Comment by annexrichmond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by annexrichmond | Hacker News Reader

Since we're on the topic of automated algorithms, one thought I had, which I have trouble wording the right way (maybe someone can help me out here):

My problem with a lot of big tech compared to traditional companies is that they get to benefit from the economies of scale of software that affords them great profit margins and not deal with the consequences. For example, people constantly say that there's too much content for Facebook to moderate, etc. Then maybe this is a broken business model? Compare this to a mortgage servicer that is regulated to have sufficient customer support. Their budget to do this grows much more linearly while Facebook's budget for support, moderation etc grows far more logarithmically simply because they barely have any support.

I'm not suggesting Facebook should be policing content per se, but they should be required to handle incidents in a timely fashion whether it's removing illegal activity (or reversing a mistake thereof), helping victims escalate harassment to authorities, or whatever.

Yes, this costs a lot, but perhaps that should be the inherent cost of running such a platform.

Companies like Facebook & Google are able to scale up in part because they're avoiding spending money and time on moderation & customer support. If they were legally required to maintain a certain level of support, then that would help curtail their speed of scaling up, and probably be a good thing in general.

Comparing customer service of Facebook to a mortgage servicer is tricky because of the value and the volume. Facebook has orders of magnitude (I'll get 10,000x more) content to moderate than a mortgage servicer where they really only answer questions when something goes wrong (3x every 5 years) the stakes are a million times higher.

The options for social media are really free (or cheap) to use and occasionally bad moderation or pay $5 per post or comment ($10 for risky ones) that see multiple human moderators to limit abuse and false positives. Or no social media. My point is the amount and quality of moderation people say they want is more expensive than they'd pay for these services, but there's still a lot of value to them, so we're left with imperfect moderation.

So instead of the company bearing the cost of proper moderation we as a society are perfectly happy to let them offload the cost as an externality on all the rest of us? Before social media existed the world got along just fine - if these companies are causing problems then they need to address those problems or they can go back to not existing... both seem like perfectly reasonable options to me.

I agree with requiring them to cover any new costs they’re creating for society as a whole, but it definitely isn’t the case that “Before social media existed the world got along just fine”.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, sectarian terrorism, and that’s just what I remember from childhood. Go back further, Cold War nukes and McCarthyism and presidential assassinations, Trade Union strikes and The Winter of Discontent, the Winds of Change and the Cypriot war of independence[0].

We’ve always been like this; the question is if social media is making it worse, and how much worse.

[0] the Cypriot war of independence isn’t ever discussed in the UK, to the extent that until a few years ago I assumed Cyprus just used to be part of Greece and not under British colonial rule

This is typically discussed in terms of:

- Avoided negative externalities. FB/Google get to ignore the costs of insufficient moderation by imposing those on their users or third parties (say, the victims of the Myanmar genocide).

- Monopoly rents. By securing a position in which they are the arbiters of access control, these giants can set both prices and terms for participation.

There's another element you're suggesting to me as well, which I don't think I've seen anyone articulate before: large monopoly players such as Facebook and Google effectively emerge into a "naive environment", one in which the scale which they provide has not yet evolved threats. Any threats which do emerge co-evolve with the monopoly.

Subsequent entrants don't have this advantage. Whilst they do have the benefit of techniques for combatting such threats, they must address the threats from the beginning.

The threats might variously be spammers, various network attacks (most especially DDoS), sockpuppet and other misrepresentation and manipulation attacks, harrassment, and the usual laundry list of Trust & Safety issues.

The notion of co-evolving threats comes from biology generally, though I'd strongly recommend Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome which postulates that civilisations (themselves social networks) and their plagues co-evolve alongside one another. I've just learned that the Santa Fe Institute crowd are fans of Harpers (Geoffrey West and David Krakauer, in a recent Complexity podcast episode), as well as Neal Stephenson.

A few contentions:

- "Insufficient" moderation is not a cause for an externality. The default level of moderation in any system, whether in nature or on the Internet, is zero. To imply otherwise is is fallacious thinking. There is no duty of care on Facebook's part to prevent bad actors from using its services anymore than there's a duty of care for a random passer-by to stop a mugging.

- How does monopoly rent exist when nothing is being charged to the to the end-user?

Even the slightest degree of consideration will reveal multiple errors here.

When one possible outcome of failure to moderate is, for example, genocide, then yes a duty exists.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/07/rohingya-refugees-sue-facebook...

We've seen what the natural state of even modestly-sized fora with no effective moderation is. They simply don't function.

You'll find this in real-world spaces as well, in the forms of attractive nuisance, negligence, joint liability, and other forms. There are reasons venues provide security in potentially volatile crowd situations, from bars and nightclubs to sports arenas.

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