zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — wondering, roughly: is the world digital or analog? if that even means anything ]
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This post — Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children — together with the tweet about it below —

Facebook moderation against hate speech allows the first four examples, but not the fifth. (source: https://t.co/zWwjusW3dM) pic.twitter.com/9ew4C2pxXG

— Alex Goldman (@AGoldmund) June 28, 2017

— triggered Zeynep Tufekci‘s latest. Here she goes:

What happens when your product is about human society but you run it from so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules with too small a workforce. https://t.co/83yeJ309f4

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

I understand the complexities here—but that's the point. A 2 billion user base cannot be reduced to powerpoints for rushed, tiny workforce.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

Code scales easily, but dealing with complexities and messiness of human societies does not. Facebook's business is almost all the latter.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

Treating human societies like simple, abstract toy models—a great tool for computer science—is how you end up here. https://t.co/fVxVd6UwWe

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

And here’s the tweet she’s quoting in that last one:

This is a real slide from a Facebook training document for its censors. The correct answer is #3: White men. https://t.co/vpvSVMIEsC pic.twitter.com/rWkuu0BwO0

— ? kade ? (@onekade) June 28, 2017

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A significant ouroboros from that ProPublica article, BTW:

Facebook also added an exception to its ban against advocating for anyone to be sent to a concentration camp. “Nazis should be sent to a concentration camp,” is allowed, the documents state, because Nazis themselves are a hate group.

That should give us pause for thought, I think.

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There’s something very important going on here in this discussion as a whole and Tufecki’s tweets in particular: quite aside from the powerful issue of Facebook and its rules for moderators, there’s a more general question about quality and quantity — or should I say qualitative and quantitative approaches?

I’m wondering how well this distinction between (depending which tweet you quote) “human societies” and “simple, abstract toy models” — or “human society” and “so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules” or “code” and the “complexities and messiness of human societies” or a “2 billion user base” and “powerpoints” — maps to the distinction between digital and analog..

Any thoughts?

[ by Charles Cameron — nothing terribly new here, just catching up with the last week or so ]
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One quick pointer.. The most significant article I’ve seen this week is Zeynep Tufekci’s Does a Protest’s Size Matter? — which contains the line:

A large protest today is less like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an initial spark.

I think Zeynep’s right on this one — which, FWIW, makes double images like these a whole lot less relevant:

President Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s, CBS

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Catching up on other examples of “form” in recent news..

I got this one from Zen, who’d posted it on FB.

This really is a pretty definitive illustration of the stress a president incurs in the world’s most terrifying, not to mention deeply contested, job.

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This one goes without saying.

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And here’s my ouroboros of the week:

As the Chinese proverb goaes:

A man needs face like a tree needs bark.

Would we do well to understand President Trump in terms of an honor-shame dynamic?

[ by Charles Cameron — when two data points contradict a trend, what’s up? ]
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Gotta love the graphic of “Twitter being written into the ancient Persian Cyrus Cylinder in an animation film for Farsi Twitter, highlighting the platforms importance for communications in Iran” (upper panel, below):

— and there’s something faintly Escherian about the screengrab of Turkish President Erdogen in, what, a hall of screens? (lower panel, above).

I’ve said before that single data-points mean little, but two of them — outliers from a general trend — may consitute an eddy in the stream, a knot in the wood, a disturbance in the force worth noting, worth looking into.

Thus far, our interest in social media in the Middle East has largely focused on terrorist uses [eg Berger 1, 2] and counter-terrorism & CVE measures [eg Aistrope], with a sidelong glance at authorities blocking the net {eg Kerr]..

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Here’s the video:

Sources:

Zeynep Tufekci / NYT, How the Internet Saved Turkey’s Internet-Hating President

Global Voices, Iranian Hardliners Want to Stop Blocking Twitter — to Defeat Saudi Propaganda

Food for thought:

Note that knots in wood are generally indicative of a third-dimensional force, oblique to the wood’s surface plane. In considering any situation analogous to a knt in wood or eddy in a river, it’s worth asking: is there an oblique force at work disturbing the current, and if so, what is it, why here, and what does it portend?