Why Facebook's "It's too hard" excuse for Vietnam war photo takedown is bullshit

[zathras]

@semiotix

Except they’re totally inseparable. Technologies are human creations that encode, at the level of their DNA, human politics and human values and human assumptions, and they’re deployed amongst humans to the benefit of some humans and the detriment of others.

Actually, I don’t think we’re smart enough to encode our politics or our values at the level of the DNA of modern technology. At least not in a way that they will ever surface again at the higher levels.

Where politics and values are encoded in technology, that happens at a very superficial level - sure, Facebook is tuned to a certain way of making money using advertisements by providing a platform for social interaction that s only useful for very specific kinds of social interaction.

Facebook’s code used to be written in the programming language PHP… and yes, programming languages can tell you a lot about the mode of thinking employed by their creators and their users. Not so much about their politics. But does any of PHP’s thinking show in Facebook’s product? I highly doubt it. Did Facebook’s politics or character as a platform change when they moved away from PHP in favor of their own variant of it?

So, techhnology encodes human values and politics. But the politics encoded “at the level of DNA” are completely harmless and irrelevant; and the stuff at the surface is easy to change.

@semiotix

Ditto ideas promulgated in science journals–and here I’m glaring in your direction, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and other people who should know better than to pretend that science is some sort of holy, apolitical process of strip-mining TRVTH from the universe.

The apolitical process is what they aspire to, I don’t remember any of them claiming that there is never any humanity involved. For well-researched questions, however, we can be quite sure that we can shake out a lot of the human biases the individual researchers held. This can be quite hard in the social sciences, but I challenge you to find an instance of “human politics” or “values” in the accepted results of physics, mathematics, or theoretical computer science. Which are quite relevant for the DNA of modern technology.
And I sincerely hope you don’t subscribe to the idea that “E=mc^2” is a “sexed equation” because “it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us”.

[semiotix]

@zathras

And I sincerely hope you don’t subscribe to the idea that “E=mc^2” is a “sexed equation” because “it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us”.

No. But this is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about all the same. You’re interpreting “science is a human activity and therefore political” to mean “science is a political activity and therefore flawed.” And you’re being pretty scathingly sarcastic about it, because–at least if you’re like a lot of people who have that response–you relate the rightness of your overall belief system (including about purely political stuff) on its relationship to what you consider the purely objective and apolitical realm of science.

And I can’t blame you. I do it too, when I think I can make the case that Science Fact X is relevant to Debate Y. It’s precisely what the early Western church did when it swallowed up Platonic doctrine as the intellectual underpinning of its theology (and then again later when it chucked Plato overboard for Aristotle). And it works! As a political move. Which is fine. That is how we roll, as social animals. If it helps you understand what I mean by “politics,” when you say

yes, programming languages can tell you a lot about the mode of thinking employed by their creators and their users. Not so much about their politics

then I’m really not sure what distinction you’re making. Because you’re absolutely right–programming languages are a FANTASTIC way of using purely mathematical operations–really nothing but ANDs and XORs and such, when you get right down to it–to constrain human thought and behavior. (And that’s not a bad thing. Otherwise you have nothing to code!) The programmer is influenced by which operations are easier or quicker to do in any given language; the user is influenced by the differences that result, and the whole thing takes place in ways that can be expressed in data structures that owe more to transistors than how humans organize information. And this has implications for the humans that use the code the minute you ask them to input their name, just to take one canonical example.

None of this is bad! Or inherently good. But absolutely, tools encode politics. My new super-awesome plow can bust the sod like a mofo. And yes, in forty or fifty years all these straight lines drawn across the prairie will lead to massive erosion and water loss, and possibly some apocalyptic dust storms. But it’s 1880 and I need to grow wheat in Kansas today, and my choice of tool reflects my priorities.

I have no problem saying that pi and relativity and hadrons and species and any other scientific term of art existed before there were humans to conceive of them, and that how we process the physical universe via our brains and words has no real influence on how it behaves. I just can’t follow you around to the idea that how we humans understand these particular things is somehow divorced from all other human thoughts and considerations.

I know this is kind of a cheesy thing to do in an internet disagreement, but in all earnestness let me recommend a book that will argue this better than I can. Even just reading the very long title will probably give you a sense of where I’m coming from: Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority by Steven Shapin. It’s accessible and it’s the best presentation I know of of the case I’m trying to make here, if you’re interested.

[SirCracked]

Tasks

Frankly, This. If you want a solution that simply removes content that’s complained about, or, that meets some quantifiable criteria, that’s “Picture from in a national Park”. If you want to be able to differentiate between Newsworthy and not, that’s much more “Photo of a Bird”. Want to delve into “Is it Art or not”, or, “Is it a sexualized nipple or not”, that’s the Title Text. And likely more easily solved in a non-technical context.

[tachin1]

@semiotix

Ditto ideas promulgated in science journals–and here I’m glaring in your direction, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and other people who should know better than to pretend that science is some sort of holy, apolitical process of strip-mining TRVTH from the universe.

I agreed with you up to this point.

@zathras

Actually, I don’t think we’re smart enough to encode our politics or our values at the level of the DNA of modern technology.

I agree, we aren’t smart enough, but we are dumb enough.
Certainly not at the language level, but at the algorithm a least.

[Verax]

@zathras

Why the hell should we?

Um, perhaps we “the hell” should because it’s a rather good solution to the problem at hand. I was looking for a more casual conversation on the matter, though.

@zathras

Why do unnecessary parts of historical pics need to be censored?

Straw Man. It is nudity that was to be censored (as it usually is on the platform), unless the visual of the sex organs was somehow necessary. If you meant to debate the assumption that sex organs should be censored in the public domain, just say so - because I’m not debating that, you can challenge that premise elsewhere. If you do grant that sex organs should (generally) not be displayed in the public domain, then I don’t know what you’re asking about.

@zathras

Why should European public discourse

Another Straw Man. I’m not concerned with European public discourse, but Facebook, which is global public discourse.

@zathras

submit to American standards

I’ll be the first to admit my American perspective, but again, we are talking about a global space. Many standards systems are taken into account - from extremely liberal (which, say, would allow everything) to extremely conservative (which, say, would censor the most), but the goal is to balance freedom of speech with the community standards. In this case, the “historical significance” exceptionality of the photo is the free speech half, but the free speech “message” does not require the specific visuals of the sex organs - so they can be censored without losing the context of nudity (blurring) and both goals are met.
(Note that this would therefore allow nudity that is itself free speech. That’s not the case here.)

@zathras

of prudishness

You’re demonstrating just how relative that term is. Considering the staggering potion of the world population that is Muslim, or just conservative in general, the obscuring of nothing but the sex organs is far from a “prudish” standard on a global scale. Perhaps your society is as liberal as you describe, but mine is a close second and yet your usage of “prudish” still sounds foreign. Notice, I’m not discussing which standards are right or wrong. If you (for example!) live in a nudist colony, it makes sense that you find the censorship of sex organs “prudish”. Just know that using it that way won’t get you very far with people who don’t.

@zathras

absolutely essential?

I said “necessary”. As in, necessary for the message to get across. Your hyperboles are unjustified.

@zathras

That image was in my grade 8 history textbook

Okay, but guess what - that’s surprising. That would not have appeared in my textbooks at any grade. Still, no one is suggesting your history class start censoring or my history class start including nudity; but your history class is hardly representative of the rest of the world.

@zathras

why should we start censoring it now?

The same euro-centrism appears. If the whole world was just Europe, then this question would make sense. But it doesn’t, because “we” [Facebook?] never stopped “censoring” it.
No one is arguing that your European journalism should change it’s standards. The photo can go as is in your country, whatever. But once it gets reshared into the public sphere, it could be subject to a standard somewhat stricter than the one you described. The two can peacefully coexist.

[Schmorgluck]

Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it too. It can’t pretend to be just a technical provider while preemptively enforcing an editorial policy.

Because of the latter, it ought to be responsible for everything that it publishes.

[nimelennar]

@Schmorgluck

Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it too. It can’t pretend to be just a technical provider while preemptively enforcing an editorial policy.

Because of the latter, it ought to be responsible for everything that it publishes.

47 U.S.C. § 230(c) (Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act):

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

230(c)(2)(A) makes it clear that even if they moderate some of the stuff on their website, that doesn’t mean that they’re now “the publisher or speaker” of the other stuff that they didn’t moderate.

[zathras]

@semiotix

And you’re being pretty scathingly sarcastic about it, because–at least if you’re like a lot of people who have that response–you relate the rightness of your overall belief system (including about purely political stuff) on its relationship to what you consider the purely objective and apolitical realm of science.

Not quite. So I’m a pretty strong believer in an objective material reality, and in at least attempting to rationally understand the world. I am not at all adverse to the idea that human understanding is always flawed; but I react allergically (and with mild sarcasm) to ideas that imply that no objectivity can be achieved, or worse yet, that nothing objective exists. While I have to admit that I still don’t know how far along that scale you’re willing to go, your initial formulation of your claim was enough to trigger my sarcasm ;-).

Barring extreme relativism that denies an objective reality, what I object to is the implication that politics is “encoded” in science. Politics influences the process of science, and can make a process that is already flawed because of human fallibility even more flawed. But the end result will usually just be a theory that is a little more wrong than we’d like it to be, or even completely wrong, but not “political”. You can’t encode politics, theology, feminism, sexism or anything like that in quantum mechanics.

So, when I hear “science is a human activity and therefore political”, I consider it more likely that someone is trying to discredit scientific results because they do not fit the right political agenda, than that the scientific results have already been influenced by someone else’s political agenda. Not that I’m accusing you personally of doing that.

@semiotix

And this has implications for the humans that use the code the minute you ask them to input their name, just to take one canonical example.

So, what about names?
I’d say dealing with human names is not “part of the DNA”, it’s rather a front-end issue. So yes, our tools encode “politics”, or culture. But they do so rather directly, in the same way a government form encodes our cultural ideas of what a name it, or how the laws of various countries just define what a name is.
Our tools do not so much encode this politics because it is somehow injected into them at a basic level, “as part of their DNA”, they encode the cultural realities at their surface because that’s what they’re made to do.
I would hesitate very much to draw epistemological conclusions from that.

[zathras]

@Verax

Um, perhaps we “the hell” should because it’s a rather good solution to the problem at hand. I was looking for a more casual conversation on the matter, though.

Sorry about that. My euro-centrism shows here, in that I didn’t expect casual use of mild profanity to impede casual conversation. Consider the “hell” retroactively removed.

Let me start by answering the charge of Euro-centrism: Guilty as charged.
This is a European issue. An issue of whether Europe is happy with what Facebook provides us, and whether it is acceptable to enter into a dependency on something like that. Facebook is censoring European public discourse here - the image was published alongside Norwegian-language text, after all. The non-Norwegian-speaking public for those articles should be quite negligible.

@Verax

you meant to debate the assumption that sex organs should be censored in the public domain, just say so

I hereby say so.

@Verax

we are talking about a global space.

A global space, run by an American company, in which most interactions happen locally. I doubt many people who do not read Norwegian were subscribed to Norwegian author Tom Egeland’s facebook page, or that of Aftenposten or of the Norwegian prime minister.

The problem is, people in Europe have enthusiastically started using a foreign product, and are now figuring out that the makers of that product are imposing foreign standards of censorship on us.
So, step one: we complain. We play the outraged customer, hoping that the foreign company will see the commercial wisdom in bowing to our will.
Should that fail, step two is to either switch to a different product or to give in. Guess which one is more likely ;-).

If you fail to understand why Europeans would view this issue based on European view of nudity: Assume a major US internet provider gets bought by a Chinese company, who then applies Chinese-style censorship to its American customers. Having stricter limits on political speech is perfectly in line with the fact that the Internet is a global space, and America has relatively few limits on political speech compared to many other countries. No one would be arguing that American journalism should change its standards; only when American newspaper articles get re-shared into a global public sphere, a stricter standard will be applied.

@Verax

(Note that this would therefore allow nudity that is itself free speech. That’s not the case here.)

Side note: Most countries, from the USA to the People’s Republic of China, guarantee Free Speech in their respective constitutions. And then they define different acts of communication and publication to be “speech” and others to be “not speech”. In the end, everything that is censored was never free speech to begin with. Yay!

[anon55609254]

@thirdworldtaxi

I’m not so sure it can be. How can a machine tell the extremely subtle difference between a pornographic photo of a nude child and a picture of a nude aboriginal child?

As mentioned below: have a database of historical photos to whitelist. Then add to it by people commenting to Facebook and reviewed by same.

[popobawa4u]

@Verax

It is nudity that was to be censored (as it usually is on the platform), unless the visual of the sex organs was somehow necessary. If you meant to debate the assumption that sex organs should be censored in the public domain, just say so - because I’m not debating that, you can challenge that premise elsewhere. If you do grant that sex organs should (generally) not be displayed in the public domain, then I don’t know what you’re asking about.

The sex organs depicted in a photograph are inert. Photos of penises and vaginas do not combine to create photos of babies. People’s restrictive morality about sex is irrelevant here because people do not engage in sexual activity with photographs.

[L_Mariachi]

But, but… anthropology is one of those soft sciences! There’s no way it’s harder than real science.

[JonS]

@popobawa4u

people do not engage in sexual activity with photographs.

uh … yes they do. Quite a lot, as it happens.

[popobawa4u]

But the photographs don’t actually participate, so somebody wanking it to a photo is not really having sex with it any more than they can be said to have sex with the room they are in, or the furniture they are on.

[JonS]

The photo isn’t completely incidental though, unlike the room or the furniture.

You’re also shifting the goal posts. You said “people do not engage in sexual activity with photos”. People DO engage in sexual activity with photos, even if the photos don’t engage back … but that’s what you’re now arguing.

[popobawa4u]

No, I am not “arguing” anything differently, merely clarifying my earlier remark. Sure, one is having sex with a photo in the sense of physical proximity, but not in the sense of participation. Such a person would still be engaged in masturbation, while the photo isn’t having sex with anybody. So yes, if the only participant is alone, everything else around them is incidental. The subject and object of desire are still limited to the one person who is present and participating, regardless of any illusions to the contrary.

We probably just disagree on the issue. I am interested in what you think happens, but it does not occur to me that either of us benefit from persuading the other.

[L_Mariachi]

@popobawa4u

somebody wanking it to a photo is not really having sex with it any more than they can be said to have sex with the room they are in, or the furniture they are on.

Q.E.D.

[anon35121463]

@popobawa4u

Sure, one is having sex with a photo in the sense of physical proximity, but not in the sense of participation.

Would you say someone was having sex with a RealDoll? Not laying any linguistic traps here, just wondering where, other than the extra dimension, the difference lies between that and a photo.

We can spin this off into another thread if you think it’s getting way OT.

[popobawa4u]

@M_M

We can spin this off into another thread if you think it’s getting way OT.

Well, the topic is about representation of people in the media, respecting agency, and evidently concerns about people’s sexuality. So I think that it is still topical, but I don’t mind if others rather spin it off. I didn’t intend to discuss it at much length anyway. The short version of my opinion is that people seem to worry more about idealized representations than they do real people. Their imaginations run away with them, but their imagination of a person in a photo is not a homunculus, it is only their own projection. [quote=“M_M, post:79, topic:85103”]
Would you say someone was having sex with a RealDoll? Not laying any linguistic traps here, just wondering where, other than the extra dimension, the difference lies between that and a photo.
[/quote]

I would say that the RealDoll is inert, and functions as a canvas for their own ideas. The resemblance to the human form makes it no more human than a table, car, or boulder. If the doll was based upon a human model, then representation does become a factor, if one is aware of this. Where I think it gets difficult is when the other participant is not inert, but not alive either. Is a computer, or some wetware construct active enough to be a sort of participant? And is it engaged with as such, or continued to be used for one’s own internal idealizations? I don’t know / it all depends…

But I think that the psychological problems of reflexively imagining a photograph or toy existing as distinct participants or objects of desire are just that - psychological problems. Probably cured by some healthy introspection. Not that there’s anything wrong with fantasy if people entertain it deliberately, but not unlike with movies I suspect that for many, losing themselves in the illusion is the goal.

[anon35121463]

@popobawa4u

I didn’t intend to discuss it at much length anyway.

The short version did nicely, thanks. You’ve got an interesting take on people and objects, so I thought it would be worth asking.

@popobawa4u

And is it engaged with as such, or continued to be used for one’s own internal idealizations? I don’t know / it all depends…

Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. I see it that a photo can be more than just a picture, depending on how much you attach/project onto it. A 3D model makes it easier to project ideas upon, but it’s not impossible to do that with either a 2D moving image or a static one. There’s various niches that encourage projection and the idea of the person depicted in the vid/photo actually being a participant, without being there, if you get me. PoV vids, dating sims, etc. But the further removed you get, the more difficult it is to project ideals upon it, or something. [quote=“popobawa4u, post:80, topic:85103”]
losing themselves in the illusion is the goal.
[/quote]

Yep. Anyway, thanks for the answer. Always fascinating.