Olives @olives@qoto.org

We have to remember that when companies like Twitter, or Facebook, got pushed around, they would come up with a PR excuse to justify their decisions. Oh, they are concerned about "safety" (a nebulous concept).

Twitter's Former Head of Trust, Safety, and Policy Vijaya Gadde was a joke who was pushed around by authoritarians (including puritans, to some extent).

If Facebook did turn to censoring abortion related speech, I wonder if he would consider that petty speech to not be prioritized?

For things like advocacy to do with Palestine, these might still fall under a terrorism catch-all, and the Harvest Moon case might fall under "drugs".

In the end, there likely would be more expression, however, the changes might not be as broad as one might assume.

I suspect he'll go beyond just a few issues like Covid and gender.

However, there are still justifications which the company might use to keep it's more pernicious forms of censorship intact (i.e. sex workers, nipples). And it might not prevent gaffes like them censoring the word "intersex".

I've heard of one which apparently censored curse words, and one which censored content for being "demonic".

Just because a company suggests they're free speech, it doesn't mean it's meaningful. For instance, there were those free speech sites, like Parler, which bragged about that but which censored things like sex.

We'll see if Zuckerberg lives up to his promises to reduce over-censorship (particularly uniformly).

Someone pointed out that FB plans to provide more information in transparency reports about content that has been removed.

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes
"we’ve started using AI large language models (LLMs) to provide a second opinion on some content before we take enforcement actions."
Of course, they would try to get these in somehow.

The article could have a better structure, they could introduce the issues at play, then how this kind of direction (lowering the error rate) could be positive for expression.

Not in this post, but in a post linking to this post.

I think there was a missed opportunity here for the EFF to point to *many examples* of unreasonable takedowns.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-metas-announcement-revisions-its-content-moderation-processes The EFF might have goofed by "applauding" it (it would presumably result in fewer erroneous takedowns / demotions) in a post without considering the political heat from other decisions.

It's hard for me to tell what's going to happen from this article, so I suppose we are going to see.

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes
"As part of these changes, we will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations."
Curiously, there is already misinfo being spread about this post about handling misinfo. This for instance is being reported as them exclusively moving to Texas (though they did name it specifically).

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes
"Over time, we have developed complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce. As a result, we have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.

For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies). This does not account for actions we take to tackle large-scale adversarial spam attacks. We plan to expand our transparency reporting to share numbers on our mistakes on a regular basis so that people can track our progress. As part of that we’ll also include more details on the mistakes we make when enforcing our spam policies."
Yes, that is an issue. For instance, an algorithm might censor someone talking about Harvest Moon because they said the word "weed".

https://mastodon.social/@GDPRhub/113763839004405363
"New decision from Italy: The DPA held that, under Italian law, the consent of both parents is needed in order to share the picture of a child on a social network."
What do you think of this decision?

I see a few takes which assume that anime style porn appeared only a few years ago (rather than being around for many decades).

When you are reading an article which references manga from sixty years ago.

Context is concern trolling by authoritarian regimes.