Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

Trust and safety is a cost center, and not valued in Tech.

If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).

If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.

But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.

Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.

Because the business model is malicious.

Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.

But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.

Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.

Also curious where the “millions” estimate for No Kings events today comes from.

Quoting tptacek from your link: “Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.”

HN guidelines make it clear: “Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”

It may be that there are politics in everything, but that doesn’t mean we need to discuss those politics here. Especially because those politics usually drown out the curiosity. Curiosity is what makes HN interesting for so many

HN's system of treating flagging as a mega-downvote doesn't help, but ultimately I don't think they are putting that much weight on the scale themselves.

- If the answer is yes, then the parent poster would excoriate the respondent for being a horrible person.

- If the answer is no, then the parent poster would triumphantly crow that the respondent is not actually against deplatforming / pro-free speech after all.

Astute HN readers should immediately be able to spot the problem: the false dilemma fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming, which is obviously nonsensical; few, if any, such people exist.

So we see that it is an attempt at a gotcha but it doesn't hold up when examined. I have no idea why people think it's clever.

Sometimes the trolling took the form of high-volume contrarian posting, but the trolls would also post porn and pictures of gendered violence in the comments on nearly every single article.

The way Jezebel dealt with it was through a variant of commenter whitelisting. Unapproved commenters (including yet-to-be-banned trolls) would have their comments in a purgatory until approved, visible only to those who have opted in.

A community like Jezebel cannot exist when supposed free-speech absolutists have their way and protect the trolls. When the free speech of trolls is prioritized, their targets are denied freedom of assembly and freedom of association.

These are all private fora so the US Bill of Rights doesn't actually come into play. But what episodes like today remind us is that the commitment of platforms like Meta and X to ensuring full participation by their political enemies is weak.

We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.

I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.

I don't cast free speech in absolute terms, I take issue with those that do since it isn't a spectrum.

Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.

It just seems like these comments want to stir the pot

Just look at the signatories of the Harper's letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

The vast, vast majority have gone on to criticize Trump in his second term.

I am pointing out how that is a absurd moral argument deriving from the rule of thumb. If anything, the corollary is the literal opposite.

Any stupidity indistinguishable from malice should be treated the same.

The usage as a epistemological rule of thumb just points out how great harm is usually caused by stupidity, intentional or otherwise, rather than intentional desire to cause the specific harm. If you aim to reduce great harms targeting just malice is not merely inadequate, it is likely missing the overwhelming majority.

Only against the right wing's Bolsonaro. The left wing's Lula can do and is doing everything they punished Bolsonaro for back in 2022.

Also, taking the word of the attacker that their crime wasn't that bad, or was an accident, without evidence, is pretty silly behavior, especially when it's facebook, with their long history of malfeasance and deception.

> this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts.

It really isn't. Courts deal with the facts in political situations all the time. Here, they looked at the facts and made their decision. You can disagree, but it's not like you're "debating" a court ruling in doing so. The excuses you're tossing out were already tried and ruled dishonest by the courts, all the way up to the supreme court.

Also, your note about Facebook being fined for refusing to block right-wing hate speech and disinformation is actually counting against your claim that the courts are biased and Facebook is not. What happened to the blocks happening across the board irrespective of politics? Right-wing hate speech and disinformation is allowed, but innocuous left-wing mainstream political movements and politicians get blocked right before an election? That illustrates the exact opposite of what you claim. We're gonna need evidence to believe your and Facebook's unconvincing claims of an "accident" here.

0 — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137079

Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?

> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).

Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.

> The only reason this is newsworthy is

...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.

It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.