9 months ago
It's amazing to me how little moderation they do for Ad content. My Instagram ads are constant crypto scams. Maybe there just isn't the same incentives to moderate companies paying to scam your users, as opposed to free users posting their political views
9 months ago
Does anyone else feel like Instagram "moderation" is, well, basically a lost cause?
The core issue with it is the algorithm. There's nothing inherently "incorrect" about 99% of the stuff I see on there but it clearly influences my mind over time regardless, it's just a bad information diet.
9 months ago
Yes. "You are what you eat" also applies to information diets. Consume simplistic, small-minded information, produce simplistic, small-minded thoughts. One of the key takeaways from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is how political and economic forces on 20th century mass media shape and constrain its contents; you will rarely come across content that runs antithetical to the interests and ethos of advertisers or providers of capital, which all provide funding to mass media outlets and thus enable their existence. Further, the government, with a monopoly on access to privileged or authoritative knowledge, is able to supply the mass media with information germane to its own agendas.
Messages will evolve according to the conditions of the medium that carries them; similarly to how biological organisms either adapt and thrive or fail according to the constraints of their environment, there exist selective pressures that determine, ultimately, what content is promoted and thrives according to the whims of the social media algorithm. "The medium is the message," and the predominant message of social media is short-form brainrot. The need to publish "content" on a regular, daily, or even live-streamed 24/7 basis incentivizes the production of quick takes, short videos, and soundbytes instead of slow, deliberative, measured thoughts that may take months, years, or longer to assemble into a literate medium. The latter form of content is actively selected against in a social media environment; thus, the proliferation of groupthink and stupidity.
9 months ago
> Does anyone else feel like Instagram "moderation" is, well, basically a lost cause?
I am low-key thinking about that problem all the time. The more I think the less I believe that it is even surmountable.
From that vantage point it sure looks like Meta does an incredible, excellent top-notch job on that. That's the failed 0.001% that are notoriously and hilariously wrong. While it sucks and hits the pain points, we can all agree it's more or less inevitable. No system can be 100% perfect. And yes, I have been on the receiving end of that lance multiple times and yes it sucks.
9 months ago
That's pretty much all media including the 24 hour daily news.
9 months ago
I agree, and more often than not, when Ive mentioned this to folks they get very defensive and insist that news isnt "media", which I definitely disagree with.
I find myself thinking about nutrition a lot after reading this a number of years ago, and trying to be careful about my intake. HN is pretty much my only (vice) news source left at this point.
> All beings subsist on nutriment: edible food, sense-impressions, volitions, and consciousness. [src](https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/whee...)
9 months ago
It's interesting, friend once told me, we are what we have read in the past five years. Similar to the food we eat and how quickly it can change our body, our mind can change quickly based on what we have read, what we watch, the conversations we have, what we do...I feel like a lot of people underestimate our malleability.
9 months ago
Interesting that they go to Twitter to complain about censorship on other apps.
9 months ago
I was noticing the big blue app doesn't let you report a fake profile unless the impersonated person has a real profile. What kind of narcissist designs a "report fake profile" feature that assumes everybody on earth has an account? Every time I report fake profiles I get the automated response that they looked into it and it's legit. Did it twice today.
As people move on to other apps, scams and fake content on "classic" fb seems to still be reaching boomers and people in other countries. As usual, I do not get the impression anyone at meta cares.
The standard techie response for how to solve this problem is to get someone internal at meta to escalate. Otherwise known as not a solution to the problem. My experience doing this is that internal people handling such tickets are actually not very bright and your internal contact needs to repeatedly push back at people who want to close tickets with no action.
9 months ago
I actually spend a lot of time curating my feed and ensuring the algorithm shows me the type of content I want to see, so I haven’t personally felt that moderation is out of control. From my experience, both the posts and the ads I see are pretty relevant and aligned with my interests.
For context, I’m based on the West Coast, which might influence my experience. Just wanted to share my perspective!
9 months ago
My experience on Tiktok: I press "not interested" on some post, then again two three times on similar posts — it stops showing such posts.
My experience on Instagram: I press not interested. It keeps showing exact same thing over and over.
9 months ago
It's not just moderation. As of one week ago, my stories disappeared and now I have to go into Settings > Archive, to see who viewed them, or delete them, etc. Not only that, but everyone I follow's stories also disappeared unless I go to their profile to view them. Also, IG won't refresh if I pull down. I have to close the app then reopen.
9 months ago
9 months ago
There is hardly any hope in controlling human expression by whatever means you employ. It is like trying to stop the waves from arriving on the beach by using a toy plastic bucket.
9 months ago
Yeah, I'm not sure what people are really expecting from these "platforms".
At the scale of Instagram you're basically expecting them to act as a censor for billions of people. It's like imagining an agent on every street corner preventing people from discussing what they like in the pub. You might be able to influence the direction, and you might be able to use models to blanket ban certain things, but real moderation? You'd need to employ hundreds of millions.
9 months ago
Took me a few yrs waiting for app.nz to be unblocked.
Finally unblocked after complaining on twitter about them
9 months ago
Given we have an election in less than a month hardly surprised that their moderation systems are erring on the side of caution.
Especially with so many well-funded, state sponsored actors using LLMs to sow division as we've seen so often on Twitter recently.
9 months ago
They're not erring on the side of anything. They removed a post containing two "Grinning Squinting Face" emojis but left one up telling all gay people to "get in the ground".
9 months ago
When you talk about they. You are talking about an inherently imperfect ML model.
Even if it was 99.99% accurate there would still be thousands of false positives positives/negatives like you describe.
9 months ago
The state-sponsored actors (with the US being one of those states) are censoring people and also using LLM bots as well to gaslight them.
Democracy cannot work without freedom of speech, and I would argue anonymous freedom of speech. Block bots, not people.
9 months ago
> anonymous freedom of speech. Block bots, not people.
As we're hearing more and more from the large tech companies, this is a hard line to walk. How do you identify what's a bot as they become more indistinguishable from humans? Apparently identity verification and/or remote attestation, both of erode the idea of anonymous freedom of speech.
Whether one believes them is another question.
9 months ago
It is a fine line to walk. However, I think one easy not filtering solution might be to sell a cryptographic solution on the open market for a price high enough that it would be infeasible to fake that. Think of it like X's premium feature but with no credit card involved. Imagine going to Target or Best Buy, smacking down a hundred dollar bill, and getting your "trusted human level $100" token. You could then use the thing to register an anonymous account anywhere you like, and the price(s) of your token(s) could even be public (in case someone did decide to pay a high price for tons of fake bot accounts, you could potentially detect it). You would have to still prevent the thing from being linked to your real identity, but that should be doable. It would also be possible for these accounts to vouch for each other. So, you know, you get some web-of-trust type of fuzzy feeling about various accounts.
Now that I think of it, maybe this can be done with TLS certs, although I don't know any CA that can take anonymous payment.
9 months ago
That works for the half of it, which blocks people from massing many accounts. Other part is flow control, limit posts to X per unit time e.g. every 5 minutes. That second part is key because we need to be operating under the assumption that said "token account" still has a clever programmer controlling it with selenium / bot. But if we have $100 / 100 posts/day on social media for 1 year or similar, that's now significantly limiting the power of any party to mass advertise. Of course those numbers would need to be tweaked, limits optimized, and then still one worries about state actors and deep pockets.
9 months ago
> That works for the half of it, which blocks people from massing many accounts.
No it doesn't, unless you're going to somehow limit the # of "tokens" per human, which seems to me to be impossible if the goal here is anonynimity.
> then still one worries about state actors and deep pockets.
You and OP seem to assume that driving the cost up will scale the cost of an attack at the same rate - it won't. These actors will just commit more crimes in order to acquire more "tokens" - either phishing/hacking them, or stealing from distributors, or...
At the same time, you'll be making it difficult/impossible for poor people to access the Internet freely, further widening income and class inequality both on the Internet and likely in reality too.
"Buy an NFT to access the Internet anonymously" is a terrible idea in every conceivable way.
9 months ago
>No it doesn't, unless you're going to somehow limit the # of "tokens" per human, which seems to me to be impossible if the goal here is anonynimity.
The intent is not to limit the number of tokens per human. The intent is to establish confidence that an account is real by allowing tokens to be associated with it. Additionally, the system would do well to have a database of all accounts associated with a single token. If someone wants to have 10 accounts with 10 separate tokens, that is fine. At least you know it's probably not a bot farm running thousands of fake accounts, because nobody could afford it.
>You and OP seem to assume that driving the cost up will scale the cost of an attack at the same rate - it won't. These actors will just commit more crimes in order to acquire more "tokens" - either phishing/hacking them, or stealing from distributors, or...
Increasing cost does limit the scale of attacks. You might as well be saying that the high price of drugs is not a limit to the scale of drug abuse because people will steal them lol. Committing more crimes is not free of cost. It requires time, opportunity, and expertise. I think a system like I have described can be used to track the tokens and prevent abuse, while allowing people to obtain them anonymously. Every crime committed adds a trail of evidence that can be used to uncover abuse.
>At the same time, you'll be making it difficult/impossible for poor people to access the Internet freely, further widening income and class inequality both on the Internet and likely in reality too.
No, that is all BS. All this means is that they may have to pay more to be anonymous. People of all social classes already have to pay more for guaranteed anonymity, whether it be through buying additional devices, VPN subscriptions, or travel costs as they go to Internet cafes. If you are poor, you still have the option of being less anonymous. We're talking about being provably anonymous here and instilling confidence in one being a real person here, which is a distinctly different problem from being online in general.
9 months ago
> You might as well be saying that the high price of drugs is not a limit to the scale of drug abuse because people will steal them lol
...I can't even respond to this.
> system like I have described can be used to track the tokens and prevent abuse, while allowing people to obtain them anonymously.
How do you track the tokens to prevent abuse while ensuring anonymity?
9 months ago
>...I can't even respond to this.
OK it's not a great example but what you wrote is an example of arguing that exceptional cases dominate the whole situation. Like "It's stupid to lock your door because a criminal can just break your door/wall to get in."
>How do you track the tokens to prevent abuse while ensuring anonymity?
The same company that sells the tokens can cooperate with any client that uses them to validate accounts to maintain a database of where the tokens are used and how many times they are used. That would allow you to disconnect accounts from each other as much as you like, but you could not register 100 accounts with a single token without raising some eyebrows. It would be on you to not connect the token to your real identity, if you don't want to be identified by that token.
9 months ago
I don't have $100 to spare, so I guess I won't be able to be anonymous?
9 months ago
I suppose it can be dependent on the platform. For example, any given platform can provide options to ignore anonymous users who lack a certain level of verification. So, you can either trust the platform with your real identity (and hide it), or else you can pay to be truly anonymous. This could get ridiculous with higher and higher prices but it's on us to resist anything too unreasonable in that situation.
9 months ago
I really don't think injecting even more wealth inequality to privacy and freedom on the Internet is a great idea.
Not to mention that this would do nothing to stop the problem of bots, as bad actors will simply do what they do now and buy/hack verified accounts.
9 months ago
The idea is to discourage botnets by increasing the cost of building a botnet. It is about as good of an idea as you're going to find. Of course there would be other ways but this is more effective than captchas, and lets you decide how important it is to you to prove that you are a human or how important it is to you that you are only dealing with humans.
You could make a system like this based on IRL contacts but that would potentially compromise your privacy even more. It's also easier to exploit in some ways than a simple payment.
9 months ago
I just wanted to throw out there that having an informed electorate was one of the reasons there is the Electoral College. We can blame LLMs, etc. now but low-information, easily-swayed voters has always been an issue.
9 months ago
Can you elaborate on this? It is my understanding that electors are not allowed to change the vote based on anything like being more informed or something similar. Is this wrong? Or did the mechanics of the election change so much over time?
9 months ago
Originally the idea was you would vote for people who would do the actual voting. A nice idea, but obviously not workable for many reasons, especially since communication rapidly improved so that candidates could be known widely enough that the actual voters could be somewhat informed. (However, I believe the electors still can change their vote from what they promised, but forget ever doing anything in politics again.)
9 months ago
Electors weren’t bound to a candidate. The founding fathers wanted democracy but were worried about “well-meaning but uninformed people” who may be vulnerable to charismatic populists, candidates with blatantly unfit characters, and influence by foreign propaganda. Electors were meant to be well-informed, exercise their judgment and prevent unfit candidates from being elected. That didn’t work in practice, and eventually states passed laws to pick partisan electors via popular vote. Then that gate keeping power shifted to party insiders, who chose the nominee and were meant to gatekeep bad/insane candidates. Then populists took that away too, because “people power” can never go wrong, right?
The current system, where you can vote in primaries, and where electors reflect their states’ vote, is just a few decades old.
Penalties for “faithless electors” are somewhat recent and only exist in states which passed laws to give themselves that power.
9 months ago
>Then populists took that away too, because “people power” can never go wrong, right?
the blatant, sneering disdain for lowly commoners that supposed proponents of "democracy" are continually unable to contain for even a few paragraphs at a time will somehow never fail to shock me
9 months ago
I’m not a proponent for anything except competent leadership. Your need to project another group’s ideas onto me, to reinforce your preexisting feeling against them, does slightly prove my point.