Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

I appealed multiple times but Twitter’s appeal process is a sham for us little people. I doubt any humans ever looked at my account.

It is only when you start having strangers talking to strangers that you run into a need for moderation, and even there you should be able to scale by sharding and punting the problem to others: if you have a group--similar to a real-world club--the moderation is on you, as the issues in your community shouldn't leak to people who haven't joined your community (and if people leave your community because you fail, all the better). The only real issue is that Facebook wants to--for the increased engagement, and thereby ad revenue--run a ton of recommendation algorithms that shove content from people you have no affiliation to in your face constantly (which one might notice should already be considered antithetical to the design of a social network) which leads to a ton of stranger-to-stranger interactions that are entirely "on Facebook" to ensure are clean.

Don't worry, Google's already doing it. And destroying your digital life if you've put too much stuff in their care. With the characteristic Google customer service of "go fuck yourself".

https://archive.ph/W41mf

I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook didn't just "not show the picture" and they actually forwarded your info to police or some three letter agency. You're probably flagged already. Probably being watched more closely as a result of your "perversion" and clearing up the matter with Facebook may not matter to anyone else they shared that particular data point with.

I agree you should get the hell away from facebook, but this kind of thing won't stop there. Apple wants to scan your personal files and so does Microsoft (last I checked Windows 10 already records and sends to MS the filename of every image you open in their "Photos" app and how long you spent looking at it). When your OS is acting against you, or even your cameras there won't be anything you can really stop using.

Just a minor correction, the Polish were sent to Haiti in 1802, way before Napoleon had started losing.

I think the "reddit model" where you have smaller communities with community mods works much better than the Facebook or Twitter model where there's one "global community". Not that reddit's moderation is perfect or that you can 100% rely on community mods, but overall, it seems to work much better.

Even from a product point of view, that's basic: your product feature doesn't pass quality, you don't ship it.

If a construction company said: “The only projects we can make a profit on are skyscrapers, but we do not know how to make a skyscraper without having it fall down and kill everybody in it.” They are not allowed to build skyscrapers no matter how important it is to their bottom line.

The problem with “Jews destroyed German economy before the war” is that it’s extremely vague and difficult to verify. There’s no good basis for the claim, but it’s not even a historical detail that could be easily verified; it’s more of an overarching theoretical opinion.

As for “Jews were murdered by Germans during the war”, sure. That’s an extremely well documented fact. They were also murdered by Romanians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other collaborators, but in context, we know that the Germans were organizing the whole thing. We also know that there’s a different context today in 2022 where some people might want to emphasize and others might want to minimize the complicity of Ukrainian collaborators.

I disagree. The problem is that nobody is willing to be realistic about the limitations of automated moderation and proceed accordingly.

If we can't create an automatic method that catches context, the solution isn't to bemoan that AI can't magically do what we want. The solution is to remove the rules that require AI to understand context in the first place, because it is fundamentally outside of our technical ability, and any attempt to achieve it will fail.

The problem is people who think that context-based censorship is reasonable for a massive platform. It simply is not. It is reasonable at an individual level. It is reasonable at an interpersonal level. It's even reasonable at a small-group level, where specific individual human beings who are invested in the community can be aware of these context issues.

It is not reasonable at Facebook scale, full stop. Facebook should not be in the business of deciding to ban things like this. That is a responsibility that belongs at a lower level. What does that look like in practice?

If an individual posted it on their wall:

* That individual uses their judgement and chooses to post it or not

* The people who see it use their judgement and click the block button if they don't like it

If an individual posted it in a small group:

* The group can socially police such actions by commenting that they are upset by it

* The group's administrators can privately reach out to the person who posted it, explain that they can't post such things in that group, explain why, and explain what actions they could take to remain in good graces

* The group's administration can make a judgement call and remove the post, not on the basis of crude keyword detection, but on the basis of human understanding

If an individual posted in a large group:

* The large group can adopt clear and unambiguous rules that do not require context to administer, and enforce them accordingly on a case-by-case basis

* The large group can pre-commit to not dealing with such issues, and require their members to deal with it privately, like human beings

Trying to automate this process will always fail, and it will cause massive false-positive and false-negative issues as it does so. Engineers used to understand these concepts when I first entered industry 20 years ago. It's very disappointing to me that they either can't or won't now.

It was a plain power struggle where two superpowers decided to invest their resources to deny the other a base in Africa. The local proxies were fine with this since they wanted nothing but to kill each other. The result was a bloodbath that went on for decades.

Norm MacDonald (I didn't even know he was sick) is said to have made the following quote, which is an interesting filter to look at all you know about history through.

"It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?"

> will not be recognized by any machine we have nowadays. The first is true, the second is bullshit, how algorithm can now this?

Forget algorithms for a second, even humans can't adequately judge nuanced issues, particularly issues that they're unfamiliar with and lack the context around, and particularly with a definitive time limit to work against.

Now think about how social media giants operate. They have teams all over the world, say in Bangalore, trying to judge the nuanced political arguments of foreigners having discussions about their own country's history that they don't know intimately. Oh, and they probably have to judge most issues in less than 30 seconds or they'll be too slow to keep their job.

It's like asking an average American to intelligently weigh in on some complicated political argument around Kashmir with a few seconds to read a post and decide who's claim is right. It's absolutely ridiculous that this is the moderation standard that exists.

Like voting weights the value of peer's votes and such.

I think it's the only way.

Otoh, the true Lord of the Flies might emerge that way. Maybe democracy is inherently flawed. I dunno. Experiments are called for.

How do we test social media designs?

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

I advertised some masks my grandma has sewn on FB. It was ok, expansive clicks like always but ok. This was running for at least a week or two. But when I changed some text it triggered a new ad review and within no hour my account was banned. It didn't even took a hour to deny my appeal as well and my account was lost forever (without ever naming any reason)

This account had 50+ (harmless) groups with way over 100k followers as well as a few thousand dollars in ad spend just that year. I didn't socialize at all on Facebook which I guess made my account fishy to some degree but all data was correct and passport verified.

This is the reason I completely ignore Facebook and all its platforms for whatever reason these days. I don't care if it could help my business, it's not worth the trouble.

Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time?

Do they lie about the review?

Is the reviewer so out of touch they don’t recognize real violence vs just the use of “beat?”

Skynet is here.

https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133

Not that that's practical for a mom and pop shop.

See my other comment on this article for another (less important) example. I'm guessing they're simply passing at least some % of them through a secondary automatic classification system.

Why would you let fairness get in the way of revenues?

Do you seriously believe it was Facebook that caused the film to fail?

I do wonder though... a lot of the ability for these companies to even exist at this scale is because they use a small amount of ppl in the loop.

So was it worth it to let these behemoths prosper so we can get these services for a low price, but suffer these sort of consequences?

Unless they pay for their publications (aka ads), in that case FB has a history of letting the most horrible shit slip "regrettably through their screening team". Bollocks.

So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms).

And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have optimized away individual decision-making as outlets for passion, we see a surge of the good-old tribal instincts.

Cancel culture is certainly a progress from stabbing and eating the members of the competing tribe, it is still a manifestation of the same kind of instinct that will bring nothing good until people find (or, likely, create) a bigger problem to worry about.

But I think we must also look why they end up this way. My thoughts are that a small portion of the public reacts so strongly and loudly to any minor mistake that it turns into national conversations. Ironically through their very platforms and algorithms that optimize for engagement (fighting). So we then paint these small populations as representative populations and make mountains out of mole hills.

I actually do believe a better algorithm would alleviate some of the issues. But I do agree that it is not a cure-all. The problem appears to be quite complex and many aspects are driven from or coupled with factors outside the control of social media platforms.

Even here, where you would think people would know better, you still see people insist that it's not censorship because it's not the government doing it.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm

> Any fair-minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ʻco-ordinationʼ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ʻit wouldn't doʼ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ʻnot doneʼ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ʻnot doneʼ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.

...

> It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ʻvested interestsʼ. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) is headline news. It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which attacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure.

> But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable. Any large organisation will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicise unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Herald for what they are. What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed.

> This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realised, for ten years earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly me whole of the highbrow press.

> Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and me urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalisation. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on me wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in me purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in me Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now.

And social media companies only control what is said on their platform not "online" aka the entire internet as you said

The biggest problem I'd say isn't necessarily the websites themselves but stuff like the app store and google play store, and things like infrastructure providers. Having your social media be removed from the apple store/google play store is basically killing them in the mass market, and we all know how incredibly selective they are especially when it comes to forbidding platforms that may contain porn(like tumblr for example and initially gab) while also but still allow twitter that is completely inundated with it. And that's before mentioning the downright mental idea that payment processors can just decide to not work with you anymore.

The social media itself I feel is the least of the things that would benefit from being treated closer to a public "utility" for the lack of a better word.

We're way past the point where people can just build their own stuff and be independent when targeting a significant audience(and sometimes even a smaller niche one), you need the support of payment providers, you need the support of app stores, you need the support of ddos mitigation companies/cdn's (especially in a post IOT world where your toaster is part of a botnet), and the list goes on.

If I had to guess, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and every business reliant on selling adverts is getting desperate.

I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core product care?

I mean, they're not banned from Facebook, but the title didn't say that either. It said that the company Facebook banned a film. Which it did.

The chaotic evil in me loves this because it opens up many ways to get away with bad takes.

Eyeballing the difference between Ashkenazi and a regular person from Central or Eastern Europe is mission impossible.