<story><title>Top German court strikes down Facebook rules on hate speech</title><url>https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/top-german-court-strikes-down-facebook-rules-on-hate-speech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rossdavidh</author><text>I suspect that the fundamental issue here is not even about hate speech, really, it&amp;#x27;s about labor.  The court wants a human to write a message to the user saying &amp;quot;we took down your message&amp;#x2F;banned your account because [reasons]&amp;quot;.  Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t want to have a human in the loop, because they have billions of users and would have to hire tens of thousands more people to monitor that.&lt;p&gt;I suspect that European governments will continue to badger FB (and Twitter, and Google, and etc.) on this until they up their headcount to deal with it using humans-in-the-loop.  The question is whether or not social networks are actually profitable if you have human moderation.  I suspect they are not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>But a real human is affected by trusting the AI. A real human might lose his&amp;#x2F;her only effective way to communicate with some people&amp;#x2F;communities who only use facebook. On the other hand, an AI cannot detect sarcasm, nonstandard quotes, and can be biased.&lt;p&gt;I know some people (even here) very much support removing and banning people for stuff they disagree with, and call all of that disinformation, but things change, you won&amp;#x27;t always be on the &amp;quot;right side&amp;quot;, and then it&amp;#x27;ll be too late.&lt;p&gt;And even &amp;quot;sides&amp;quot; change... Covid is one such example, where not so long ago, you could be calling for people to wear masks to protect themselves, and with current facebook tools, your posts would be removed for misinformation and conspiracies&amp;#x2F;fearmongering about covid, because &amp;quot;There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there&amp;#x27;s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly&amp;quot; [0]&lt;p&gt;Then a few weeks&amp;#x2F;months later &amp;quot;whoops&amp;quot;, let&amp;#x27;s ban &amp;quot;the other side&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;edition.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;world&amp;#x2F;coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;edition.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;world&amp;#x2F;coronavirus-who-mas...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Top German court strikes down Facebook rules on hate speech</title><url>https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/top-german-court-strikes-down-facebook-rules-on-hate-speech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rossdavidh</author><text>I suspect that the fundamental issue here is not even about hate speech, really, it&amp;#x27;s about labor.  The court wants a human to write a message to the user saying &amp;quot;we took down your message&amp;#x2F;banned your account because [reasons]&amp;quot;.  Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t want to have a human in the loop, because they have billions of users and would have to hire tens of thousands more people to monitor that.&lt;p&gt;I suspect that European governments will continue to badger FB (and Twitter, and Google, and etc.) on this until they up their headcount to deal with it using humans-in-the-loop.  The question is whether or not social networks are actually profitable if you have human moderation.  I suspect they are not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mc32</author><text>Kind of a tangent, but doesn’t the Chinese censorship program use (or at least used to) use mostly actual people taking down “illegal” posts?&lt;p&gt;So it seems they have proven it’s possible to do with people in the loop.</text></comment>