[AusNOG] More legislative interventions
Mark Newton
newton at atdot.dotat.org
Wed Apr 10 12:23:04 EST 2019
“Tech companies” already employ human screening.
That’s why the Christchurch response that the politicians are all panicking about worked so well.
For all their faults, I think Facebook’s response to the livestreaming was superb. According to press accounts a couple of weeks ago, they took it down in about forty minutes, then successfully prevented tens of thousands of re-uploads of copies of it, and took down hundreds of thousands of others. Only a few thousand viewers out of their multi-billion worldwide userbase saw the original livestream.
They managed this in a fog of uncertainty where virtually nobody knew what was going on: The police in Christchurch took at least half an hour to respond, none of the news agencies were supplying reliable accounts of what was going on. There was very little clarity for the first hour.
I think Facebook did what any realistic reasonable person would have expected them to do. And they’re getting kicked in the face by all-comers for not doing it well enough. I know there’s been escalating negativity about them since Cambridge Analytica, and they’re nobody’s favorite company right now (or forever), but credit where credit is due, they did a phenomenal job here.
(and they’re still doing a phenomenal job: I’ve not seen a single instance of the video appearing in my feed; I’m almost certain that zero of the readers of this message have too, unless they’ve gone out of their way to go looking for it. Have you stopped and thought about how unusual that is?)
How did they do it? Well, MPs and other people with brainworms and no idea what they’re talking about wax lyrical about fingerprinting and AI, but the way they actually did it is with a veritable army of contractors in the US, Philippines and India who are employed to trawl through Facebook in response to user complaints. They have literally tens of thousands of these people to perform an absolutely soul-crushing and emotionally harrowing job. Because that’s the only way to do it.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona <https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona>
They’ve chosen option (b) from Scott’s list below.
There’s no mystery or secret technology sauce, it’s enabled by billions of dollars worth of contractor payments.
My take is that no Australian companies can afford the financial commitment that Facebook has made, and if our government is going to set an expectation that that’s what platforms are expected to do, then that’ll mean that no Australian company will ever be able to afford to legally operate as a platform, and Facebook’s sociopathic dominance will be further protected.
- mark
> On Apr 10, 2019, at 11:54 AM, Scott Wilson <siridar at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I feel like legislation will compel tech companies to implement human screening in some capacity, and there will be huge downsides to that - I mean, which is more likely:
>
> a) screening team members are offered abundant mental health support resources, given follow-through on reporting (that video you flagged last year resulted in a conviction and a jail sentence, congratulations!) and are limited to short periods...
>
> or:
>
> b) screening team members are a minimum wage disposable/contractor/gig economy workforce, desperate for any income, performance tracked to the extreme (we require 55 minutes of video content viewed per hour) and discarded when they inevitably burn out?
>
> On Wed, 10 Apr 2019 at 11:45, Nick Stallman <nick at agentpoint.com <mailto:nick at agentpoint.com>> wrote:
> I didn't know Tineye could tell if an image was violent or not.
>
> The existing systems work for copyright purposes, finding a similar match.
> This works to some extent currently, and can handle recompression,
> scaling, etc...
> It falls apart when an adversary wants to get around it however.
>
> But for the case that this legislation is targeting, i.e. taking down
> violent video, fingerprinting is useless.
> It's brand new content - completely impossible to detect in advance.
> You can only remove the content after it's been distributed for quite
> some time, not pre-emptively which is what the politicians want.
>
> On 10/4/19 11:16 am, Paul Wilkins wrote:
> > https://tineye.com/search/f274c3b49edcca9a6d83994a43629445a5ea5a23/ <https://tineye.com/search/f274c3b49edcca9a6d83994a43629445a5ea5a23/>
> >
> > On Wed, 10 Apr 2019 at 11:12, Matt Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org <mailto:mpalmer at hezmatt.org>
> > <mailto:mpalmer at hezmatt.org <mailto:mpalmer at hezmatt.org>>> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 10:56:12AM +1000, Paul Wilkins wrote:
> > > Now I would say that for instance, if the eSecurity Director
> > posts the CRC
> > > of a file as being "abhorrent violent" content, and your company
> > doesn't
> > > expeditiously take down that material, expect problems down the
> > pike. I
> > > doubt a CRC check alone is sufficient.
> >
> > Given that a CRC changes if you modify any bit of the file, and
> > common CRC
> > implementations have a space of either 16 or 32 bits (65,536 and
> > ~4 billion
> > possible values, respectively), "insufficient" doesn't even begin to
> > describe such a scheme.
> >
> > > I'd say a fingerprinting system to
> > > match altered copies of the subject file should be implemented.
> >
> > Once again with this magical "figerprinting" scheme. Nothing like
> > what
> > you're describing actually exists. Further, there's no point in each
> > company coming up with their own scheme for calculating this magical
> > fingerprint, because if the eSecurity Director wants to say "take down
> > everything like this fingerprint" they have to use the *same*
> > scheme to come
> > up with the same fingerprint.
> >
> > > It doesn't have to work in all cases.
> >
> > It won't work in *any* case.
> >
> > > I am not a lawyer. This is not expert advice.
> >
> > Yes, I think that is quite evident.
> >
> > - Matt
> >
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