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Meta Says It's Mistakenly Moderating Too Much (theverge.com) 54

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."

Meta Says It's Mistakenly Moderating Too Much

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  • that it was 'because of the Biden administration' - everyone knows that Zuckerberg would have ignored or worked around any order contrary to his own vision - no way his ego would let him step down to what was a toothless administration.
    • I wish YouTube would stop accidently removing comments and demonetizing channels too.
      • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @01:01AM (#64989391) Homepage

        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.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          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

        • "Zuck on the other hand, clearly seems to stay awake at night worrying about what would happen if his platform became the next MySpace"

          If I had to write a job description for CEO of Facebook, it would be that.

    • Err. The main part of the COVID mostly pandemic happened during the Trump administration. This is not some innocent little "we did some bad stuff and want to blame the government". This is Zuck actively trying to show his fealty to Trump by blaming Biden for the bad things that happened under the previous Trump administration. Whilst you are still able to check this up, if you don't remember that part of history, go and look it up on Wikipedia and the news archives and remember that these people will soon b

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        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.

    • by whitroth ( 9367 )

      You're full of shit. It was about all the self-proclaimed "evangelical Christians" and the GOP. Friends and folks I know who post anti-GOP stuff have been more and more getting moderated out.

      IT'S YOUR FAULT,

      Let's not even *begin* to discuss the "community standards" that what they have online is nothing more than corporate bizspeak that means *nothing*. I want to know what the *actual* standards are that the algorithm uses, and I want to know who wrote them, and what *their* credentials are. And let's not e

  • by BDeblier ( 155691 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @01:06AM (#64989397) Homepage

    ... and you notify them, you always, 100% guaranteed, get the automated response that they didn't remove the content.

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @01:39AM (#64989435)

    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

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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

  • facebook has become a barren hell scape with not one real person posting and only adds and obvious AI bots ? "They moderated them out" ? lol
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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.

  • They have been censoring abnormal.com for years because it contained hacking related stuff or something vague.

  • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @04:44AM (#64989641)

    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.

    • by radaos ( 540979 )
      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.
      • 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.

  • by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @05:52AM (#64989743)

    Correctly Moderating Too Little

  • by preflex ( 1840068 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @09:15AM (#64990081)

    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].

  • 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

  • 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.

  • So, you just create a website, program a couple of bots to maintain it, right?

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