 years ago

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is.

It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be.

I don’t know how every Integrity system could be modified to make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how to codify it in a way that would seem “fair”. If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.

gwright• 5 years ago

Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society,

Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help".

As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.

q1w23• 5 years ago

The real underlying issue is that high profile accounts are targeted by groups of users who "report abuse" simply because they don't like that sports team/politician/etc...

High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.

acoil• 5 years ago

Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people- its in the name. Who's face is prettier?

zepto2• 5 years ago

Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.

smsm426• 5 years ago

I think people that work on this feature mean well - or at least they think that they mean well. But as a result, we have a two-tier system where the peasants have one set of rules and the nobility has an entirely different one. It may have started as a hack to correct the obvious inadequacies of the moderation system, but it grew into something much more sinister and alien to the spirit of free speech, and is ripe for capture by ideologically driven partisans (which, in my opinion, has already happened). And once it did, the care that people implementing and maintaining the unjust system have for it isn't exactly a consolation for anybody who encounters it.

q1w23• 5 years ago

You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work.

Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team.

If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.

Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?

nindalf10• 5 years ago

Let me try to explain it again. Suppose an integrity system has a true positive rate of 99.99%. That would be good enough to deploy right? Except that when applied to millions of accounts, 0.01% is still a massive number of people. This is even worse when those people are unusual in some way. For example they might open conversations with hundreds of strangers a day for good reasons. But their behaviour is so similar to those of abusive accounts that they get penalised.

You might say that maybe 99.99% isn’t good enough and the engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.

Your concerns about different treatment for some people is valid. But again, their experience is different. For example, if an account or content is reported by hundreds of people it’ll be taken down. After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right? Except celebrities often are at the receiving end of such campaigns. There needs to be exceptions so such rules aren’t exploited in such a manner.

jensensbutton• 5 years ago

Meh, we already live in a world with one set of rules for the peasants and another for the nobility. Seems like just another area where Facebook reflects the real world.

winternett2• 5 years ago

I agree with the perspective of peasants and nobility being at play...

Remember back in the day when a friend got a new game console and invited you over to check it out with the ideal that you'd get to try it but they only had one controller? Really all they wanted to do was have you come and watch them play, and you sat there until you got bored of never having a chance to engage with it? That is the modern social media experience.

They play with your ability to be visible even to people that follow you for updates on your posts. The only way for non-elites (people deemed worthy of ranking) is to pay for ads, which appear as lower quality "promoted" content.

The model of social media started with everyone on the same playing field, but there are so many dimensions that can be manipulated to keep users thinking that it is functional while these sites change to serving the purpose of generating revenue for partners and paying interests underneath a façade of being fair communities. If you speak out against them, they censor you as well, all behind the scenes.

It's simply better to go back to creating independent sites, and then to hope you get ranked fairly on Google, and that people bookmark you... We become powerless when we allow corporate control of our communication, because governments are not aware nor vigilant of/to the impacts to regulate social sites until it's far too late, and because profit is king in that world over simply doing what is fair and positive. The business model feeds misinformation, chaos, disharmony, and conflict, just like reality TV does now, Why? Because it keeps people glued to their screens.

Even these platforms are terrified of instituting positive changes out of fear of losing their market share and user base... Overnight Twitter, FaceBook, IG, or any of these sites can lose their user base and reach just like Club House and Vine... That has to be said as well.

A big problem is that many accounts that post sensationalized (violent, graphic, sexual) content are really run by people that are building follower accounts to sell later on, as a symptom of heavily limited organic account growth (the ability to get followers) on these platforms... People build accounts by posting wild content and then sell them on the black market to others who start out looking like popular individuals because the accounts come with followers already included. Being successful on social media is no longer about having quality content, it's about how much you pay and how professional your image is... No wonder why class-ism has taken hold on it all.

There are still plenty of ways of maintaining fairness on any of these communities/platforms, and company leadership needs to go back and review the original promises they made to everyone in order to build their current user base (promises that they've all now totally broken) and fix those issues as the primary basis for resetting their flaws and oversight.

dundermuffl1n• 5 years ago

Most of your response treats the service and its flaws as an engineering problem, whereas the ramifications in the real world aren't something Facebook gets to absolve itself from. They need to own the problem completely. If they can't solve the issue through engineering, it is their responsibility to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

I disagree.

Let's take your example of Mark Z.

What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects?

A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device.

I could think of a lot of people that would find it useful.

Or allow setting up 2FA token (other than mobile) correctly.

Instead what FB does is make it impossible to secure your account because they insist whatever you want you should always be able to recover your password with your phone number.

Years ago when I was still using it (I had reason) I tried to secure it with my Yubico. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to configure FB to not allow you to log in on a new device without the key.

I understand how the discussion probably went: "Let's make it so that we can score some marketing points but let's not really make it requirement because we will be flooded with requests from people who do not understand they will never be able to log in if they loose the token."

But that's exactly what I want. I have a small fleet of these so it is not possible for me to loose them all but unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't do it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account so it is not possible to log in the next time without the token.

Ansil8494• 5 years ago

unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't do it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account so it is not possible to log in the next time without the token.

This is a great point. AFAIK, Google is the only service which allows you to set mandatory U2F login requirements. Does any other service offer this functionality?

cbsmith5• 5 years ago

The never allowing multiple tokens things drives me nuts.

bo10242• 5 years ago

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies.

I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left.

You can hire whole teams to prevent singed fingers or protect certain possessions, but the point of a fire is to burn. If there are no good solutions while maintaining FB's core approach and business model, then it would be better for the world if it were extinguished.

cbsmith5• 5 years ago

Note that moderation is not part of the business plan. FB was pretty much dragged kicking and screaming into that function.

helen___keller• 5 years ago

It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left.

Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general.

Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube even (personal experience: I have a family member that was radicalized by misinformation on the internet. It was all on Youtube, she had never even used Facebook).

I've noticed that people go a lot harder on Facebook than on other tech companies. I think Facebook's reputation is well deserved, but I do think that reputation should be shared with really all social media in general.

josefresco3• 5 years ago

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article.

Is everyone at Facebook this naive? You didn't think a system that creates a secret tier of VIP accounts where the rules (and laws) don't apply while publicly claiming the opposite would end up ... in the news?!?!

anigbrowl3• 5 years ago

One of the nice things about transparency is not having to engage in performative theatrics at a later date.

cheath• 5 years ago

One of my favorite things about HN is seeing people come out of the woodwork to raise their hand and say that they worked on a system and give their insight. Thanks for sharing this perspective.

rwmj• 5 years ago

So when Mark Zuckerberg buys a new phone or whatever, what happens?

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

My bet is he emails the auth team and gives as much info as he can about the device. Then they create auth rules as if a regular login had happened.

I also assume if he's on the internal network it might be easier to just manually allow auth attemps from a few internal IPs for a few seconds.

schwank• 5 years ago

This system also made it impossible for me to ever log in again. It had been a few years since I used FB but some friends tagged me at an event, so I figured what the heck.

I was presented with a system I had never configured, which asked me to contact people I don't know to get them to vouch for me. At the same time my FB profile was blackholed, and my wife and long time actual friends can't even see that I exist anymore. Just some person that astroturfed my name with no content (I have a globally unique name).

So I no longer exist from FB perspective, which made both my decision to not use FB as well as never use any FB products like Occulus much easier.

tlear2• 5 years ago

You are surprised that after blatantly lying for years the truth came out?

I mean unless you are the 5th directorate of KGB.. but even then shit like this always comes out.

sub7• 5 years ago

"I was only following orders"

iammisc• 5 years ago

That's all well and great, but your comment as an insider directly implicates Facebook CEO of perjury by lying to congress. During a hearing he claimed all users were treated equally. This is clearly not the case.

Perjury before congress can result in jail time and I hope he's made an example of.

tomp• 5 years ago

Almost the same as the COVID restrictions.

Why? Because the public wants restrictions to feel safe, while the elite wants to be free and independent. Each gets what they want.

misiti3780• 5 years ago

"In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook."

Ouch

threatofrain• 5 years ago

I’m not sure how we can ever expect FB to treat everyone fairly; there isn’t a system on earth which does so, including any judiciary ever. Imagine that I were treated the same as a president or king.

paulluuk2• 5 years ago

Why should you be treated worse than a president or king?

nradov4• 5 years ago

Because Facebook is a for-profit private business, not a charity or government.

pueblito• 5 years ago

At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter.

Why the SEC?

ilikejam• 5 years ago

Because everything everywhere is securities fraud.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

hapless• 5 years ago

Facebook are infamous liars, but journalists keep covering Facebook as if their various PR statements are true

This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, ever changes

Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting the public, journalists are shocked, shocked that FB would do something like this.

dralley• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5CTxckRywg&t=2543s

gverrilla• 5 years ago

journalism is a very corrupt industry

mox1• 5 years ago

Is it really that bad that they apply slightly different sets of rules to accounts with more notoriety?

For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers?

Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't).

I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.

rosmax_1337• 5 years ago

The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".

It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible ofcourse.

The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing more or less the same happen in the west about our own controversial issues.

[sarcasm not directed at you] But it's ok. In the west companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do business with whoever they want. It is not censorship therefore. [/sarcasm not directed at you]

bmhin• 5 years ago

The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".

This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.

And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.

I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.

Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.

wldcordeiro• 5 years ago

The same is true of its advertisements. 'High-profile' organizations get freedom to literally spam you and the report action is meaningless.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

Yes. In both directions: 'Low-profile' advertisers (millions of dollars per year is still low-profile) meanwhile get the nonsensical AI rejections and shadowbans

winternett2• 5 years ago

This is the reality of our new modern world that spans far beyond Facebook.

It is the popular, chosen, and paying that succeed on a dramatically increasing level, bolstered online by code and algorithms. This is how ideological and sales monopoly is bolstered and protected with promotion, paywalls, and glass ceilings.

It is no wonder why wealth inequality is surging worldwide as it's becoming more impossible to find wealth for everyone but those chosen and those in control...

The very minute Facebook and Twitter changed timelines to non-linear formats, and when Reddit began to hide downvotes, the ruse began... I subconsciously doubt that we can really trust analytics properly anymore to be honest, because there now always seems to be a hidden agenda in IT now to suit a specific purpose like profit, messaging, promotion, or subversion.

I'm no crusader, but the ideal that anyone can find success on their own merits and hard work is a lie in the digital world especially now, and a lot of the people that look like successful business minds are in reality just wealthy starters that are losing money they started out with while "portraying themselves" as successful and self made...

The few platform providers/controllers are the only ones making new money, this is why they have so much disposable cash that they spend on wasteful things like flying penis shaped objects outside of the atmosphere, and on failed ideas like triangular shaped pick up trucks...

Talent, wisdom, track-record, and accomplishment are being overlooked for Sensationalism, wealth, and popularity at an all time high in my opinion... This unreasonable and harmful hypocrisy is a critically bad trend that is being promoted, made popular, and deceptively normalized by social media sites as engineered hype.

No wonder why it's driving people to do bad things to hop onto the popularity train... :/

jmwilson• 5 years ago

Strong opsec that the supporting documents are actual photos of a computer screen from the visible moire (or somehow altered to look that way).

After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).

Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring everything down to the system call level, and practically every access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ... congratulations, you're caught.

nickysielicki• 5 years ago

The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).

Well that, and the fact that his face was immediately to the left of his name.

killion• 5 years ago

Here is the Apple News link. If you have News+ you can read the article…

https://apple.news/A7aEPaMT1SOSmVLGU7J_EOQ

egypsy31• 5 years ago

Sean Hannity promoted gun sales on his FB. When reported they said it did not violate their rules. When appealed they upheld that original decision. He was given an exemption. Now I get it.

jmull• 5 years ago

This was very obvious already (though it's good they did the reporting). We all watched certain high-profile users flouting the rules constantly.

Jasper_2• 5 years ago

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until backlashed pushed them out.

If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by accident.

I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination, achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't know that going in...

docmars• 5 years ago

Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and curate absolutely everything that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by their political partners, and their team of fact checkers complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme partisan players who won the Elite Olympics™ with their nearly infinite wealth and sway.

shadowgovt7• 5 years ago

It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."

danielrpa• 5 years ago

And the size of this problem, managing the entire human race, is part of why they make so much money. They are in front of a lot of people and extracting value from them.

So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring some benefits to people, it also does a lot of harm, to the point that I'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or even if it's possible to have a net positive company in this space).

civilized• 5 years ago

Privatize gains, socialize losses: not just for the finance industry!

nindalf10• 5 years ago

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.

I can't feel pity

No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less.

I feel like you really wanted to get all of this off your chest and then replied to me because the comment was high up.

dataflow• 5 years ago

> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"
Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.

Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:

> "With time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over."

Jasper_2• 5 years ago

I read your comment a bit like a defense of Facebook, saying "you know, when you scale to millions of people, it's really hard and expensive! Cut them a bit of slack"

I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their moderation systems were ready.

For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping to fix the system.

dang• 5 years ago

Please don't fulminate on HN or take threads on generic-indignant tangents. Those are much less interesting and usually turn nasty. Substantive critique is welcome, but if you reply to a comment you should really be replying to something specific in that comment, and you definitely shouldn't be blasting the other user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

So the more followers someone has, the less scrunity of their content to make sure it follows Facebook's guidelines they get... this seems backwards.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

Indeed, and therefore it reveals that enforcing guidelines is not the priority.

mannanj• 5 years ago

I got banned yesterday for quoting a nazi official on propaganda:

“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” - Joseph Goebbels

Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks.

Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in which another organization now decides you are dangerous and censors your presence from the internet independent of what you say.

bvhg33• 5 years ago

I don't use facebook but HN has censored many of my comments over the years and shadow-banned multiple accounts. Information is dangerous.

SV_BubbleTime4• 5 years ago

I was banned from Facebook market place for selling a computer with a bad bitcoin joke in the description. Because the computer had an RTX3090 in it (surplus company PC) I wrote something like "Good for making dinosaurs launder money for you if you're into mining".

Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful who your target is, as per your quote.

js2• 5 years ago

FB's AI has no sense of humor. I got banned for 24 hours for this:

https://ibb.co/ysFwkCY

https://ibb.co/VjLZhPQ

otterley14• 5 years ago

Let’s be fair here; quoting Goebbels is never a good idea unless you’re writing a history book or a research paper. If you don’t understand why, the problem is you, not Facebook.

shadowgovt7• 5 years ago

The thing about what Facebook is doing is that it may be impossible. And if it's not impossible, it may be a profoundly bad idea.

Facebook is trying to build a social network with 100% reach and a userbase beholden to a globally uniform set of rules (where possible; the laws of individual nations will forever intervene). This is not something that has ever succeeded. We don't actually know, apriori, whether you can govern the whole of humanity under one set of norms. It's never been done.

It's possible it fundamentally can't be done... That the end result of this experiment is that Facebook fractures and ends up either having to vend multiple views of its userbase with different rules (like Reddit) or has a large chunk of the human populace it can never get on-board. But we should keep in mind what the goal is.

NullPtrEx• 5 years ago

I mean... we all already knew this

aaroninsf• 5 years ago

Another week, another detailed account of the hubristic sociopathic amoral culture that defines this firm.

If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them, you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you should find another mechanism to stay in touch.

Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war that is currently destroying the west.

haspoken• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/3fE10

5faulker• 5 years ago

Managing a large-scale community is not easy. The rules are still evolving and AI have not taken control over the world, so we'll see.

ThinkBeat• 5 years ago

It is extremely distressing that a few companies, all located in the same country, and many located in the same state, if not quite the same city, run by a few men with similar politics has the immense power that they do.

Some people do not quite understand why.

Imagine in they were all Russian and owned by friends of Putin.

It should be a matter of national security for other nations to develop regional competitors. It should also be in the inrest of the US to have more internal competition.

This is not easy.

Making Facebook 3.0 is not the problem, though running at Facebook scale is a challenge.

It is how to get users to adopt it. As has been the problem for US upstarts as well.

Thankfully a lot of younger people want other social network platforms than Facebook, but it is a bit pointless when the owners of the new networks are the same people who own the old ones.

I guess TikTok proves it can be done. It also proved how upset US social media gets when competition knocks on their doors.

China, by locking out competition, developed products that are used domestically. There are drawbacks and negative effects of that as well.

I dont know how big VK is in Russia.

Ideally Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram would be broken into 250 or so different companies spread out among different nations and regions.

danielmarkbruce• 5 years ago

If you zoom out, it's not especially concerning.

The history of media companies suggests all of these companies will become less influential in little time. A few people used to own radio stations. Then it was TV stations. Overlapping them was newspapers/magazines. Things come and go, they tend to concentrate power, but they don't seem to last very long. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are young. There is little indication they'll have much influence in 20 years.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

True, but lots of harm can be done in 20 years and lots of harm was done by concentrated media in the past (eg all the cases in Manufacturing Consent)

deltron3030• 5 years ago

They won't get broken up because western govs want to compete with China and have similar control while still being able to fly under the freedom flag. FB is a virtual China, "soft authoritarianism" basically.

Jensson• 5 years ago

They will get regulated by governments though, there is no reason those companies should have that kind of power.

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

Indeed. I can see the logic for the US - accept that these guys milk your own citizens a bit in exchange for bringing in loads of cash from abroad plus massive spying and influence capabilities wrt the rest of the world. But why GB, EU etc go along with it is beyond me. Seems like a strategic blunder.

xtat• 5 years ago

Hearkens oligopoly when only the already powerful can talk. Baby steps.

balozi• 5 years ago

Technically, all these users are getting Facebook services for free. Is the complaint here that some people are receiving lesser free services than other people's free services?

If that's the case then we need to look at the value of said free services.

beezischillin3• 5 years ago

Outside of the Facebook issue, can you ever really automate solutions for managing society-scale interactions while still being fair to people?

If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into corporate budgetary restrictions (you’re not worth it but the celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social and societal consequences of this?

alanlammiman13• 5 years ago

depends on your definition of 'automate'. If you mean by computer software, perhaps not, but it begs the question of why one would presume that automation to be necessary. If you just mean 'software' (not necessarily computer software), then yes, rule of law is software that has scaled to manage society scale interactions and run for hundreds of years. Whether it is 'fair' is still debatable, but it is at least more legitimate than FB's system.

beezischillin3• 5 years ago

I don't believe that you can manually moderate platforms at this scale. Even with the hybrid model of some manual moderation, I've read a lot of articles on the content they're forced to deal with crushing their mental health.

Add to that politics intervening threatening regulation unless they're allowed to tilt the scales. I can't even imagine how endlessly complicated that gets.

I've been debating this question internally for a while and also the question of algorithms. Subjectively speaking it seems to me that it's just as herculean of a task to come up with an algorithm that provides quality content to just about any user. I've tried some of these "alt-tech" sites/servies that claim to have no feed algos other than popularity and even the ones that have a few quality channels on them have their front pages flooded with all sorts of cooky, weird, bad material.

This is not a defense of Facebook (or Twitter), just some thoughts I had for a while now.

mbostleman• 5 years ago

All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

narrator• 5 years ago

I have been better trying to understand how the world will change under China's hegemony. To that end, I have been studying Neo-Confucianism. That being adaptations of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese philosophy of governance, to the 21st century. Facebook's policy seems very neo-Confucian.

"Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point of view, people are unequal—as they differ in virtue, intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible to give everyone equal rights without considering their standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal rights or obligations."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing_(Confucian)

darthvoldemort• 5 years ago

They should have this a paid-for feature. If people care and want humans to look over their posts, etc, then they can pay $10/month or more. Then it won't be just celebrities it could be anyone. The program could pay for itself.

KhayriRRWoulfe• 5 years ago

Accounts and pages that have the blue checkmark on Facebook are exempted to all of its rules. The reviewers do not take down blatantly hateful and discriminatory content when these are posted by verified accounts.

adminscoffee• 5 years ago

dating apps have been doing this for years

grapist4202• 5 years ago

this is totally reasonable and arguably necessary for a platform. High profile users are going to be targeted for reporting much more, and the consequences of a false suspension are more visible for them. Think of it like how you might whitelist people who you trust from auto moderation or rate limits on Reddit or some other site if you trust them because the auto mod makes mistakes or you want to give them more options. Obviously FB and Twitters moderation sucks, but that isn’t related to this directly

neycoda• 5 years ago

This is true! They make them too much money or they'll cause too much trouble because of their clout if they complain.

Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

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