The ex-CIA agents deciding Facebook's content policy (2022)

https://mronline.org/2022/07/14/meet-the-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebooks-content-policy/

by WhereIsTheTruth • 11 months ago

112 69 11 months ago

mronline.org

buyucu4• 11 months ago

Meta has basically been taken over by US and Israeli intelligence agencies.

drukenemo• 11 months ago

It was always in their hands.

giancarlostoro2• 11 months ago

If you see "Trust and Safety" it is actually a partnership between major tech companies. It provides guidance on how their TOS / community standards should be defined. Twitter was also a member until Elon bought it out. This is where things like policies on misinformation come from (or anything in general really). Every major social media company you can imagine is part of it, Discord, Reddit, Meta, Apple, etc.

The part that always concerns me is things like this are ripe for abuse. Whoever controls the partnership potentially controls all major platforms. They'll say you dont have to follow it to the letter, but that doesn't mean some wont.

This is also why when reddit changes internal rules Discord follows suit.

I am interested in this subject because I've seen Facebook become hostile over the years on specific types of remarks. I actually quit Facebook over its AI moderation, I made a harmless meme / joke comment and it flagged me, and when I appealed, it flagged me. Meanwhile others post much worse and I get dinged for making meme references that harm no one, my what? 50 friends on facebook will read it and not get my reference?

I've also seen other platforms shift their policies (a reddit comment section today is a night and day difference from a reddit thread in say 2010).

Digital Trust & Safety Partnership website here:

https://dtspartnership.org/

impossiblefork2• 11 months ago

I think the model actually cares about where you post though, or at least there's some kind of location based standard.

I've used Reddit for ages, but recently received two 'account suspensions' both which misrepresented my remarks, one in which the appeal was ignored, the other in which the response to the appeal was a false claim that the remark was a threat.

But both happened very soon after I participated in discussions in /r/ukpolitics. I especially think they want to get rid of discussion concerning the proscription of Palestine Action. I don't think it's somebody from there following my comment feed and reporting things but instead something actually automated and part of Reddit itself, because it was rather fast.

hungmung• 11 months ago

/r/ukpolitics

Found your problem.

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

does "a partnership between major tech companies" mean "centralized control"?

giancarlostoro2• 11 months ago

That's my question after learning about DTS.

newsclues• 11 months ago

Partners are big tech and government (or government staffed and funded 3rd parties).

potato37328422• 11 months ago

It's not "centralized control" in the same way that a closed market with a few players not caring to compete on price isn't a "conspiracy" to keep prices high. Nobody is coordinating, corresponding or otherwise conspiring but everyone is smart enough to know what's good for them.

ninininino2• 11 months ago

From what I can tell (I have a coworker I get lunch with who works in the Risk & Policy side of TNS at a tech major), it's not necessarily a "here's the top-down orders of what our new policy will be" as much as:

1) the people in this sub-industry role attend conferences and network and make friends and build professional relationships (for job referrals if there are layoffs at one tech co but hiring in the same area at different tech co)

2) at conferences, in group chats (w/ friends made at other companies in previous roles or friends from said conferences), common news events, developments in the field, and trends are discussed and ideas bounced off each other, which means even if there's no top-down order, there's sort of an averaging-effect and consensus building and battle-testing of ideas and approaches

3) there's a revolving door of people who work at one company in this area developing real-utility experience that translates well to working at another, so people move about and policy ideas cross-pollinate and spread. if you plucked someone off the street, even if it helped ideologically diversify the pool, they would truly be less effective as they ramped up and learned.

You don't actually need anything nefarious to happen, just an insular, small community with similar educational backgrounds, shared values, etc. Not a lot of Repubs from Alabama decide to attend Barnard and study _relevant_humanities_field_slash_law_ and then join tech to try to fight injustice/CSAM/bias/misinfo/election interference at the right time during ZIRP and then build the resume to then continue to land those roles.

These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.

And even if you disagree with their moderation policy, there are huge, non-controversial areas you never see or think of that they are fighting everyday too (anti-terrorism, anti-suicide, connecting victims to resources, anti-CSAM, etc).

Probably the same way in physics departments, String Theorists hire other String Theorists and over time it grows and grows and grows. Or how economists all arrive at modern monetary theory.

PeterStuer2• 11 months ago

So you're saying it actually is a cabal?

potato37328422• 11 months ago

These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.

Exactly. Nothing intentionally nefarious is happening. Unintentionally nefarious things are happening all the time as a result of subsets of industries becoming insular circle jerks of like minded individuals. You see this in everything, it's not just for RightSpeak enforcers at FAANG.

It's just there's a lot more consequences for the rest of us bunch people at Meta do it to influence public discourse than when some business gets run off a cliff because the MBAs had too many sigmas or whatever.

lwo32k• 11 months ago

This is what Max Weber calls Moral Detachment. These people are not in direct contact with people who suffer. And so their intentions will always be mistrusted. Costs of which will mount with time and manifest in all kinds of shocks and surprises.

Worth looking at why the Church (which has survived much longer than govts, businesses, science/tech orgs) emphasizes direct contact with suffering, through things like Pastoral Care. This is not an accident. They have learnt that lesson the hard way again and again through out history.

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

My cousin doesn't buy it when I tell him the United States has more aggressively censored media than China.

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

we're 20 years into social media 1984 and Americans still want to believe that it's unimaginably worse in China.

ch4s33• 11 months ago

It seem by all account imaginably worse in China, particularly in Xinjiang. I might also call to attention the disappearance from western social media of a prominent Chinese maker. I'm also unaware of anyone in the US being sent to prison for political speech online.

vorpalhex2• 11 months ago

That statement is still incorrect. China censors directly and heavily, eg "pooh bear"

In the US you are still very much free to insult the president, etc but if you post things deemed to be pro-terrorist or against what the Government wants to promote on social media, it won't go anywhere. Firearms or vaping content during the Biden admin as an example.

The current admin has heavily gutted the federal funding and workforce that backed these efforts and issued bulletins to private industry, but I suspect there is still pressure from pseudo-government "advocates".

adamsb62• 11 months ago

You can buy Winnie the Pooh merchandise in every mall in China.

You can't use Winnie the Pooh as code to agitate against the government.

pizzathyme• 11 months ago

My understanding was in the US, they can openly criticize the government

You are saying that is inaccurate? Or you are talking about a different type of censorship?

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

speech is heavily, heavily restricted in the united states, in particular on American social media platforms.

there are a massive number of subjects which cannot be spoken about on social media without risking massive deboosting and the blacklisting of your accounts.

this censorship is directed by "former" CIA agents working at all major American social media companies. In other words, this is direct government censorship of private citizens' speech.

kelseyfrog2• 11 months ago

In China, dissent is caged because it still has teeth. In the US, free speech is allowed because the teeth are all gone. We parade the animal about, saying, "Look, we still have free speech", but it has no ability to bite.

I don't know what's worse, being trapped in a cage or de-fanged and let loose. I've only ever lived without teeth, so the idea of biting sounds almost beautiful.

aisosodndn3• 11 months ago

You can about some things. Others (most recently anything too anti Israel) will get you deported, debanked, etc.

The saddest part of US censorship is it isn’t even pro American. It’s pro American billionaires who are disproportionately pro Israel.

afroboy2• 11 months ago

Say something bad about Israel in your public social media.

euleriancon4• 11 months ago

The nature of Chinese censorship makes it difficult to provide hard numbers, but it really is worse. America's handling of censorship is certainly not the best, and it has gotten worse recently, but it is not on the level of China.

antonymoose3• 11 months ago

At least the Chinese have the courtesy to be obvious about it. The American and European powers pretend we’re free and open societies while actively undermining public speech that it doesn’t like.

1oooqooq• 11 months ago

there's a paper that compares both when it comes to promoting organized political action (which is the only type of censorship that is not morally justifiable under any semblance of democracy) and both countries scored the same low points.

both got high passing grades on allowing meaningless complaining about government.

ipython3• 11 months ago

Really? Who do you think douyin hires to perform content moderation for example?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714013

Also, don’t forget to obtain your icp license from the government before establishing a website in the mainland!

paxys• 11 months ago

And let me guess, you think the USA is currently more fascist than Nazi Germany?

afroboy2• 11 months ago

Yes, read what they did to Muslims in middle east.

IncreasePosts• 11 months ago

So what you're saying is "my cousin has viewpoints grounded in reality"?

elteto• 11 months ago

And he's right, one shouldn't buy into crap.

ChrisArchitect• 11 months ago

(2022)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191637

zthrowaway• 11 months ago

I remember when this was dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

r721• 11 months ago

Originally published: MintPress News

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

guizadillas• 11 months ago

Right now Tiktok is suppressing any content related to the LA protests, they adopted new terms to avoid this censorship by saying they are 'music festivals'

It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship

lobf• 11 months ago

It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship

A new way of speaking which removes nuance and is formed entirely of acceptable concepts and terminology as determined by the regime. We could call it newspeak.

Seems double-plus ungood to me.

legitster2• 11 months ago

Keep in mind the government pumps tens of thousands of enlisted through military intelligence analyst programs every year. These people are trained to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day reading mostly garbage and making objective summaries.

So a lot of highly trained intelligence analysts hit the market every year (I personally know about half a dozen). It's just going to be natural that some of the more experienced intelligence analysts are going to be sought out for these content moderation positions, especially now that foreign and nation-state actors are present.

I am pretty skeptical more of the more "deep-state"/"thought-police" concerns. Obviously these people are going to be biased towards collecting intelligence and collaborating with the government. But the CIA would almost certainly rather keep any media manipulation campaigns clandestine and in-house rather than trust former analysts to do their bidding.

skarz• 11 months ago

These people are trained to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day reading mostly garbage and making objective summaries.

You just described the entire Cyber Mission Force, lol.

MeIam• 11 months ago

Even the article itself gives people a pause in order to avoid being blacklisted.

It basically says that they are watching you so you will self censor.

The ex-CIA agents deciding Facebook's content policy (2022)

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