Meta Says It's Mistakenly Moderating Too Much (theverge.com) 78
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta is mistakenly removing too much content across its apps, according to a top executive. Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, told reporters on Monday that the company's moderation "error rates are still too high" and pledged to "improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules."
"We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable," Clegg said during a press call I attended. "Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly." He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the covid-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.
"We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic," Clegg said. "No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight. But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit. We're acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content."
"We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable," Clegg said during a press call I attended. "Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly." He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the covid-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.
"We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic," Clegg said. "No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight. But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit. We're acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content."
Not very likely... (Score:2)
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Re:Not very likely... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between Google and Facebook is that Google doesn't care if you go elsewhere. They've got their fingers in so many pies it really doesn't matter where you are, Google will still suck up every bit of marketing information they can glean from you and then use it to serve you ads.
Zuck on the other hand, clearly seems to stay awake at night worrying about what would happen if his platform became the next MySpace, and he'd go as far as making a deal with the devil himself to prevent that from happening.
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And that is why they're mass deranking Youtube videos advertising alternatives like Rumble and derank competitors in search to the point where this is now a cornerstone argument in several lawsuits against them, try to shut down the likes of GrayJay that offer polycentric identity based distribution for content creators that would make them less dependent on google, and all the countless other similar shenanigans google does on daily basis to ensure that people don't go elsewhere.
The actual difference is th
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If I had to write a job description for CEO of Facebook, it would be that.
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Wait, history is wrong and Trump won the 2020 election? Because pandemic was 2020 to 2023, and disease wasn't even assessed as pandemic until march 2020.
I know that far left loves to rewrite history, but this is a bit too recent of history to try to rewrite this much.
Re:Not very likely... (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. Covid19 was assessed as a pandemic on 11.03.2020. It wasn't even considered a public health emergency of international concern until 30.01.2020.
Source: WHO.
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Do you also think butterflies are made of butter because they have "butter" in the description?
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The funniest part in this desperate attempt to rewrite history is that original moniker of the virus in December 2019 when it was only present in PRC in any meaningful numbers was "Wuhan Influenza" or "Wuhan Flu" in line with previous similar outbreaks like the Spanish Flu where disease is named after the location of the initial outbreak. Official (re)naming came later in mid February of 2020 due to pressure from PRC, which at the time pushed the narrative that it came from Italy as that's where the first W
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Correct. Covid19 was assessed as a pandemic on 11.03.2020.
Source: WHO.
Please keep in mind that some users of slashdot are in the US, and some in Europe, so when you write "11.03.2020" half the people here will read that as "November 3, 2020," and half will read "3 March 2020".
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ISO 8601 [wikipedia.org] for the win! Repairing the previous comment's middle-endian dates:
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It's generally considered impolite to talk about your foot fetish in public.
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Luckily there's a second sentence which features 30.01.2020. I know US school system is messed up right now, but I'm pretty sure there aren't that many foot fetishists who will think that this is a 1st day of 30th month of the year 2020.
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Luckily there's a second sentence which features 30.01.2020. I know US school system is messed up right now, but I'm pretty sure there aren't that many foot fetishists who will think that this is a 1st day of 30th month of the year 2020.
I dunno, 2020 felt like it was thirty months long...
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I stand corrected.
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Believing some variation of this makes a lot of people sleep better at night. Are you sure you want me to shatter your delusion of "elites have it all under control, the problem is that they're evil", rather than "no one is in control, elites are as susceptible to basic human flaws as the rest of us and we're all barely scraping by in life"?
Because that is an understanding that comes after the youthful naivete of the kind you're displaying. And a lot of people's psyches don't survive contact with that reali
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But Trump was president at the height of the pandemic. He was around for 11 months of the pandemic, and the vaccine arrived while he was still in office. The covid anti-vax stuff started and was on Facebook while Trump was in office.
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Don't worry. Now that he's going to be the president again, you won't have to invent these convoluted reasoning patterns to hate him.
He'll provide you with actual real ones once again.
Twitter-X does not ban Leftists. FB bans the Right (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: Twitter-X does not ban Leftists. FB bans the R (Score:2, Troll)
It's true, though. I recently joined X, deliberately subscribing to accounts on both sides of the political spectrum.
Initially, at least, it works. Time will tell, whether "the algorithm" notices which kinds of posts I tend to agree with...
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I will say the algorithm doesn't always show things one agrees with. Sometimes it will go in runs, lots of stuff I agree with for some block of hours to days and then a similar number of hours /days with stuff I disagree with. I think it is partly because we actually engage more with stuff that makes us mad... it balances out overall but just a heads up you'll get blocks of material in one direction and then the other. For me this actually means getting spammed with left leaning content a lot of the time.
On
Twitter is useless crap - will never use again.. (Score:1)
There is so much crap, lies and right-wing propaganda on twitter that there is no point using it - there are better alternatives.
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Let us all observe a minute of silence in memory of all those "very important" messages that didn't make it through.
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The "default" X preferences, if you don't go and manually choose them, will promote conspiracies.
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>They will ban you for being critical of Musk though
Musk is #54 most corrected person on the platform's official public correction system: community notes.
https://community-notes-leader... [community-...rboard.com]
Stop projecting your values, such as "silencing our political opponents is good" on your political opponents. They do not share them.
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Your claim:
>They will ban you for being critical of Musk though
My note: not only is reality the exact opposite that you're allowed to be critical of Musk on X, but Musk provides a specific mechanism which allows you to be more easily critical of him, and more easily see criticism of him on his own platform.
I.e. you're not just wrong. You're intentionally projecting your own values on him, because you can't fathom existing as a human with any other set of values. Whereas his values are completely differen
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Highlighting a doxing account targeting Elon Musk isn't quite the same as being critical of him.
And when there is something that should be removed (Score:3)
... and you notify them, you always, 100% guaranteed, get the automated response that they didn't remove the content.
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So much this... I don't go around randomly (or vengefully as some do) reporting content.. it's all blatant scams or fraud or bots and absolutely 0% of the time are any of the posts removed. Heck I'm in the beta testing group and I've reported as bugs either over-matching or easy-to-detect patterns they could add to the algo to prevent a lot of nefarious activity going on and... surprise: nothing.
Meanwhile: This article. AYFKM??? They can't seem to detect a single truly bad actor in their space but the most
Coincidence (Score:3)
Amazing how all of this comes out right after the election as Zuck looks to help the administration.
--
I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, 'Wow, these networks have a lot of information.'- Mark Zuckerberg
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Zuck helps whoever is in power, because that way he gets to keep his business. Trump's first term when incumbent bureaucracy ruled and Trump was basically a lame duck who couldn't really do anything on his agenda without bureaucracy reinterpreting everything he ordered to do whatever they actually wanted to do, his side got censored into oblivion on Facebook. This continued until now. And now that Trump is likely going to get a proper team to implement policy changes and his views broke through the censorsh
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Witness accounts describe a shriveled short white mushroom. The clown paint only covers the face; often not even competently.
Is that why (Score:2)
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Most of facebook nowadays is closed groups of people who know each other talking to each other about specific subjects of interest. Open side of facebook is the bot infested part, and it's frankly been irrelevant for a very long time.
Too much? You don't say (Score:1)
They have been censoring abnormal.com for years because it contained hacking related stuff or something vague.
So is YouTube ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Meta Says It's Mistakenly Moderating Too Much
So is YouTube. The words 'fundament' and 'posterior' are now words rude enough to warrant deleting your comment. You can't even use the word 'explode' anymore but somehow 'ammo' is OK but 'shoot' is not, in a discussion about war.
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The following got my comments removed:
Quoting a line from the Geneva Convention.
Expressing mild scepticism about the capabilities of AI.
Mentioning a nationality or their president, you know the one, world's largest country.
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The YT moderation algorithm has had the dial turned up to 11. The following got my comments removed: Quoting a line from the Geneva Convention. Expressing mild scepticism about the capabilities of AI. Mentioning a nationality or their president, you know the one, world's largest country.
Yes, and for some reason calling the leadership of certain western car companies 'utterly incompetent' also got my comment deleted.
Mistakenly Moderating Too Much (Score:3)
Correctly Moderating Too Little
Excessively Aggressive (Score:5, Informative)
My dad's piano is ridiculously out of tune. It's been at least 40 years since it was tuned, and it's been moved twice during that time.
To demonstrate this, I recorded video of playing a one-octave c-major scale. It was hideous. I posted it on Faceboot to share with my friends, many who are musicians.
Within 30 seconds, it was removed. Faceboot says I had violated the copyright for this song [youtube.com].
First thought. (Score:2)
I immediately thought, "Hey... that's impossible. The correct amount of Meta moderation would be 100%". The world would simply be better off if the vast majority of the population didn't have a voice reaching past their neighbours and whomever they could phone one call at a time. Or maybe the letters page in their local newsaper.
I've been actively online since I ran a dialup bulletin board on my Commodore 64 in 1983 at 300 baud. And more than once I thought that maybe - just perhaps - I should shut the fuck
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Why only government funded experts? Worthy voices bubbled into the zeitgeist long before the internet existed.
It's easy to not know what you refuse to know (Score:3)
Clegg said. "No one [of the people we allowed to talk] during the pandemic knew [or were publicly allowed to state what they knew about] how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight [now that we have the luxury of going back and pretending to be good guys who could not possibly have known that by censoring ideas we were ensuring that our specific ideas would become the consensus position which circularly also insulates us from any real ownership of the problem because now we get to claim it was unavoidable that "nobody could possibly have known" things even though our multi-billion dollar corporation was directly responsible for controlling what people could and could not have known from our platform] .
When the FIFY is longer than the original words, you know nothing was learned and we'll do all of this again next time. And there will be a next time. There always is, so long as civilization continues.
Need Human Moderators (Score:2)