Olives @olives@qoto.org
Software Engineer. Psy / Tech / Sex Science Enthusiast. Controversial?
Free Expression. Human rights / Civil Liberties. Anime. Liberal.
Joined May 2023
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/03/twenty-five-years-of-the-dmca-some-good-but-mostly-bad/ Reminder that the DMCA is also an awful law.
https://reason.com/2023/11/02/brickbat-the-crime-of-reporting/
"An Iranian court has sentenced two journalists to more than a decade in prison for their coverage of the death Mahsa Amini. Amini died last year in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for violating the nation's Islamic dress code."
https://reclaimthenet.org/visitors-to-the-eu-will-soon-face-fingerprinting-and-facial-scans
"The new rules state that visitors will be subjected to both face and fingerprint scans aside from surrendering other biometric data. It’s disconcerting that this data will be reserved within the European Commission’s Common Identity Repository (CIR), a database accessed by numerous agencies, including law enforcement."
"The implications of this regulation change could be even more disconcerting from a privacy perspective. Critics and advocates of digital privacy have sounded the alarm on not just the possible misuse of this extensive data pool by governments, but also the potential exposure to hacking threats, be they criminal outfits or invasive foreign governments. There’s also the risk of rogue insiders dealing with this sensitive information."
I think one of the arguments around the screen time was that while mental health declined in the United States, it improved in Europe, despite social media use, and Europe is also known for having less of a helicopter parent culture.
https://reason.com/2023/11/02/a-missouri-cop-shot-a-familys-dog-and-threw-its-body-in-a-ditch/
"In August, a Missouri family's dog, Parker, wandered away from the family home during a violent storm. When the neighbor who found the dog called the police for help, instead of returning Parker to his family, an officer shot him and threw his body in a ditch."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/03/online-vitriol-could-undo-decades-political-progress-dutch-deputy-pm While I'm particularly sympathetic to her, as they've pushed for some good policy, such as opposing the chat control:
"anonymous accounts" Curbing the use of anonymous accounts would be quite problematic for the freedom of expression. Also, I don't think this actually worked out when they tried it in South Korea.
"doxing" Maybe, something could be done about doxxing?
"hate speech" Ugh, the problem is that the particular argument which people use for this is one which tends to also be used elsewhere (and that is both bad for expression and often inappropriate as well).
I think you'd be better off breaking up Facebook into several smaller social networks. It would be very politically difficult but it doesn't involve fiddling around with matters of content.
@skymtf WSJ is a very right wing source (and a paywalled one to boot). I don't trust "some non-expert who works at FB has a take" takes from them, especially not a "for the children" take.
It's also not clear what can be done about this, especially as FB seems to have problems like this, despite being big on censoring sexual expression. Though, the article is, well, you know, paywalled. I'm concerned that vague "do more" calls just leads to largely ineffective attempts which just violate rights.
And yes, I agree with you that that bill, and stances like that from politicians are very problematic.
The problem of mainstream social media (and why half-baked fixes don't really work).
The problem is scale. Scale. I don't mean millions of users. Or tens of millions. I mean these sites with over a hundred million users. They become a bigger than life staple of the political consciousness (and also attract the sort of problems you might run into in politics, particularly the nastier side of politics).
It is also prone to context collapse. Truth is, we operate in different contexts all the time. Present ourselves differently in different scenarios. Mainstream social media pumps in a load of information and collapses everything down into the same one arena. There also isn't much breathing room without "taking a side".
Even imperfections of the moderation, inability to get correct information to inform such moderation. Scale. Also, due to scale, every mistake is now political and a million eyes will scrutinize it (sometimes, in an uninformed manner, as guess what, the hearsay also spreads at scale).
Ridiculous conspiracy theories? Again, the problem is scale. We've always had conspiracies.
They're also all in the same pot. Right up against one another. Not much breathing room.
Even with the "reduced functionality mode" idea, where they strip out every convenience feature in social networks, how many people are really going to use that? It's a feature which just makes it a fair bit harder to use the site and I don't think anyone has patience for that.
Though, does this still count as infinite scrolling? I think a page based design definitely wouldn't.
If large social networks get forced to forgo infinite scrolling, I wonder what you'd get, a "load more" button?
That'll be a bit painful for them, as if you know UX, then you'll know that users are not patient and 100ms delays in loading times already have a (small but cumulative) impact on Amazon sales.
When China complains about "screen time", keep in mind China is a country with a 9 to 9 6 days a week schedule for at least some sectors.
Olives
boosted
New LLM paper highlighting quite how weird and ridiculous these things are https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760
Adding "it's important to my career" can produce better results, across every model they tested!
https://truthout.org/articles/anti-lgbtq-group-wants-supreme-court-to-repeal-wa-ban-on-conversion-therapy/ If you remember, there is a loophole to conversion therapy bans, which one religiously motivated quack in Utah was using (while abusing others as well). That isn't okay either.
@SirTapTap The worst vague tag of all, though not on those sites, is "female". Someone actually sits there tagging female, female, female, but don't add any attribute that would actually be useful.
Oops, I might have already covered this one a few months back. Well, here it is again.
"Hosting provider Uberspace has taken down the website of YouTube-ripping software, youtube-dl. The removal is the result of a German court order in a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by Sony, Warner and Universal. While Uberspace didn't host the open source software, it was held responsible for the website linking to the software hosted on developer platform GitHub."
https://torrentfreak.com/lead-youtube-content-id-scammer-sentenced-to-46-months-230821/
"After masquerading as legitimate music rightsholders, two men fraudulently extracted over $23 million in revenue from YouTube's Content ID system. The men were indicted in 2021 and subsequently entered guilty pleas. An Arizona court has now sentenced Webster Batista Fernandez, who reportedly initiated the scheme, to 46 months in prison."
Software Engineer. Psy / Tech / Sex Science Enthusiast. Controversial?
Free Expression. Human rights / Civil Liberties. Anime. Liberal.
Joined May 2023
