It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a case like Myanmar.
First there would be the delay of the rest of the community understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the network. Fourth they can't stop the Myanmar government from setting up its own Mastodon instances, blocking access to outside instances, etc.
You'd better believe that if Modi keeps going down the road he is going on that India will kick out all western social media companies if they try to block his campaign of dehumanizing non-hindus.
From my perspective there is a lot of harmful talk that goes on social media that falls short of hate speech. In terms of my own feed I have keyword blocks against most Republican primary candidates (not Nikki Haley though) and there are many other topics that I think people are not capable of having a civil and productive conversation on or that I just don't want to be exposed to. A lot of stuff on the slippery slope to "hate speech" is blocked by this and it is OK when I do it because it is my own feed, but you'd better believe there are lots of people who think they have something so important to say that it would be crime to "censor" their shit (for lack of a better word) if the block affected more than just me.
Unfortunately the discussion around A.I. is dominated by positions like: (1) ChatGPT is the God at the end of the universe that Teilhard de Chardin told us about, or (2) It was just fine that Google stole everybody's content for years and years but all of a sudden ChatGPT came out and be outraged all of a sudden at this rip-off.
The truth about it is that machine learning algorithms over text have terrible performance, even the good ones. The performance curves look something like
and for my RSS reader I am happy to approach an AUC of 0.8, an AUC of > 0.95 for most tasks is getting into science fiction territory. And that's nowhere near being able to clean up hate speech at the rate that it should be cleared.
The short of it is that if you want to get rid of a lot more than "5%" of the outright "hate speech" you will also get rid of a lot of "dislike speech" and "angry speech" and "annoyed speech" as well as some "innocent speech".
To be really frank my filter deletes anything about "cis" and "trans" because it I think maybe 10% of what people say on the subject is outright hateful, 80% of it is emotionally negative, maybe 10% of the time somebody has something neutral or positive to say. My take is that losing a small amount of content I might want to see for being free of a lot of negativity is a bargain I am willing to make. A platform that imposed that kind of judgement on the community could be a much more emotionally positive place than anything you've seen but it is also going to get all sorts of criticism from people for doing so.
It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a case like Myanmar.
First there would be the delay of the rest of the community understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the network.
This (except the last bit) is missing the point about what Mastodon is for.
Why would "the rest of the community" would even be entitled to decide what to do about it ? Not that there would be a lot of overlap with the Burmese community anyway, so that wouldn't have much of an effect.
We already had an example BTW, with Gab splitting out with Mastodon, but then in a heavily English-speaking context.
What would have made at least a symbolic difference, is that some of these Mastodons would have been operated by the anti-hatred groups described in part I, and they would not have needed to unsuccessfully beg Facebook about doing moderation (with 0-4 moderators from other continents).
But in the end this is mostly spurious discussion : hate speech only effectively gets stomped out when a judge hands out sentences to the haters, but when the law enforcement that should handle them are the ones preparing genocide...
(Not that Facebook is not condamnable for heating it up.)
Certainly a lot of people seem to believe that many Mastodon instances are better moderated than commercial social media.
Certainly some kinds of right-wing hate are suppressed but there is very little pushback about widespread misuse of the word "fascist" to describe your local police department, or people in women's sports who use period trackers to prevent ACL tears, mainstream milquetoast politicians, or just about anyone.
On the other hand a lot of it seems like BS, there are two Mastodon instances that seem to be at war with Hacker News, I think I understand why one of them is mad at HN, I don't know if the second is mad out of sympathy with the first or they have some other grievance.
Many mastodonsters were concerned that Threads would be poorly moderated (might allow posts about how period tracking prevents ACL tears in female athletes I guess) but Threads pretty much dropped everybody's radar.
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One angle is that a system like this should have "defense in depth", like you try to create a culture where hateful speech is not welcome, where people don't try it because they know they'll get disapproval, where people know they'll get confronted if they call Keir Starmer a fascist, where people know you just don't boost hateful things, etc.
In that sense you might just want to cultivate a lot of positive and neutral stuff and encourage people seeking negativity to go elsewhere. I think this is what Instagram was going for with Threads and it might be one reason why people should be asking "whatever happened to Threads?" but they don't because they've forgotten all about it.
The problem with Facebook, Twitter, even Reddit to a large extent, is that it is hard or impossible for users to self-segregate.
Mastodon offerts a possibility of having truly disconnected communities who do their own thing though sharing a protocol. What's acceptable in one community is not in another and that's fine because users can pick and choose what they participate in and what they see. However, this model is not perfect in Mastodon either as people who believe crusading is a virtue actively seek to undermine communities they don't participate in.
With Facebook however, the profit structure of the company and the way the website works pushes it to categorize users to receive content not based on user preference but based on algorithmic optimization. I may intentionally not join any motorist group, I still get shown content that gets a lot of engagement from idiotic suburbanites.
Comments
It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a case like Myanmar.
First there would be the delay of the rest of the community understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the network. Fourth they can't stop the Myanmar government from setting up its own Mastodon instances, blocking access to outside instances, etc.
You'd better believe that if Modi keeps going down the road he is going on that India will kick out all western social media companies if they try to block his campaign of dehumanizing non-hindus.
From my perspective there is a lot of harmful talk that goes on social media that falls short of hate speech. In terms of my own feed I have keyword blocks against most Republican primary candidates (not Nikki Haley though) and there are many other topics that I think people are not capable of having a civil and productive conversation on or that I just don't want to be exposed to. A lot of stuff on the slippery slope to "hate speech" is blocked by this and it is OK when I do it because it is my own feed, but you'd better believe there are lots of people who think they have something so important to say that it would be crime to "censor" their shit (for lack of a better word) if the block affected more than just me.
Unfortunately the discussion around A.I. is dominated by positions like: (1) ChatGPT is the God at the end of the universe that Teilhard de Chardin told us about, or (2) It was just fine that Google stole everybody's content for years and years but all of a sudden ChatGPT came out and be outraged all of a sudden at this rip-off.
The truth about it is that machine learning algorithms over text have terrible performance, even the good ones. The performance curves look something like
https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/...
and for my RSS reader I am happy to approach an AUC of 0.8, an AUC of > 0.95 for most tasks is getting into science fiction territory. And that's nowhere near being able to clean up hate speech at the rate that it should be cleared.
The short of it is that if you want to get rid of a lot more than "5%" of the outright "hate speech" you will also get rid of a lot of "dislike speech" and "angry speech" and "annoyed speech" as well as some "innocent speech".
To be really frank my filter deletes anything about "cis" and "trans" because it I think maybe 10% of what people say on the subject is outright hateful, 80% of it is emotionally negative, maybe 10% of the time somebody has something neutral or positive to say. My take is that losing a small amount of content I might want to see for being free of a lot of negativity is a bargain I am willing to make. A platform that imposed that kind of judgement on the community could be a much more emotionally positive place than anything you've seen but it is also going to get all sorts of criticism from people for doing so.
This (except the last bit) is missing the point about what Mastodon is for.
Why would "the rest of the community" would even be entitled to decide what to do about it ? Not that there would be a lot of overlap with the Burmese community anyway, so that wouldn't have much of an effect.
We already had an example BTW, with Gab splitting out with Mastodon, but then in a heavily English-speaking context.
What would have made at least a symbolic difference, is that some of these Mastodons would have been operated by the anti-hatred groups described in part I, and they would not have needed to unsuccessfully beg Facebook about doing moderation (with 0-4 moderators from other continents).
But in the end this is mostly spurious discussion : hate speech only effectively gets stomped out when a judge hands out sentences to the haters, but when the law enforcement that should handle them are the ones preparing genocide...
(Not that Facebook is not condamnable for heating it up.)
Certainly a lot of people seem to believe that many Mastodon instances are better moderated than commercial social media.
Certainly some kinds of right-wing hate are suppressed but there is very little pushback about widespread misuse of the word "fascist" to describe your local police department, or people in women's sports who use period trackers to prevent ACL tears, mainstream milquetoast politicians, or just about anyone.
On the other hand a lot of it seems like BS, there are two Mastodon instances that seem to be at war with Hacker News, I think I understand why one of them is mad at HN, I don't know if the second is mad out of sympathy with the first or they have some other grievance.
Many mastodonsters were concerned that Threads would be poorly moderated (might allow posts about how period tracking prevents ACL tears in female athletes I guess) but Threads pretty much dropped everybody's radar.
---
One angle is that a system like this should have "defense in depth", like you try to create a culture where hateful speech is not welcome, where people don't try it because they know they'll get disapproval, where people know they'll get confronted if they call Keir Starmer a fascist, where people know you just don't boost hateful things, etc.
In that sense you might just want to cultivate a lot of positive and neutral stuff and encourage people seeking negativity to go elsewhere. I think this is what Instagram was going for with Threads and it might be one reason why people should be asking "whatever happened to Threads?" but they don't because they've forgotten all about it.
The problem with Facebook, Twitter, even Reddit to a large extent, is that it is hard or impossible for users to self-segregate.
Mastodon offerts a possibility of having truly disconnected communities who do their own thing though sharing a protocol. What's acceptable in one community is not in another and that's fine because users can pick and choose what they participate in and what they see. However, this model is not perfect in Mastodon either as people who believe crusading is a virtue actively seek to undermine communities they don't participate in.
With Facebook however, the profit structure of the company and the way the website works pushes it to categorize users to receive content not based on user preference but based on algorithmic optimization. I may intentionally not join any motorist group, I still get shown content that gets a lot of engagement from idiotic suburbanites.