Facebook's Content Takedowns Take So Long They 'Don't Matter Much', Researchers Find (msn.com) 27
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them.
"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?
"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.
"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?
"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.
Recent example. (Score:2)
Only yesterday my girlfriend asked me "Why am I seeing this on facebook? Can you do anything about it?". Turns out they were videos of upskirting, which is illegal in the UK and at least controversial in other parts of the world. She was getting full on naked upskirt shorts among her facebook stories on top of the page. Meanwhile, there was no related "report this" action button anywhere on the story.
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Afterthought: I should have asked her if she was complaining because they were naked twats instead of dicpics. Wonder if she'd be complaining then. ;-)
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Your guess is as good as mine. They looked professional. There was no way to tell if staged or not. Doesn't change the fact that it's not the content general public should be getting in their feeds just because someone managed to success at marketing...
Re: Recent example. (Score:2)
Who walks around in a skirt with nothing underneath?
Re: Recent example. (Score:5, Funny)
Besides true Scotsmen?
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Summer, init? ;-)
Re: Censorship (Score:2)
LOL think of another eorld leader
Water is wet, sky is blue (Score:5, Interesting)
Listen folks, the reason spam exists, and continues to exist, is because people keep clicking on it, and there are computers out there endlessly churning it out because it's so cheap to do, and costs nothing.
The solution to spam, has ALWAYS been the solution people were worried about. Taxing it. That's what postage stamps are for with mail, if you want to send useless crap by post, you have to actually pay bulk rates. The problem is over time, the environmental cost (think about all the post vans driving around delivering grocery fliers to a store that is not even walking distance away, every week) outweighs the positives (delivering lettermail) of having the service at all.
So the solution to eliminating spam is to move to a kind of P2P platform where unsolicited messages are only exchanged at a toll cost. If company X wants to send you an email, and you are not on the "zero cost" list (eg you have a financial interest eg bank/creditcard) then the underlying system must pay the toll to pass thru that system. Spam gets 100% eliminated because people don't want the hassle of adding every tom dick and harry who wants to contact them once. If you are important enough to receive a message, you can set that toll at $20 dollars, and people who actually have legitimate business with you will pay that to ensure you receive it. No more giving a shit if your contact details are out there, you won't be receiving anything not paid, and it can't be screwed around with by using chargeback fraud because you pay upon send, not receipt. If someone signs you up for a mailing list you didn't ask for, the mailing list operator won't be paying it, and the message won't even be sent in the first place.
That's the solution. What you see as scam ads on youtube, facebook, twitter, and even websites are people paying sub-penny amounts to deliver ads to websites who accept all ads, no matter how shitty the ad is because they want money. If they simply set their minimum price to 0.10/cpm virtually all the shit ads would disappear from the internet overnight, from every site, and bigger sites like facebook and youtube could even make more money by raising that to 1.00/cpm so that less of that AI slop gets pushed.
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FACEBOOK? That's still a thing? (Score:1)
I haven't been on FB for 10 years. Nobody I know personally uses it. We see Mark Zuckerberg sucking Trump's dick but that's on TV.
Seriously why is it relevant WHEN content gets taken off when all the people who COULD see it left years ago?
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Congrats. But you're not a trend. You're an outlier. Facebook boasts 3.05bn MAUs making it still 10x the size of Twitter and by a long shot the largest social network globally.
Knowing a couple of sane people who don't use it doesn't change this fact. Don't let your immediate surrounds bias you away from recognising what is going on in the world.
Seriously why is it relevant WHEN content gets taken off when all the people who COULD see it left years ago?
Don't be ignorant. There's a reason Facebook is still in the sights of governments the world over, as there is a reason why Meta has made $200bn in the past 5 years,
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Errr are you autocorrecting my post in your head? I never said we're friends... I said you're not a trend. I.e. just because you left Facebook doesn't mean everyone else did either.
Read your own swill.
No it's there for *you* to read. I wrote it. Read it properly.
Shut your mounth and be respectful to your betters.
You just said you don't know me, but now you claim you're my better? Better at what? Certainly not reading, certainly not being polite. Actually I can let you be better at being polite. Here I'll let you get one up on me: Go fuck yourself in your toxic arsehole.
Not just when, but also with what context (Score:3)
My mother (god bless her sorry soul) is still heavily into Facebook, along with sharing of active bullshit. One of her more recent complaints were that Facebook sends her a message saying that her shared post was deleted due to being misinformation / against terms of services / etc, but they never actually tell her what the post was.
So even if she is inclined to change her world views (she's not), she couldn't do it if she wanted to as she never gets informed what it was she was reading was fake.
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That is the regulatory change I think we need. Platforms can control their content but they do need to specify to the user why, what the statement was and tie it back to the TOS and have a standard for appeals. I think that's a fair way to have law that doesn't infringe either parties speech.
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That is the regulatory change I think we need. Platforms can control their content but they do need to specify to the user why, what the statement was and tie it back to the TOS and have a standard for appeals.
On a not totally unrelated subject: I was browsing fb this morning when my account got suspended. Why? Apparently, according to the page that loaded anyway, their algorithm determined I might not be a real person. If I want to regain access I need to upload a video of my face, turning it to present various profiles to the camera, to prove I am, in fact, a real person...
Ah well, looks like I am going to, finally, be able to avoid those random time-wasting doom-scrolling sessions in future.
Why hide the posts? (Score:2)
Use them as bait and kick off everyone who views them and fails to click the report button.
but (Score:2)
Facebook seems to not care (Score:2)
I'm a glassworker and for years glassworkers have used facebook to show and sell their work.
Then scammers appeared and copied all of the photos of famous artists' work and offered them for sale at very low prices. Of course, nothing was ever delivered.
When the legitimate artists, whose photos were copied, informed facebook, nothing was done. When lots of other artists also informed facebook, nothing was done.
It appears that facebook does not care at all about these scams