Facebook Turned Off Search Features Used To Catch War Criminals, Child Predators, And Other Bad Actors (buzzfeednews.com) 84
The human rights and war crimes community is up in arms over Facebook's decision to turn off a set of advanced features in its graph search product, which is "a way to receive an answer to a specific query on Facebook, such as 'people in Nebraska who like Metallica,'" reports BuzzFeed News. "Using graph search, it's possible to find public -- and only public -- content that's not easily accessed via keyword search." The decision, which was not announced publicly, was likely made in an effort to limit data scandals and improve privacy. From the report: When Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced graph search in early 2013, he billed it as equal in importance to Facebook's News Feed and profile timeline. On launch day, the company also published a post offering journalists tips on how to use graph search. Over the years, graph search became a valuable tool for investigators, police officers, and journalists. At the same time, social media became a key source for uncovering war crimes, disinformation campaigns, child exploitation, and other crimes and abuses.
The move raised even more concern in the human rights and investigative journalism communities because Facebook appeared to thwart attempts to find workarounds. Henk van Ess, an investigator and trainer who works with Bellingcat, operates a tool that uses graph search to enable powerful searches of public content. After Facebook turned off some searches, he was able to find workarounds -- until the company blocked them. "I patched my tools 5 times and each time, after 2 hrs, the tools were crippled by FB," he wrote in a Twitter direct message. "Other toolmakers experienced the same." Van Ess now requires people to request permission from him to use his tool; he says he's been flooded with requests from people pursuing investigations "involving human rights abuses, war crimes, terrorism, extremism, white collar crime ... corruption, disinformation campaigns, environmental crimes, cybercrime -- the list just keeps on going." A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News: "The vast majority of people on Facebook search using keywords, a factor which led us to pause some aspects of graph search and focus more on improving keyword search. We are working closely with researchers to make sure they have the tools they need to use our platform."
The move raised even more concern in the human rights and investigative journalism communities because Facebook appeared to thwart attempts to find workarounds. Henk van Ess, an investigator and trainer who works with Bellingcat, operates a tool that uses graph search to enable powerful searches of public content. After Facebook turned off some searches, he was able to find workarounds -- until the company blocked them. "I patched my tools 5 times and each time, after 2 hrs, the tools were crippled by FB," he wrote in a Twitter direct message. "Other toolmakers experienced the same." Van Ess now requires people to request permission from him to use his tool; he says he's been flooded with requests from people pursuing investigations "involving human rights abuses, war crimes, terrorism, extremism, white collar crime ... corruption, disinformation campaigns, environmental crimes, cybercrime -- the list just keeps on going." A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News: "The vast majority of people on Facebook search using keywords, a factor which led us to pause some aspects of graph search and focus more on improving keyword search. We are working closely with researchers to make sure they have the tools they need to use our platform."
Loaded headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternate headline: Facebook turned off search feature used by oppressive governments and shadowy organizations to unmask dissidents, amass databases for political targeting, and otherwise surveil people who are too stupid to set the right privacy settings on their accounts.
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Alternate headline: Facebook turned off search feature used by oppressive governments and shadowy organizations to unmask dissidents, amass databases for political targeting, and otherwise surveil people who are too stupid to set the right privacy settings on their accounts.
Find all billionaires in San Francisco, CA who own multiple homes on a block, and do not have an ethical compass.
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Alternate headline: This is why we need Anonymity.
When I think of bad actors destroying the case for anonymity nobody does it better than Antifa.
I don't see a lot of bad acting (Score:1)
I'm just saying that if I had a choice between a roomful of angry Nazis and a roomful of angry antifa guys I'l pick Antif
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If you close your eyes then you don't see anything bad happening anywhere! This is why what you personally see is not a good indicator for what is reality. Antifa engaging in violence is easily found via a quick google.
I'll take an extremely small minority of socially-decried outcasts over a socially accepted and often defended real existing group which advocates and actively engages in violence any day of the week. Nazis are a boogeymen invented to excuse abhorrent behaviour. They simply are not a problem
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Nine in the USA over the last 37 years. Note that not all nine included actual casualties, since some were done after hours.
Hmm, the FBI is investigating about 900 "domestic terrorism" cases, which includes "white supremacists" as a subset. Note that there were ~50 murders last year that were linked to white supremacists in the USA. Out of about 16K murders....
I'm not sure I
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from them. A few heated protests, but the worst I've really seen out of the movement is some milkshaking and a few white supremacists getting punched.
I'd say that you weren't paying attention then but to be fair to you most news outlets have been misreporting events and giving Antifa a pass. Citation: https://quillette.com/2019/05/... [quillette.com]
Compare that to the number of Abortion clinics bombed and the noticeable upswing in violence from the white supremacists in general (which, let's not forget, side with the right wing in America) and I'll take Antifa any day of the week.
'white supremacists' is a term that gets thrown around so loosely these days that I'll have to ask you to be more specific. Did they just not vote for Hillary or is it more than that? I suspect that you don't want to go down the road of looking at violent incidents by race as a protected class will dominate the statistic
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Nope. The beaches of Normandy were "stormed" by scared 18 year old conscripts who would have been prosecuted for desertion if they refused to go to their deaths. It was the same on the other side.
You want to go after the real criminals? Go after the enablers, the "elites" that create the environment in which hate and bigotry thrives.
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Thars monies in them thar serchings, fuck off yeah free feeding leacherous dogs. That is all that is floating around in Facebook executive and board minds. No more free data mining of Facebook, want it, argh hargh, well bloody pay for that extortion material.
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They could have kept it available for trusted organizations.
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Like Buzzfeed?
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Note that all the data is public anyway, it's just the advanced search engine which they are taking away.
Presumably government agencies already have their own, even better search engine, e.g. X-Keyscore.
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With a warrant, the "trusted organizations" can go get this data. It's still there. They can go get it.
What they CAN'T do is trawl everyone's data to profile likely criminals. Because the 4th amendment exists and we are supposed to be "secure in our papers". Because otherwise we'll have a society constantly afraid of acting out of line and getting black-bagged in the night for political dissent, similar to the Red Scare or the bad times in communist countries.
How are they supposed to find war criminals... (Score:1, Troll)
...when there are so many conservatives left unbanned, so many examples of WrongThink that need to be suppressed, so many Social Justice Warriors that need to be appeased?
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LOL! In reality, I suspect the Facebook system was just overloaded by search requests from Slashdot users searching for:
"IT janitor from San Jose who works at 7 AM for a three letter agency in Palo Alto"
Re:How are they supposed to find war criminals... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah they seem to miss that those search features dont just let the good guys stalk the bad guys. It also lets the bad guys stalk the good guys.
A few years ago a friend of mine, a mother of 2 with political savy about as naive as you might expect was copping horrible harassment from some psychotic 14yo 4chan racist who was going after her , and sending threats about her kids and the like. I ended up using facebooks search features to track down this kids parents and have a word about what comes next unless
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Same problem Stalin faced. It takes time and effort to go through millions of people to find everyone who engages in wrongthink.
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Not anymore! There's an app for that.
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After all, who could be against any and all measures to put those bastards away?
This hurts a bit, but,
"Hear, hear, to the Facebook".
Well, the question is what is the algorithm used to say, decide someone is a pedophile? My guess is that Facebook's algorithms might have fingered some folks incorrectly. That could lead to all sorts of problems, from a innocent person being surveilled, or even arrested, and the possibility of Facebook being implicated in that.
Re:War criminals and pedobears (Score:5, Interesting)
Too often, evidence is manipulated to reinforce confirmation bias. We see it in political and religious belief sets, and we'd be remiss to imagine it doesn't exist in the persecution of the most easily reviled.
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As long as somebody powerful profits, evidence will always be manipulated, withheld, misinterpreted, placed and outright fabricated. Secret agencies consider this fair game to manipulate society and get rid of anybody that disagrees with them.
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To paraphrase physicist Matt Parker:
You can support any conclusion, to any level of precision, as long as you're willing to ignore enough data.
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Well, the question is what is the algorithm used to say, decide someone is a pedophile?
That's easy....they ask Elon Musk!
Zing!
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The algorithms don't decide anything. It's simply an advanced search tool that allows people investigating to more easily find public information. Any decisions are made by human beings.
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The algorithms don't decide anything. It's simply an advanced search tool that allows people investigating to more easily find public information. Any decisions are made by human beings.
In demonstrating the search, Zuckerberg typed in “Friends of Priscilla and me who live around Palo Alto” https://www.wired.com/2013/01/... [wired.com] and got a listing. It is a pretty darn amazing search only tool that will parse and search on that. As well, a project that had 50 engineers and 2 linguists working on it seems a little excessive for a fairly straightforward database search. There has to be some extensive background work going on to enable a search engine that works on queries like "Find
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Well, the question is what is the algorithm used to say, decide someone is a pedophile? My guess is that Facebook's algorithms might have fingered some folks incorrectly.
Apparently the algorithm can cut out the middle man and do the fingering all by itself.
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Well, the question is what is the algorithm used to say, decide someone is a pedophile? My guess is that Facebook's algorithms might have fingered some folks incorrectly.
Apparently the algorithm can cut out the middle man and do the fingering all by itself.
And we all know algorithms are really accurate, amirite? I do get the joke, though.
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Last I checked, most war criminals were safely at home, protected by a large national army. Dick is not at risk from FB "war crime investigators". George isn't. Tony isn't. Condoleeza and Collin aren't. Henry, Madeleine, Bill, Hussein - all safe.
So, why do we have this brouhaha again?
Redeeming features? No way! (Score:1)
Researchers find something USEFUL about Facebook.
Facebook blocks usage of these features.
Facebook will only allow society crushing features and outrage on their platform. Anything that actually might benefit humanity, that's not allowed.
Hindsight (Score:2)
But, and sorry for double post. These sound like the exact features Cambridge Analytica used to isolate voting blocks for targeted ads. So yeah. Just wanted to mention that part too. There's two sides to this coin.
And here we are (Score:1)
investigators, police officers, and journalists... (Score:1)
In other words, the tools were for use by
totalitarian state oppressors, enforcers and propagandist
I'm not just talking about China here.
The state and the party deserve to know all your personal information, but you can't have access to any information about them. They will filter it for you.
Graph search was useful (Score:2)
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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Obtain it? Yes. Easily? No. You've apparently never used anything like a reverse telephone directory, I take it. Without one, you have to go through every entry in the phone book looking for a match. Without graph search, sure, you could go through everyone's Facebook page and check for a match... but it would take you a while.
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Facebook did what Facebook wanted (Score:1)
Wait, do you think Facebook owes you something? Because if you do, go send them an invoice.
Otherwise they get to do WHATEVER THEY WANT and we get to participate or not.
Oh, you participate? You're a Facebook member? You give them your info for free.
You're getting exactly what you deserve.
You're welcome.
E
Honk (Score:2)
But evidently, one can no longer write the word "honk" on Facebook. [reddit.com]
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That would really h**k me off!
Catching leftists (Score:1)
Rumour has it that it was catching leftists. They're the criminals and they were being jailed so they had to stop that. Antifa, democrats, etc.