Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy
Here we are, deep down in the dystopia of Automatic Content Classification by robots.<p>Far less important of an example, but I was just put in &quot;Facebook jail&quot; for 24 hours for posting a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit with no shirt. Y&#x27;know, as one does at the beach. I can only assume it&#x27;s because my son has long hair and the Convolutional Neural Network or whatever decided he was a girl and therefore I&#x27;m a pervert.<p>Sadly it was the &quot;appeal&quot; I submitted that got me blocked. Presumably by a &quot;human&quot;, but who knows.<p>Before I appealed they were simply going to not show the picture. Appealing got me in &quot;trouble.&quot;  That might be even <i>worse</i> than the original misclassification. On top of that, if I was <i>actually</i> a &quot;community standards&quot; violator who posted potential child exploitation imagery, I&#x27;m not sure how a 24-hour ban on activity on Facebook is of any use, either? Except I&#x27;m terrified to imagine a world where Meta might have called police on me based on the output of a neural network image classification.<p>Others have said but I&#x27;ll say it again: This kind of business doesn&#x27;t scale ethically. You can&#x27;t have billions of people on a bulletin board. It doesn&#x27;t work. Moderation is essential to modern communication. But you can&#x27;t do moderation automatically or at scale and in a universal way.<p>Very dark patterns emerge the moment you go FAANG scale and toss algorithms tuning for advertising and &quot;engagement&quot; into the mix, and attempt to do so with the help of computers.<p>&quot;Sad&quot; as it is, we will need to &quot;retreat&quot; back into smaller forums and BBSs where communities self-police.<p>Facebook has infiltrated so many aspects of society. Want to interact with the parents from the local school your kids go to? You have to do that on Facebook. Event announcements? Keeping in touch with your distant aunt? Facebook.<p>If something like Facebook is really a universal utility, it will have to be put under public administration; like the post office. But clearly, that isn&#x27;t going to happen and would have other problems.<p>I am going to have to find some other way to engage with old friends and family.<p>Frank Herbert had some intuition with his whole &quot;Butlerian Jihad&quot; thing.