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The internet's dirtiest secrets

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 Offwidth 26 Mar 2019

For the lovers of the long documentary format a compelling tale of the reality of current moderation on the big Social Media platforms.

The hypocricy is in full view...freedom if speech is OK in the west (and enthusiastically utilised by far right activists in the US) but even breasts are too much for freedom of expression. Clear agreements with repressive regimes and doing nothing to block fake hate news in what are, in practice, now the main media sources in places like Burma and hence fueling the genocide of the Rohingya.

The so called 'cleaners' have outsourced contracts for moderation of, for example, 25, 000 images a day, with only a few 'mistakes' a month allowed. Many struggle to unsee some of what is posted with the obvious psychological problems resulting from that (including moderator suicides). The lauded AI takes hardly any of the strain.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003f2f/storyville-the-internets-dir...

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OP Offwidth 27 Mar 2019
In reply to Offwidth:

Last night I re-watched the two shows that followed the one above on BBC4. With the additional hindsight of the last year they look even more prescient and worrying. They are co-produced with the Open University. It's still almost unbelievable that Facebook, Google and Twitter had staff working in the main social media campaign office for Trump's election, alongside Cambridge Analytica! Also the utopian attitudes of the CEOs hardly matched their actions, which nearly always followed the money as any big corp would  (hence why they helped Trump... he was spending loads). Their tax behavior in particular is really aggressive.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b091zhtk

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0916ghz

Highly recommended if you missed them first or second time around.

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pasbury 27 Mar 2019
In reply to Offwidth:

> The lauded AI takes hardly any of the strain.

AI for a start isn’t intelligent. It’s just fancy pattern matching and massively overrated, except for the fact that it gives ads to people who don’t want to see them.

It’s like a toy being played with by people who think it’s ‘cool’.

 planetmarshall 27 Mar 2019
In reply to pasbury:

> AI for a start isn’t intelligent. It’s just fancy pattern matching and massively overrated, except for the fact that it gives ads to people who don’t want to see them.

Except that it does. In fact, providing users with relevant advertising is one of AI's biggest success stories, and it does it much better than any human being.

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pasbury 27 Mar 2019
In reply to planetmarshall:

Well yes but what a pathetic waste of technology.

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 Timmd 20 Apr 2019
In reply to Offwidth:

My heart/mind goes out to the moderators, I accidentally came across footage of a woman being stoned in Iraq, you could only see the crowd, and blokes carrying boulders into their midst and then a trial of blood from where her head presumably was, but it stuck with me for a long time, and had it's effect on how I viewed human nature and societies for quite a while. That was only one thing, too, they must see so many things during the course of a week that I'm not surprised that some can't cope.

On a vaguely related note, I gather that it's the sounds which the police who deal with child porn talk about finding the hardest to deal with.

I've been meaning to watch the documentary in the original post. Shall watch it before it's no longer watchable on iplayer.

Post edited at 18:52
 Fishmate 20 Apr 2019
In reply to planetmarshall:

> Except that it does. In fact, providing users with relevant advertising is one of AI's biggest success stories, and it does it much better than any human being.


That misses the point. Most people don't want advertising, so the comment that "it’s like a toy being played with by people who think it’s cool" stands for most people. It is only a success for the d*cks that deploy it.


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