
I've been scrubbed - danso
https://www.facebook.com/jim.macmillan/posts/1439058316404002
======
Buge
Any form of moderation will be abused by people.

There's a fair number of people online who hate me and repeatedly report
things that I do. I uploaded a youtube video showing a XSS vulnerability that
I found, reported, and had been fixed. Someone reported it and it got deleted,
I got a red mark on my account and it put my account in "bad standing". I
appealed it and it got put back up and the stuff reversed.

On a different site I got a 2 week ban for posting a link to a completely
harmless and completely rule-abiding youtube video. I appealed it twice and it
wasn't lifted. On that same site I had my account deleted for posting a
rickroll video. That time they listened to the appeal and reinstated my
account.

My reddit account was shadowbanned. I appealed it and it got reinstated.

My point is that moderation is always somewhat subjective and usually done by
low paid workers going through high volumes of disgusting stuff, so there will
always be mistakes. And there are people who get mad and basically treat that
report button as a dislike button. I even went to a talk by a facebook
employee on the spam team, and he said there are some countries they
essentially completely ignore reports from because reporting innocent stuff is
so wide spread there.

~~~
brobdingnagian
You think that's bad? Try posting anything critical of what someone else says
on HackerNews. Frankly, having discussions about censorship on this platform -
including this very comment - is to be willfully blind to the kind of
censorship that's going on here and that we're ignoring.

~~~
tomcam
Please do not confuse censorship, which is governmental tampering with free
speech, with private moderation of a free message board to whose terms of
service you signed voluntarily. This trivializes real censorship issues, which
are abundant.

~~~
dragonwriter
Censorship is not only governmental suppression of speech, though governmental
censorship is of particular concern.

------
danso
> _I posted the photo to my Instagram account and clicked the button to share
> to Facebook. But while discussing the incident with a colleague last night,
> I scrolled back and discovered that both posts had been deleted._

Censorship issues aside (I know, seeing the trees instead of the forest here),
I wonder if this is an actual mechanism due to Facebook and Instagram having a
high level of integration...i.e. a Facebook mod pushes the "delete" button and
it makes a privileged deletion call to Instagram's API (or vice versa)...or
did it just happen to be that users from each service separately flagged the
posts, and by the time OP noticed, the post had been removed from both
services?

------
staunch
reddit is starting to do the same thing. Twitter already does it. Even HN mods
"scrub" stories off the home page all the time, usually for very good reasons,
but also often for reasons many HN'ers would disagree with. You can see hidden
(demoted) posts on [http://hnrankings.info/](http://hnrankings.info/)

Private companies have every legal right to do this but it's not ultimately
the way the world should be. People themselves should be the ones curating
what they see, not faceless administrators secretly making judgment calls
using unwritten policies. It creates a situation in which you can't be sure
what you're _not_ seeing, which is far worse than sometimes seeing things you
don't like.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Curated content can be useful and efficient for a readers time if they want to
visit a site with a particular content. It allows a site to focus on a core
relevancy and limits the hivemind effect. IMO there is value in both curated
and community driven sites. The key is either site is upfront about what they
expect to offer.

~~~
PopeOfNope
This isn't limited to community driven sites and has existed long before the
word "social" had anything to do with computers. It used to be if you posted
controversial things to your website, you had to contend with the company you
bought your hosting from.

Facebook and Twitter make it easier, but this is nothing new and has nothing
to do with curation.

------
luso_brazilian
That's something that have been happening for a while but, as always, first
they came for the undesirables and nobody said a thing.

The Syria civil is going for as long as the term "Arab spring" exists, with
protests and the beginning of armed conflict going as back as 2011.

With access to means of communication not controlled by the state the start of
this conflict was very well documented, in real time even.

From something happening (a mass protest, a shooting of protesters or
policemen, takeover of public buildings) to the post of the video on Twitter
or Facebook sometimes not even 15 minutes elapsed. It was all there, live,
unedited, raw. Anyone with a mobile phone could show the works exactly what
was happening, from all sites involved. All it took was to make a page on FB
or an account on Twitter or YouTube and to push "upload".

Or so they thought. See [1] and [2] below for context. Lots and lots of
footage, pictures and live testimonial were "scrubbed" by overzealous
application of the TOS, usually motivated by organized mass report of content.

It is very sad because not only they believed that, for the first time they
could broadcast their message without cost or risk of censorship (they
couldn't) but also a very valuable piece of our collective history was lost
forever.

Thus first they came for questionable content from a sensitive subject of a
conflict in the other side of the world. Now they can apply the same reasoning
at home and people will have little recourse because the precedent was set.
More and more we hear "first amendment only applies to the government, not to
private companies" and that's true but doesn't make it any less sad to cope
with the repercussions of this deletionism.

[1]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/the...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/the-
syrian-opposition-is-disappearing-from-facebook/283562/) [2]
[http://www.vice.com/read/facebook-and-the-crisis-in-
syria](http://www.vice.com/read/facebook-and-the-crisis-in-syria)

P.S. Sorry for the long rant.

------
gfosco
Maybe he didn't actually share it to Facebook. He's just going on the fact
that he can't find it, and immediately assuming Facebook just deleted it
without mention. I'm skeptical any of this happened. That's not how it works.

~~~
Rifu

        I posted the photo to my Instagram account and clicked the button to share to Facebook. But while discussing the incident with a colleague last night, I scrolled back and discovered that both posts had been deleted.
    

Even if he might not have shared it to Facebook, he does mention that his
Instagram post was also deleted.

~~~
rtpg
On Instagram, the choice to share to facebook shows up before you actually
upload the image. But the image still is saved to your phone's gallery.

So he could have thought he finished everything and in fact not have done
anything.

Though rereading it, it did show up on Twitter...

~~~
51Cards
IFTTT auto copied it to Twitter, so it must have existed at some point.

------
bla2
Facebook has a huge team in the Philippines doing manual gore removal. There
was an article on how the people doing that work can't do it very long as it's
mentally taxing. Since this was a picture of a dead person, I bet this was
just removed by that team.

Edit: Link to the article: [http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-
moderation/](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/)

~~~
nrmitchi
I'm sorry, but did you read the article? It clearly states that it was, in
fact, not a picture of a dead person.

~~~
bla2
I have; how would I write this comment from the heading "I've been scrubbed"?
But the cleanup team didn't read the post. The photo is shown at the bottom,
together with the byline it looks like there might be a dead person behind
that tarp.

------
morgante
I'm immensely skeptical that Facebook would delete this from his personal
Facebook account.

It's not that I don't think Facebook is capable of censorship. It's that I
doubt they'd extend their hand over such a small matter. What possible crazy
conspiracy theory connects duck boats and Facebook headquarters (beyond "all
corporations are evil and regularly meet to decide how to suppress the
evidence")?

~~~
lnanek2
Facebook is actually well known for deleting drugs, gore, etc.. You should
consider every picture you post to Facebook to be queued to be seen by a
moderator. A cheap, third world country moderator, true, but one none the
less.

------
brudgers
Normally I don't comment on my flags, but just to dampen some potential future
conspiracy theories, the low quality comments generated by this thread are the
reason I flagged it. So if it disappears from the front page, for me it will
be despite my opinion about the importance of the topic or about the quality
of the article itself. It will be because it is making HN worse.

------
RexRollman
In the end, the only way to control your content is to host it yourself.

~~~
PopeOfNope
Nope. You still rent bandwidth from your ISP. If you're doing something they
don't like, they can and will shut you down. Whether we like it or not,
everything on the internet exists at the whim of one company or another.

~~~
wpietri
Having run my own servers for almost 20 years, I think you're orders of
magnitude safer with your own box collocated with some ISP. Commercial ISPs
have very few fucks to give for people who are upset about content. Other than
spam, network abuse, and crime, which are direct threats to their business, or
properly filed DCMA notices, which incur legal liability, I just don't see any
concern. In fact, I see a studious and practice avoidance of interest. Large
ISPs just aren't very whimsical.

For the really paranoid, you can get yourself bandwidth from multiple
providers; then you're only worried about synchronized whimsy. Which, I
suppose is definitionally not whim at all.

------
rcthompson
I don't think the offensive part is necessarily the "scrubbing", but the lack
of transparency. The post just disappeared with no notification or
explanation. If I made a post and then subsequently received an email from
Facebook or whoever saying "We have deemed your post inappropriate because
...; it has been removed," I would have a lot less of a problem with it than
if it just disappeared without a trace.

------
fabulist
Archive link: [https://archive.is/lAxHz](https://archive.is/lAxHz)

------
seanmcdirmid
From a cursory look at the picture, this might have got caught by some crazy
"no free advertisement" bot, since a phone number is clearly legible. That
probably wasn't the intention, but it is easy to see how a DNN would classify
this as a commercial advertising picture without additional context.

------
Gigablah
Why does this author sound like he has an agenda regarding duck boats?

~~~
zwtaylor
It doesn't seem to me like he has an agenda. Keep in mind that the "duck
boats" are pretty much universally reviled by natives in Philadelphia; they
are loud, feel out of place in the neighborhoods they operate in and are full
of gawking tourists.

The incident in 2010 he mentioned was pretty big news in Philly. Just seems
like a concerned reporter who was at the right place at the right time and
noticed a series of recurring events with these boats.

~~~
themartorana
Seconded. Although it's true this was likely the fault of the woman (she
apparently walked in to traffic against a light in a high-traffic neighborhood
while staring at her phone) it took about 5 minutes for news of it to get
around Philly. I learned about it before the scene had even been cleared.

------
antifakeix
That guy defending his choice to post pictures of dead people, pretending the
"corporate platform" (because well, it's always Us vs Evil Corporations isn't
it -- don't forget those corporations are just collections of people like us)
Facebook for taking it down, and not once taking responsibility for how his
choice to post that may have been legitimately upsetting or offensive, or even
morally wrong. Why does it work for his amateur opportunistic "scoop" take
precedence over the deceased's privacy? Why does it work for him to claim
posting a picture of someone violently killed by a truck is some kind of moral
good, and yet taking it down is assaulting the very foundation of all that
preserves the shrinking territory of what is good in our society.

This crusader has his moral compass all wrong.

As if he's angry his amateur "scoop" has been censored, like he's some kind of
force of history and truth, when really he's just posting gore, declining to
think of the people who height be harming by doing so. Because it's really all
about him and his "rights", isn't it?

This guys confusion of his personal amoral choice with some fantasy of a moral
crusade, and fake embedding of himself in some kind of narrative of evil
corporations vs moral individuals, is just self-aggrandising hackery, that his
gore lust doesn't merit. That his deluded ideas has any currency is one the
things wrong with contemporary thought.

~~~
Gracana
Please read the post, or at least scroll down to see the picture. It's not
gore, it's a photo of police spreading a tarp.

~~~
strathmeyer
The more likely scenario is a relative of the person killed reported it
because they had a similar reaction. People don't understand when they are
allowed to have their pictures taken.

------
vortico
Facebook and Twitter are not places that withhold a no-censorship philosophy,
so no one should be surprised (except for possibly _why_ it was taken down.)
There are a number of imageboards and forums that do, but you wouldn't reach
the larger audience of these moderated outlets.

------
kirinan
I hate to sound all conspiracy theorist crazy but this makes me scared of the
fact that people may start to just up and disappear 1984 style. Covering up
murders of people is not good on even a personal level as nobody gets closure,
but on a wider societal scale its just frightening. It starts with takedowns
on Facebook and moves into the larger media: whats next? CNN?

~~~
task_queue
No reason to sound all conspiracy theorist.

It's happened in the past, the same drives that motivate "disappearances"
haven't gone anywhere and we're a country with a recent history of
disappearing people to black sites to never be seen again.

Inconvenient content is buried or erased on the internet all the time. Entire
events have been tried to be erased from the from the internet (think Great
Wall).

Nothing is more inconvenient than Joe Citizen catching you red handed and
making it public.

Monitoring or shutting down social media and chat services is one of the first
thing that happens during a political upheaval. Violence and people dying in
the streets is inconvenient.

------
megablast
So duck boats are bad, butt he million people who die a year due to car
accidents are somehow more acceptable to society?

~~~
vonklaus
I don't know if duck boats are "bad" as they are simply objects. However,
there are many more people using automobiles in our society, and the utility
of automobiles is much higher than duck boats (at least how we choose to
employ them currently).

Also duck boats can be bad and so can car accidents. This is a non-sequitor.

------
SoreGums
That's one aspect I really like about South East Asian culture - it hasn't
been infected yet by the whites "politically correctness" \- life happens and
they simply get on with it. I follow some people and man some of the graphic
photos that get posted (Facebook) there are intense, think /r/gore x10.

Anyways minority ruling the majority... 1 person complains all obey, sad

~~~
adventured
Ok, I'll take the other side of that theory.

China doesn't massively censor its society based on what the authorities
decide is correct?

You can't get any more of a controlled, politically correct society than China
when it comes to censorship. They're the actual definition of political
correctness censorship.

How about porn in China? The authorities decided long ago that was politically
incorrect, and it's illegal.

How about Japan censoring - for 70 years - all sorts of aspects of what they
did during and before WW2?

How about Singapore's censorship dictatorship, where Lee Kuan Yew ruled the
news media there with an iron fist, and directly dictated what was culturally
and politically acceptable. The very definition of political correctness based
censorship.

Is your theory that South Korea has an open society when it comes to political
correctness? I completely disagree, they outlaw anything even remotely
pornographic, and they block _all_ pornographic web sites. Again, the
definition of enforced political correctness.

Then we can get into Thailand, which is censored heavily by their political
correctness machine; it regulates everything from speaking out against regimes
to pornography.

How about Indonesia's anti-porn laws, the very definition of enforced
political correctness:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-10-31/indonesia-passes-
tough...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-10-31/indonesia-passes-tough-new-
anti-porn-laws/188804)

This only begins to touch the surface of the political correctness censorship
rampant in Asia. And that's all before we get into the really bad examples,
like Myanmar and North Korea.

~~~
SoreGums
Right - having read that, my use of "politically correct" was not what you've
laid out and I've used an inaccurate term to describe what I want to say.

When in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, there is a sense that people look out
for themselves. The govt is there, however they aren't there to make sure you
wear your seat belt, tuck in your shirt, etc. Sure there is an exercised
control over media/news and ensuring the message about the government is
inline with what the government wants. I'm not referring to this.

I'm referring to the: the photo is there, I don't have to look at it if I
don't like it. I'll call you a foreigner, because you are. I'll call you
white, because you are. Referring to people relating to each other. The people
are most interested in themselves and their families rather than what other
people are up to. The opposite of the American way "how dare you exist and
offend me, I'll sue you!!" \- whatever this is...

Cheers for taking the time to re-define what Politically Correct actually
means :)

