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Facebook Said It Would Ban Holocaust Deniers. Instead, Its Algorithm Provided a Network for Them (themarkup.org) 62

Posted by msmash from the new-lows dept.
Last month, Facebook announced a crackdown: The platform would no longer permit content that "denies or distorts the Holocaust" as part of its larger policy prohibiting hate speech. From a report: While noting that successful enforcement could take time, Monika Bickert, Facebook's vice president of content policy, explained the ban in a blog post. "Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people," she wrote. But as of mid-November, The Markup has found, numerous Facebook pages for well-known Holocaust denial groups remain active -- and for users who find the pages, Facebook's algorithms continue to recommend related content, effectively creating a network for pushing anti-Semitic content. Facebook has long struggled to tamp down on quick-traveling misinformation and shape-shifting conspiracy groups, but many of the discriminatory pages The Markup found either belonged to groups with a long history of prominence within the Holocaust denial movement or directly referenced well-known anti-Semitic or white nationalist memes, making them seem like obvious targets for Facebook's crackdown. It's unclear whether Facebook considers the posts and groups The Markup found unacceptable. The company did not announce how it would define Holocaust denialism, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment; all the pages and posts referenced in this article were still active as of Nov. 23 at 5 p.m. ET.
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Facebook Said It Would Ban Holocaust Deniers. Instead, Its Algorithm Provided a Network for Them More

Facebook Said It Would Ban Holocaust Deniers. Instead, Its Algorithm Provided a Network for Them

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  • Monetary denial? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kelxin ( 3417093 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:28PM (#60762252)
    You really think Facebook would ever turn away any kind of advertising revenue or content? It's capitalism, not humanitarianism. Anything that makes them more money they will do and continue to lie about and hide.

    • Re:Monetary denial? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @03:10PM (#60762354) Homepage Journal

      Trying to nudge users away from conspiracy theories in the face of algorithms which maximize engagement metrics is just spitting into the wind.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by al0ha ( 1262684 )
      Facebook and other social media are a joke and will always be. Everyone one of them so has been created with the idea that all the users will be upstanding people that adhere to the ideals of the creators of the platform. I know because I was the same when BBS services first came along; I though they would be a panacea for sharing information to the betterment of society. How niave.

      Social media has the same problem, albeit on a much larger scale, that information security related to application develo

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Pimpy ( 143938 )

        There were plenty of great BBSes that were excellent sources of knowledge, but you did also have to tolerate a lot of nonsense. I don't really see the medium as being the problem, USENET had the same problems, too, the only difference in those days is that someone had to at least be semi-literate to find their way into these places in the first place.

        As for Facebook, it's possible that the original motivation was to make the platform about the users, but this changed pretty early on when the business model

        • I don't really see the medium as being the problem.

          The op never claimed that it was. The problem is, and always has been, human nature.

          If I may make an analogy: Guns don't kill people; guns aren't the problem. But I'm still not going to give one to my four year old kid.

          • I don't really see the medium as being the problem.

            The op never claimed that it was. The problem is, and always has been, human nature.

            If I may make an analogy: Guns don't kill people; guns aren't the problem. But I'm still not going to give one to my four year old kid.

            Guns don't kill people - the laws of physics kills people.

            But the issue is that a company like Facebook is well within it's rights to no wish to host holocaust deniers, porn or anything it defines as distasteful hateful or illegal. I have websites - I have complete control of what goes on them.

            To your mentioning human nature - yes, you are right. A fair number of people are always going to have messed up thought processes. They think we didn't go to the moon while keeping the conspiracy silent would

    • Ay ay, you gotta make a living already!

  • Good. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thrasher thetic ( 4566717 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:29PM (#60762256)
    We should all want those dorks spouting their idiotic nonsense in as public a manner as possible. That way, we know who they are.

    • Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by javaman235 ( 461502 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:55PM (#60762308)

      There is a such thing as a "fallacy of realism" as I would call it: it happens when you believe something you observe existed before you observed it, when it fact your process of observing created the thing observed. Its even a physical thing, quantum experiments show it.

      In this case, its like you are looking for cookie thieves so you set up all these cookies, all these people claiming they take the cookies all the time without ramification, until some fool (like the kind of person who would choose to advocate holocaust denial on a site owned by a man who had a Star Wars themed bar mitzva) takes the cookie, and a-ha! The sting worked, it revealed a cookie thief. Yet would the idiot have stolen the cookie in normal circumstances? Probably not, but they are an idiot so they did when they saw other people doing it.

      It's wrong because A) you're only solving problems you created. B) you're only gathering intell on idiots, who are not the people to worry about.

      • B) you're only gathering intell on idiots, who are not the people to worry about.

        I think the last four years in the United States disproves that on its face. Although, we could deny that it all ever happened, because really, who would believe it [mcsweeneys.net]?

      • Reminds me of this study [sciencemag.org].

        we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it.

      • Not even sort of the same thing. There's no entrapment or enticement here, just people speaking publicly. There is no 'sting'. There is no gotcha moment. Just information to be parsed. In this case, allowing people with stupid or outright evil beliefs to reveal themselves as such. Censorship doesn't eliminate faulty thinking, it just pushes it underground. Deplatforming doesn't, it merely moves the damned thing.
        • There's no entrapment in the parent's example. Entrapment would be planning a cookie heist, recruiting people for your scheme, and then turning those people in to the police. It's not really a sting either. What the parent is talking about is creating an environment, a culture, of cookie thievery. This is a situation where cookie-stealing seems normal, and so the idiot is just conforming to his environment. He didn't have some underlying predilection to cookie-thievery which has now been revealed.

          Likewis

        • Censorship doesn't eliminate faulty thinking, it just pushes it underground. Deplatforming doesn't, it merely moves the damned thing.

          Of course not. But unless you are claiming that all social media is public space, where all must be accepted, we still do have property rights. I look at the demands to force Facebook to all in the same manner as those people coming into my house, and I must allow them their say.

          Regardless, there is now a platform for these people that promises that they can say anything they wish, including violent overthrow, and I saw a post outlining a plan and incitement to assault "Democrats".

          It turns out to be an

      • Sorry to burst your quantum bubble, but Holocaust deniers don't spontaneously manifest when you decide to look for them, and quantum states probably don't either. Even _if_ you have no way of knowing who is a Holocaust denier without asking, it's mentally lazy to claim you manifested reality in the act of asking, just because it makes no difference mathematically.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by rednip ( 186217 )
      Why do so many Trumpster claim that damaging the truth is without consequences? What is wrong with the GOP to allow such a person to command it though obvious lies.

    • Exactly this.
      Let idiots BE IDIOTS and establish an online track record of their moronic ideas.

      Plus, it's pretty fucked up if we're letting a company be the arbiter of what's truth. In this case I happen to agree with them, but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see the potential problems with that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      We should all want those dorks spouting their idiotic nonsense in as public a manner as possible. That way, we know who they are.

      I understand the sentiment. The problem isn't whether or not they get a platform, the problem is Facebook is a slow slippery slope that uses sensationalism and psychological tricks to keep people on the platform. The algorithms that do this don't care what is true or false, they don't care what is a lie of omission, they aren't made to care about truth, they are made to keep peopl

  • I'm looking at you Swastika guy.

  • If there is a rise there must be a cause, and I would like to know why.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      Isn't it always the same? Someone wakes up one day, realizes their life hasn't turned out how they'd hoped, sees a minority doing better, and concludes that the minority is somehow to blame. You see this kind of silliness anytime discussions about immigrants "stealing" jobs are brought up, while conveniently ignoring the fact no non-immigrants want to do these kinds of remedial jobs, either. As this line of thinking is more typically associated with right-wing populism, it's always "on the rise" whenever th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Any time you get a rise in conspiracy theories you get a rise in anti Semitism, because anti Semitism is the universal conspiracy. Any time there are people secret manipulating events the Jews are the go-to.

      Of course anti Semites love to co-opt other conspiracies and inject their racism into it too. Use them as a gateway to their bullshit.

    • It's the distance from WWII. As the generations most affected by the war are perishing, their postwar taboos (racism, nationalism, duty and structure), young people regard WWII as just another figment in their history books. It's like asking "why the rise in pro-monarchy" 3 generations after the French revolution. It's that they don't share that anti-monarchy taboo anymore . Young people don't give a damn about racism anymore. It's just another nag the TV says is bad.

    • If there is a rise there must be a cause, and I would like to know why.

      It is an issue starting with paranoia. A distrust in what you are told. A strange concept that the powers that be are in all cases lying to people. It is amplified by the dunning-kruger effect, where incomplete thought processes pick only the evidence that fits that paranoid concept.

      tl;dr version - stupid people manipulated by cynics

  • Shape-shifting conspiracy groups (Score:3)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @02:55PM (#60762306)

    If I were on Facebook, I'd start a shape-shifting conspiracy group named "Odo" or "Founders" just to mess with them.

  • Even if the information is false, how is banning it going to change anything? They people who publish the information still exist.
  • ...as usual in 2020 (or any year, in facebook)
  • When (if) future historians are able to identify the causes of the failure of the American experiment, social media will surely be near the top of the list. If they succeed in trying anyone for crimes against humanity, Zuck will surely be in the defendant's chair

  • It's the people. You can either have a moderated to hell platform where only approved ideas are allowed, or you can deal with a bit of anarchy.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. banned people like this, another social media platform would pop up that will capitalize on their apparent need to spread their beliefs without censorship (I'm looking at you Parler, though even this platform still censors).

    The solution is not to censor, the solution is to inoculate the general population from believing misinformation.

    To do this, we need massive education in critical thinking skills so that fewer and fewer people are tricked by this manipulation. Critic

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