Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's Complaint Process Is Arbitrary — But So Is Campaigning
Bennett Haselton writes
"After initial abuse reports failed to shut down some anti-women and pro-rape pages on Facebook, a wider lobbying campaign succeeded in prompting a Facebook policy change. This has been alternately hailed as a vindication of the campaigner's cause, or derided as proof that Facebook can be cowed by humorless feminists. In reality, the success of the campaign was most likely the outcome of a mostly arbitrary and random process that required a lot of luck, just as the initial abuse reports didn't succeed because they didn't have the necessary luck on their side. Neither result should be taken to reflect on the merits of the campaigner's actual points."
Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.
On May 28th, Facebook
released a statement
acknowledging that it had not responded effectively to complaints against pages
containing "gender-based hate speech" (e.g. "Slapping hookers in the face with a shoe." and several
much worse examples glorifying rape or violence). The
decision came at the end of the "#fbrape" campaign by feminist groups to pressure advertisers whose ads had been appearing
on the most offensive pages; major advertisers like Nissan
announced that they were withdrawing advertisements
from Facebook until they could be assured their ads would not appear on the pages in question (most of which
were ultimately shut down by Facebook).
I've written before about the arbitrariness of Facebook's abuse-report process, and in particular how it can be abused by convening a "flash mob" of users to file abuse reports about pieces of content that they want removed, even when that content doesn't violate Facebook's terms. The solution I proposed, briefly, was for Facebook to sign up, say, 100,000 volunteers (or even paid users) to review "abuse reports." and when an abuse report is received, have the report evaluated by a random subset of 100 of those volunteers, to vote on whether the report is legitimate. The decision whether to remove the content can be based on what percent of those 100 users vote that it violates the terms of service. The nice property of this system is that it can't be manipulated by conscripting a "flash mob" of users to file complaints all at once — no matter how many mobsters you have filing abuse reports, if your complaints don't have merit, they won't pass the random-sample review (unless you manage to control a significant proportion of the 100,000 users that the 100 users are randomly selected from, but that would be a very tall order).
This also means that no abuse complaint would be ignored because too few people submitted it — any abusive content that was reported, would trigger the 100-user review. (Or if you thought cranks would waste too much of the reviewers' time by filing phone abuse reports, you could only trigger the 100-user review after, say, 3 people had complained about a given page. Or you could start ignoring complaints from users after they had filed a certain number of complaints that were all rejected by the 100-user review process.) Readers suggested various improvements to the algorithm and pointed out potential problems, but I think the basic idea is still sound.
Some of the abusive pages cited by the #fbrape campaigners, are truly graphic and offensive, certainly in violation of Facebook's "community standards" against "hate speech." If they had been reviewed by a 100-user random sample, they probably would have been removed. As it is, the complaints probably landed in the lap of some $1-an-hour grunt worker who ignored them (Facebook's opacity in regards to its review process gives us little more information than that). If the complainers had been luckier, perhaps the abuse reports might have gotten noticed by someone more proactive.
So even if the #fbrape campaigners didn't put it in these terms, their gripe was essentially that the Facebook complaint review process leads to arbitrary outcomes, and the complaints didn't gain traction because luck wasn't on their side.
But what about the #fbrape campaign itself, to bring the pages to Facebook's attention through media action, after the initial abuse reports were ignored?
This is probably an example of what could be called the "Salganik Effect." Matthew Salganik is a Princeton University professor who in 2006 conducted a study examining how certain songs became popular in simulated worlds in which users could rate songs and recommend them to their friends. In his simulation, he divided users into eight artificial "worlds" in which the users in a given world could only see the ratings and recommendations from other users within that world. Then each world was seeded with the same set of songs to see which songs grew in popularity. His team found that the set of songs which became "successful." varied wildly between worlds — such that within any given world, although the very worst songs never came popular, the set of songs that did become popular were essentially a random selection from among those that were merely "good enough."
Online movements gain traction through such a similar process — users 'liking' a page or recommending it to friends, recommendations radiating out from the popular elite according to Malcolm Gladwell's "Law of the Few -- that this suggests the success of a campaign like #fbrape could have been the result of an arbitrary process dominated by luck, just like the success of a song in one of Salganik's artificial worlds. We can never know for sure, since we can't divide real-life Facebook users into multiple artificial worlds, or re-run history to see how often the outcome would be different. But you should read Everything Is Obvious* (Once You Know The Answer), a book written by Duncan J. Watts, one of the co-authors of Salganik's study. The book argues that many of the outcomes that seem like foregone conclusions in hindsight, such as the success of a product, twitter meme, company, idea, or person, are really the result of an arbitrary process that is impossible to predict, much less control. If you liked Freakonomics or Thinking, Fast And Slow, you should add Everything Is Obvious to your reading list right away.
In the case of the #fbrape campaign, the strong form of the conclusion would be to say that the success of the campaign is probably the outcome of a random process. But everyone should at least agree with the weak form of the conclusion, which is that the success and failures of online campaigns could be a random process — and that it's a mistake to say that the success of a campaign definitely is determined by the merits of the campaign's ideas or by the efforts of the campaign organizers. If we can't prove how much luck has to do with it, we have to acknowledge that it could be quite a lot.
That doesn't mean the #fbrape campaign didn't have merit. Like the songs in Salganik's artificial worlds that were "good enough" to succeed if given the chance, the #fbrape campaign organizers did have a point. But we shouldn't take the phenomenal success of the campaign to mean that they had that much more of a valid point than many other campaigns which fizzled out due to bad luck. (Thus I think that articles like this one by Sandy Garossino, even if they're right about the problem of pro-rape content, are missing the point insofar as they imply that the movement's success was due to the hard work of the "smartest feminists on the planet." It's a bit early to declare that "On May 27th, women won the Internet.")
The initial complaints failed because of an arbitrary process, and then the #fbrape campaign succeeded because of an equally arbitrary process. The next such awareness campaign, even if it has merit, might not have luck on its side.
The arbitrariness in both of these processes can be fixed. For the first process — abuse reports submitted to Facebook — the fix is easy: have each complaint reviewed by a random subset of volunteers or employees who are signed up to review such content, as described above. This makes the outcome dependent on the attributes of the content itself (as it should be), rather than luck and/or the size of the mob that wants something removed.
The arbitrariness in the second process — the process by which memes "catch fire" and spill over into mainstream media and broader awareness — is a taller order, but I think it can be fixed by essentially the same algorithm. What would be required would be for a site that has the power to make new memes through its sheer dominance, like Google+ or Reddit, to implement the random-sample-voting algorithm for memes and calls-to-action. Any user can submit an argument — very broadly, any type of exhortation that "we" should do "something" -- and these arguments could be reviewed by a random sample of, say, 20 other users on the site. Those arguments that have the highest percentage of "Yes" votes would get promoted on the front page. (This is the algorithm I was pushing in a previous article, Censorship By Glut.)
The system sounds deceptively simple, but note what's missing: You can't manipulate the voting by rallying your friends to vote for your idea (or by creating multiple "sockpuppet" accounts to vote up your own post). You don't even have the accidental Salganik effects, where friend-to-friend recommendations result in a chaotic feedback loop where certain ideas race ahead of others due to random factors that have nothing to do with the idea's merits. You've taken the arbitrariness out of the process, so that the fate of the idea is a function only of the attributes of the idea itself, which determines the percentage of randomly sampled users who vote it up. (This is not quite the same as rewarding the ideas with the most "merit" — rather, it's the ideas that the population being sampled perceive to have the most merit — but at least the outcome is not random, and the system cannot be gamed.)
Meanwhile, I hope that Facebook won't err too far on the side of abolishing sexist humor where the humor is in proportion to the offensiveness. In Women, Action & the Media's list of examples of "gender-based hate speech." they included a Facebook page titled "Hope you have pet insurance because I'm about to destroy your pussy." which I would optimistically like to think refers to enthusiastic sex and not rape. (The humor really derives from the fact that the words appear next to a physically unattractive man, which is one group that feminists never seem to get riled up about defending.) And what about jokes about anti-male violence, which were left out of WAM's examples? A friend of mine likes posting things on his Facebook like "I was trying to remember the name of Rihanna's ex, and then it hit me," which I thought was funny, but which some WAM supporters probably would have reported as "abusive content." I wonder how many of those same people would have filed a report if he'd said, "I was about to say the name of Lorena Bobbitt's ex, but I got cut off."
I've written before about the arbitrariness of Facebook's abuse-report process, and in particular how it can be abused by convening a "flash mob" of users to file abuse reports about pieces of content that they want removed, even when that content doesn't violate Facebook's terms. The solution I proposed, briefly, was for Facebook to sign up, say, 100,000 volunteers (or even paid users) to review "abuse reports." and when an abuse report is received, have the report evaluated by a random subset of 100 of those volunteers, to vote on whether the report is legitimate. The decision whether to remove the content can be based on what percent of those 100 users vote that it violates the terms of service. The nice property of this system is that it can't be manipulated by conscripting a "flash mob" of users to file complaints all at once — no matter how many mobsters you have filing abuse reports, if your complaints don't have merit, they won't pass the random-sample review (unless you manage to control a significant proportion of the 100,000 users that the 100 users are randomly selected from, but that would be a very tall order).
This also means that no abuse complaint would be ignored because too few people submitted it — any abusive content that was reported, would trigger the 100-user review. (Or if you thought cranks would waste too much of the reviewers' time by filing phone abuse reports, you could only trigger the 100-user review after, say, 3 people had complained about a given page. Or you could start ignoring complaints from users after they had filed a certain number of complaints that were all rejected by the 100-user review process.) Readers suggested various improvements to the algorithm and pointed out potential problems, but I think the basic idea is still sound.
Some of the abusive pages cited by the #fbrape campaigners, are truly graphic and offensive, certainly in violation of Facebook's "community standards" against "hate speech." If they had been reviewed by a 100-user random sample, they probably would have been removed. As it is, the complaints probably landed in the lap of some $1-an-hour grunt worker who ignored them (Facebook's opacity in regards to its review process gives us little more information than that). If the complainers had been luckier, perhaps the abuse reports might have gotten noticed by someone more proactive.
So even if the #fbrape campaigners didn't put it in these terms, their gripe was essentially that the Facebook complaint review process leads to arbitrary outcomes, and the complaints didn't gain traction because luck wasn't on their side.
But what about the #fbrape campaign itself, to bring the pages to Facebook's attention through media action, after the initial abuse reports were ignored?
This is probably an example of what could be called the "Salganik Effect." Matthew Salganik is a Princeton University professor who in 2006 conducted a study examining how certain songs became popular in simulated worlds in which users could rate songs and recommend them to their friends. In his simulation, he divided users into eight artificial "worlds" in which the users in a given world could only see the ratings and recommendations from other users within that world. Then each world was seeded with the same set of songs to see which songs grew in popularity. His team found that the set of songs which became "successful." varied wildly between worlds — such that within any given world, although the very worst songs never came popular, the set of songs that did become popular were essentially a random selection from among those that were merely "good enough."
Online movements gain traction through such a similar process — users 'liking' a page or recommending it to friends, recommendations radiating out from the popular elite according to Malcolm Gladwell's "Law of the Few -- that this suggests the success of a campaign like #fbrape could have been the result of an arbitrary process dominated by luck, just like the success of a song in one of Salganik's artificial worlds. We can never know for sure, since we can't divide real-life Facebook users into multiple artificial worlds, or re-run history to see how often the outcome would be different. But you should read Everything Is Obvious* (Once You Know The Answer), a book written by Duncan J. Watts, one of the co-authors of Salganik's study. The book argues that many of the outcomes that seem like foregone conclusions in hindsight, such as the success of a product, twitter meme, company, idea, or person, are really the result of an arbitrary process that is impossible to predict, much less control. If you liked Freakonomics or Thinking, Fast And Slow, you should add Everything Is Obvious to your reading list right away.
In the case of the #fbrape campaign, the strong form of the conclusion would be to say that the success of the campaign is probably the outcome of a random process. But everyone should at least agree with the weak form of the conclusion, which is that the success and failures of online campaigns could be a random process — and that it's a mistake to say that the success of a campaign definitely is determined by the merits of the campaign's ideas or by the efforts of the campaign organizers. If we can't prove how much luck has to do with it, we have to acknowledge that it could be quite a lot.
That doesn't mean the #fbrape campaign didn't have merit. Like the songs in Salganik's artificial worlds that were "good enough" to succeed if given the chance, the #fbrape campaign organizers did have a point. But we shouldn't take the phenomenal success of the campaign to mean that they had that much more of a valid point than many other campaigns which fizzled out due to bad luck. (Thus I think that articles like this one by Sandy Garossino, even if they're right about the problem of pro-rape content, are missing the point insofar as they imply that the movement's success was due to the hard work of the "smartest feminists on the planet." It's a bit early to declare that "On May 27th, women won the Internet.")
The initial complaints failed because of an arbitrary process, and then the #fbrape campaign succeeded because of an equally arbitrary process. The next such awareness campaign, even if it has merit, might not have luck on its side.
The arbitrariness in both of these processes can be fixed. For the first process — abuse reports submitted to Facebook — the fix is easy: have each complaint reviewed by a random subset of volunteers or employees who are signed up to review such content, as described above. This makes the outcome dependent on the attributes of the content itself (as it should be), rather than luck and/or the size of the mob that wants something removed.
The arbitrariness in the second process — the process by which memes "catch fire" and spill over into mainstream media and broader awareness — is a taller order, but I think it can be fixed by essentially the same algorithm. What would be required would be for a site that has the power to make new memes through its sheer dominance, like Google+ or Reddit, to implement the random-sample-voting algorithm for memes and calls-to-action. Any user can submit an argument — very broadly, any type of exhortation that "we" should do "something" -- and these arguments could be reviewed by a random sample of, say, 20 other users on the site. Those arguments that have the highest percentage of "Yes" votes would get promoted on the front page. (This is the algorithm I was pushing in a previous article, Censorship By Glut.)
The system sounds deceptively simple, but note what's missing: You can't manipulate the voting by rallying your friends to vote for your idea (or by creating multiple "sockpuppet" accounts to vote up your own post). You don't even have the accidental Salganik effects, where friend-to-friend recommendations result in a chaotic feedback loop where certain ideas race ahead of others due to random factors that have nothing to do with the idea's merits. You've taken the arbitrariness out of the process, so that the fate of the idea is a function only of the attributes of the idea itself, which determines the percentage of randomly sampled users who vote it up. (This is not quite the same as rewarding the ideas with the most "merit" — rather, it's the ideas that the population being sampled perceive to have the most merit — but at least the outcome is not random, and the system cannot be gamed.)
Meanwhile, I hope that Facebook won't err too far on the side of abolishing sexist humor where the humor is in proportion to the offensiveness. In Women, Action & the Media's list of examples of "gender-based hate speech." they included a Facebook page titled "Hope you have pet insurance because I'm about to destroy your pussy." which I would optimistically like to think refers to enthusiastic sex and not rape. (The humor really derives from the fact that the words appear next to a physically unattractive man, which is one group that feminists never seem to get riled up about defending.) And what about jokes about anti-male violence, which were left out of WAM's examples? A friend of mine likes posting things on his Facebook like "I was trying to remember the name of Rihanna's ex, and then it hit me," which I thought was funny, but which some WAM supporters probably would have reported as "abusive content." I wonder how many of those same people would have filed a report if he'd said, "I was about to say the name of Lorena Bobbitt's ex, but I got cut off."
So tired of this glass three-quarters full smiley touchy feely people are nice crap. Why anyone would produce a social network with the scale of human emotion reduced to 'positive' dandelion buttery-chinned goodness... I cannot imagine.
Bring on an equal measure of opposition and disagreement. Not just an absence of 'like'.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
People are still on Facebook? Even as Zuck the Fuck is trying to change laws to give Americans' jobs to foreigners? Even as Facebook is giving everything away to the NSA and selling everything else to whomever wants it? Even though social networks are now widely considered a vanity thing unacceptable even for teenyboppers?
HAW!
-- Ethanol-fueled
I know this site is mostly read by guys, so I guess we should expect sexist comments abou humourless feminists.
What is so wrong about letting people make their own choices? Why are people trying to demonize decisions as "arbitrary" and "random"?
...
I trust human discretion a thousand times over policy. Policy is just a coat of varnish people put over to make things look better. Are we to be slaves to appearances all the time?
I'm going back to reading my Kierkegaard now
People who are against "pro-rape" pages are now considered "humourless feminists"? That strikes me as a poor choice of words. I would like to think all sane people would be put off by "pro-rape" propaganda.
help out abused women and children by visiting everysecondmatters.ca WOO!!!
Honestly, when it comes to face book, is there really a need to take things down? Sure, if someone posts illegal bits (child porn), the legally have to get rid of it, but just wacky opinions and offensive stuff? Here in the US (where FaceBook is incorporated), we let people be Nazi and we don't make the Westboro Baptist Church shut up. The Ku Klux Klan gets legal protection for their speech here. This freedom to state your opinions (and make offensive jokes) is the main freedom we have left in this country. Its also the freedom to make yourself look like an insensitive idiot.
I find it sad that people want to take down crap on FaceBook, and also sad that FaceBook complies. FaceBook is under no obligation to take this stuff done, nor are they under any obligation to keep it up. Its purely a decision on their part: they simple think having some censorship is more profitable, so they do so. They may even be right about that, but that is kinda sad.
I don't think the 100k reviewers would work out in practice as smoothly as Haselton does, simply because definitions of 'abuse' vary so widely that even a set of 100 reviewers might be dominated by chance of juror selection, but his wider point about luck and hype is completely spot on. Trying to follow the shifting tides of *-o-spheres on the internet is a study in transience and whims. One could probably build a powerful random number generation system by examining popular keywords and phrases of highly populated sites.
Of course, everyone probably knows this, and the hype about a 'successful movement' is probably itself another spin on the news story roulette wheel. Eh, it could be worse. It could be another terrible youtube song.
Yes, random chance is a factor in which grassroots campaigns take hold. Luck is a factor in everything. Luck is a factor in Mr. Haselton's proposed solution as well (basically extending the "internet jury duty" idea he's pushed in many other posts) - if this campaign had been reviewed by 20 random internet-users who just so happen to be militant anti-feminists, then it would've been killed on the spot.
The luck factor of a success can be minimized by actually being better than the alternatives. In the Salganik study, though the popular songs were chosen randomly, they were chosen randomly from the better subset of songs. No "world" chose a crappy song to be popular. And that study was on a very subjective medium - how good or bad a song was. In something that is generally more agreed-upon, such as "rape is bad", the luck factor is understandably much diminished.
So just because a success has a luck factor involved, that's not a reason to cast doubt on the veracity of the success. If you run a simulated NFL season a million times, certainly the same team will not win the Super Bowl all million times. When an actual team then does win the Super Bowl, does that take away from their victory, that part of it came from luck? No.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
some anti-women and pro-rape pages on Facebook... humorless feminists.
We have different senses of humor.
Remind me again why Bennett Haselton gets to use the Slashdot front page as his personal blog?
Seriously, you are a windbag.
TL;DR: Blah blah blah
I'm sure Facebook looked at the legal liabilities of allowing such content on their service in their decision. It wasn't simple campaigning. If it weren't for the problems of people posting openly about illegal activity, this would have fallen on deaf ears. There's a reason that campaigning hasn't convinced Facebook to stop treating breastfeeding photos as pornography, despite the constant campaigning by groups of mothers. There's no potential for getting sued for deleting their content (breastfeeding is explicitly protected in, I believe, 48 states), but there is potential for liability if Facebook does nothing about people openly claiming to be guilty of or proposing and condoning the commission of violent personal felonies against individuals.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Normally I'm one the few ./ers that actually RTFS. But seriously, this summary is longer than most articles that pop up on here...
I need a tl;dr version of the summary.
Bennett isn't crapflooding us, he's crapflooding the NSA. I guess he's hoping that if he writes enough pointless shit like this, the NSA's AI bots will commit suicide.
In fact, he may not be a person at all but some sort of low quality chinese AI script designed to write longwinded and boring essays.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Bernert Herseltern!
But seriously, why is Slashdot now his personal soapbox?
another group of people being offended by trolls on the internet.
Why would anyone prevent bigots from self-identifying with facebook groups?
I don't understand why anybody thinks that as Facebook products/users, they'd have any ability at all to influence Facebook. Seems pretty silly for me to use a service for free and think that you'd be able to have any say as to the quality of the service. I think that some people forget that they're not the customers, but the *products* that Facebook sells to customers. This guy seems to think that Facebook is some sort of public utility that regular people have some sort of rights to influence.
I don't respond to AC's.
Fuck Facebook.
Welcome to 2010 when cycling groups noticed a surge in anti-cyclist pages, advocating intentionally harassing or injuring cyclists. In some cases, posters proudly brag about harassing and striking cyclists.
Facebook has formally refused to remove the groups despite clearly violating their policies.
Please help metamoderate.
In reality, the success of the campaign was most likely the outcome of a mostly arbitrary and random process that required a lot of luck
1. Someone shows Nissan and other major advertisers how advertisements for their products were showing up on pages advocating/glorifying rape.
2. Nissan (and other) execs pretty much instantly say "Holy Shit I don't want us associated with that" and pull ads from FB, COSTING FACEBOOK HUGE GOBS OF MONEY.
3. Facebook starts addressing the problem.
#fbrape hit them in the wallet. There's nothing random or lucky about it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I don't know why Facebook should be forced to remove jokes that feminists find offensive. It shouldn't be Facebook's job to be the PC police on tasteless jokes, but I guess feminists are a strong enough political movement that they managed to enforce their will on Facebook. I'm sure that tasteless jokes about men do not get a beep on anyone's radar. What's next? Religious jokes? Can't have those heathens blaspheming, after all...
In reality, the success of the campaign was most likely the outcome of a mostly arbitrary and random process that required a lot of luck
Forgot to mention, that sentence needs to be taken out and shot.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Its facebook, hence youre the product. The product does not complain or pout or campaign. The product is sold to the market, and as long as a market exists for gender based hate speech the pages will exist as well.
now, with Nissan, you are a consumer. if you as a consumer dont appreciate their marketing on these pages then by all means direct your complaints to them. in turn Nissan will demand a partial refund for poor demographic targeting and insist facebook fine-tune its system to prevent further unrest and complaint from their customers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
These days, whoever whines the most wins.
I'm sorry Miss this bill is counterfeit.
Oh my god, I've been raped!
TO "$1-an-hour grunt worker[s]" who are ineffective, you claim.
Is to get minimal or zero paid workers. Which is what they apparently already have. So you just want more of them?
So basically, that entire essay is just saying that they should expand their workforce and have multiple people look at each report
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Where can we access these allegedly pro-rape and anti-woman pages, to verify that the complaints aren't simply misandrist reactionaries?
The last week has been most telling. More Americans consider the NSA leaker a patriot, rather than a traitor, and some are outraged about their lack of privacy.
This is in spite of most Americans choosing to use Facebook, a company that will try to guess profiles of people that are not members, and do some social engineering to get them to join. Many people choose to use Facebook Comments on various websites. Facebook will actually sell your information to companies that will use that information, unlike highly classified spies that want to kill terrorists, answer to congressional committees, and don't care about your boring friends. People participate in grocery store data mining programs, in exchange for a 5 percent discount.
Many Americans supported big and expensive nation building operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 'supporting the troops' on the grounds of fighting 'them', 'over there', and it cost America over a trillion dollars. Americans don't know that Bill Clinton launched the Kosovo War without much support from Congress, or that there was not large scale ethnic cleansing, and that the KLA were drug dealers. Now, the People in DC are committing to go to war with China, on the behalf of Vietnam and Malaysia over some islands, or that Japan is claiming some islands, the Ryukyu Kingdom said were Chinese in a six hundred year old treaty.
When you fight terrorists on your home turf, you have the police, the populace on your side, and the telecommunications systems on your side. Especially, when the terrorists think the later is not, and will let down their guard, like those Chechnyans in Boston did with their screwed up car robbery a few months back. At least Congress had the smarts to do widespread survellance, when parts of the populace were calling for greater action, like war. A leaker could have been more productive, and leaked about the surveillance of OWS, and Congress could take action... or show its colors. But, no, the stupid leaker, felt he knew better than members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, al qaeda is going to be more careful with its communications. Just like when Osama stopped using his satellite phone, when the New York Times reported that Osama was being tracked by his satellite phone.
Americans got the privacy they chose to have. May the leaker from a bullet wound to the face.
how can this be true, actually? first amendment:
since corps exist only by laws allowing them to, free speech should apply transitively, since "no law" can "[abridge] the freedom of speech"
This overlaps with something a friend of mine, Jon Smith, is experiencing at the moment. He collects ocean liner memorabilia and posts them on his various Facebook groups (such as "The Olympic Class Liners"). He watermarks them in line with Facebook's policy of showing where images come from, and also to protect his investment as pictures are routinely lifted and passed off as someone else's property. The watermarks show that the images in this case have come from his own collection and not pilfered by right clicking Google images.
This has angered other groups, such as "Lovers of the Ocean Liners" who routinely steal other's pictures, usually claiming them off as their own images. Of course they can't do this with watermarked images, so they are particularly irate. This theft has irked other observers external to FB too too, such as this lot. "Lovers of the Ocean Liners" are an odd bunch, prone to banning people on a whim, routinely lying about pictures and so on. Three of their admins (Kipfer Fox, Carl Ireton and Gene Speroni (now posting under the name Virgil Gene)) have received permanent bans from Facebook for theft but somehow they always seem to come back and gloat about how they get around Facebook. So far the watermarking has resulted in some grumbling, but things went to a new level when one user accused my friend Jon of plagiarising pictures by right clicking and putting his name on the images, thereby in his view, laying claim to not just the odd postcard Jon has bought, but EVERY single instance of that photo created since the dawn of time. This man doesn't seem to realize that there is an infinity of different in watermarking an instance of a picture and copyrighting all images.
This is where it starts to get really unpleasant. The user referred to above has taken his malice to new levels. He set up a facebook group called "Fakers frauds and other plagiaristic pariahs" to hound the copyright thieves but it in a group set up mainly to attack Jon and his friends. You may think "So what, this is just is a silly spat over very old photographs, well outside of copyright". You may have a point. BUT on that "Fakers Frauds..." page, the "gentleman" in question took to posting homophobic slurs and various threats. He said that he would have his friends break Jon's legs. He made comments about Jon and his friends molesting people. He even accused one lad of being a child molester with not a single piece of evidence presented. There are many other examples. The man, Mike Crowe (who also goes under the FB name Michael Crowe, thereby breaking Facebook's one-account-per-person rule) is an interesting man. He claims to be have been a director of a cruise line but when contacted they say that he hasn't worked for them for over a year (he has since changed his details); his inability to articulate except in crude terms would not seem to be on par with someone who claimed to study at Oxford University and then served at the RAF. He claims to
What exactly does "anti woman" mean?
I'm being serious here. Exactly how does someone create a page/group that attacks half the population in a way that anyone would take seriously?
Exactly how do you successfully cast half the world as the "other?"
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.