Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

Can Facebook tell the difference between interest in studying history and interest in repeating it? Interest in a skinhead band seems to only have one interpretation, but couldn’t Goebbels and Himler search queries just be to learn and see who is discussing them? I know I’ve spent a lot of time reading about WW2. I’m not trying to be obtuse, just ignorant to what degree Facebook can target different intents behind a query or interest.

View on HN

Not all skinhead bands are nazis. It might be seen as a minor point but I am worried how quickly we make sweeping appraisals based on partial information.

Early skinhead culture and music overlapped heavily with Jamacain rude boy culture.

There's even a group who is (was?) dedicated to skinheads fighting racism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Preju...

I didn’t know that. You’re right; I made an assumption without researching the band or the genre.

In fairness, the interest of Facebook is to target ads, so I don't think they really care. An impression on a user with Himmler interest is an impression on a user with himmler interest, a click is a click.

Now the folks monitoring at DHS? Yeah, I think they probably go to great lengths to try to differentiate and segment the population of people who look at extremist material of any kind.

Actually being interested in skinhead bands might also have a legitimate scientific intention when studying political extremism. Intention and interest are very difficult to distinguish.

This is a great point. How many high school kids doing school history reports are getting funneled into nazi indoctrination?

And you've described why I use DuckDuckGo when I want to learn about something like that. I have no idea how Google is interpreting my intent, if it is at all, and how it might come back to bite me in the future.

Do you think being a skinhead is a requirement for listening to a skinhead band?

I think it's absolutely a datapoint considered by any organization that is trying to build a comprehensive profile of citizens to catch people like this before they hurt anyone.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guar...

My understanding is that they rely on the reporting system because their whole curation model is built around assessing individual posts rather than patterns of activity.

I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of Hitler speeches on YouTube, just because I was historically interested in what the man actually said and how he said it. He's a fascinating person to study - also from a psychological point of view - precisely because of the horrible things that happened. Anyway, after that, YouTube kept recommending me nazi speeches for at least half a year. I remember how on some days I opened YouTube and Hitler kept reappearing on my front page. Now, I'm not a sensitive person so I don't mind, it's actually kind of hilarious. But after months of this, it irked me a bit.

Indeed, someone may have a very strong interest in Hitler and Nazis and Neo-Nazi culture without being one - aka a professor or researcher of authoritarian history.

I read a bit of history. I was once derided by a self-important house guest for having a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich with its visible swastika on my bookshelf.

She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of noted mass-murderer Che Guevara.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com