How Facebook Is Complicit in Myanmar’s Attacks on Minorities
Facebook faces accusations of favoring a majoritarian regime in Myanmar.
thediplomat.com
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Wildly overstated, and objectively wrong. I can't see anything in the details of the whistleblower case that's actually villainous, and I can't see any concrete "crimes" apart from "helps people with similar ideas to find and connect with each other (and some of those people/ideas are bad)"
I agree that social media has negative side effects, and afaict that's a direct consequence of optimising for engagement. FB is, at worst, a paperclip maximizer - there is no crime, and there's no villain*.
First Law- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third LawA robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Robots and artificial intelligences do not inherently contain or obey the Three Laws; their human creators must choose to program them in, and devise a means to do so. Robots already exist (for example, a Roomba) that are too simple to understand when they are causing pain or injury and know to stop.
I don't really see how it's possible to regulate the big social networks in a meaningful way. Do you have any suggestions?I find the argument that if you are using algorithms to choose what people see in their newsfeed then you are a publisher and should be regulated as such to be persuasive.
Erm ... the paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment where a simple algorithm innocently destroys the world. If only there was some way of making it obvious when some text was a link, eh @thumped ?comparing that to cute little bot that collects paperclips is wild understatment.
Maybe break them up a bit, they're too big, monopolizing the social media space. It might be better if there were more AI algorithms selecting and hiding stuff for people in opaque ways rather than just one.I don't really see how it's possible to regulate the big social networks in a meaningful way. Do you have any suggestions?
Wildly overstated, and objectively wrong.
there is no crime, and there's no villain
I guess framing it in those terms might create enough public outrage to fuel some political will to Do Something About It, but what can actually be done? I think your tobacco analogy is probably a good one, and I suppose regulations against optimisation-for-engagement could be created, but I don't really see how it'd be possible to enforce them in practice even if the political will existed. Are governments going to hire an army of algorithm experts to examine every social network's source code and make sure they're not optimising for the wrong things?
* Cory Doctorow himself is optimising his content for engagement by making these grandiose claims - he's doing exactly the same harmful thing that he's criticising FB for.
Erm ... the paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment where a simple algorithm innocently destroys the world. If only there was some way of making it obvious when some text was a link, eh @thumped ?
Well to begin with i'd ask our resident regulation expert @ann post if Ireland's newspapers regulations are any good? My understanding is that they are quite light touch, self regulating, and have led to the Denis O'Brien consortium of "Independent News & Media" leading with a far from independent stance on everything.I don't really see how it's possible to regulate the big social networks in a meaningful way. Do you have any suggestions?
Haha ok I concede this pointyes. but that’s a cheap point to try to score. no whataboutery on thumped! we’re better than that!
It's not though, it's more that it's incredibly difficult even for them to do anything about it. They've put in automatic filters for stuff. I see content all the time that's marked as ... oh I can't remember the exact wording, but it's something like "we think this is untrue". People who run ads on FB get their ad accounts disabled regularly because some bot has flagged the content as problematic when it actually isn't. That's why some famous people have the bot filters disabled and instead are (supposed to be) moderated manually - because the filters are AIs too and therefore get it wrong a lot of the timemost prosecutions for war crimes are prosecutions for *knowing that something was happening* and *choosing to do nothing about it* — which is exactly what facebook is doing
Hey, I'm not saying "let's not try". I'd love a job as a cyber cop reviewing FB's code.It's very easy to go "Oh it's too hard, can't be done, let's not try" and certainly big corporations have encouraged that kind of thinking from day one
it's incredibly difficult even for them to do anything about it.
This was directly aimed at your "crimes against humanity" accusation. They have discovered that there are harmful side-effects to what they are doing, and they are trying to eliminate those side-effects. That is not equivalent to "knowing something is happening and choosing to do nothing about it"in the technical sense, yes, this is absolutely true. it’s a bit like arguing that the tobacco company can’t invent a non-cancer-causing cigarette. so what?
This was directly aimed at your "crimes against humanity" accusation. They have discovered that there are harmful side-effects to what they are doing, and they are trying to eliminate those side-effects. That is not equivalent to "knowing something is happening and choosing to do nothing about it"
edit ... just another rhetorical point, really, it's not that relevant to this discussion one way or the other
Well to begin with i'd ask our resident regulation expert @ann post if Ireland's newspapers regulations are any good? My understanding is that they are quite light touch, self regulating, and have led to the Denis O'Brien consortium of "Independent News & Media" leading with a far from independent stance on everything.
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