Online ordering was the biggest story in the restaurant business this year-- if you're running a restaurant, you either adapted to the trend or you went broke, probably. Unless you're Thomas Keller or somebody like that. I'm sure it's hurting the food vendors too.
The best part? If you want to have any online sales, you have to sign up with a monopoly like Grubhub, which takes a whopping 13.5% cut of each transaction (on average). Suddenly the food vendor, who is trying to lift himself above poverty level and is struggling with razor-thin margins, has to hand over 13.5% of his gross receipts to a Silicon Valley millionaire.
In all fairness and objectivity: One of the reasons I come to Slashdot is that there is much, much *less* virtue-signalling here than on most of the forums I visit. I mean, go to one of the Gawker sites (io9, Jezebel, Kotaku, etc) and you will see roughly 100x the amount of virtue-signalling (that's not hyperbole; it's a sober estimate).
The disturbing part isn't that somebody published this absolutely idiotic study. (I won't go into why it is idiotic, since literally every other post has pointed out one or more serious flaws in the study-- rarely have I ever seen anything ripped to shreds quite this thoroughly). No, the disturbing part is that Amnesty International was involved. THIS is what Amnesty International is doing these days?
I mean I'm not an expert, but I always thought Amnesty International was one of the most respected of all human-rights organizations-- the sort of organization I would donate money to. Not any more.
Yes, but then the robocallers will just use their own AI programs-- only connecting you to a live person if and when the AI thinks that it has a live "customer" on the line. (Navient, the loan company, does this already when it calls you about an overdue payment).
To get past the digital assistant, the robocaller will try to convince the digital assistant it's a real person (and not a robocaller). Likewise, the digital assistant will try to convince the robocaller it's a real person looking for their credit card (and not a digital assistant). It'll be an arms race, in which increasingly sophisticated AI programs administer Turing tests to each other.
It's not true that nursing homes are "only for the elderly". In Chicago a lot of nursing home residents are young-- I've seen people who are placed in nursing homes by their parents at age 21. And they don't always cost $5k a month (although of course some can cost that and more-- I've heard of $11k/month for dementia care). A lot of them just take your disability check as payment, giving you $30 back every month as walking-around money. (Ridiculously small amount of walking-around money-- it's basically a dollar a day-- especially if you smoke, as most of the residents do).
Some of the nursing homes are OK, some are atrocious, and sometimes the really bad ones get shut down. Some of the residents really do need to be in nursing homes-- they're chronically unable to function on their own, even if you give them an apartment, a monthly check, a healthcare team, and a social worker. Some of them really don't need to be in nursing homes. I worked with ex-nursing home clients for many years and it's hard to generalize.
That's what we used to have, but there was a huge moral panic about the deplorable conditions in those facilities and public outcry lead to them being shut down. There's just no getting around the fact that people with severe mental health issues aren't going to behave like well adjusted human beings, but from a pure cost to society perspective, it's probably much cheaper to house them in sanatoriums than it is to run around putting out the small fires that arise when you leave them to wander the streets.
Of course we still have these places-- lots of them. They're just not called "sanitoriums". They're called nursing homes, or IMD's (Institutions for Mental Disease), or ICF's (Intermediate Care Facilities), or other things.
Every single EHR system I've used has had the same problem: The designers think they know my job better than I do. In the old days (1990s) you trusted the doc to write or type down the information that was important and relevant. Today, the EHR designers are worried that I'll forget to ask some clinically important bit of information (like the patient's smoking history), so they force me to fill out dozens of little boxes, check-marks, drop-down menus, etc., just to ensure that all of the clinically important questions are answered (with "clinically important" being defined by a committee of god-knows-who).
It's a fucking mess. Instead of a couple of succinct paragraphs, you get 30 pages of checklists and prefabricated phrases. There are several unintended consequences to this-- when doctors have to click through dozens of checklists (some of which may be of questionable clinical importance), they get in the habit of doing it as quickly as humanly possible, and that's when mistakes get made. That's how you end up with notes that say "Pelvic exam performed and was normal. Prostate exam performed and was normal." Of course, no one would actually TYPE this shit, since it doesn't make any sense-- these are phrases that got inserted into the chart because someone "clicked through" a wall of checkboxes.
You also wind up with situations where you are forced to choose from a limited number of wrong or partially-wrong answers. (I've run across systems where instead of being able to describe the patient's affect, you had to choose from a selection of about five different adjectives to describe the patient's affect).
Look, I get it. Doctors are imperfect and sometimes they really do forget to ask certain questions, perform certain parts of the exam, or issue certain warnings. I'm of the opinion that we need more mechanisms to double-check the work doctors do. But this should NOT be the job of the software developer who writes the EHR software.
The rats in the study were only exposed to cell phone radiation for 2 years, and I'm assuming they were sacrificed at the end of the 2 years. (Rats only live 3-4 years anyway at best). How long does it take humans to develop cancer after exposure to a carcinogen? Quite a lot longer than that, in some cases. Sometimes it's decades.
I realize that there were factors in this study which would tend to overestimate the risk (e.g., intensity of radiation and daily length of exposure), but the limited length of the study would seem to introduce an error in the other direction.
Recently I had to replace the lightning port on an Iphone 7 plus. Cost at Apple Store: $350, plus I was going to lose my data, since their repair plan was actually to replace the entire phone with a refurbished unit. Cost at an independent shop: $70, no loss of data, and they got it done in less than an hour (even dropped it off at my workplace for an extra $20).
This will be a fucking disaster for Mac owners. It'll be like taking an out-of-warranty Mercedes to the dealer for new brakes. I can't stomach going back to Windows (even less so after today's story about the magical disappearing files), and I can't use Linux, since one of the main things I do with my computer is record music. So I'm basically stuck.
I wonder if part of bittorrent's resurgence is due to the fact that it offers a way to access censored material.
What's the old saying-- the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it? That's being put to the test, right now, on an unimaginably huge scale. You have totalitarian regimes like China (to name but one example) which restrict free access to information, and massive corporations like Google that are eager to help them restrict free access to information, and a population that is more aware with every passing year that they are being denied something that the rest of the world is allowed to have.
What we need is a low-latency bluetooth standard. It's annoying to watch a show on a phone via bluetooth earbuds. The spoken lines don't match the mouth movements as though the A/V sync were faulty (it isn't). The latency is quite noticable, probably on the order of 200 milliseconds or so.
Low-latency bluetooth would also be great for musicians who want to monitor a mix in real time (for recording overdubs, live performance, or just low-volume rehearsal at home). It would have to be really low though, like 5 ms or less, and I have no idea if that's feasible for bluetooth.
You can replace a team of 5 expert doctors, 10 nurses and a group of psychologists per patients just by implementing a software that can do diagnosis better than doctors and a pill of correct medicine.
This post is so disconnected from reality that it's almost not worth responding to-- it's like saying you can replace a 747 with a jar of herring.
Diagnosis is really a pretty small part of what doctors and nurses do all day. It can be an interesting part, and that's why TV shows tend to focus on it, but it's a minor percentage of the overall workload. Most of the time you know what's wrong with the patient. Anyway, there are already lots of algorithms and treatment guidelines to help "automate" the process of diagnosis. There may be an interesting role for software in helping to further automate this process, but any advances in that area are going to be incremental, not transformative.
The only exception I can think of-- the only area where I can see software actually putting physicians out of work-- might be radiology. If I were a radiologist at the beginning of my career, I'd be a little bit worried.
Which is why the *only* solution is to pass a law so that Facebook, Twitter, ISPs, etc are not held legally liable for the content other people disseminate on their platform.
Are you being sarcastic, or do you not know that they already enjoy this legal protection?
Really, it's more complicated than my earlier post suggested. The issue is not merely whether Facebook is protected *now*: it's whether they can count on that protection going forward. As the recent congressional hearings with Zuckerberg made clear, Facebook is terrified of what laws Congress might come up with to punish them, and they are currently scrambling to take steps to *prevent* that happening. Hence the renewed interest in automated speech filters and so on. Hence TFA.
And this issue isn't confined to Facebook, of course. Really, it affects anyone and everyone who is providing a platform for people to communicate with each other.
My post was overly simplistic, because a single law isn't going to fix the situation-- laws can always be amended or superseded. What is needed is constant vigilance against laws that hold such platforms liable. The only thing that could help in a more lasting manner would be a Supreme Court decision invalidating such laws. I'm not legally knowledgeable enough to know if that outcome is possible or likely.
I've somehow managed to get by for many years without any algorithms to "protect" me from speech.
You've probably never been on the receiving end of messages telling you that they are going to rape you until you bleed. Or that they have a K-Bar and are going to shove it up your cunt. Or that your "mutilated corpse will be on the cover of Jezebel tomorrow." Or that they are going to kill your children, and add "I know where you live" followed by your home address.
So, yes, since it affects other people who aren't you, and you are the only person who is important, sure, it's not a problem.
Well, I have a few thoughts on that:
1) If someone conveys a believable threat of violence or bodily harm to you, they've committed a crime-- a felony, I believe-- and you can talk to the police and have them arrested. I work with quite a few clients who are victims of DV, so I've seen this done many times. 2) If someone is intent on conveying a threat of violence or bodily harm, they have an infinite number of options for doing so. They can send you a text message. They can make a threatening phone call. They can send you a threatening postcard from Istanbul. Etc. 3) You may or may not be able to successfully prosecute the person making the threat. It comes down to whether you have evidence of the threat, and whether you can identify the person who made the threat. And I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the odds of a *successful* prosecution go way up if the threat was made on a forum like Facebook, where all the evidence is preserved for forensic investigators. An anonymous postcard or a late-night phone call from a $30 burner phone would be much harder to prosecute.
I've followed my usual practice of responding to the parts of your post that raise a legitimate concern, and ignoring the ad-hominem parts.
It's not for you, it's for Facebook. Unsupported Facebook doesn't want certain content on its platform, e.g. illegal images.
Policing content is very labour intensive, so they create tools to reduce the burden. Blocking known images, for example. But that still means a lot of human review, which is not only labour intensive but pretty hard on the reviewers too.
It's even worse with hate speech. They can do some simple pattern matching like "1488" but most of it is users reporting material and well beyond the ability of AI to evaluate.
Which is why the *only* solution is to pass a law so that Facebook, Twitter, ISPs, etc are not held legally liable for the content other people disseminate on their platform.
These entities are not "publishers" in the traditional sense. They don't read a post before it goes live; they exercise no editorial control prior to publication, and as you point out, it would be humanly impossible for them to do so (because of the vast amount of content being published every second). They are more akin to a phone company or a mail service, ferrying content from one place to another. You don't prosecute the phone company if someone uses one of their lines to convey "hate speech". Not yet, anyway.
If someone uses the Internet to post content that is actually against the law-- e.g. libelous statements, threats of harm to a specific individual, child porn-- then you can use the relevant law to prosecute the person who posted the content.
I know that this is a lot to ask, since it flies in the face of recent legislative trends. But it's the *only* way to address the very real problem you are talking about. If you can think of another way, let me know.
Amused to find that within two minutes of posting, my contribution was modded "50% Insightful, 50% Redundant".
I have to admit, it's a fair enough grade. Even as I posted I was thinking to myself-- what I am saying is so blindingly obvious, does it really need to be said at all?
But I think the very existence of this "research" shows that it does need to be said, loudly, and often, and by as many people as possible.
I've somehow managed to get by for many years without any algorithms to "protect" me from speech. So here's my message to the inventors of this algorithm: I'd love it if you would fuck right off, OK? Thanks and have a great day!
This single comment has more value than all of the endless blither-blathering about UBI that has been in the news recently.
The disability system is broken. Like, really, obviously broken. AC above explains exactly why. It's a system in which people are punished for trying to work. A lot of my clients are on disability, so I see this literally every day.
The one positive aspect of UBI is that, unlike the current system, it removes this disincentive. Aside from that element, UBI is fucking nonsense. Do the math: If you provide $10,000 a year to the adult population of the US (currently 242 million), you will be spending $2.42 trillion a year. It's an insane idea, and that's before we even get into the effect on inflation.
Seriously, can someone explain to me why UBI is even being discussed? Why can't we, instead, have a discussion about fixing the disability system?
Instead of sending all these Facebook/Twitter postings down the memory hole, they should just flag them: "These are posts which we have reason to believe originated with Iranian operatives" (or Russian military, or whatever they think it is). Give people the option to hide these posts, or to browse them, or whatever they want to do. Personally, I'd be curious to look at them, at least briefly. It could perhaps lead me to be better informed about what the various state actors are up to on social media. It would certainly do a lot to raise public awareness of that problem.
The current solution sucks, since it does nothing to raise awareness of the problem, and raises the possibility that Facebook is engaging in censorship for their own reasons. As others have observed on this thread: it smells a little gamey when Facebook says "We're going to delete all these posts because we think they originated with [x]. No, we're not going to tell you why we think that".
The solution to speech you don't like is to add more speech of your own. The solution is never to suppress the speech you don't like.
Why? For providing a second source of searching the internet to the Chinese thereby weakening the effects of state run censorship through mistakes and imperfections in the control of an American company?
An interesting theory, that Google's decision will ultimately weaken the effects of state censorship. But I see it differently.
Right now there are about a billion Chinese citizens who are acutely aware of the fact that they lack certain basic human rights-- such as free speech, freedom of association, and free access to information. They are rapidly becoming richer, more cosmopolitan, and more globalized. They realize that most of the civilized world has freedoms they don't enjoy. You're already seeing some push-back in the form of quiet civil disobedience (using technology to bypass the Great Firewall, smuggling in "forbidden" books/movies, etc.) Eventually there will be push-back through political means as well-- it's just a matter of time. Xi Jinping may have declared himself president for life, but he's not immortal.
What Google's decision will do, I think, is to reduce the urgency of this push-back. It "normalizes" the status quo. Instead of going out of their way to get access to a real search engine, a lot of Chinese will simply make do with the "look-alike" Chinese version-- which I'm sure will work wonderfully for everyday tasks like reading about the next Marvel blockbuster, and only blocks you from a few pesky little topics that their authoritarian masters don't approve of.
I would argue, also, that if an authoritarian regime wants to infringe on human rights, we should not provide them with the tools to do so. Period. What was it Lenin said-- when it finally comes time to hang the capitalists, the capitalists will sell us the rope?
So, I just literally googled "how to boycott Google".
It's not as difficult as I thought it might be. There are non-affiliated search engines (DuckDuckGo, Bing, WolframAlpha). There are obviously alternatives to Chrome. Youtube (a Google property since 2006) might be the hardest thing to find a replacement for.
The real problem, of course, is that you would need a *lot* of people to participate for a boycott to have any effect on corporate decisionmaking.
Among the many, many, many problems with this horrible idea, there is the fact that private companies (such as Amazon and Starbucks) are not obliged to uphold the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. (Whenever unpopular speech is suppressed, for example on a platform like Facebook, the pro-suppression argument always leads off with "It's their platform and they have a right to kick you off it if they don't like your speech").
Most of the interesting-but-unpopular comments end up modded to 0, not to -1. I think the unofficial rule is that *no* comment which actually relates to the topic should be modded to -1, even if the comment is idiotic, abusive, or offensive. (Note that if a comment consists entirely of abuse, e.g. a comment consisting only of the words "You're a moron", then it doesn't contain any material relevant to the topic and qualifies for the -1 rating).
At least, that's the rule I follow when modding, and I get the sense that it's the rule most people follow. Look at the current thread: All but one of the spam comments have been modded to -1; there is not a single "unpopular-but-relevant" comment modded to -1.
I know it's de rigueur for Slashdotters to complain about Slashdot, but I think the current moderation system has worked very well for 20+ years, and I would be hesitant to suggest messing with it. (Can you name a website that has a *better* moderation system?)
Facebook is useful and popular precisely because everyone in the world with any interest in social media is on it (well, except for places that restrict free access to the Internet, like China). You can't "break it up" into 20 different social-media sites, because then it won't be useful any more.
Sure, you could force them to spin off Instagram or whatever as a separate corporate entity, but as brucekeller observes-- what difference would that make? You'd still be left with a core platform that has billions of users. That makes the core platform bigger than any news outlet in the history of the world, and means that it will always have enormous power to influence political opinion.
With that said: I'd love to migrate from Facebook to a different social media site, one which still retains the basic functionality of Facebook. I'd be OK with doing this even knowing that most of my friends would *not* be on the new site, at least initially. But I tried looking for Facebook alternatives a few months ago, and the results were... not encouraging. Maybe someone here can post a suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
Online ordering was the biggest story in the restaurant business this year-- if you're running a restaurant, you either adapted to the trend or you went broke, probably. Unless you're Thomas Keller or somebody like that. I'm sure it's hurting the food vendors too.
The best part? If you want to have any online sales, you have to sign up with a monopoly like Grubhub, which takes a whopping 13.5% cut of each transaction (on average). Suddenly the food vendor, who is trying to lift himself above poverty level and is struggling with razor-thin margins, has to hand over 13.5% of his gross receipts to a Silicon Valley millionaire.
In all fairness and objectivity: One of the reasons I come to Slashdot is that there is much, much *less* virtue-signalling here than on most of the forums I visit. I mean, go to one of the Gawker sites (io9, Jezebel, Kotaku, etc) and you will see roughly 100x the amount of virtue-signalling (that's not hyperbole; it's a sober estimate).
The disturbing part isn't that somebody published this absolutely idiotic study. (I won't go into why it is idiotic, since literally every other post has pointed out one or more serious flaws in the study-- rarely have I ever seen anything ripped to shreds quite this thoroughly). No, the disturbing part is that Amnesty International was involved. THIS is what Amnesty International is doing these days?
I mean I'm not an expert, but I always thought Amnesty International was one of the most respected of all human-rights organizations-- the sort of organization I would donate money to. Not any more.
Yes, but then the robocallers will just use their own AI programs-- only connecting you to a live person if and when the AI thinks that it has a live "customer" on the line. (Navient, the loan company, does this already when it calls you about an overdue payment).
To get past the digital assistant, the robocaller will try to convince the digital assistant it's a real person (and not a robocaller). Likewise, the digital assistant will try to convince the robocaller it's a real person looking for their credit card (and not a digital assistant). It'll be an arms race, in which increasingly sophisticated AI programs administer Turing tests to each other.
It's not true that nursing homes are "only for the elderly". In Chicago a lot of nursing home residents are young-- I've seen people who are placed in nursing homes by their parents at age 21. And they don't always cost $5k a month (although of course some can cost that and more-- I've heard of $11k/month for dementia care). A lot of them just take your disability check as payment, giving you $30 back every month as walking-around money. (Ridiculously small amount of walking-around money-- it's basically a dollar a day-- especially if you smoke, as most of the residents do).
Some of the nursing homes are OK, some are atrocious, and sometimes the really bad ones get shut down. Some of the residents really do need to be in nursing homes-- they're chronically unable to function on their own, even if you give them an apartment, a monthly check, a healthcare team, and a social worker. Some of them really don't need to be in nursing homes. I worked with ex-nursing home clients for many years and it's hard to generalize.
That's what we used to have, but there was a huge moral panic about the deplorable conditions in those facilities and public outcry lead to them being shut down. There's just no getting around the fact that people with severe mental health issues aren't going to behave like well adjusted human beings, but from a pure cost to society perspective, it's probably much cheaper to house them in sanatoriums than it is to run around putting out the small fires that arise when you leave them to wander the streets.
Of course we still have these places-- lots of them. They're just not called "sanitoriums". They're called nursing homes, or IMD's (Institutions for Mental Disease), or ICF's (Intermediate Care Facilities), or other things.
Every single EHR system I've used has had the same problem: The designers think they know my job better than I do. In the old days (1990s) you trusted the doc to write or type down the information that was important and relevant. Today, the EHR designers are worried that I'll forget to ask some clinically important bit of information (like the patient's smoking history), so they force me to fill out dozens of little boxes, check-marks, drop-down menus, etc., just to ensure that all of the clinically important questions are answered (with "clinically important" being defined by a committee of god-knows-who).
It's a fucking mess. Instead of a couple of succinct paragraphs, you get 30 pages of checklists and prefabricated phrases. There are several unintended consequences to this-- when doctors have to click through dozens of checklists (some of which may be of questionable clinical importance), they get in the habit of doing it as quickly as humanly possible, and that's when mistakes get made. That's how you end up with notes that say "Pelvic exam performed and was normal. Prostate exam performed and was normal." Of course, no one would actually TYPE this shit, since it doesn't make any sense-- these are phrases that got inserted into the chart because someone "clicked through" a wall of checkboxes.
You also wind up with situations where you are forced to choose from a limited number of wrong or partially-wrong answers. (I've run across systems where instead of being able to describe the patient's affect, you had to choose from a selection of about five different adjectives to describe the patient's affect).
Look, I get it. Doctors are imperfect and sometimes they really do forget to ask certain questions, perform certain parts of the exam, or issue certain warnings. I'm of the opinion that we need more mechanisms to double-check the work doctors do. But this should NOT be the job of the software developer who writes the EHR software.
The rats in the study were only exposed to cell phone radiation for 2 years, and I'm assuming they were sacrificed at the end of the 2 years. (Rats only live 3-4 years anyway at best). How long does it take humans to develop cancer after exposure to a carcinogen? Quite a lot longer than that, in some cases. Sometimes it's decades.
I realize that there were factors in this study which would tend to overestimate the risk (e.g., intensity of radiation and daily length of exposure), but the limited length of the study would seem to introduce an error in the other direction.
Recently I had to replace the lightning port on an Iphone 7 plus. Cost at Apple Store: $350, plus I was going to lose my data, since their repair plan was actually to replace the entire phone with a refurbished unit. Cost at an independent shop: $70, no loss of data, and they got it done in less than an hour (even dropped it off at my workplace for an extra $20).
This will be a fucking disaster for Mac owners. It'll be like taking an out-of-warranty Mercedes to the dealer for new brakes. I can't stomach going back to Windows (even less so after today's story about the magical disappearing files), and I can't use Linux, since one of the main things I do with my computer is record music. So I'm basically stuck.
I wonder if part of bittorrent's resurgence is due to the fact that it offers a way to access censored material.
What's the old saying-- the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it? That's being put to the test, right now, on an unimaginably huge scale. You have totalitarian regimes like China (to name but one example) which restrict free access to information, and massive corporations like Google that are eager to help them restrict free access to information, and a population that is more aware with every passing year that they are being denied something that the rest of the world is allowed to have.
What we need is a low-latency bluetooth standard. It's annoying to watch a show on a phone via bluetooth earbuds. The spoken lines don't match the mouth movements as though the A/V sync were faulty (it isn't). The latency is quite noticable, probably on the order of 200 milliseconds or so.
Low-latency bluetooth would also be great for musicians who want to monitor a mix in real time (for recording overdubs, live performance, or just low-volume rehearsal at home). It would have to be really low though, like 5 ms or less, and I have no idea if that's feasible for bluetooth.
You can replace a team of 5 expert doctors, 10 nurses and a group of psychologists per patients just by implementing a software that can do diagnosis better than doctors and a pill of correct medicine.
This post is so disconnected from reality that it's almost not worth responding to-- it's like saying you can replace a 747 with a jar of herring.
Diagnosis is really a pretty small part of what doctors and nurses do all day. It can be an interesting part, and that's why TV shows tend to focus on it, but it's a minor percentage of the overall workload. Most of the time you know what's wrong with the patient. Anyway, there are already lots of algorithms and treatment guidelines to help "automate" the process of diagnosis. There may be an interesting role for software in helping to further automate this process, but any advances in that area are going to be incremental, not transformative.
The only exception I can think of-- the only area where I can see software actually putting physicians out of work-- might be radiology. If I were a radiologist at the beginning of my career, I'd be a little bit worried.
Which is why the *only* solution is to pass a law so that Facebook, Twitter, ISPs, etc are not held legally liable for the content other people disseminate on their platform.
Are you being sarcastic, or do you not know that they already enjoy this legal protection?
It's more complicated than that. See for example: https://www.npr.org/sections/a...
Really, it's more complicated than my earlier post suggested. The issue is not merely whether Facebook is protected *now*: it's whether they can count on that protection going forward. As the recent congressional hearings with Zuckerberg made clear, Facebook is terrified of what laws Congress might come up with to punish them, and they are currently scrambling to take steps to *prevent* that happening. Hence the renewed interest in automated speech filters and so on. Hence TFA.
And this issue isn't confined to Facebook, of course. Really, it affects anyone and everyone who is providing a platform for people to communicate with each other.
My post was overly simplistic, because a single law isn't going to fix the situation-- laws can always be amended or superseded. What is needed is constant vigilance against laws that hold such platforms liable. The only thing that could help in a more lasting manner would be a Supreme Court decision invalidating such laws. I'm not legally knowledgeable enough to know if that outcome is possible or likely.
I've somehow managed to get by for many years without any algorithms to "protect" me from speech.
You've probably never been on the receiving end of messages telling you that they are going to rape you until you bleed. Or that they have a K-Bar and are going to shove it up your cunt. Or that your "mutilated corpse will be on the cover of Jezebel tomorrow." Or that they are going to kill your children, and add "I know where you live" followed by your home address.
So, yes, since it affects other people who aren't you, and you are the only person who is important, sure, it's not a problem.
Well, I have a few thoughts on that:
1) If someone conveys a believable threat of violence or bodily harm to you, they've committed a crime-- a felony, I believe-- and you can talk to the police and have them arrested. I work with quite a few clients who are victims of DV, so I've seen this done many times.
2) If someone is intent on conveying a threat of violence or bodily harm, they have an infinite number of options for doing so. They can send you a text message. They can make a threatening phone call. They can send you a threatening postcard from Istanbul. Etc.
3) You may or may not be able to successfully prosecute the person making the threat. It comes down to whether you have evidence of the threat, and whether you can identify the person who made the threat. And I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the odds of a *successful* prosecution go way up if the threat was made on a forum like Facebook, where all the evidence is preserved for forensic investigators. An anonymous postcard or a late-night phone call from a $30 burner phone would be much harder to prosecute.
I've followed my usual practice of responding to the parts of your post that raise a legitimate concern, and ignoring the ad-hominem parts.
It's not for you, it's for Facebook. Unsupported Facebook doesn't want certain content on its platform, e.g. illegal images.
Policing content is very labour intensive, so they create tools to reduce the burden. Blocking known images, for example. But that still means a lot of human review, which is not only labour intensive but pretty hard on the reviewers too.
It's even worse with hate speech. They can do some simple pattern matching like "1488" but most of it is users reporting material and well beyond the ability of AI to evaluate.
Which is why the *only* solution is to pass a law so that Facebook, Twitter, ISPs, etc are not held legally liable for the content other people disseminate on their platform.
These entities are not "publishers" in the traditional sense. They don't read a post before it goes live; they exercise no editorial control prior to publication, and as you point out, it would be humanly impossible for them to do so (because of the vast amount of content being published every second). They are more akin to a phone company or a mail service, ferrying content from one place to another. You don't prosecute the phone company if someone uses one of their lines to convey "hate speech". Not yet, anyway.
If someone uses the Internet to post content that is actually against the law-- e.g. libelous statements, threats of harm to a specific individual, child porn-- then you can use the relevant law to prosecute the person who posted the content.
I know that this is a lot to ask, since it flies in the face of recent legislative trends. But it's the *only* way to address the very real problem you are talking about. If you can think of another way, let me know.
Amused to find that within two minutes of posting, my contribution was modded "50% Insightful, 50% Redundant".
I have to admit, it's a fair enough grade. Even as I posted I was thinking to myself-- what I am saying is so blindingly obvious, does it really need to be said at all?
But I think the very existence of this "research" shows that it does need to be said, loudly, and often, and by as many people as possible.
I've somehow managed to get by for many years without any algorithms to "protect" me from speech. So here's my message to the inventors of this algorithm: I'd love it if you would fuck right off, OK? Thanks and have a great day!
This single comment has more value than all of the endless blither-blathering about UBI that has been in the news recently.
The disability system is broken. Like, really, obviously broken. AC above explains exactly why. It's a system in which people are punished for trying to work. A lot of my clients are on disability, so I see this literally every day.
The one positive aspect of UBI is that, unlike the current system, it removes this disincentive. Aside from that element, UBI is fucking nonsense. Do the math: If you provide $10,000 a year to the adult population of the US (currently 242 million), you will be spending $2.42 trillion a year. It's an insane idea, and that's before we even get into the effect on inflation.
Seriously, can someone explain to me why UBI is even being discussed? Why can't we, instead, have a discussion about fixing the disability system?
Instead of sending all these Facebook/Twitter postings down the memory hole, they should just flag them: "These are posts which we have reason to believe originated with Iranian operatives" (or Russian military, or whatever they think it is). Give people the option to hide these posts, or to browse them, or whatever they want to do. Personally, I'd be curious to look at them, at least briefly. It could perhaps lead me to be better informed about what the various state actors are up to on social media. It would certainly do a lot to raise public awareness of that problem.
The current solution sucks, since it does nothing to raise awareness of the problem, and raises the possibility that Facebook is engaging in censorship for their own reasons. As others have observed on this thread: it smells a little gamey when Facebook says "We're going to delete all these posts because we think they originated with [x]. No, we're not going to tell you why we think that".
The solution to speech you don't like is to add more speech of your own. The solution is never to suppress the speech you don't like.
Why? For providing a second source of searching the internet to the Chinese thereby weakening the effects of state run censorship through mistakes and imperfections in the control of an American company?
An interesting theory, that Google's decision will ultimately weaken the effects of state censorship. But I see it differently.
Right now there are about a billion Chinese citizens who are acutely aware of the fact that they lack certain basic human rights-- such as free speech, freedom of association, and free access to information. They are rapidly becoming richer, more cosmopolitan, and more globalized. They realize that most of the civilized world has freedoms they don't enjoy. You're already seeing some push-back in the form of quiet civil disobedience (using technology to bypass the Great Firewall, smuggling in "forbidden" books/movies, etc.) Eventually there will be push-back through political means as well-- it's just a matter of time. Xi Jinping may have declared himself president for life, but he's not immortal.
What Google's decision will do, I think, is to reduce the urgency of this push-back. It "normalizes" the status quo. Instead of going out of their way to get access to a real search engine, a lot of Chinese will simply make do with the "look-alike" Chinese version-- which I'm sure will work wonderfully for everyday tasks like reading about the next Marvel blockbuster, and only blocks you from a few pesky little topics that their authoritarian masters don't approve of.
I would argue, also, that if an authoritarian regime wants to infringe on human rights, we should not provide them with the tools to do so. Period. What was it Lenin said-- when it finally comes time to hang the capitalists, the capitalists will sell us the rope?
So, I just literally googled "how to boycott Google".
It's not as difficult as I thought it might be. There are non-affiliated search engines (DuckDuckGo, Bing, WolframAlpha). There are obviously alternatives to Chrome. Youtube (a Google property since 2006) might be the hardest thing to find a replacement for.
The real problem, of course, is that you would need a *lot* of people to participate for a boycott to have any effect on corporate decisionmaking.
Among the many, many, many problems with this horrible idea, there is the fact that private companies (such as Amazon and Starbucks) are not obliged to uphold the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. (Whenever unpopular speech is suppressed, for example on a platform like Facebook, the pro-suppression argument always leads off with "It's their platform and they have a right to kick you off it if they don't like your speech").
Most of the interesting-but-unpopular comments end up modded to 0, not to -1. I think the unofficial rule is that *no* comment which actually relates to the topic should be modded to -1, even if the comment is idiotic, abusive, or offensive. (Note that if a comment consists entirely of abuse, e.g. a comment consisting only of the words "You're a moron", then it doesn't contain any material relevant to the topic and qualifies for the -1 rating).
At least, that's the rule I follow when modding, and I get the sense that it's the rule most people follow. Look at the current thread: All but one of the spam comments have been modded to -1; there is not a single "unpopular-but-relevant" comment modded to -1.
I know it's de rigueur for Slashdotters to complain about Slashdot, but I think the current moderation system has worked very well for 20+ years, and I would be hesitant to suggest messing with it. (Can you name a website that has a *better* moderation system?)
I'm interested-- got a link?
Facebook is useful and popular precisely because everyone in the world with any interest in social media is on it (well, except for places that restrict free access to the Internet, like China). You can't "break it up" into 20 different social-media sites, because then it won't be useful any more.
Sure, you could force them to spin off Instagram or whatever as a separate corporate entity, but as brucekeller observes-- what difference would that make? You'd still be left with a core platform that has billions of users. That makes the core platform bigger than any news outlet in the history of the world, and means that it will always have enormous power to influence political opinion.
With that said: I'd love to migrate from Facebook to a different social media site, one which still retains the basic functionality of Facebook. I'd be OK with doing this even knowing that most of my friends would *not* be on the new site, at least initially. But I tried looking for Facebook alternatives a few months ago, and the results were... not encouraging. Maybe someone here can post a suggestion.