Olives @olives@qoto.org

Do you believe there is one right way of doing moderation? Or that someone can "zero in" on that one right way? That is the impression I'm getting from reading some of these "Trust & Safety" takes. It is also fundamentally wrong, and encourages the wrong expectations from stakeholders.

I've seen cases where Big Tech might jump onto the same bad policy decision (typically, censorious in some weirdly specific way), and I think that is indicative of this problem.

Tricks like that are a very bad idea for them, because well, Facebook is not a hard company for a competitor to attack. Do they want to invite that? Or put away the nastiness instead?

With these two tricks out the window, maybe Facebook will have to engage in actual competition.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-meta-tiktok-targeted-victory_n_62446838e4b0742dfa59f045 Remember that Facebook tried to smear #TikTok.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-meta-tiktok-targeted-victory_n_62446838e4b0742dfa59f045
"In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society."
When I see a former Facebook executive rubbishing their competitors, I'm reminded of this.

We *know* Facebook has been known to do these things.

Progress is being made, but it's still fairly incomplete, more to do.

By serious, I mean, like a hypothetical "what if" scenario with a more serious response, rather than being more fantasy. Well, I'm not interested enough to look deeply into it.

Weird shows like this are actually pretty rare. It's just unusual enough that it invites me to comment on it.

https://nichegamer.com/if-my-wife-became-an-elementary-school-student-premieres-fall-2024/ rofl

It looks like it might be a more serious story but this premise is funny.

There are also people who assume that a few tech companies are using the *same technology* as they did a decade ago and that they're not adopting even less accurate technologies.

Around a decade ago, Microsoft opened up the whole can of worms of private mass surveillance. Retrospectively, it was probably a bad decision and it sold the idea of violating someone's right to privacy as a tool of convenience for chasing crime.

Then, we get takes like this, where someone reckons that the government spying on people is not surveillance at all.

So, I saw a take like this earlier:

"Scanning people's messages is not 'mass surveillance'."

Uh, how is opening up everyone's messages and checking to see if there're certain things in there not mass surveillance.

What. You mean there are sites which don't just immediately permanently ban people because of some stupid technicality. How shocking.

When Discord pitches the concept of a "warning", something which has been done in content moderation for over thirty years, as if it is some new radical thing to others.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/police-are-using-drones-more-and-spending-more-them Drones kind of remind me of this. #Minnesota #privacy

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/police-are-using-drones-more-and-spending-more-them
"Minnesotan law enforcement flew their drones without a warrant 4,326 times in 2023"

"This marks a large, 41 percent increase from 2022, when departments across the state used drones 3,076 times"
#Minnesota #privacy

https://www.wired.com/story/titan-submersible-disaster-inside-story-oceangate-files/ What's so remarkable about it is that the CEO didn't just cut corners and get people killed. He cut corners and got himself killed.

"The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined"
I don't think anything to do with this guy can surprise me at this point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/20/meredith-walker-signal-boss-government-encryption-laws
"Police have used the “very legitimate grievance” the public has with large tech companies like Meta about data collection and surveillance as a pretext to undermine user #privacy, the president of encrypted messaging app Signal has said."
#auspol

https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/kinderpornografie-zahl-der-falschen-verdaechtigungen-bei-online-bildern-massiv-gestiegen-a-a746b118-82e7-4560-8ba4-45f02489768c In Germany, the number of false reports from U.S. companies increased but the actual number of actionable child porn reports did not. #chatcontrol