This is an excellent piece which really does a good job at explaining the nuance that exists in this challenging problem domain. Thank you for writing this. It's a great piece to point to whenever the next scandal gets "exposed" by click-seeking folks on the internet.
It's good that it keeps getting exposed that a single organization without accountability decides what people are or are not allowed to publish on a platform to the people who explicitly subscribed to their publications.
The fact that moderation is a hard problem is orthogonal. The fact remains that there are different rules for different people, both for flagging and for content. The fact that there is more nuance than "two sets of rules" doesn't really change the fundamental problem that private companies now get to arbitrarily police publication by normal people.
I have the distinct impression that in 100 years the default mode is going to be "if it's legal you can post it, if it's not you can't, and if you have a problem with the boundary, take it up with the lawmaking authority and not us". We will look back at this time at the emergence of any-to-any publishing like the dawn of radio or TV or newspaper where a few rich guys got to decide what could or could not be published.
Do you really want pictures like this everywhere on Instagram? So now we have a no sex acts rule. But then an art museum is hosting an exhibition of art, and that art is depicting sex. Maybe even pedophilic sex, like a vase in the Met that has an old man stroking a young teenagers hairless genitals on it. That's very likely child pornography, except that the law can't ban images of artistic value, and the image of the vase has a lot of value, and I doubt anyone would find it erotic. Should the Met not be allowed to use a picture of a bunch of vases to promote its exhibitions?
There's lots of reasons why reasonable seeming results are not possible from simple rules, and why it's legal, let's have it is not a great rule. Having a moderation system that addresses e.g. art studios and museums differently from other people is quite sensible.
The solution to that is a rule set that users can select what they want and automated tagging. It is essentially opt-in moderation vs. chosen for you moderation. And it could become fairly sophisticated too! We are starting to see it in the form of subscribing to block lists on twitter.
Also in practice I think this is covered for %99 of cases people via an NSFW & NSFL tag system. That would be an NSFW art and thats that.
The children issue will boil down to parents are the real root user of their children's accounts and parents will have control over the tagging set for moderation until they are of age.
IMO I think most people are fine with mandatory labeling of goods, and actually welcome it because it gives more control and informed consent. It's the mandatory censorship that become the issue.
Abusive false labelling might become the next hot topic, but that is far smaller of a surface area.
Isn't that basically what happens now? Say I join a local city group. All posts to that group could be tagged with said #city in your world. Well right now anyone who is in one of these groups knows that many people come in and post lots of extremely charged national politics. They inevitably have their content removed as it's off-topic, not from Facebook but just from the city-specific group. The poster cries that their right to freedom of speech is being violated and that the mods are censoring them.
So in your world, say the same person posts biased national political opinions and tags it with #city. Unless someone is moderating that tag, the tag becomes absolutely useless. It seems like how things work today, just with extra steps?
You have a choice to filter out #city tagged items or not. And you can debate that a tag is incorrect as a matter of fact, much as you can debate if a food good does have sodium in it or not. And also tags are not singular, you can tag something #city #redteamblueteampolitics #highlyemotional #inflammatory and YOU get to choose if you want to see #highlyemotional content or not, not the platform. You get to choose if you want to follow the #rude #crazy person on Server Y, not your mastodon instance admin.
Also a big part of this is matter of scale and choice. I don't think people care that much about a small subreddit and their bullshit most of the time, or petty facebook group politics. It's when the platform itself does the censoring, and when the platform is where %95 of content exists due to network effects and has user counts that are in the billions that it starts having a duty of neutrality. It's much like city roads or housing or similar, the people you filter out from housing and city roads have to be filtered out for dangerous damage to the infrastructure or people itself and that is it, otherwise you get into really bad political and discriminatory territory when you say black people or people of opinion Y can't buy housing here or drive on the roads.
In this future system, you can also have alternative tagging systems, credit ratings for moderators, published AI models that tag client side, etc. I think it would be a very interesting marketplace of services!
Short of writing a novel, what would be more clear than the clear indication that it is Not Safe For Weaklings? If you don't think you're strong enough to handle it, don't venture in. Seems pretty straightforward.
Not Safe For the Limp is just variant of Not Safe for the Weak. They both communicate that if you aren't strong, stay away.
> Or, perhaps we need a “4chan and similarly tasteless degenerates” tag.
It's just an arbitrary grid of pixels. Either you are strong enough to handle viewing arrangements of pixels or you aren't. The weak have been warned, the strong have no concerns. No need to overcomplicating things.
No it’s not. It’s unusual by most (>75% feels like a safe bet) people’s but it’s not self destructive… it could be considered and probably was a little on the unhygienic side of things considering the potential for urinary tract infections, but a person doing that is not a person that’s doing it for the first time. From physical deformation (not that different to someone using gauged ear piercings) and a different urinary pathogen exposure profile, their body has changed a bit. No different from skeletal and muscle related changes in people pushing the boundaries of performance in countless sports.
It’s just very different, but posed in a way that is simultaneously provocative due to the sexual nature yet mundane given how different the sexual act is.
Self-mutilation for sexual gratification is a disturbing, self-destructive act and it’s not something I’m better for having seen.
I also don’t see any artistic merit in the work whatsoever, but you’re welcome to your own views and predilections. I just wish there’d been a more accurate warning so I could avoid it.
I take your point about accurate tagging … but my point was more in response to calling it self mutilation and I was mainly trying to argue that it’s not self-mutilation… but like a lot of Mapplethorpe’s work, it kinda makes you want to talk about it, it’s “confronting” but I’ll stop myself before I go down a tangent again.
Specifically addressing my argument it’s not self mutilation is that this is the sort of thing that if they stoped doing it today would “heal”. Elasticity would change and the body would slowly return to normal. Which is why i specifically called out the gauged ear piercings. When you turn a 1mm hole in your ear to say, a 25mm hole (large but not extreme) that’s not really “self mutilation” when compared to people that deliberately undergo processes for artistic scar patterns or to use another ear example, have shapes cut out of the ear cartilage. The gauge piercing will heal, so would this and there are vastly more shocking things people do in the body modification world… many of which id say it was entirely fair to judge as self mutilation… like sclera eye “tattooing”… having something done to you that has a high potential to impart your vision or even blind you for the sake of achieving a specific artistic look on your face feels like a much more clear cut case of self mutilation than this particular photographed act.
"Do you really want pictures like this everywhere on Instagram?"
As all things, this should be determined by subscription to content. I mean if i subscribe to CNN news and CNN stars posting dick picks or gore. I unsubscribe and thats the end of dick picks for me.
I should not see things that i don't subscribe to same way as i should not be presented with web pages that i do not explicitly go to by clicking on a link or entering url address.
It's on me if i go to 4chan. And same thing goes i opposite direction. If i like dick pics i should be able to subscribe to all of them and not be judged for that.
What makes you think something as unique and hard-fought as the First Amendment will be applied to the Internet when all trends point in the other direction, both on and offline?
The "scandal" that prompted this article is referenced with sources under the heading "Why XCheck is in the news". Neither the article nor the comment you're replying to says anything about data breaches.
It makes sense from a technical perspective why you'd build a system like XCheck. The problem is that once you build XCheck you actually need to say to your C-suite and PR department "Actually no, you can't say we treat everyone equally, we're manually going in and exempting certain people from scrutiny, and that's entirely within our discretion."
The problem isn't technical, it's legal - you can't build a system that operates one way and then publicly misrepresent it.
Legal will certainly advise leadership they can continue claiming that the system treats everyone equally, because scope of the word system includes the entire Trust organization people + automation, and “equally” can mean almost whatever Mark needs it to mean.
“Senator, thank you for the question. We treat everyone equally. To be clear this means every single user on our platform is subject to the same terms of service they agreed to when signing up.”
By the definitions you're using, Mark Zuckerberg personally logging in to the database and type DELETE FROM USERS WHERE "Policital_Affiliation_heuristic" == "Conservative".
So fine, if you want to define the words as meaning something they clearly don't, and want to try and fight that battle in the media... ok. But almost certainly the first thing that happens is something exactly like this - some nerdy engineering comes out and goes "Well no actually, we manually intervene for the people we like". And then you get to go back to Congress and explain to them why you clearly lied to them, and you're not going to get out of that by using Mark Zuckerberg's pure eye-watering levels of charisma.
Legally, their TOS probably allows them to be completely opaque and arbitrary.
And any system which involves reporting from the public will need to build a "this account gets lots of false reports of category X, to save time assume they're all false" system. As well as "all the reports made by this user are bogus".
Given that people pay to advertise on facebook, any false statements they make about their moderation systems via the internet almost certainly constitute wire fraud.
As Matt Levine says, “everything is securities fraud,” and this is probably the area of greatest exposure for a company with a substantial degree of departure between their stated practices and their actual practices.
It’s not likely to be more than a nuisance to defend and not terribly expensive to settle, but an enterprising plaintiff’s lawyer could probably find a cause of action that passes summary judgment.
> "Actually no, you can't say we treat everyone equally, we're manually going in and exempting certain people from scrutiny, and that's entirely within our discretion."
Isn't that literally what Twitter does as well? Making exceptions for Politicians and Government Representatives? Or does HN's bias towards Twitter exempt it from any form of scrutiny?
I don't think this has too much with celebrities, but about exempting "problematic people" from being repeatedly banned by algorithmic and applied AI systems. IOW, they don't have controls over internal mechanisms of so-called algorithms, and a separate suppression system is used to reduce harm.
> Isn't that literally what Twitter does as well? Making exceptions for Politicians and Government Representatives? Or does HN's bias towards Twitter exempt it from any form of scrutiny?
What a completely bizarre comment.
No one mentioned Twitter, there is no "HN" general viewpoint, and if I had to say I'd say most comments on HN about Twitter are negative.
I'd say this could be the worst case of "Whataboutism" I've ever seen, but it is such a weird thing to use "what about" regarding.
When it comes to India, Twitter is typically at the forefront of mainstreaming propaganda and selectively applying rules. So my perspective comes from that (since this article concerns feud between Meta and The Wire which covers India). Whenever Twitter gets mentioned (atleast in HN) concerning its role in policy with regards to politicians it mostly gets a pass.
Let me put it this way: what you feel Meta is doing in the West, is what many in India (like me) feel Twitter is doing here. And the sentiment I see is mostly anti Meta and mostly pro Twitter here.
After all it is my perspective and I could be wrong (as I obviously don't have statistics to say if HN definitely has a Twitter bias or not). But I believe I have a right to express my opinion on what I feel is HN sentiment towards big tech censorship (which mostly circles around Meta but rarely around Twitter).
I haven't seen twitter getting a pass? When trump finally got the boot, the comments were along the lines of "the only thing that can't get you kicked off of twitter is to run an insurrection against the US government"
And the ban was done after Opposition Party supporting Bureaucrat (from the IPS cadre) threatened to get the account banned. Basically Twitter acted on behalf of the Opposition not the Ruling Party. You can read the full story here [1].
If Twitter is truly unbiased, it wouldn't be siding so openly with Opposition Parties in India.
Quoting the user (TrueIndology) who was banned:
`She asked me for my personal details. I refused to divulge those details. She then said "Your time is up". And boom. My account was suspended within 5 minutes. Twitter sent no mail. Gave no reason. Simply suspended my account`.
The Government of India has authority to regulate Law and pass Executive Orders to entities operating within the Country. The Opposition of India has no such powers. Yet Twitter defied the Government's Executive Orders but did not defy the Opposition Party Bureaucrat's diktat. That should tell you how openly biased Twitter is.
Anyways, being a "strong BJP supporter" is not a crime on HN I presume. Where propaganda thrives it is better to be a strong, vocal supporter. Even if all alone and in minority.
This comment made me actually read the OPIndia article and wow it's pretty bad. To quote:
> The TrueIndology account is very popular and has thousands of followers. The person behind the account is a meticulous fact-checker who corrects wrong and distorted claims often pushed as history mostly by left-liberals, and cites actual sources to debunk myths and leftist propaganda on Indian history. Though the reasons for the accoun[sic] suspension are not clear, it comes just a day after he had ‘fact-checked’ and had idulged[sic] in an online arguement[sic] with senior IPS officer D Roopa.
Spelling errors are reproduced as is.
It's surprising how closely the "left-liberals"/"leftist propaganda" rhetoric matches "Leftist Media cabal"/"Western media propaganda outlets" language of the OP.
I'll explain the context behind this because Vice (as is usual with Western media propaganda outlets) does not provide any details.
The "journalist" in question, who goes by the handle @zoo_bear, tweeted out a clip from a heated National TV debate between a ruling party spokesperson and another Islamic scholar. Some unsavory remarks were made by the Islamic scholar on the ruling party spokesperson's Religious beliefs (she is a Hindu). She retaliated in the TV debate with her own unsavory remarks on his Islamic beliefs.
Now this "journalist", instead of putting out the entire clip, decided to cut the clip to only show the spokesperson's remarks which went viral not just in India but across the World. She not only received beheading/death threats but was also forced to apologize, tender resignation from the Party and go into hiding. Then after that, 4 other Hindus (completely unconnected to this TV debate) were beheaded, by Islamic terrorists, as a "revenge" for what she said. Only later did the entire clip surface and things cooled down. But by then, the damage was done. Was any of this reported by Vice? Nope. This is the kind of propaganda that Western media outlets indulge in.
Now the Government of India wanted to take this out-of-context Tweet down (as well as suspend the "journalist"s account) as he continued to put out partial information just to keep the communal pot boiling.
India is a multi-cultural, multi-religious democracy with a billion+ people. Any riots that break out has potential to turn into communal clashes on a pan-India scale. The Government, unlike Western Governments, has extra responsibility to take care of the social fabric of the Nation apart from protecting the country from adversaries on our borders.
So the Government of India is perfectly justified in requesting take down. Twitter not taking it down is purely politically motivated. It is not like it hasn't taken down accounts/tweets at all. It has done so multiple times on behest of opposition party members.
Note that this explanation is only one of the (many) incidents outlined in the (long) Vice post. As the Vice article points out, the tweet was over 4 years old when he was arrested for it. The Indian article[1] about the arrest doesn't make any claims about the tweet going viral or being responsible for the things the OP is claiming here. Notably neither the police themselves not the complainant make these claims.
This quote summarises the overall situation reasonably well:
> A 2021 transparency report released by Twitter revealed that India was the single largest source of government takedown requests in the second half of 2020—accounting for 25 percent of the global volume. The compliance rate for these requests was 0.6 percent in India, as opposed to 30 percent globally.
> The Indian article[1] about the arrest doesn't make any claims about the tweet going viral or being responsible for the things the OP is claiming here.
Of course the Indian Authorities are going to charge him for the most heinous/offensive tweet. And they will choose the one that will stick when they prosecute him in a Court of Law. That does not mean what he did, did not lead to beheading of 4 innocent Hindus. This is well documented fact that the communal tension was result of him sharing a doctored clip that went viral.
> The Indian article[1] about the arrest doesn't make any claims about the tweet going viral or being responsible for the things the OP is claiming here
LMFAO from Indian Express of all the papers? The ones who falsely published a report that Indian Army had moved towards Delhi to do a coup on the previous Government of India? [1] and [2].
Please refer to better sources.
> A 2021 transparency report released by Twitter revealed that India was the single largest source of government takedown requests in the second half of 2020—accounting for 25 percent of the global volume
Ah yes. And we should take Twitter at its word. Twitter can also reveal exactly what those tweets were which the GoI wanted taken down. I bet at least half of them involve some fabrication (like The Wire BS that is currently being propagated) or something communal to stoke riots and unrest in India.
I have no idea who Nupur Sharma is. Instead I was referring to the mention of the arrest of @zoo_bear in the linked article.
>> the tweet was over 4 years old when he was arrested for it
> Nice deflection. This is not the tweet I was talking about.
Good for you? How exactly was I supposed to know this when the tweet I was talking about was the one mentioned in the article you were so keen to dispute?
We asked you just recently to stop posting nationalistic flamewar comments to HN. Since you've continued doing it and then some, I've banned the account.
> You don't know about Nupur Sharma, but seems to know about BJP.
I'm Australian. I know what the ruling party of India is, but I certainly don't claim any deep knowledge of Indian politics.
I just Googled Nupur Sharma and she seems to have come to prominence in July 2022[1]. I guess my knowledge of Indian politics is 3 or 4 months behind? Not sure what the relevance is.
I see zereo issue with what Facebook is doing. They are indeed "treating users equally." To not have special measures in place protecting accounts that are orders of magnitude more likely to receive false reports would be unequal treatment, and would result in celebrities' accounts being very frequently taken down.
"Unequal treatment" would mean: these users are not subject to our policies. That's not the case here. XCheck just turns off the "we receive 100 reports, an algo shuts that account down" phenomenon. Humans review those cases manually, and the account can still be suspended or banned. How in the world could that be contentious?
Thanks for your reply. The first few paragraphs are educational and appreciated.
We may disagree on the last one - I find "everybody understands..." assumptions can range from mostly happen to be true to tragically incorrect to manipulatively deceptive. Based on other discussions in this thread, I'm not alone. The fact that you indicate diversity and inclusion has moved away from equal treatment phrase, that Equal vs Fair is now being taught as basic differentiation just like Pretend vs Real, and Opinion vs Fact in school, also I believe supports my claim these are meaningfully, substantially, importantly different concepts. Again, I think they get confused enough, intentionally or unintentionally, that "everybody understands" is just too dangerous of an approach, even if well meant.
Your stance, as described, doesn't make any sense. You're being willfully obtuse here. Equal treatment would mean that users are treated the same by the company. They are not, in the same situation.
Imagine the following three enforcement schemes for taking down a post due to reports:
* if your post gets reported 10 times, it gets taken down
* if your post gets reported (# of followers / 10) times, it gets taken down
* if your post gets reported (# of followers * 100) times, it gets taken down
Which of these are fair in your opinion?
For an account with a huge # of followers, the last one effectively means their posts can't be taken down.
It seems a system like XCheck is a step function where at a certain point, you get exempt from certain checks altogether.
The "equality" here could refer to each account's potential to go through the vetting that would give them exempt status.
==============
Maybe this deserves a separate response, but another way to think of this is to compare it to income taxes. There are different income brackets that affect your marginal tax rate in the US. Is it equal for everyone to pay the same dollar amount in income taxes? The same rate? A progressive rate? Are people treated equally under the law in all these cases? In none of them?
Who said anything about fair? The only one that is "equal treatment" is the one where 10 reports takes them down. It's shitty policy, but that's a different question isn't it? Number of followers playing a role is where treatment stops being equal. I'm not arguing what's the right way to handle this, I'm just contradicting rhetoric aiming to justify their policy by fallacious argument.
Edited to add: I don't think tax code is meant to or treats people equally, even though they're all subject to the same rules. The rules explicitly divide taxpayers into categories with different treatment.
I like that they've started teaching difference between "fair" and "equal" in kindergarten now in Canada. This is not meant as a slight, just a generational gap - I myself was not taught that as a kid and it took me way too long to realize that "fair treatment" and "equal treatment" can be wildly different things.
Xcheck is, by definition, at its very core, not "equal treatment". Equal treatment is easy and uncontroversial to define.
It may or may not be "fair treatment". That is always subjective and depends on goals and objectives and frameworks.
Something like Xcheck may or may not be necessary. It's interesting to read about problem it's trying to solve and discuss whether and how much it succeeds and at what price and what limitations.
What Xcheck does not get to do, however, is present / defend itself as "equal treatment",and in any meaningful discussion we should not mix and match or treat those as synonyms - that's confusing and unproductive at best, deceptive at worst.
I wish they would explain what xcheck is and how it works before the talk about the problems with it. This reads like a blog post to other Integrity FB engineers that already know that system.
XCheck is a system that supports tagging specific accounts with tags that exempt that account from certain integrity enforcement. In the post I give an example of a tag that used to exempt accounts from the fake account checkpoint. Applying these tags is usually a manual process and usually carefully vetted.
You yourself claim that you are only aware of Xcheck "features" since 2021,
As of June 2021 no XCheck tag I knew of allowed a user to take down content at will.
Are you also claiming that there have been no changes, and no new features, added to XCheck since June 2021? Are you aware of the new social media regulations recently passed by the current Modi government of India? (To be credible, you need to honestly answer these questions and address it in your article too, as otherwise you are basing your assumptions on incomplete information, thereby misleading yourself and others.)
To clarify, one of the requirement of this regulation is:
Under the new Intermediaries Rules, intermediaries must *complete* the takedown process under Section 79(3) of the IT Act, within 36 hours.
Very simply put, large social media platforms are legally required to respond and delete content when requested by government representatives.
Under such a scenario, can you confidently say that XCheck hasn't been extended with new features, like a tag that allows a user to immediately flag posts that must be compulsorily taken down when the particular user reports it? It seems a very obvious extension when you consider the political demands that are placed on Meta from around the world, and in India in particular.
I can’t explicitly state that because I can’t look at the code right now. What I can say is that I would be very surprised if it was. XCheck isn’t meant to be called explicitly by integrity detection. Detection should make its own decision and take the action on the account or content. During action enforcement XCheck is implicitly called.
> The stories are simply incorrect about the cross-check program, which was built to prevent potential over-enforcement mistakes. It has nothing to do with the ability to report posts, as alleged in the article.
Trying to "gotcha" someone being helpful and replying to comments is quite rude. No one working at Facebook would reply yes to that comment, which makes it quite worthless.
Wow, is it not rude to question the intent behind asking for a technical clarification? There is no gotcha here. It's simply asking OP to rule out this very obvious gap that their statement leaves unaddressed. Being helpful != being accurate.
The OP has pretty much said that X-Check tags are not intended to automatically take action on reports.
That is a pretty different thing from saying the people applying the tags don't expect action to be taken, but there could be entire organizations of 1000s of people where those tags serve a different purpose.
Please read the link above for context on how terrible Facebooks data control practices are, wherein this very act could be routinely occurring and OP or anyone making decisive statements would be irresponsible in doing so.
In order to state anything which they know to be true, they must first prove it to themselves. But if it is something which cannot be proven, then of course they cannot know it to be true, and consequently they cannot then honestly state it.
> a system that exists and mostly works is preferred to a hypothetical perfect system that is never built.
At any sufficiently large scale - especially with a product you're not paying for - this is the best you're likely to get. Once you fully understand and embrace this, your stress levels about imperfection tend to go way down.
Every newspaper and pretty much any other medium over the past century or so. That’s what editors used to do.
Scaling is not the problem - profits scale with the number of users, the cost of moderation would too, in the worst case. The problem is company’s unwillingness to pay anything at all. Their profits didn’t came from offering a good product, but from discovering a new way to offload the costs of their operation while keeping the income. In this case - by pretending to be a part telco, part newspaper (which brings income), but without taking their main responsibilities (which cost money).
Newspaper editors don't have to deal with large scale attempts to publish material as journalists on the newspaper's staff - or insofar as they do have to deal with it they just ignore unsolicited submissions. That's the closest analogy I can see in the newspaper business.
In most newspapers there has been a section for letters to the editor. Those sections are moderated by editors. That is the reference, not some situation of random readers somehow publishing material, by posing as journalists on the newspaper's staff.
An updated version of that is the comments section for online stories.
The article you linked doesn't say how much fb pays for their moderation. It doesn't say how many people are in their "moderation army". Nor does it say anything current. That article was written 8 years ago.
> XCheck isn't really about content moderation, it is about special security for specific people and how that interacts with posting.
According to the description, xcheck is all about content moderation - it chooses when not to moderate content.
I think that the key takeaway from the entire Wire vs Meta fiasco is that there is a lot of absolutely weird Spy vs. Spy behavior going in the Indian political and media industries.
I was initially extremely sympathetic to the story presented by The Wire, because it's quite believable that Meta/FB would go to extreme lengths to try to distance themselves from such a situation, but the facts ... just ... don't add up. As Alex Stamos has noted, there is little debate regarding collusion between Meta's "government relations" people and policy groups, so that's not really much of a scandal -- it's not like Meta will deny that Modi was treated like a divine being when he visited their campus, so the idea that his people can easily call in a favor to crush a social media post won't really surprise anyone.
The bulletproof evidence with DKIM authentication and a video of a logged-in admin instance doesn't look so bulletproof after all, based on the credible reports from those who know how Meta's admin tooling actually looks and functions, and those with other DKIM authenticated emails from the fb.com domain.
So, the question is, what's the agenda here? Why would someone go through all of this effort, to create a scandal out of something that is not very far from the truth? What's the point of this entire thing? Maybe this is like Nick Denton and Gawker losing their entire business over the stupidest sex tape story ever; or maybe this is part of something else that requires domain knowledge regarding Indian politics and media to understand (do page views monetize so well that this mini-scandal is going to be super-profitable to The Wire? Highly doubtful, right? What could they possibly get out of this?).
The whole thing is just really weird. It's also a major distraction from the very real problems that Meta doesn't even try to hide. Meta's relationship with the governments in various countries -- including the United States -- is way too close for comfort, and absolutely toxic on multiple levels. If this story turns out to be fake news, it'll do a lot to help the company deny, deflect and discredit the next real scandal. I think this is what the wacky conspiracy theorists call "4D chess," but I don't think that's what's happening here.
The true story behind all of this is bound to be very strange, and very stupid.
Based on my conversation with the editor of the Wire, he seems sincere in his belief in this source. He is a respected journalist with decades of experience so he wouldn’t trash that just for a few clicks.
My read is that he wants this story to be true so much that he’s ignoring evidence to the contrary.
As for why the source is doing this, I couldn’t say.
Fwiw Devesh Kumar has to be in on the fabrication given that he provided an impossible story as to why the email screenshots they initially posted showed 2021 (impossible because the day of the week didn’t match the displayed date, indicating the screenshot was fabricated).
It also takes a special level of suspension of disbelief to think that Andy Stone somehow writes emails in Indian English and that XCheck gives privileges to take down content from other users.
Thanks, this is very helpful. It would be wild if this was a very carefully crafted campaign meant to bait The Wire into blowing itself up over an almost-true but totally fake news story. Now I really want to know where this all ends up.
I was sympathetic that they were getting played when the first story came out but after they doubled down on it not once but twice, and seeing the “evidence” they’re putting out, it appears that at least one of their employees is in on the fabrication and regardless the whole outlet is willing to ignore basic journalistic standards in reporting this story.
The wire is notorious for propoganda hit pieces in Indian political landscape. Based kn conversation is not enough merit when you see kind of reports the wire dishes out.
I'd speculate this is part of an "Opposition research" move by a political party that might benefit.
The extreme lengths that these people seem to have gone to is shocking. Whatever it is, FB has the evidence on their servers as Alex Stamos points out since they created a Workspace instance.
The first thing that comes in to mind is the Bezos leaked nudes.
At the time there was a story about the Saudi's being involved and some link to Trump.
Years later it came out that Bezos's investigator knew pretty early on that it was likely the brother of Bezos's girlfriend, however the National Enquirer was already in trouble for allegedly acting as a foreign agent for the Saudi's. By seeding the fake Saudi story they were able to apply huge pressure on the Enquirer.
Maybe something similar is happening here, Meta is under legal pressure somewhere on this topic. It doesn't have to be true, it just has to annoy the wrong politician/judge.
I’m nitpicking, but the reason Gawker went bust was because someone went out of their way to make sure they did. Sure the tape was the proximate cause, but if it hadn’t been that, it’d have been something else.
Peter Thiel was going around with an open checkbook, actively looking for anyone who may have a viable case against Gawker. If it hadn't been Hulk Hogan's sex tape case, it would have been unlawful termination, or some other grievance that involved Gawker Media in some way.
Edit: lol, no wonder parent & gp were circumspect on names - I'm getting downvoted :'-D Anyhow, here are my sources:
Yup. Gawker was victim of a targeted assassination. Sure, their editor gave a truly disastrous deposition which probably directly caused them to lose that particular case more than any other single factor, but if it hadn’t been that case, it would have been the next fact pattern where a well funded opposition would have even a slim chance at nailing them to the wall.
There’s plenty Gawker did that I didn’t like or didn’t care for, but as a proponent of free speech, I see nothing positive about them losing that shit.
This is a mildly interesting post only because of how it comes up to, but avoids ever talking about, the central flaw in the system it describes — they're conflating several things without ever really acknowledging that they're different. Theres "integrity", which is a Meta-internal term; verification of ID, which is a far deeper rabbit hole than they're going to go into; abuse; and undesirable behavior. They're all different things.
Different but related, I would say. For example abuse of a service and undesirable behaviour on a service could be thought of as different points on a spectrum.
2M “subscribed” users to a subreddit is about 10% or 200,000 daily viewers with about 1% of those commenting and 0.1% posting so 2,000 comments and 200 posts per day. Some subs will be more
or less but that’s the magnitudes we’re talking about.
The equivalent situation assuming mods review every comment would be a subreddit with 1 billion users. If mods are only reviewing reports which is some small percentage of comments then adjust accordingly.
Moderation workflow starts with user-reports on posts/comments. At scale, you can set a threshold as well, which dramatically reduces the number of items to review.
Obviously, scaleup the number of reviewers.
Obviously, add some obvious algorithms: warnings, temporary/permanent bans, etc.
...
Very well put, it's not even close to the same ballpark. It would also be like moderating a 1 billion user subreddit where nearly every single post is off topic and comes from different users, whereas in subreddits a few super users often produce a huge percent of the content.
This is a very efficient moderation force. I'd be happy to get away with 10s of thousands per billion. That's still under 100 per million. Under 1 per 10,000.
Try multiplying your numbers by a few thousand, billions of people use lets platforms daily. Reddit user interaction is also very different in regard to celebrities.
Sure, but bias is going to be a factor with any system of evaluation. It happens with human moderators, it happens with automated systems, it happens in corporate performance reviews and it happens among 12 of a defendant’s peers convened for a criminal trial. The existence of bias doesn’t pertain to whether or not a given system is scalable.
It is relevant to the objective existence of a problem though, as well as the magnitude of the importance of the problem (importance may vary substantially per instance of censorship).
My experience:
- yes there inherent bias, accidents etc
- an escalation system can provide double check against petty judgments. Back pressure can be created through the possibility of greater penalties.
- obviously there needs to be bias for credible accounts (older, more active, verified IRL, etc) to avoid throwaways.
They're interesting problems for sure; it's equal parts fun, technically challenging, and then you get to throw in having to quickly react to adversarial responses.
If I were designing a system like this, I'd likely implement a reputation system for reporters (users who report, not journalists).
When you report content for the first time your reputation score is 0.5, if the content is of a celebrity or public figure, your reputation will invisibly drop, enough of these and your score will be so low as to not be a useful flag when evaluating whether content is objectionable.
On the other side, if the content is reviewed as violating ToS, your rep will increase.
With a system like this the fake reports and brigading will quickly lose its power, eventually all users who abuse reports will be ranked so low as to not matter.
A threshold of rep score can be set before the content is auto removed. Maybe something like 25pts in order for it to be removed, and that's after adding together all the rep of the reporting users.
In a system like this they will play both sides. They do, in fact. Set up accounts that produce content that violates TOS and accounts that report it. The reporting accounts will have their rep increased for correctly reporting tos violations.
Then they use the high rep accounts to brigade and fake report.
Or sell them.
They are patient, so even if you make reputation go up slowly, they will just build a pipeline of account harvesting.
I always thought that this is how it already worked.
That being said, the above can also be abused by creating a bunch of high rep accounts or opening up a black market of high rep accounts for sale. It's definitely a higher bar though.
> That works well for about two weeks until users figure out how to exploit this. They form groups that agree to coordinate to report content. Now reports become lower signal than before, but still somewhat useful. We use the reports, but try to limit exploitation.
What about human employees reviewing users reports, especially randomly picked samples from those that resulted in successful takedowns. If the content was found to be sound under the rules, penalise the reporters. Suspend their ability to make reports (probably in the form of silently ignoring them).
Ie some human moderation should still be done at this scale, but using a combo of random sampling and system-flagged-suspicious.
This is Slashdot's meta-moderation system from 20(?) years ago? Logged in users would randomly be selected to check moderation, and accounts that abused their mod points were flagged. Granted, you probably couldn't do that today as you could see meta-moderation brigades out in the wild. Employees should be better, although there's still the chance that an employee might use their position to punish opinions they disagree with.
Yeah I remember slashdot days. Having employees do the meta moderation is key imo, and sounds like would need a second level of meta moderation to review samples of the employees actions.
I’m also very pro a pay for final review, where eg you pay $50-100 or something around that level of inconvenience to have a multi-employee review (each employee reviewing it independently, unknownst to each other, and taking the majority decision).
I remember Dota2 (video game) did this, people fake reporting had less reports and they counted for less, while people that were consistently reported players that got punished got more reporting power. Only one report per match "counted" too so a group of player couldn't gang on reports on one player.
Of course that could be abused as well,but you'd have to make a group of people that first got the good rating then reported same people and that would be significantly harder
I'm wondering if it's XCheck that locked-out my later account when it decided by zombie account (I don't have the email address anymore) was a "duplicate". The check condition it fired on was visiting the 2FA settings page. Some nice wf on-call fixed it from an oops task and I don't touch that page anymore. :)
So I work at Meta and just got MetaMorphized s/@fb/@meta/g.
When I started, my personal account was banned twice on the condition of adjusting 2FA. It was sorted out. I had a past account that I could no longer access as email domains changed, so it looked like I was trying to maintain duplicate accounts. Why it triggered on adjusting 2FA didn't make sense. Then, it wanted me to verify my identity in a way that created a Catch-22 of wanting a login from itself or to a device that didn't have a valid login session. I set the options for better security and left it, rolled all of my personal passwords, eliminated public data, canceled unnecessary social media accounts, and enrolled in security features like Google's Advanced Protection Program. I'm hesitant to make changes risking getting locked-out again.
I recently spoke with someone in Readiness who works with hiring human verifier contractors around the world. A primary issue is scale. You would need to hire the entire world's population to moderate the content being produced. Still there will be bias and misinterpretation of sarcasm, and varying standards of acceptability and decorum. AI is a force-multiplier to an extent, but it takes human judgement to rectify mistakes and data to identify brigades, scammers, terrorists, and political manipulators seeking to exploit an imperfect system. Sadly, the humans with the best judgement typically have better career options that they couldn't be paid to do social media moderation. It can be made better, but the ultimate realization is with even great care, good intentions, and attempts at making things sensible and fair, there are always going to be mistakes. It's trying to minimize mistakes and not enable genocides, election sentiment manipulation, or product scams. It's doable to minimize mistakes, but it take persistent vigilance, wisdom about human nature, and creative solutions to deter and prevent harm while avoiding harming innocent persons. Mistakes are bad and disappointing and it feels bad when they happen.
In case anyone were wondering, the security is the inverse of Twitter's. Everything is logged and access requires a business purpose for a limited time, narrow scope, and approval to get that access. Almost no one has access to production data. PII is taken very seriously. There are no laptops with copies of user data. All laptops are encrypted, just in case, and for general principles. Password complexity requirements are insane. I can see my work/personal FBID user object in the graph, but as soon as I try to prod any links to other users, big warnings appear. There's an army of insane genius security researchers and practitioners who create and deploy defense-in-depth tools for broad and specific solutions to prod, corp, and endpoints that reduce our risks to being compromised, data being exfil'd, and security "oops"es from happening.
Work users who transit through certain "hostile" countries lose some security credentials and access. I'm actually wondering why laptops aren't spot-checked for malware implants and hardware/firmware modifications. I would assume employees with critical access who travel internationally with their work laptops and phones are prime targets.
PS: I wonder if people would pay $X / month (say $199) to have a high-signal social media service that requires a level of "vouching" invitation, names with faces profiles (not visible to the wider internet), sensible/proportional mediation and civilized feedback, politically-neutral, and free speech-loving to increase the sense of community and reduce the potential of anonymous bad actors. 37signals/basecamp accumulated research that showed that smaller communities with faces and real profile names lead to nicer interactions. I don't recall the source, but communities that are defended in terms of politeness and boundaries tend to endure while undefended communities drive away users and tend to disperse.
Seems unsurprising to me. If you, as a company, want ironclad confidentiality from people after they leave, that wouldn't be free or automatic. None of what was shared seems to qualify as a trade secret, which would have some protection.
I've never worked somewhere that didn't have me sign some kind of broad NDA-esque clause saying I wouldn't share proprietary or non-public info for a certain period after release (imo, completely reasonably). This blog post is literally nothing BUT non-public proprietary info. Like the parent I'm really surprised the blog author feels comfortable sharing all this. Even if it ended up being technically legal, I have to imagine this kind of thing is extremely frowned upon.
Not to be unduly cynical, but any Public Relations 101 course will introduce the importance of third-party messaging, because statements coming from outside a company directly involved in some (apparent) scandal or other will always carry more weight with the public than an official corporate statement. Additionally, this kind of distance removes certain concerns about legal liability if more insider information is leaked later.
[edit] I have no knowledge or opinion on this story, never read the Wire, and never use Meta or any of its products. It does, however, seem rather clear that governments and corporations concerned with controlling message and image do view social media platforms as the most important battleground in the information wars these days.
In my country, unless you're compensated specifically for your silence you're free to ignore such clauses. An employment contract can be definition never restrict you from doing anything after your employment has ended. Employers try to put in nonsense such as non-compete clauses by they are always toothless.
This is a little different than a noncompete though. Those are hardly enforceable in the US either.
You mean to tell me in your country there is nothing to prevent you from quitting your job and then next day writing up and publishing full detail reports about internal operations?
meta being so big they're almost part of public institution just privately held; and public scrutiny is less frowned upon especially if many believes they do not contribute to the betterment of the republic
Thanks for the email. But I think it should be fine.
I haven’t said anything that could be exploited by bad actors. As for competitors, there are no competitors in integrity. The entire industry goes to great lengths to share knowledge on what works and what doesn’t. We all win when we combat abuse well.
Internal comms are notoriously open, this kind of post would be a welcome contribution for explaining XCheck to a general audience outside of the integrity org. I don't know what kind of confidentiality agreement they signed but mine would have technically prohibited discussing this. Not only that, it's not time limited in nature, it applies "at all times during the term of my Relationship with the Company and thereafter".
I wouldn't expect Meta to actually do anything about this blog post but I wouldn't have felt comfortable posting it.
The source has been verified by The Wire to be a Meta employee / contract worker.
We reiterate the faith we have in our sources, whose identities and positions in Meta are known to us. Our reporters have had a productive relationship with them for some time already, prior to the Instagram story. Meta’s suggestion that sources who don’t know each other have teamed up to “hoax” The Wire is ludicrous.
The emails have been verified to be authentic by The Wire and 2 independent experts, one of whom works at Microsoft. Further proof of the "instagram URL" has been shared.
Even if we assume that the "instagram" workplace portal is the "weakest" evidence and a "fake" (as you and others claim), than Meta should be easily able to identify the person who created the "fake" instance and populated it with all the "fake" tickets. This is what Alex Stamos too tweeted:
If The Wire is wrong, then Meta has all the evidence they need. While you could create a whole fake Workplace, the easier move is to just create a free trial instance, meaning those fake notes are sitting in Meta's databases along with the metadata of whomever created them.
I think, at this point, it's on Meta to write-up a detailed response with whatever technical evidence they have. This will not go away just by ignoring it.
The fact is that The Wire have an obligation to protect their source and so are limited in the evidence they can share publicly (unless taken to court). So this begs the question that if Meta and you and other FB employees) are so sure of the evidence being fabricated, why do you think The Wire hasn't been sued yet to take down the "fake" articles? (Note that you do not even need to identify who faked the evidence, to sue them, as long as you can prove that it is fake, which should be easy to do so according to all the claims made by Meta, you and other FB employees).
If that's the case, it seems like someone should be informing Facebook that their DKIM signing keys have been compromised. The impact of that would be much worse than just a forged .eml file sent to a journalist.
My reasoning is two fold - I haven’t shared anything that could be exploited by anyone. And second, Meta and others in the industry try to share information about how their integrity efforts work so we can learn from each other.
“Legal peril” and “I think” are not compatible, for a rational person. “I know” is where you want to be, before putting yourself in front of one of the largest collections of lawyers on the planet.
This is not some general blanket approach you can take to talking about internal implementations. You are either right, or wrong. There is no middle ground or "I think". If you've signed an NDA around these internal implementations I would wager that NDA came with a clause to not discuss it without consulting Meta, even after your departure.
And it's obviously BS that companies can abridge a citizen's freedom of speech after the employment agreement ends. If this individual wants to be the case on the lawsuit that's a long time coming, more power to them.
This Supreme Court is not big-tech-friendly; good time to shift up the precedent.
Have you never seen https://engineering.fb.com/? Engineers there blog about their tech tools all the time. "Legal peril" sounds like a bit of a stretch.
These posts are all thoroughly reviewed by comms and legal teams. In onboarding, it’s thoroughly communicated that you need to go through the proper channels to publicly publish anything with technical details.
It's a nice impulse to try to explain the background to this story, but the gratuitous flamebait you tossed in is bad, and bad outweighs good in these things.
Please eliminate nationalistic/political flamebait from your HN posts. It leads to nationalistic/political flamewars, which are hellish and exactly what we don't want here.
You know, someone not liking the current Indian government doesn't mean they hate India. To those in the US, Meta meddling in politics and turning a blind eye to those who used the platform to peddle misinformation isn't news.
Ankhi Das, a top Facebook India executive left the company in 2020 over allegations by the WSJ that the company favoured the ruling party when it came to removing posts that violated its hate-speech rules. So putting business above integrity is nothing new for Facebook in India either.
> I see the hypocrisy in HN when it comes to how it treats Meta vs how it treats Twitter
Man HN is the most Twitter hating group I've ever interacted with. I don't think I've ever seen a thread mentioning Twitter where people _don't_ complain about Twitter's moderation
I don’t get this Whataboutery? The news story and the article is about Meta - why bring Twitter or any other media into discussion, unless you want to distract from the topic at hand.
Because I have seen this bias on HN. I feel the need to call it out. Why is it bothering you? Can't I have my opinion? Or should I be forced to conform to everyone's opinion here? I'm no sheep. I have my own independent thinking and I base my opinions on that. I am infact against Big Tech censorship as a whole. What I find amusing is that Big Tech on HN gets preferential treatment based on which side of the political aisle one is on (as the Company you support or are against depends on the Company's overarching political leaning).
Well, it is an object fact though — isn't it? Twitter is an order of magnitude smaller than Meta, and Facebook / Meta / Zuckerberg have been fined and trialled an order of magnitude more times than twitter for its deeds. Whistleblowers have presented an order of magnitude more documentation and proof for Facebook's shady practices. It is only fair that it is discussed an order of magnitude more times than Twitter.
Just because you want the two to be "equally bad" doesn't make it so, and bringing up Y when the topic is X in this case is the textbook definition of whataboutery.
The background about Meta and The Wire, along with Alex Stamos' great thread about inconsistencies can be presented without resorting to conjecture on your part about the motivations of the owners of the publication.
> can be presented without resorting to conjecture on your part about the motivations of the owners of the publication
Why not? Are journalists different from politicians that we should not hold them accountable? We know these journalists quite well and we know what their political leanings are. This is not the first time they have done this. Won't be the last either. So calling them out is not a wrong thing.
> who hates India, the current government and probably himself as well ... As someone who dislikes both Meta and The Wire, this is a source of great entertainment.
As an American it's fascinating how the tone of HN completely changes whenever the merits of cancel culture, the Internet Archive, or the current government of India comes up. It's an odd list.
Because, believe it or not, plenty of Indians are satisfied with the current Government in India. We have had shit Governments for more than 70 years. So don't be surprised if Indians don't support Western media narratives on Indian Government (which is mostly fabricated/fake).
I think you should speak for yourself instead of for all Indians. You believing or not believing something has little effect on facts. Bullying everyone into believing your unquestioned love for the present day government is rather disenginious.
You are mostly sharing your opinion. I am not saying that you are wrong, but stating your opinion has much less weightage than stating the facts where your claims are supported by some data/references.
How do I share "facts" on somethings that are fabrications by the Opposition?
I'll attempt it: let us take the Rafale Deal accusations that was leveled against the Government of India by the Opposition Parties. They could not substantiate it with any evidence whatsoever except to claim that Modi and his Party, along with billionaire Ambani, minted billions of dollars from a defense deal which involved Government of India and the French Government in procurement of Rafale Jets (Dassault Aviation). The Opposition mounted an offensive right before the 2019 elections and even took the case to the Supreme Court of India. There, they could not substantiate any of their claims. And they took the case to the same court 3 times with various appeals. In the end, the Supreme Court got frustrated by the repeated petitions and threw out the case [2].
The reason being that the Government of India, for the first time ever, had inked the deal with the French Government directly instead of going through middlemen (which was the case with Bofors Scandal of the 90s and Augusta Westland scandal of the 2000s). Earlier Governments used middlemen to sign deals so that the monetary exchange happened through these middlemen who would give a kickback to the politicians involved in making the deal happen.
The current Government of India decided not to go through the middlemen route and instead inked a deal directly with the French Government. This obviously did not sit well with the Opposition as it lost a big source of corruption revenue (the Opposition was gunning for Lockheed Martin's F-16 (and subsequently Hybrid F-21 jet) or Eurofighter and wanted it done through middlemen). If Government had gone through this route, there would be huge kickback (to the tune of billions of dollars) that would go straight into the pockets of greedy politicians.
Now since the Government did not take that route, there was no scope for corruption anymore as everything had to be done in black and white (with the French Government having to pay the Indian Government directly which would be received by the Treasury and not some corrupt politician or middleman).
Yet the Opposition cried that there was corruption in the deal by picking clauses out of context (for example, the offset clause in the deal) or randomly accusing the Prime Minister of actually facilitating the deal on behalf of billionaire Anil Ambani. None of these accusations withstood the scrutiny of the Supreme Court of India [1]. But in 2019, it was the biggest election issue. Turned out to be a damp squib.
Can you please name top 3 things for which you think Indians are satisfied with the current Government in India? What are few things that have changed from the last 70 years?
1. Abrogation of Article 370 and removing Special Status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir, reintegrating it with India. This has been the bone of contention that has caused weakness in the Northern borders of India with Pakistan. Multiple Wars have been fought and lots of terror attacks took place on Indian soil which was used by Pakistani terrorists passing through this State specifically. This was literally a 70 year old issue which was left unsettled by the first Prime Minister of India: Jawaharlal Nehru. Many considered it impossible to Abrogate the Article (which included eminent lawyers). Securing borders is primary importance for Indians and it was only done after 70 years.
2. Implementing GST (Goods and Service Tax). Before we had 12 different taxes that we had to pay (including VAT). All of it was subsumed into 1 tax code bringing India on par with Democracies across the World which had 1 indirect taxation methodology. GST was delayed by 2 decades due to successive weak coalition Governments. This caused India to lag behind majorly. Sure there were multiple technical bottlenecks (with the system crashing multiple times when it was launched) but that has now largely been resolved and simplified.
3. Citizenship Amendment Act. This was passed to ensure that Refugees (from minority religions) who fled Religious persecution in neighboring Islamic Nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh were given fast-track Citizenship. Most of these refugees had landed in India in the 1970s after the Indo-Pakistan War (which involved US and the West supporting theocratic State of Pakistan while Soviet Union supported India). India won the War, breaking Pakistan into two parts, with one part liberated as Bangladesh. Before the War started, there was major Religious persecution of minorities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) which resulted in genocide [1]. Estimated 2,000,000 people escaped persecution and landed in India seeking India's intervention. India did liberate Bangladesh but did not decide on the future of Refugees for the next 40+ years. Those Refugees were finally granted Citizenship on a fast track basis.
4. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act. This Act (also called Triple Talaq Bill) was passed by the Indian Parliament to make "instant divorce/Talaq" a punishable offense thereby restoring the dignity of minority Muslim women (who used to be earlier divorced by their husbands over SMS/WhatsApp by just writing Talaq, Talaq, Talaq 3 times — called Talaq-e-Biddat).
5. Economy flourished: India's GDP shot up from being 10th largest in 2014 (when Modi came to power) to now 5th largest economy. Share in Global GDP rose from 2.6% to 3.2%. FDI inflows shot up from 2.1% to 6.7%. In combating Climate Change crisis, rose from 31st to 10th. Ease of doing business shot up from 142nd to 63rd place. People started noticing real change on the ground. Highways being built at record pace. Electrification close to 99% all over India.
6. Settling the Ayodhya Dispute, which happens to be the most important issue for Hindus.
7. Unified Payments Interface. One of the best technological implementations I have seen and is quite shocking that it was a Government initiative no less. I can transfer cash to anyone instantly by just knowing their UPI ID (which is similar to email ID). No need to share bank details. No need for waiting for a day or two for transfers to happen. No need to use credit/debit cards. Chances of fraud minimized big time.
8. Reducing/eliminating big scale corruption on National/Federal/Central level. India was rocked by multi-billion dollar corruption scandals for 70+ years. This is now thankfully a thing of the past. Corruption still exists in some pockets (and in some States as well) but it is largely reduced.
There are a lot more. But I have only listed a few which I am happy with. A mix of social + economic issues that were resolved.
There are other issues where the Government underperformed IMHO:
1. Passing the landmark Farm Act and then backtracking on it due to pressure from rich farmers and Khalistani Terror groups operating out of Canada. This set back India's farming sector by 2 decades. This reform was much awaited and would have propelled India's farm sector to great heights. But politics and propaganda won over common sense reforms. The only time I was extremely upset with the current Government.
2. Not tackling home grown terror organizations with an iron fist due to fear of being perceived as a "fascist party" by International Media and International Organizations. Lots of Islamic terror organizations were floated that worked without any fear (with many openly tying with ISIS, Al Qaeda etc) because the current Government chose not to act against them. Even when majority of the supporters pushed the Government to ban such organizations it seemed shaky and did not wish to act decisively. It ultimately had to once these organizations started talking about breaking India (by staging a "protest" — read it as riots and communal violence — in the "Chicken neck" region and cut off entire North-Eastern India from rest of the mainland) and the Anti-CAA riots broke out which resulted in communal clashes. Then the Government had to intervene and ban these Organizations. I wish it had done sooner. Innocent people would not have suffered.
3. Demonetization, as a concept, was a disaster. Though it propelled India as a whole to move towards online banking (see the point on UPI above), the core objective for bringing in Demonetization: reduction/elimination of black money, was not met.
4. Hasty implementation of Aadhaar without consultation with Privacy Experts and Tech professionals. In fact, this Government performed poorly when it came to Privacy issues and surveillance. It is trying to emulate both US and China in this aspect. Which I do not agree with or support.
5. Buying out elected representatives from Opposition Parties to form Government. This is one thing I hate about the current dispensation. Though this is not new and has been going on since India got Independence and became a Democracy, I expected this Government to not indulge in horse trading. As those coming into the Party do not necessarily have the same ideological inclinations, commitments or dedication as a ground-level Party worker. This party level corruption needs to end.
6. No strong Opposition. Currently, the Indian Opposition Parties are divided, with no strong leaders heading them. They are directionless and visionless. The oldest Party of India (the Indian National Congress) is headed by a buffoon who spends most of his time in Italy and only occasionally visits India when there is some contentious issue and then goes back to Italy to party. There is no serious contender to Modi right now. All the good leaders are gravitating to one party. And this is a bad thing IMHO. India definitely needs a strong Opposition to have the right checks and balance. But definitely not the jokers we have in the Opposition now.
Thanks a lot for sharing detailed answer, and I appreciate you for even including few points that you don't like about the Indian Government.
If you allow, I would also like to share my opinion (and some facts backed with references) on the points that you shared.
1. Abrogation of Article 370: Honestly I like that government made a strong decision and completed a long pending issue but I don't see how it can improve peace in the region or how it can stop the attacks or how it impacts life of any common citizen.
2. Implementing GST (Goods and Service Tax): Again I like that government made a strong decision and completed a long pending issue. However, I see the GST has also caused tax rate to be increased a lot on most of the items. There are many different tax rates and businesses has to file a lot more reports on monthly/yearly basis. For example VAT on software products used to be 5% but now GST on software products is 18%. Similarly now people have to pay GST on many essentials and food items. [1]
3. Citizenship Amendment Act: The way I see it, it's done only to act against muslims of India. They excluded only muslims from the list and included all other religions. There are conflicting statements from the ministers of Indian Government where Home Minister of India even seems to be indirectly threatening Muslims [2] [3]
4. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act: I think this is also done only to act against muslims of India. I absolutely do not support Triple Talaq and I like that they ended it but I don't think the intension is to protect women rights. Even current PM Modi has left his own wife without giving her a divorce. [4]
5. Economy flourished: Agree with you that India's GDP and Ease of doing business is growing. But I don't know what are real changes that people started noticing on the ground. Highways are being built at record pace but they are charging Toll for most of the highways and those highways are built and operated by private companies.
6. Settling the Ayodhya Dispute: Is it done by Supreme Court or Government? Are you implying that Supreme Court is not independent and Government has a hand in Supreme Court decisions?
7. Unified Payments Interface: Agree, this is a very good initiative and I heard good things about it.
8. Reducing/eliminating big scale corruption on National/Federal/Central level: I think there is still a big time corruption, but now government controls the narrative and mainstream media and probably judiciary too (See my comment on previous point). Just a high level list of potential scam happened under BJP/Modi government. Whenever opposition raises these issues, mainstream media actually blames opposition parties instead of calling for investigation into the allegation:
8.1 Rafale Scam: The supreme court of India headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi gave clean chit to government without requiring any investigation. Government recommended the same judge for Rajya Sabha right after his retirement from the court. I cant say how its morally/ethically right for a judge to accept post-retirement benefit from government and how you can guarantee that the decisions from that judge were unbiased. [6] [7]
8.2 PM CARES Fund: The Prime Minister's Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM CARES Fund) was created on 27 March 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The total amount of funds donated and the names of donors have not been publicly disclosed, and the fund is privately audited. The Government of India had initially claimed that the fund is a private fund, and denied that the PM CARES Fund is a public fund for the purposes of transparency laws such as the Right to Information Act 2005, even though the Fund uses government infrastructure and the national emblem of the Government of India. In December 2020, the Government of India reversed its stance and admitted that the PM CARES Fund was a public fund, but still refused to disclose information regarding it under the Right to Information Act 2005. [8] [9]
8.3 Electoral bonds and FCRA amendments: While the common man has to declare every cent of their income, political parties are allowed to take huge sum of money without disclosing any details. The Delhi high court had in 2014 indicted both Congress and BJP for receiving foreign funds in violation of the existing FCRA Act, and the RPA Act that specifically prohibits parties from accepting contributions from a foreign source. The court asked the government and EC to act against the two political parties. In response, the BJP government has amended the FCRA Act itself, and exempted from scrutiny all foreign funding to parties retrospectively from 1976! Furthermore, the amended Companies Act now allows any foreign company registered in India to make contributions through bonds to political parties, overruling legitimate doubts about who or where its real owners are, or what its source of funding is. [10]
>> The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019. It amended the Citizenship Act, 1955 by providing a pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians, and arrived in India before the end of December 2014. [1]
Government of India amended a bill to allow Indian citizenship. They added a list of religions but somehow excluded only Muslims from that list.
> Government of India amended a bill to allow Indian citizenship. They added a list of religions but somehow excluded only Muslims from that list.
Because Muslims obviously are not traveling to India fearing religious persecution in ISLAMIC countries. That is... a big oxymoron.
The fast-tracking of Citizenship was for "persecuted religious minorities".
Muslims are welcome to come through Regular routes just like every other Citizen of the World (which also includes Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Christians from other countries not part of the 3 countries mentioned in the Act for instance). There are many Hindus who fled Sri Lanka and taken refugee status in India but haven't been brought under CAA as their status is still unclear (i.e. if they want to go back to Sri Lanka or not as the persecution was not of religious nature). The CAA was enacted specifically for minority religious persecution. How can you link that with regular Immigration which continues unabated? These refugees are languishing without Citizenship for 40+ years. Have some sympathy for them.
It is exactly the same as Jews fleeing persecution. Did US not fast-track citizenship for such Jews? Precedent has already been set by the United States. Now will you condemn USA for the same? [1]
Let me quote from the Lautenberg Amendment and the discussion prior to that:
"C. Special Category Aliens
Since 1989, legislators have pushed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for increased admissions of specific religious and ethnic groups, in particular Soviet
Jews and Evangelicals, Czechs, and Poles. In doing so, they have created special preference categories for specific aliens. 34 In May of 1989, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (DNJ) proposed that Congress create a "rebuttable presumption of refugee status for Soviet Jews, Evangelical Christians and certain Southeast Asian nationals."
`The Lautenberg Amendment required the Executive branch to establish:
one or more categories of aliens who are or were nationals and residents of the
Soviet Union and who share common characteristics that identify them as targets
of persecution in the Soviet Union on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion .... [One such category
shall include] aliens who are ... nationals ... of the Soviet Union and who are
Jews or Evangelical Christians.`
`President Bush signed the Lautenberg Amendment on November 21, 1989.41 The
Amendment allows for a reduced admission standard for the particular groups and requires the eligible aliens to assert a fear of persecution and show a "credible basis for
concern about the possibility of such persecution. 42`
> names of donors have not been publicly disclosed
Why should names of donors be disclosed? It is a donation for a charitable cause. Charity is typically done anonymously unless the donor explicitly requests to be named.
> fund is privately audited
I don't see anything wrong with that. It is the same as the erstwhile Prime Minister's National Relief Fund which ran for 70 years and introduced by the Congress Party.
> The Government of India had initially claimed that the fund is a private fund, and denied that the PM CARES Fund is a public fund for the purposes of transparency laws such as the Right to Information Act 2005, even though the Fund uses government infrastructure and the national emblem of the Government of India
This is fake news spread by NDTV. The Government did not say anywhere that it was a private fund. This was deliberate misinterpretation of Clause 5.3 of the Trust Deed [1] by NDTV. It was registered as a "Public Charitable Trust" [2]
Yes it does not come under RTI just like the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund which was setup by the Congress Party but was not even registered.
The Fund using Government infrastructure or National Emblem of GoI has no bearing on it to being included under RTI. Even the earlier Prime Minister's National Relief Fund, which was unregistered entity, carried the National Emblem and used Government infrastructure and was not under RTI. So why was no issue raised on that? The PM CARES Fund is not an institution that is established or constituted by an act of Parliament or a state legislature. And the funds are not used for day-to-day functioning of the Government of India. Hence, it cannot come under RTI. Now would it be good if the Government brought it under RTI? Yes, it would be good as it would quell all doubts regarding the fund. Can it be forced to bring it under RTI? No it cannot be. There is already precedent set by Prime Minister's National Relief Fund which functioned for 70 years as an unregistered entity with no audits being carried out by the CAG. At least the PM CARES fund is registered and goes through scrutiny by independent auditors from a panel suggested by the CAG. I would definitely vote for more transparency in the fund, but I wouldn't be shocked/surprised if this petition was struck down by the Courts.
---------------------------
> 8.1 Rafale Scam: The supreme court of India headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi gave clean chit to government without requiring any investigation. Government recommended the same judge for Rajya Sabha right after his retirement from the court. I cant say how its morally/ethically right for a judge to accept post-retirement benefit from government and how you can guarantee that the decisions from that judge were unbiased. [6] [7]
Yes you can question the ethics/morality of this. But this is not the first time such a thing has been done. CJIs/Judges taking up jobs in the Government (or even joining Political Parties) post-retirement is not new. And in my opinion it should be avoided to safeguard sanctity of institutions s/he was part of. But you cannot restrict a private citizen from exercising his fundamental rights. The Judge, after retirement, is a private citizen who has all the Rights to do as he pleases. Even if that means joining a Political Party.
However, this cannot be the basis for questioning a judgement based on facts. You are not just insinuating that the CJI acted with bias but also the other 2 Justices of the Supreme Court of India to not have exercised their independent judgement but were coerced by the Government of India. Don't forget that it wasn't Ranjan Gogoi alone but 2 other Justices who sat on the bench. It was decided by all 3 of them. It was unanimous verdict. Not a tie breaker where the CJI had to involve.
The Chief Justice of India or any Court of Law is not duty bound to conduct/direct conducting of investigations in an "alleged" scam without prima facie evidence. In fact, it is the duty of the petitioner to produce evidence "after" conducting investigations "prior" to submitting the petition. Is it the job of the Court to order investigative agencies to investigate random petitions, with no prima facie evidence, filed by petitioners? Can I make a wild accusation against the Government of India, move a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court and expect the Court to direct investigative agencies to investigate the Government just to satisfy my wishes? Then I can easily get 1000s of petitions filed with frivolous accusations and turn the Court and the Government into a circus show. You are expecting too much from the Court. The Court only orders investigations if it finds prima-facie evidence that there is some malpractice or illegality. It could not find any in this case.
Splitting into multiple comments as Hacker News is complaining that it is too long. I'll answer in the order of the most contentious issue you raised first. I will tackle the easy ones in the end.
Responding to 8.3:
> In response, the BJP government has amended the FCRA Act itself, and exempted from scrutiny all foreign funding to parties retrospectively from 1976
This is partly true and some of the wording is incorrect (and facts are misinterpreted). Firstly, the article is written by Pavan K Varma who is a Politician from an Opposition Party (and was recently removed from the party). Not saying that it somehow invalidates his points. Just that there can be vested interests in this as it is his opinion.
The fact is that the Congress Government had already implemented this in 2010 (in a previous amendment to the act). The current BJP Government shifted the year from 2010 further back to 1976. Even if the current BJP Government hadn't amended it, it wouldn't have any issues itself as the case concerned those Governments pre-2014 as per the Court order (and would have scrutinized the previous BJP Government of the 90s headed by different individuals, all of whom are not even in power today). The current BJP Government probably did it to not want to waste Government resources and time on checking every single donation received from 1976 onwards for all parties. This is just my guess. An explanation of this in the Supreme Court will definitely be provided by the Government. We can only wait for that explanation. But even then, I'll try to answer with my limited understanding of the matter.
Pavan K Varma seems to have misunderstood the amendment. The amendment declared what is considered a "foreign source". The technicality is that of having received "foreign contributions" and it being violation of FCRA act. That part I agree with. What I disagree with is that it can now no longer be "scrutinized". That is patently false. It can be scrutinized but cannot be called "illegal". Now is this ethical/correct thing to do? Absolutely not. I suspect all the Political parties arrived at an understanding to not allow skeletons of the past to tumble out in public domain and collectively agreed to allow this amendment to pass. It is not mere coincidence that the Government passed this Amendment without discussion amidst din in the Parliament orchestrated by the Opposition benches. It did so fully in collusion with Opposition parties as well (as they knew what was in the amendment and did not want to discuss it in public domain). This should not have been done this way. It would have been better if there was a discussion held, the political parties accepted their faults of the past and declared to the Nation that they'll rectify it going forward. But it wasn't done because the Opposition has its own skeletons to hide and hence is weak. The ruling dispensation has its own skeletons to hide but is not willing to go through them as it has power and can do whatever it likes. Which is why I stressed on having a strong opposition in my final point in my previous reply. This sort of constructive opposition is needed so that the Government is put in the dock and truth comes out. But we have such a weak opposition (primarily cos it has its own horrid past) that it targets the Government only on those points where it knows it is bound to lose.
Anyways, this is where the Supreme Court comes in and now that the matter is before the Court, the Court will definitely take a call.
Now is it possible for Government to retrospectively fix this illegality? Yes it is possible. It has all the legislative powers to do this. Can Court strike down this amendment? Not possible at all as Judiciary cannot overstretch to that extent. It can only interpret the Law not amend it. It can strike down a Law if it has specific proof of the Law being used for malicious intent. I don't see that happening. As the Government can easily explain it away by saying that the Law was enacted without keeping in mind "so and so [insert excuse here]" and hence needed to be Amended. In fact, this sort of stuff happens quite regularly even for regular citizens like you and me, where stringent penalties (both civil and criminal) are sometimes retrospectively amended as the Law was enacted wrongly to begin with (happened in GST amendments so many times I lost count). In my case specifically (since I am an exporter and this applies to all exporters), the Government, through RBI, decided to push the date for regularization of Bank Realization Certificates indefinitely (even though it is against FEMA regulations) to facilitate exports which were badly affected during COVID crisis. This was done through an order by RBI. Another one is forgiving/waiving of farmer loans. It is literally making something illegal legal. Another good example is retrospectively amending the imposition of a minimum alternative tax on foreign companies so that FDI inflows are not affected. Not all retrospective amendments are "bad" per se. Sometimes the Law is just too strict to be able to do anything meaningful with the Law requiring such retrospective amendments as such Laws were enacted at a time where such issues were not envisioned to occur. The only time retrospective amendment was negatively scrutinized was during the Vodafone case where Vodafone dragged Indian Government to the International Court of Arbitration, Hague with the Indian Government losing the case.
> While the common man has to declare every cent of their income, political parties are allowed to take huge sum of money without disclosing any details
This is wrong. Political parties are 100% exempt from paying taxes on donations. However, they are not given relief from disclosing details of the donations. In fact, the Political parties are duty bound to declare every single paisa they get. Any political party as per Section 13A is required to furnish return of income under Section 139(4B) if its income exceeds maximum amount not chargeable to tax (limit is computed before taking into consideration Section 13A exemption). Tax slab applicable for political parties is same as the one applicable to normal resident individual. It is the responsibility of CEO of the political party to file the return of income and also to sign and verify the same.
The bone of contention really is that Electoral Bonds introduces anonymous electronic donations. But that was the case before as well. Except it was in hard cash and not electronic cash. And hard cash = black money. Electoral Bonds on the other hand can only be purchased through check or demand draft with full KYC. So even though the payee is not necessary to be declared (as donors would like to protect their affiliation), the amount itself is not black money at the very least as it has to now only be paid through Cheque/Demand Draft and not Cash. Now the question is, should the payee details be declared? What if I donated to Congress today and some despot/tyrant takes over India tomorrow and gets a list of all donors who donated to Congress so as to kill them? Do I want my political affiliation to be declared publicly? This is a question of privacy of an individual/corporate entity and not of legality. What if me donating to BJP leads to some mob deciding to cancel me for my political affiliation? Isn't that what happened in US where US Companies were forced to shut down their donations to a certain political party by the mob because it did not align with mob interests else be cancelled for supporting such party? This directly affects my Freedom of Expression. If my voting preference must be kept private and anonymous, why should my Electoral donations be forced to be made public? Wouldn't that reveal my voting preference? How ethical is that?
> 6. Settling the Ayodhya Dispute: Is it done by Supreme Court or Government? Are you implying that Supreme Court is not independent and Government has a hand in Supreme Court decisions?
The Supreme Court only resolved the title issue. The Government on the other hand went out of the way to provide Muslim Party huge land to build a Mosque. Which was welcomed by Muslim Organizations except for Asaduddin Owaisi and few terror organizations like PFI/SDPI. There was no need for the Government to give land to Muslim Organizations to build a Mosque when the title dispute was between private parties. So yes, I applaud the Government for doing what it did.
> 5. Economy flourished: Agree with you that India's GDP and Ease of doing business is growing. But I don't know what are real changes that people started noticing on the ground. Highways are being built at record pace but they are charging Toll for most of the highways and those highways are built and operated by private companies.
Why shouldn't Toll be charged? I don't see any problem in this as the roads require continuous maintenance too. I don't see anything wrong in Public-Private Participation. Why shouldn't highways be built by private companies? The tender is issued by the Government of India. Paid for by the citizen's taxes. Which goes to the Private companies which employs millions of Indians. So the taxes I pay are indirectly coming back to me in various forms and infrastructure is being built simultaneously. I don't see what exactly is wrong here. Do you want the Government to build highways? I want minimum Governance. I don't want Government to involve in areas where private sector would do a much better job. I rather the Government outsource it to private sector which can do it quickly and efficiently than try to do everything and not succeed in anything. Most public sector companies directly controlled/managed by the Government is always loss making (with exception of ISRO). Look at what happened to Air India. I prefer if Government sells public sector companies to private enterprises and only focus on legislation, security and governance and not involve in building companies. The Government's role is not to build Companies.
> 4. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act: I think this is also done only to act against muslims of India. I absolutely do not support Triple Talaq and I like that they ended it but I don't think the intension is to protect women rights. Even current PM Modi has left his own wife without giving her a divorce. [4]
Modi leaving his own wife was not to get into relations with another woman. Nor was it to not provide alimony. Modi left his wife as he was forced into the engagement when he was a child (teenager) against his wishes (as it was tradition/custom during those days to do child marriage — a custom which he refused to follow and accept). He wanted to live the life of an ascetic so he ran away from home and reached the Himalayas to study under a Sage and become a monk. The Sage instead refused to teach and induct him into the Sanyasi order and told him to enter politics as that is where his destiny lies.
Modi and his wife have an understanding between them. If his wife was upset, she could have moved the court anytime. She hasn't. In fact she supports him by attending all his rallies in Gujarat.
I, for one, applaud Modi for not consummating his child marriage (he was engaged at tender age of 13 years). This is a very difficult thing to do. Especially in that sort of orthodox society and during those times (this is 1960s rural India). This is nothing but progressive thought.
Comparing this to instant triple-talaq is an insult IMHO. Triple-talaq is a disrespect to the woman involved. It is not done out of agreement but pure misuse of Islamic Sharia Law.
> 3. Citizenship Amendment Act: The way I see it, it's done only to act against muslims of India. They excluded only muslims from the list and included all other religions. There are conflicting statements from the ministers of Indian Government where Home Minister of India even seems to be indirectly threatening Muslims [2] [3]
No. This sort of Act was implemented by the United States too. When it gave fast-track citizenship to Jewish migrants fleeing Nazi Germany. They fled fearing persecution and rightly so. They were granted fast-track Citizenship rightly so. So why then should Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis fleeing Islamic Nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh fearing Religious Persecution not be granted fast-track Citizenship? Did the Government of India bar regular Citizenship to Muslims from neighboring countries? No it did not. Even now Muslims from neighboring countries are taking citizenship through normal route.
The articles you linked don't say anything about "threatening Muslims". [2] is about not linking NRC with CAA. NRC is different Bill altogether that hasn't even been drafted, let alone passed in the parliament. NRC is register of Citizens just like every Democratic Country keeps a register of its Citizens to differentiate between legal citizens and illegal aliens so as to provide Government subsidies and services only to legal citizens. The NRC on a State level is only implemented in Assam till now. Assam because of mass illegal migration that has been going on from Bangladesh to India. In neither of the links you provided has the Government threatened Muslims. Illegal aliens will be deported however. This is not a new issue but a long standing demand of majority of Indians from the past 4 decades (ever since the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971). You can check any opinion poll that was conducted regarding this issue and you will get at least 95% of the poll responding with a yes to introducing NRC. However, CAA has no connection to NRC whatsoever.
> 2. Implementing GST (Goods and Service Tax): Again I like that government made a strong decision and completed a long pending issue. However, I see the GST has also caused tax rate to be increased a lot on most of the items. There are many different tax rates and businesses has to file a lot more reports on monthly/yearly basis. For example VAT on software products used to be 5% but now GST on software products is 18%. Similarly now people have to pay GST on many essentials and food items. [1]
That is again wrong. The earlier VAT and Service Tax regime had a tax-on-tax issue which doesn't exist in GST. Only VAT had input tax credits which could be redeemed. Service Tax did not. The rest 10 other taxes also did not have input tax credits facility. This facility was only provided under GST. Thereby the net product value actually dropped. The compounding tax issue is something that can only be explained by an example.
In earlier regime, if I had a 10$ raw product (say I manufacture plastic pellets), the 12 taxes together would have been say 5%. That would be 10.5$ in total. Now if I purchase the raw material to create plastic bottles. The cost of manufacturing plastic bottles is 10$. Now the total cost would be 10+10.5 = 20.5$. Adding 5% tax on that, it would be: 21.0125$. Which is what the end consumer would pay. You would have paid a total tax of 1.0125$.
Now let us take case of GST. It would be 10$ + 18% = 11.8$. However, that extra 1.8$ would come back to me as Input Tax Credits. So effectively I have purchased only for 10$. Now I manufacture the product for 10$. The total cost of the product would then be: 10$ + (10$ + 18% * 10$) = 21.8$ (notice that there is no compounding of tax like in previous regime). In this case, my output tax liability would still be 1.8$ only. However, I pay 0$ in tax as I have 1.8$ as credits from my previous purchase which I can utilize to reduce my output tax liability. So the total cost of the product would then be: 21.8$ with me effectively paying 0 tax as a seller. This is a brilliant taxation scheme. In fact, you can not just club in raw material purchases but also any business expenses and bring your tax liability to negative and request a refund from the Tax department. It is called as "cascading tax effect" which GST removes completely. I think you haven't understood how important GST is and you aren't taking advantage of what GST provides if you are only taxing your software product but not claiming Input Tax Credits for your business expenses. Read more about "cascading tax effect" here [4]
> 1. Abrogation of Article 370: Honestly I like that government made a strong decision and completed a long pending issue but I don't see how it can improve peace in the region or how it can stop the attacks or how it impacts life of any common citizen.
That will happen in due course. Already seeing major improvements in Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh. Don't forget that the State is not just Kashmir. It also includes Jammu and Ladakh which actually form the major part of the State. However since Ladakh was bifurcated into its own Union Territory, it now gets special attention as it was the most neglected region before the Abrogation happened. And it will take time to bring everything back to normalcy. The spate of Terror attacks has definitely reduced a lot but now there is targeted killings of Kashmiri Hindus. That will also die down slowly as the Indian Army eliminates Terror groups and Terror sympathizers.
Being the vaccine manufacturing hub of the world since a few decades, if India did not manufacture its own vaccines it would be a shock. I don’t think that’s something unusual – if anything failure to scale up vaccine manufacturing that led to a deadly second wave is to be considered an abject failure.
Wow. What was the government action that they didn't get credit for? Do you have any reference to support your claim?
During peak time of corona, PM Modi was doing in-person election rallies during the day with thousands of crowds and giving a speech in evening to ask people to avoid gatherings.
This is a news article from April 19, 2021. [1]
>> Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces growing criticism across the political spectrum for holding large election rallies as the country’s health system reels from a deadly wave of Covid-19 cases, forcing citizens to beg for oxygen and hospital beds on Twitter.
>> Modi avoided wearing a mask at a campaign rally on Saturday, saying “I’ve never seen such huge crowds” at an event in West Bengal.
>> That night he said “India had defeated Covid last year and India can do it again” following a virtual meeting with health officials who spoke of critical shortages of drugs, vaccines and other supplies in a nation that has seen a string of new daily records in the past two weeks.
>> Modi was doing political rallies with large number of crowds when coron was at its peak in India.
In Feb Modi hosted Donald Trump with a gathering of 100,000+ Indians. [4]
>> AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - (Feb 2020) Donald Trump was cheered by more than 100,000 Indians at the opening of the world’s largest cricket stadium on Monday, promising “an incredible trade deal” and “the most feared military equipment on the planet” at his biggest rally abroad.
> Normally such content would be taken down after sufficient number of reports were received.
I can't be the only one who sees a problem with this. No content should ever be taken down automatically just because a bunch of random people report it.
1. Leave up child porn, revenge porn, hate speech, gore, fake and misleading stuff, etc for a long time, possibly forever, since a machine can no longer automatically take down mass-reported content
OR
2. Hire so many human moderators that facebook goes bankrupt
OR
3. Use untrained and unpaid/underpaid human moderators, such as strangers (the reddit model); go back to square 1 where volunteer moderators take down stuff they don't like with minimal oversight
OR
4. Have so few users that a small number of human moderators can actually review every report, i.e. the hacker news model. Or actually, no, hacker news "dead"s posts based on just number of reports without a human seeing it, I take that back. I guess this is the approach forums, most smaller blog comments, and other quite small websites use.
Do you have another solution that isn't one of those? Do any of those solutions sound good for facebook? Better than what they have now?
Here's a possible system: replace "random people" with "people with a solid track record of previous correct reports". When something gets reported, human moderators categorize it as either "correctly reported, and should be taken down", "incorrectly reported, but possibly a misunderstanding or a borderline case", or "a clearly bad-faith report against content that no reasonable person would actually believe breaks the rules". Keep track of how many reports from each user end up in each category.
If almost all of your reports are in the first category, then you're considered trusted, and if enough trusted users report a post, then it can be automatically removed before a human moderator sees it. If you haven't reported anything before, or too many of your reports are in the second category, then your report only helps to get the submission in front of a human moderator and doesn't directly contribute to it being removed. If more than a handful of your reports ever end up in the third category, you get banned for abusing the report system.
Is that not already the case? Do you think facebook doesn't already weight reports by the historical quality of the reporter?
That still seems like a violation of "No content should ever be taken down automatically just because a bunch of random people report it", as you wrote above.
Because you have no idea if those reports are at all genuine, or if the reporters met up elsewhere (online or off) in order to brigade and mass-report said content, with the intention of getting it taken down despite breaking no rules. Sometimes, the coordination isn't even necessary, it just needs to be the right target posting something online. (Eg more than a few people have gone and reported every post by a politician you like/dislike for hate speech and inciting violence.)
The article well explains this downside of user reports, so I don't see what this comment adds. It does not answer my question. The article also describes problems of not acting on them, so the conclusion requires more than just finding a negative.
I'm sorry you're unable to understand my answer. Let me try saying the same thing as the article another time, and maybe you'll be able to understand the answer?
Your question was Why should no content should ever be taken down automatically just because a bunch of random people report it.
It's because the random people reporting it can't be trusted to be acting honestly. Without a human in the loop, the automated system becomes a tool for cyberbullies, and harms the very users you intend to protect. The foregone conclusion, thus, is that a fully-automated system will do more harm for the user-base than good.
I understood the answer, it just didn't address the question properly. I think you failed to understand the problem with the answer.
> The foregone conclusion, thus, is that a fully-automated system will do more harm for the user-base than good.
This is not an answer, it is just lazy circular reasoning. "Automated take downs should not be used because they do more harm than good." Yes we have already established that is your assertion, I am asking for how you were able to conclude that.
I wasn't asking about possible downsides, of course there are pros and cons. I'm wondering how you came to conclude that taking down the content is the wrong strategy for facebook (or in general).
