The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.
Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.
I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.
A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?
Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say “I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare”; if you respond “no, there is no right to healthcare” you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.
I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about it with a regular ban; make it clear what they are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don’t apply to companies performing shadowbans.
Feel free to educate us instead of just saying the equivalent of “you’re wrong and I hate reading comments like yours”.
But I think, in general, the alteration to Section 230 that they are proposing makes sense as a way to keep these companies in check for practices like shadowbanning especially if those tools are abused for political purposes.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
It wastes bot’s time
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
So just don’t commit thought crime against Big Brother and you’ll be good?
When a platform gets to a certain size, we need to consider its effects on society as a whole. Hiding undesirable content and promoting desirable content can be a monopolistic practice for the org to get outsized impact on things it finds important. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” depends on how closely that org’s interests are aligned with the average person.
I, for one, do not think Meta’s interests are aligned with my own, so I think it’s bad that they have so much sway that they can steer the public discourse through their ranking algorithm. Shadowbanning is just another way for the platform to get their desired message out.
Instead of trying to restrict yourself to only posting what the platform wants you to post, you should be seeking alternatives that allow you to post what you think is valuable to post.
That’s a good solution for you, but some of us don’t generally bend over to assholes.
And that’s not serious. You’ll get shadowbanned for any kind of stuff somebody with that ability wants to shadowban you for. You won’t know the reason and what to avoid.
I got shadowbanned on Reddit a few times for basically repeating the 1988 resolution of the European Parliament on Artsakh (the one in support of reunification with Armenia).
Don’t hang out in spaces that don’t align with your beliefs.
I was on reddit for 15 years and never caught a ban and I’m not exactly a demure person. If you go to an anti vax thread (this is an example since i know nothing of armenia) and post stuff about vaccination, even it’s 100% factual, it’s not surprising when you catch a ban.
I usually go to places which (on surface) align with my beliefs in what the end goal should be, and generally on the means.
I
'm willing to drop some of my beliefs on the means if that makes the goal closer. And no system of belief is perfect, so it seems sane to argue on details of achieving something.
Which is when the reality hits that most people don’t care about end goals. They just want to join some crowd.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.
If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.
I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.
The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.
For example, if I said “I believe people have a right to healthcare”, you might correctly respond “people do not have a legal right to healthcare” (in America at least). But you’d be missing the point, because I’m speaking morally, not legally.
I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
I think private platforms that do this are acting in an unethical manner. Lots of things that are perfectly legal but of dubious morality. Like fucking a 16 year old as a 40 year old man in Georgia or used car dealerships.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments.
There’s a sub to test if you are shadowbanned. The mods set it up so automod automatically approves any post there, so that way even if you’re shadowbanned you can post.
Then a bot goes through and scans to check your comments and sees if they show up.
When shadowbanned, people can still see your comments if they go onto your profile. They just won’t see it in the thread.
You ever seen a thread that says something like “3 comments” and you click and only see 1? 2 people commented that were shadowbanned.
I’ve gone through the sub and browsed through profiles of people who were shadowbanned. Some of them posted nothing controversial to warrant a shadowban.
Because I can gather a pretty believable list of pros and cons for him as a person, which make sense together and didn’t change too sharply. Not the case with Biden.
This makes my point stronger. You must be very smart if you can characterize this specific man and get some idea which groups he represents, what is his strategy and to what end.
Because a good person would never need those. If you want to have shadowbans on your platform, you are not a good one.
A bit like animal protection, while animals can’t have rights balanced by obligations, you would want to keep people cruel to animals somewhere where you are not.
Because a good person would never need those. If you want to have shadowbans on your platform, you are not a good one.
This basically reads as “shadow bans are bad and have no redeeming factors,” but you haven’t explained why you think that.
If you’re a real user and you only have one account (or have multiple legitimate accounts) and you get shadow-banned, it’s a terrible experience. Shadow bans should never be used on “real” users even if they break the ToS, and IME, they generally aren’t. That’s because shadow bans solve a different problem.
In content moderation, if a user posts something that’s unacceptable on your platform, generally speaking, you want to remove it as soon as possible. Depending on how bad the content they posted was, or how frequently they post unacceptable content, you will want to take additional measures. For example, if someone posts child pornography, you will most likely ban them and then (as required by law) report all details you have on them and their problematic posts to the authorities.
Where this gets tricky, though, is with bots and multiple accounts.
If someone is making multiple accounts for your site - whether by hand or with bots - and using them to post unacceptable content, how do you stop that?
Your site has a lot of users, and bad actors aren’t limited to only having one account per real person. A single person - let’s call them a “Bot Overlord” - could run thousands of accounts - and it’s even easier for them to do this if those accounts can only be banned with manual intervention. You want to remove any content the Bot Overlord’s bots post and stop them from posting more as soon as you realize what they’re doing. Scaling up your human moderators isn’t reasonable, because the Bot Overlord can easily outscale you - you need an automated solution.
Suppose you build an algorithm that detects bots with incredible accuracy - 0% false positives and an estimated 1% false negatives. Great! Then, you set your system up to automatically ban detected bots.
A couple days later, your algorithm’s accuracy has dropped - from 1% false negatives to 10%. 10 times as many bots are making it past your algorithm. A few days after that, it gets even worse - first 20%, then 30%, then 50%, and eventually 90% of bots are bypassing your detection algorithm.
You can update your algorithm, but the same thing keeps happening. You’re stuck in an eternal game of cat and mouse - and you’re losing.
What gives? Well, you made a huge mistake when you set the system up to ban bots immediately. In your system, as soon as a bot gets banned, the bot creator knows. Since you’re banning every bot you detect as soon as you detect them, this gives the bot creator real-time data. They can basically reverse engineer your unpublished algorithm and then update their bots so as to avoid detection.
One solution to this is ban waves. Those work by detecting bots (or cheaters, in the context of online games) and then holding off on banning them until you can ban them all at once.
Great! Now the Bot Overlord will have much more trouble reverse-engineering your algorithm. They won’t know specifically when a bot was detected, just that it was detected within a certain window - between its creation and ban date.
But there’s still a problem. You need to minimize the damage the Bot Overlord’s accounts can do between when you detect them and when you ban them.
You could try shortening the time between ban waves. The problem with this approach is that the ban wave approach is more effective the longer that time period is. If you had an hourly ban wave, for example, the Bot Overlord could test a bunch of stuff out and get feedback every hour.
Shadow bans are one natural solution to this problem. That way, as soon as you detect it, you can prevent a bot from causing more damage. The Bot Overlord can’t quickly detect that their account was shadow-banned, so their bots will keep functioning, giving you more information about the Bot Overlord’s system and allowing you to refine your algorithm to be even more effective in the future, rather than the other way around.
I’m not aware of another way to effectively manage this issue. Do you have a counter-proposal?
Out of curiosity, do you have any experience working in content moderation for a major social media company? If so, how did that company balance respecting user privacy with effective content moderation without shadow bans, accounting for the factors I talked about above?
Nice writeup but there’s one key piece of information here that’s wrong in the context of reddit.
The “bot overlord” can easily tell if an account is shadowbanned. I use my trusty puppeteer or selenium script to spam my comments. After every comment (or every x interval of comments), I load up the page under a control account (or even just a fresh page with no cookies/cache, maybe even through VPN if I’m feeling fancy, different useragent, different window size… go wild with it) and check if my comment is there.
Comment is not there after a certain threshold of checks? Guess I’m shadowbanned, take the account off the list and add another one of the hundreds I have to the active list
The fact is that no matter what you do, there will be bots and spammers. No matter what you do, there will be cheaters in online games and people trying to exploit.
It’s a constant battle and it’s an impossible one. But you have to try and come up with solutions but you always have to balance the costs of those solutions with the benefits.
Shadowbanning on reddit doesn’t solve the problem it aims to fix. It does however have the potential for harm to individuals, especially naive ones who don’t fully understand how websites work.
I don’t think the ends justify the means. Just like stop and frisk may stop a certain type of crime or may not, but it definitely does damage to specific communities
“Major social media companies” in my opinion shouldn’t exist. ICQ and old Skype were major enough.
Your posts reads like my ex-military uncle’s rants when we talk about censorship, mass repressions, dissenters’ executions and so on.
These instruments can be used solely against rapists, thieves, murderers and so on. Usually they are not, because most (neurotypical) of us are apes and want power. That’s why major social media shouldn’t exist.
No, I don’t think so. My real point was the one I described which is the same as that they shouldn’t exist. And any true statement is the same as all other true statements in an interconnected world. That’s a bit abstract, but saying what others “should” do is both stupid and rude.
That’s a bit abstract, but saying what others “should” do is both stupid and rude.
Buddy, if anyone’s being stupid and rude in this exchange, it’s not me.
And any true statement is the same as all other true statements in an interconnected world.
It sounds like the interconnected world you’re referring to is entirely in your own head, with logic that you’re not able or willing to share with others.
Even if I accepted that you were right - and I don’t accept that, to be clear - your statements would still be nonsensical given that you’re making them without any effort to clarify why you think them. That makes me think you don’t understand why you think them - and if you don’t understand why you think something, how can you be so confident that you’re correct?
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don’t really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I’m explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there’s a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of “popular” content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that’s entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting “unboxing” videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that’s converged on “Oops! All Ads!” and is steadily making its way to “Oops! All scams!” as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
In business, it’s described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you’re working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic “unsolved problem” of social relationships.
have you contracted police to, well, police your area?
Sadly, I’ve been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.
Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power
All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.
Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.
Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.
Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.
Internal Affairs. Yes. Internal to the Russian Communist Party.
No, to the union. That included police.
The NKVD weren’t Jew-hunters, engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing.
Actually they were that too for a short period of time before Stalin’s death, when he got paranoid.
Also did you know there were unofficial quotas for good universities for the amount of Jewish students, while some simply didn’t accept any? In MSU such quotas existed, while in Gnesinka there were no Jews at all.
You could say the same thing about Ayn Rand.
She is usually criticized for her simplistic understanding of the world outside of Soviet matters, not for understanding them wrong.
You definitely sound very knowledgeable
Well, what they clearly was outside of their usual activities was protecting worker rights.
The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.
Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.
I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.
I bet you scream about your first amendment rights being violated whenever a moderator deletes your posts.
A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?
Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say “I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare”; if you respond “no, there is no right to healthcare” you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.
I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about it with a regular ban; make it clear what they are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don’t apply to companies performing shadowbans.
They are in no way publishers…ugh you people who don’t know shit about the law are insufferable.
Feel free to educate us instead of just saying the equivalent of “you’re wrong and I hate reading comments like yours”.
But I think, in general, the alteration to Section 230 that they are proposing makes sense as a way to keep these companies in check for practices like shadowbanning especially if those tools are abused for political purposes.
I bet you think this reply was sharp-minded and on spot and something else.
How much would you like to bet? I accept PayPal.
Oh, if this is not a figure of speech, then how much was your bet? I accept BTC (being in a sanctioned country and all that).
Mine was, of course, this is not worth a penny to me, I already know your measure.
If you would bet nothing, I guess you don’t actually believe your own words.
Thanks for admitting what you said was false. I think we can move on now.
There are a few factors, one of them is your value as a person.
Why would you say that if that’s false?
What is my value as a person?
And your question makes absolutely no sense.
Negligible, like the effort to type this sentence.
I’ll repeat - why would you say that I “admitted” something when I didn’t?
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted. Similar to vote obfuscation. It wastes bot’s time so it’s a good thing.
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
They never said shadow bans reduce the number of bots on a platform Classic straw man.
It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.
Which sucks just as badly.
Don’t post shit that gets you shadowbanned. Problem solved.
Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies
So just don’t commit thought crime against Big Brother and you’ll be good?
When a platform gets to a certain size, we need to consider its effects on society as a whole. Hiding undesirable content and promoting desirable content can be a monopolistic practice for the org to get outsized impact on things it finds important. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” depends on how closely that org’s interests are aligned with the average person.
I, for one, do not think Meta’s interests are aligned with my own, so I think it’s bad that they have so much sway that they can steer the public discourse through their ranking algorithm. Shadowbanning is just another way for the platform to get their desired message out.
Instead of trying to restrict yourself to only posting what the platform wants you to post, you should be seeking alternatives that allow you to post what you think is valuable to post.
That’s a good solution for you, but some of us don’t generally bend over to assholes.
And that’s not serious. You’ll get shadowbanned for any kind of stuff somebody with that ability wants to shadowban you for. You won’t know the reason and what to avoid.
I got shadowbanned on Reddit a few times for basically repeating the 1988 resolution of the European Parliament on Artsakh (the one in support of reunification with Armenia).
Don’t hang out in spaces that don’t align with your beliefs.
I was on reddit for 15 years and never caught a ban and I’m not exactly a demure person. If you go to an anti vax thread (this is an example since i know nothing of armenia) and post stuff about vaccination, even it’s 100% factual, it’s not surprising when you catch a ban.
I usually go to places which (on surface) align with my beliefs in what the end goal should be, and generally on the means. I 'm willing to drop some of my beliefs on the means if that makes the goal closer. And no system of belief is perfect, so it seems sane to argue on details of achieving something.
Which is when the reality hits that most people don’t care about end goals. They just want to join some crowd.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.
If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.
I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.
The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
You are wrong. You have no right to a voice on a private platform.
Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.
For example, if I said “I believe people have a right to healthcare”, you might correctly respond “people do not have a legal right to healthcare” (in America at least). But you’d be missing the point, because I’m speaking morally, not legally.
I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
So if I own a cafe and I have an open mic night and some guy gets up yelling racial epithets and Nazi slogans, it’s their right to be heard in my cafe and I am just censoring them by kicking them out?
As the one with the administrative power, should I put it up to a vote?
More if you own Ticketmaster, and you decide you’re going to freeze out a particular artist from every venue you contact with.
And yes. Absolutely censorship.
Changing the scenario doesn’t answer my question.
I came up with a scenario directly related to your previous post.
I can only imagine you are changing the scenario because you realize what I said makes what you said seem unreasonable.
Then why did you change the scenario?
I think private platforms that do this are acting in an unethical manner. Lots of things that are perfectly legal but of dubious morality. Like fucking a 16 year old as a 40 year old man in Georgia or used car dealerships.
Then how did you see them?
There’s a sub to test if you are shadowbanned. The mods set it up so automod automatically approves any post there, so that way even if you’re shadowbanned you can post.
Then a bot goes through and scans to check your comments and sees if they show up.
When shadowbanned, people can still see your comments if they go onto your profile. They just won’t see it in the thread.
You ever seen a thread that says something like “3 comments” and you click and only see 1? 2 people commented that were shadowbanned.
I’ve gone through the sub and browsed through profiles of people who were shadowbanned. Some of them posted nothing controversial to warrant a shadowban.
You think hes better than Biden? Why?
Because he thinks of him as a murderer?
Because I can gather a pretty believable list of pros and cons for him as a person, which make sense together and didn’t change too sharply. Not the case with Biden.
Way to not answer
I mean, you can look at a wall and say it’s a door, it’s your right.
Biden, the guy who’s been president for four years? You can’t tell who he is as a person?
This makes my point stronger. You must be very smart if you can characterize this specific man and get some idea which groups he represents, what is his strategy and to what end.
Why should shadow bans be illegal?
Because a good person would never need those. If you want to have shadowbans on your platform, you are not a good one.
A bit like animal protection, while animals can’t have rights balanced by obligations, you would want to keep people cruel to animals somewhere where you are not.
This basically reads as “shadow bans are bad and have no redeeming factors,” but you haven’t explained why you think that.
If you’re a real user and you only have one account (or have multiple legitimate accounts) and you get shadow-banned, it’s a terrible experience. Shadow bans should never be used on “real” users even if they break the ToS, and IME, they generally aren’t. That’s because shadow bans solve a different problem.
In content moderation, if a user posts something that’s unacceptable on your platform, generally speaking, you want to remove it as soon as possible. Depending on how bad the content they posted was, or how frequently they post unacceptable content, you will want to take additional measures. For example, if someone posts child pornography, you will most likely ban them and then (as required by law) report all details you have on them and their problematic posts to the authorities.
Where this gets tricky, though, is with bots and multiple accounts.
If someone is making multiple accounts for your site - whether by hand or with bots - and using them to post unacceptable content, how do you stop that?
Your site has a lot of users, and bad actors aren’t limited to only having one account per real person. A single person - let’s call them a “Bot Overlord” - could run thousands of accounts - and it’s even easier for them to do this if those accounts can only be banned with manual intervention. You want to remove any content the Bot Overlord’s bots post and stop them from posting more as soon as you realize what they’re doing. Scaling up your human moderators isn’t reasonable, because the Bot Overlord can easily outscale you - you need an automated solution.
Suppose you build an algorithm that detects bots with incredible accuracy - 0% false positives and an estimated 1% false negatives. Great! Then, you set your system up to automatically ban detected bots.
A couple days later, your algorithm’s accuracy has dropped - from 1% false negatives to 10%. 10 times as many bots are making it past your algorithm. A few days after that, it gets even worse - first 20%, then 30%, then 50%, and eventually 90% of bots are bypassing your detection algorithm.
You can update your algorithm, but the same thing keeps happening. You’re stuck in an eternal game of cat and mouse - and you’re losing.
What gives? Well, you made a huge mistake when you set the system up to ban bots immediately. In your system, as soon as a bot gets banned, the bot creator knows. Since you’re banning every bot you detect as soon as you detect them, this gives the bot creator real-time data. They can basically reverse engineer your unpublished algorithm and then update their bots so as to avoid detection.
One solution to this is ban waves. Those work by detecting bots (or cheaters, in the context of online games) and then holding off on banning them until you can ban them all at once.
Great! Now the Bot Overlord will have much more trouble reverse-engineering your algorithm. They won’t know specifically when a bot was detected, just that it was detected within a certain window - between its creation and ban date.
But there’s still a problem. You need to minimize the damage the Bot Overlord’s accounts can do between when you detect them and when you ban them.
You could try shortening the time between ban waves. The problem with this approach is that the ban wave approach is more effective the longer that time period is. If you had an hourly ban wave, for example, the Bot Overlord could test a bunch of stuff out and get feedback every hour.
Shadow bans are one natural solution to this problem. That way, as soon as you detect it, you can prevent a bot from causing more damage. The Bot Overlord can’t quickly detect that their account was shadow-banned, so their bots will keep functioning, giving you more information about the Bot Overlord’s system and allowing you to refine your algorithm to be even more effective in the future, rather than the other way around.
I’m not aware of another way to effectively manage this issue. Do you have a counter-proposal?
Out of curiosity, do you have any experience working in content moderation for a major social media company? If so, how did that company balance respecting user privacy with effective content moderation without shadow bans, accounting for the factors I talked about above?
Nice writeup but there’s one key piece of information here that’s wrong in the context of reddit.
The “bot overlord” can easily tell if an account is shadowbanned. I use my trusty puppeteer or selenium script to spam my comments. After every comment (or every x interval of comments), I load up the page under a control account (or even just a fresh page with no cookies/cache, maybe even through VPN if I’m feeling fancy, different useragent, different window size… go wild with it) and check if my comment is there.
Comment is not there after a certain threshold of checks? Guess I’m shadowbanned, take the account off the list and add another one of the hundreds I have to the active list
The fact is that no matter what you do, there will be bots and spammers. No matter what you do, there will be cheaters in online games and people trying to exploit.
It’s a constant battle and it’s an impossible one. But you have to try and come up with solutions but you always have to balance the costs of those solutions with the benefits.
Shadowbanning on reddit doesn’t solve the problem it aims to fix. It does however have the potential for harm to individuals, especially naive ones who don’t fully understand how websites work.
I don’t think the ends justify the means. Just like stop and frisk may stop a certain type of crime or may not, but it definitely does damage to specific communities
“Major social media companies” in my opinion shouldn’t exist. ICQ and old Skype were major enough.
Your posts reads like my ex-military uncle’s rants when we talk about censorship, mass repressions, dissenters’ executions and so on.
These instruments can be used solely against rapists, thieves, murderers and so on. Usually they are not, because most (neurotypical) of us are apes and want power. That’s why major social media shouldn’t exist.
But major social media companies do exist. If your real point was that they shouldn’t, you should have said that upfront.
No, I don’t think so. My real point was the one I described which is the same as that they shouldn’t exist. And any true statement is the same as all other true statements in an interconnected world. That’s a bit abstract, but saying what others “should” do is both stupid and rude.
Buddy, if anyone’s being stupid and rude in this exchange, it’s not me.
It sounds like the interconnected world you’re referring to is entirely in your own head, with logic that you’re not able or willing to share with others.
Even if I accepted that you were right - and I don’t accept that, to be clear - your statements would still be nonsensical given that you’re making them without any effort to clarify why you think them. That makes me think you don’t understand why you think them - and if you don’t understand why you think something, how can you be so confident that you’re correct?
You seem to think proving anything to you has any effect on the world, it doesn’t
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don’t really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I’m explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there’s a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of “popular” content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that’s entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting “unboxing” videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that’s converged on “Oops! All Ads!” and is steadily making its way to “Oops! All scams!” as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.
In business, it’s described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you’re working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic “unsolved problem” of social relationships.
I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.
Sadly, I’ve been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.
No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.
Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.
Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.
Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.
I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.
Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.
Internal Affairs. Yes. Internal to the Russian Communist Party.
The NKVD weren’t Jew-hunters, engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing.
You could say the same thing about Ayn Rand.
You definitely sound very knowledgeable
No, to the union. That included police.
Actually they were that too for a short period of time before Stalin’s death, when he got paranoid.
Also did you know there were unofficial quotas for good universities for the amount of Jewish students, while some simply didn’t accept any? In MSU such quotas existed, while in Gnesinka there were no Jews at all.
She is usually criticized for her simplistic understanding of the world outside of Soviet matters, not for understanding them wrong.
Well, what they clearly was outside of their usual activities was protecting worker rights.