
Instagram's War on Bullying - jbredeche
https://time.com/5619999/instagram-mosseri-bullying-artificial-intelligence/
======
mrweasel
While I understand the desire to have Instagram, and others, police their
sites to prevent bullying, I also think it's pointless to a large extend.

The head of Instagrams public policy is very correct when she states: Teens
are exceptionally creative. Assholes and bullies have always existed, 25 years
ago at least you had a respite at home after school, but now social media
makes victims available 24-7.

Not to sound defeatist, but I don't think social media can exist while
preventing bullying. For the victims it's binary, either they're being bullied
or they're not, so social media needs to prevent 100% for bullying and that is
not going to happen, people will always find a way to be assholes.

In my mind the effort is misplaced, at least for teenagers who often know the
bully. It's the schools and parents that need to take action, not some random
faceless US corporation.

For 100% online bullying... I don't think there's away around that. You can
try to reduce the amount, but you won't be able to eliminate it.

~~~
dtech
I do not agree with your assertion. Bullying is similar to spam and other
unwanted messages. You can never get 100% protection, but you can get pretty
far.

Things like Whatsapp not giving you a way to prevent you from being added to a
group (until very recently) are fixable. Victims could not even prevent
themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.

If I translate your post to spam filtering all efforts there are useless and
everyone should disable their spam filters, because either you receive spam or
you don't.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Bullies then figure out how to make new unblocked accounts, stalk you around
the internet on other services and spam you there.

I think we need to address bullies directly, figure out their reasoning and
help to resolve those issues. Problem is few actually do get addressed long
before it's too late.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _stalk you around the internet on other services and spam you there_

That's not a good reason for (e.g., Whatsapp) to not put in some frankly
minimal effort to prevent this on _their_ platform.

------
ab_c
Not sure why people are suggesting shadow-banning doesn't work. Shadow bans
have existed for a long time, already. Message forums and MMOs have used this
method to deal with toxic community members and it has already shown to be
successful.

The way they measure the decrease in toxicity is based on support tickets.
When organizations implement this feature, a reduction in complaints means
they don't require as much support staff to deal with it. It saves them money.

The logic behind it is simple: Toxic community members want a voice to be
heard. This method sends players the message that if you post something
offensive or unwelcomed, it'll be voted down and no one will see it.

------
close04
>Go after bullying too aggressively and risk alienating users with stricter
rules and moderation that feels intrusive at a time when the company is a
bright spot of growth for Facebook. Don’t do enough, especially after
promising to set new standards for the industry, and risk accusations of
placing profits over the protection of kids

Seems these days the second option is always the preferred one. It's easier to
ask forgiveness (and make money while you do) than it is to get permission.

~~~
dexen
>Seems these days the second option is always the preferred one.

Not on the internet, no. The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking. Ditto
the good old IRC. There's plenty of other services that are more rough-and-
tumble than milktoasty. Any of the new social media like Mastodon, Minds,
BitChute have rather hands-off moderation - any lawfull content has rather
good chances of staying there undisturbed.

The difference is one of perception - namely, which ones get favorable
opinions in the media as family safe, and which ones get condemned as the
seedy, scary underbelly.

~~~
pjc50
> The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking

I feel it's only a matter of time before they get blocked at the router or at
least DNS level in a western European country. They were blocked in New
Zealand for a while after the chan-radicalized mass murder there.

~~~
nkkollaw
That's so stupid, though. A whole service gets blocked for 1 person?

I assume this person could have gotten radicalized by talking to other
radicals on the phone, so you ban phones?

~~~
Sahhaese
> could have

But they didn't, that's a detail you can't just conveniently drop to argue in
the abstract.

~~~
RankingMember
The point remains that crime/radicalization can occur over any site/medium.
Banning a site or medium seems heavy-handed unless it exists expressly to
facilitate crime/radicalization, in my opinion. TOR, for example, has been a
known avenue for the spread of child pornography, yet we don't shut it down.

~~~
hi5eyes
there's more CP on twitter than TOR but nice meme

edit: nice meme bc who actually uses TOR? theres so much more cp on surface
web liek chans, tumblr used to be a pedos dream, twitter etc.

no one uses tor zzz

~~~
RankingMember
Got any proof to back up that statement? There have been numerous FBI busts of
Onion sites. For example: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-
operated-23-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-
operated-23-tor-hidden-child-porn-sites-deployed-malware-from-them/)

~~~
hi5eyes
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/13/twitte...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/13/twitter-
failure-child-pornography)

[https://sputniknews.com/science/201905091074866833-Twitter-3...](https://sputniknews.com/science/201905091074866833-Twitter-370K-Accounts-
Suspended-Promoting-Terrorism-2018/)

you can literally google twitter child porn

theres hundreds of threads exposing how these people start group dms baiting
kids

[https://twitter.com/xcutesannex/status/1147456947727282177](https://twitter.com/xcutesannex/status/1147456947727282177)
shit in a similar format to this

~~~
RankingMember
This is a weird quibble. Is your argument simply to let me know I could've
used an example with more child porn? Unless you're arguing there's no CP on
TOR, my point in the context of the original comment stands.

------
cookieswumchorr
the case described had nothing to do with the victims account on any specific
platform, it was people misusing his picture for lulz. If banned on instagram
they could have continued anywhere else.

~~~
lawlessone
>If banned on instagram they could have continued anywhere else.

They could, but it wouldn't be instagrams problem then.

~~~
mrweasel
But that's a really weird way of looking at the problem, unless you're
Instagram.

Continuously closing accounts, blocking content and reporting bullying isn't
fixing anything. In some cases I get the feeling that it will make the problem
worse.

We want to stop the bullying, not simply remove the evidence of it. Instagram
can't prevent bullying, they can only hide parts of it.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Instagram can 't prevent bullying, they can only hide parts of it._

But they can take steps to mitigate it on their platform. If you're doing your
best and genuinely helping solve the problem on your platform, then you can
say to kids, "hey - come hang out on this platform. It's a safer place. This
is a place where you can socialize with less risk than other places."

That's good for the kids, and for the platform.

Arguing against is like saying, "My kid gets bullied, but why should I only
solve the problem for him?"

~~~
mrweasel
I'm not saying this shouldn't try, but you're making my point: with less risk
than other places

It's not "no risk", it's not a safe space, it's just safer than it could have
been with no policing. And which other spaces is it safer than? School, the
kids room, or 4Chan? Because I would argue that 4Chan is safer than Facebook
or Instagram.

You need to address bullying on an individual level, because there's nothing
you can do on a large scale that will eliminate all bullying.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _eliminate all bullying_

Why is everyone treating this as the only acceptable condition?

------
raxxorrax
If you do not want anybody to have the possibility to make fun of your
picture, don't upload it to the internet.

I wonder if Instagram would pay me for this ingenious solution.

~~~
hombre_fatal
The second sentence of TFA says someone else was taking and uploading pictures
of him. Keep brainstorming!

~~~
devit
The solution is to fix the school system so that people are not forced to stay
with a bunch of classmates they didn't choose and not prevented to do what
they would really like to do in life, resulting in activities like this as a
replacement.

~~~
rectang
In the US, the doctrine of "separate but equal" was resoundingly rejected in
Brown vs. Board of Education.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal)

The persecuted should not have to live life on the run, fleeing from one ever-
shrinking, insecure refuge to another. Instead, we hold victimizers
responsible for the problems they cause, and insist on fixing those problems
at the source.

~~~
devit
Yeah, in normal adult social circles if you behave like an asshole you get
ignored and if you force others to put up with you you get kicked out and
police is called if you refuse.

If the social circle you are in doesn't kick assholes you find another one.

But in school someone can just terrorize everyone else with impunity because
people are usually not expelled, you can't easily choose a school that expels
people and the abusers don't care about being ostracized or potentially
expelled because they don't care about being in school in the first place.

