Insanity: Theresa May Says Internet Companies Need To Remove 'Extremist' Content Within 2 Hours
from the a-recipe-for-censorship dept
It's fairly stunning just how much people believe that it's easy for companies to moderate content online. Take, for example, this random dude who assumes its perfectly reasonable for Facebook, Google and Twitter to "manually review all content" on their platforms (and since Google is a search engine, I imagine this means basically all public web content that can be found via its search engine). This is, unfortunately, a complete failure of basic comprehension about the scale of these platforms and how much content flows through them.
Tragically, it's not just random Rons on Twitter with this idea. Ron's tweet was in response to UK Prime Minister Theresa May saying that internet platforms must remove "extremist" content within two hours. This is after the UK's Home Office noted that they see links to "extremist content" remaining online for an average of 36 hours. Frankly, 36 hours seems incredibly low. That's pretty fast for platforms to be able to discover such content, make a thorough analysis of whether or not it truly is "extremist content" and figure out what to do about it. Various laws on takedowns usually have statements about a "reasonable" amount of time to respond -- and while there are rarely set numbers, the general rule of thumb seems to be approximately 24 hours after notice (which is pretty aggressive).
But for May to now be demanding two hours is crazy. It's a recipe for widespread censorship. Already we see lots of false takedowns from these platforms as they try to take down bad content -- we write about them all the time. And when it comes to "extremist" content, things can get particularly ridiculous. A few years back, we wrote about how YouTube took down an account that was documenting atrocities in Syria. And the same thing happened just a month ago, with YouTube deleting evidence of war crimes.
So, May calling for these platforms to take down extremist content in two hours confuses two important things. First, it shows a near total ignorance of the scale of content on these platforms. There is no way possible to actually monitor this stuff. Second, it shows a real ignorance about the whole concept of "extremist" content. There is no clear definition of it, and without a clear definitions wrong decisions will be made. Frequently. Especially if you're not giving the platforms any time to actually investigate. At best, you're going to end up with a system with weak AI flagging certain things, and then low-paid, poorly trained individuals in far off countries making quick decisions.
And since the "penalty" for leaving content up will be severe, the incentives will all push towards taking down the content and censorship. The only pushback against this is the slight embarrassment if someone makes a stink about mistargeted takedowns.
Of course, Theresa May doesn't care about that at all. She's been bleating on censoring the internet to stop terrorists for quite some time now -- and appears willing to use any excuse and make ridiculous demands along the way. It doesn't appear she has any interest in understanding the nature of the problem, as it's much more useful to her to be blaming others for terrorist attacks on her watch, than actually doing anything legitimate to stop them. Censoring the internet isn't a solution, but it allows her to cast blame on foreign companies.
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Filed Under: censorship, extremist content, theresa may, uk
Companies: facebook, google, twitter
Reader Comments
The First Word
“It's not. It's to silence competing narratives and restore the control over information that these bloodsuckers had before the internet came along.
It's not a conspiracy. They don't think of it in those terms. They just feel an instinctive hostility to anything that threatens their power - and an open internet is the biggest threat there is.
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Quick Take
Then there is the concept of what constitutes 'extremism'. Extreme could be left or right or up or down or any other label so long as one takes the time to go further than others. What definition will she put into law?
Further, is she employing the concept that what is law in Briton should be law everywhere?
And finally time. Some laws have the ability to be...well let's say intensive (aka very very long) and might take more than two hours to even read, let alone analyze. Is May purporting that all Internet companies hire super fast readers, or people that can watch video at 4 or more times regular speed, and still comprehend it...comprehensively... and have the full faith and credit to NOT take down something that may not be 'extreme'? Or is she going to rely on black box algorithms?
Maybe May should be asked about how she will clean up the messes she is making.
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Re: Quick Take
Her opinions are 'extreme' I also find them highly offensive. I think she should be banned from the internet.
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Beholden to your same standards...
Law Number 1: This law will find mismanagement of public funds (i.e. graft, kickbacks, improper expenditures, etc.) within the same requisite amount of time within the government. The government heads will then be held responsible any time any of these activities occur and are not caught within 2 hours.
Law Number 2: I also want NHS to be able to identify medical fraud within 2 hours, otherwise the employees will be subject to criminal penalties...
Law Number 3: I want lawmakers to have all of their facts checked and a retraction for their false statements to be done within 2 hours and failure to issue such retraction will result in criminal and civil penalties.
I mean... if asking Google to censor 'extremist' content in 2 hours is fine, these should be a piece of cake as well!
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Re: Beholden to your same standards...
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Moral of the Story
People are stupid and support stupid shit that sounds good to them because they are too Dunning-Kruger to listen to facts or reason?
Yep... sounds just like TD.
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Re: Moral of the Story
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poor babies
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I honestly think she just wants to be seen to be doing something, she is grandstanding to the people that unfortunatly don't understand how tech really works.
Like when a company says "We have greater AI" or "Better prediction" what they really mean is "We've added a tonne of If statements and catch clauses"
I see this as nothing more than a power grab from someone who is clinging on to the last bit's of power she has and grandstanding.
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Look at the upside
Until they all go broke...
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Re: Look at the upside
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Rather than filtering the Internet
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Re: Rather than filtering the Internet
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This is good news
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Re: This is good news
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Re: This is good news
May in UK, Trump in US, Turnbull in Australia. None of them represent their citizens on any substantial policy issues. They represent the power of money to buy policy and the power of PR to manipulate and game electoral systems.
Votes don't matter. The support structures under these corrupt governments matter. Are YOU part of the support structure? (hint: we almost all are to some extent).
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Demanding the overthrow of the democratically elected US government is just one example of his extremist content.
If Theresa May had her way a couple years ago, Trump would have been gone from social media. In turn, he likely wouldn't be President today.
Hmm. Not the point I was going to make.
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Politicians approach to programming
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Starting with her (crazy, extremist rantings)
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Re: Starting with her (crazy, extremist rantings)
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We had this conversation recently.
We were discussing regarding SESTA the problem that any website that has enough user content to be profitible would have too much user content to feasibly afford human moderation for all cases.
But also that wouldn't help. Humans would have to be held by guidelines too strict to apply quickly, or so lax that the biases of individual moderators would decide what is censored or not. Here in the states Kill the gays! will fly where Kill the Jews! gets blocked.
But considering the character of UK government in the last decade, their next step would be to redefine extremist content to include all dissent.
Because we've already seen they really want to go full-Orwell as soon as there's an opportunity to do so. They've been chomping at the bit for it since the Snowden revelations.
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May has no creativity when it comes to solving problems.
The ministry will also be responsible for sending identification of the uploader to the "Ministry of Love" who will then monitor the extremist uploader possibly sending the "Thought Police" to charge said uploader with thoughtcrimes.
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I propose...
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They could do it, but they won't
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Re: They could do it, but they won't
Chances are it was reported by another user, not through any automated process. Crowd-sourcing is the only potentially effective means filtering all that content in any appreciable amount of time. The more humans, with all their brain power, view new content the more likely at least one of them will raise an issue if that content is objectionable. Typically that results in some other human reviewing the complaint and making a decision. Seeing this done in an hour on a platform like Facebook is going to be the exception rather than the rule. You can expect even this process to take much longer on average.
Now consider what it would take to have automated systems detect something like an exposed nipple and take the content down as "objectionable". If that's what happened in the Facebook case it probably would have happened in under a minute, not in an hour. If it took an hour to find an objectionable image their systems would lag hopelessly behind in their workload in mere milliseconds. Still, have you any idea what it takes to achieve that? What it costs? Do you think that's a reasonable barrier to entry for new, young internet companies? Or do you see taking voice away from the general public (shutting down Facebook, no more blogs, no more comments sections like this one, etc) to be a worthy tradeoff for not having to see a nipple?
> I think they can probably comply with May's request.
You're wrong. Categorically.
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http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-to-outline-lumos-its-machine-learning-platform-for-images /
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If you create an account and post an image that gets flagged the same day, Facebook probably lets the bot take it down. If CNN posted the same image, it probably won't get taken down.
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Both are about identifying patterns that make up features then looking for similar features in new data. It's how you can ask Google Photos to show you pictures of pugs and it can discriminate between a pug and a boston terrier. It's all about the characteristics.
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"Why don't these platforms have a meeting to decide which week they all shut off access to the UK? How many days will it take before a large part of the population are at Theresa May's door step looking for a resignation?"
The only bad part is that she will probably consider this "extremist".
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Re: Let It Be
I hope they'll all be singing
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Good luck
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The more likely outcome is that all the small to mid-sized players will be excluded from the UK market. This will create several monopolies in that market. Great for the big players, terrible for everyone else.
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HOW MANY ON THAT LIST?
Politicians Lying..
Anti banking comments..
Anti Rich comments..
Random threats by you and your EX..
There is NO REAL definition of EXTREMEST.. And none for Over reaching comments or ACTIONS..
No one Expects the Spanish inquisition..
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My solution would be to simply email bomb every MP...
An automated extremism-removal system would've been activated by the word 'bomb' in your comment. This reply too, now that I think about it. Y'know, it'd be pretty hard to discuss what's filtered as extremism in a world that filters 'extremism'. Oppressive governments are kinda funny, sometimes; that is, when they're not crushing your spirit and any lingering shreds of hope you might have left for the world.
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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It's not. It's to silence competing narratives and restore the control over information that these bloodsuckers had before the internet came along.
It's not a conspiracy. They don't think of it in those terms. They just feel an instinctive hostility to anything that threatens their power - and an open internet is the biggest threat there is.
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Tragically, it's not just random Rons on Twitter with this idea.
A Random Ron - Anyone who makes a comment related to the internet or any area of IT in which his/her estimate of scale is off by so many orders of magnitude that it makes you want to laugh your way to a brain aneurysm.
What, The Streisand Effect wasn't enough for you?
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It may not grow in popularity like The Streisand Effect, but as a software developer, I needed a name for those people who have so little clue that they talk about us whipping up some really complex system in a matter of minutes or days because they saw it on NCIS or some such.
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"A few years back, we wrote about how YouTube took down an account that was documenting atrocities in Syria. And the same thing happened just a month ago, with YouTube deleting evidence of war crimes."
Nice try, Mike, at attempting to project the illusion that inappropriate take-downs happen infrequently at the Google owned product known as "YouTube". In reality, inappropriate take-downs happen hundreds of time a day, if not more often, because very seldom, if ever do they inspect the content after having been asked to take it down and taking it down, and because most take-down requests are motivated simply by content rubbing someone's sensibilities the wrong way and not for any valid real world reason, most of them can therefore be categorized as INAPPROPRIATE.
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I think that might have been the point Mike was trying to make, it's just he focused on the grey area's where these videos/channels were flagged WITH human intervention, how bad do you think it would be without human intervention.
I am sure if you check through TD enough you will find plenty of articles that mention the many many takedowns on the likes of YouTube that are plainly baseless.
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I don't think she is that stupid
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Funny that.....
"sorry I cannot teach someone to walk on water if they are not willing to be crucified".
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