Since you're implying otherwise, this article doesn't talk about getting rid of anything. It just describes part of the horrible slave market that has extended into modern technology.
This is why we've turned Facebook and Twitter into political machines. You are blaming the social media companies for enabling slavery. Slavery existed long before the internet, removing it from the internet just means it goes back to working the old fashioned way.
This is like blaming a hammer manufacturer for enabling hammer murders. It isn't their intention to make a murder tool, it isn't its primary use, and they don't market it for that purpose. They make a tool, and although that tool will certainly be abused, the benefits outweigh the costs. Same goes for these new communication tools.
When I attended F8, Facebook gave a presentation on how sophisticated their drug post detection had gotten. Things like being able to differentiate between a photo of broccoli tempura and weed (that slide can be seen here: https://www.cnet.com/news/marijuana-or-broccoli-facebook-ill...), "candy" being sold at unusual prices, factoring in how networks of people interact with the posts, etc. were highlighted that appeared highly sophisticated, to the point where some examples took hints for the humans in the room to figure out the right answer.
Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag. I'm dubious that that's the best they can do.
I think this is the (American) white privilege bubble at work, in a different way than usual. Drug use is pervasive in American society, everyone knows this and it's an obvious thing for Facebook to police. Same with violence, racist abuse, and pornographic images. Buying and selling domestic workers, on the other hand, is so far removed from our experience that it's not something that I would have even thought to work on. I know human trafficking happens, in the abstract sense that I read about it in The Economist or The Atlantic magazines, but the idea that people would take advantage of social media platforms to do it still blows my mind.
What blows my mind about what you're describing is how ill-equipped society was for Facebook, and how laughable it is that Mark Zuckerberg is in charge of reconciling Facebook and society, for the very reasons you're talking about.
When I think about the global scale and social/political/economic scope required to responsibly run Facebook, and compare that to the skill set of Mark Zuckerberg it's just, like, insane that he's in charge of it. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is truly brilliant and capable of becoming a great international leader. No doubt. I just don't think it should be, like, his first job. Lol. It's truly absurd.
That is his point. Who is qualified? It'd probably have to be many people, but then who are they accountable to? Is it really better to have Facebook be government run? I highly doubt it.
I don't know the answer and won't bore you by trying to make one up on the fly. I'll just say this is a novel challenge to human society and requires a novel approach to corporate governance & accountability. What we're doing now isn't working and the stakes are as high as they can be.
We have the responsibility to insist on better from our institutions.
You could simply replace "Facebook" with "the Internet", or just "electronic communication networks". If our reaction to every new technological advance is either 1) "let's wait until society is ready for it", or 2) "this should be strictly controlled by the government", we'd still be banging rocks together to make fire.
Zuckerberg is certainly ill-equipped for this. So is every other person on the planet, but at least Zuckerberg has enormous financial and public relations incentives to figure it out. I do not envy his job.
> Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag
Their only announced action. It would be nice to know more, but it's really common to not announce your strategy so people can't easily avoid it. I hope they're doing more and it's just not public.
I don't know, hardware manufacturers are expected to design and manufacture their stuff with harm prevention in mind. There are tons of regulations intended to prevent not just injuries due to stupidity but also abuses.
If the same goes for the communication tools, maybe we should regulate them too? Software is like the wild west when it comes to regulations and unfortunately, regulations will come because the software developers fail spectacularly to regulate themselves.
Does your software act as a perfect tool for genocide or a decline in the health of a society? You won't be able to stand with straight face counting your money saying "not my problem" simply because a business is supposed to create more value than it takes from the system and if the opposite happens the system will eject that business. Commies will take over, something will happen before people die off for the ideal of the free enterprise. That's why we don't have free organ market.
Anyway, this doesn't mean that Instagram or any other app makers are evil, it simply means that there's a problem that their business enables and some people are asking questions.I hope they don't say "not my problem" because that's how revolts begin, commies take over or guillotines become street attraction.
Are cellphone or walkie talkie manufacturers regulated because those devices can be used to run drug rings? It's easy to make analogies to draw a range of conclusions.
Social platforms are given a hard time for being walled gardens, but they are clearly getting to a kind of scale where they are hard to police, almost like the internet at large. If they weren't owned by a single company maybe this would be seen differently?
Yep, cellphones, cans containing chemicals that people abuse, knives, car trunks, alcohol bottles etc. There are tons of regulations that are a response to an issue that someone created by using a product the way it was not intended to be used.
Yeah my secondary point that I deleted was that it's the sims that are regulated. Isn't that closer to regulating an ISP? But then a cellphone is more like a computer or iPad, so all these analogies are a stretch.
They obey to other less obvious regulations, manufacturers cannot sell you a phone that transmits in a frequency you desire or let you input your own IMEI number etc.
Seriously, hardware is regulated. Check it out.
It's all about response to some kind of abuse and it's different everywhere. In some places regulators mandate that the alcohol bottles must have special plugs that let out alcohol but cannot be re-filled easily because at some point someone started bootleg alcohol business by re-filling the consumed bottles.
Depends on where you buy it. If the place didn't have a problem with criminals using burner phones, you would not have ID requirement otherwise they will make a copy of your ID before activating your pre-paid phone.
Different places have different problems enabled through different technologies or goods, therefore different regulations. The place is huge and devided to about 200 parcels all with different approach of handling issues, check it out here: https://www.google.com/maps
No. This is like blaming hammer-as-a-service company for hammer murders.
If you're leasing out equipment, you better have reasonable tracking/prevention mechanisms of your equipment. This is much like tracking car leases, computer leases, apartment leases.
wat.... ?
1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal .
2. Go rob a bank with it.
3. The rental car company is liable?
According to this logic, if you checkout a book from the library, hit someone on the head with it, then the library is liable....
Society will stop functioning in this case. Google would have to start requiring background checks to open a gmail account...
If FB/Instagram was: 1. Actively promoting that illegal activity, or 2. Turning an blind eye / not removing posts that are clearly doing illegal stuff, then they might be liable...
The point is that there are hundreds of millions of accounts in FB/Instagram, and it is almost impossible to monitor everything that goes on it.....
> wat.... ? 1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal .
2. Go rob a bank with it.
3. The rental car company is liable?
No. The rental car company should
1. Do driver record check
2. Contain enough info about drivers to aid law enforcement
I believe it is faster to sign up for an instagram account than getting a rental car.
Social media cannot prevent everything. On the other end of the spectrum, they can't just brush themselves off of the responsibility either. This is simply, to protect children and vulnerable.
They need to be ok with losing fake users, bots and illicit activity accounts from their MAU counts.
That is a dumb analogy. The manufacturer of a hammer cannot control what people do with a hammer. Instagram can control what its users do on Instagram.
> "What they are doing is promoting an online slave market," said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery.
> "If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable."
Of course we don't want social media enabling that. But the bad guys are the people who are keeping others as slaves, and the law enforcement that turn a blind eye. The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. A single dev could mock up a replacement, "like craigslist, but for slaves".
Why can these apps block "breaking copyright" and discussions about piratebay, but cant stop slave trade?
Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery?
Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this.
But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.
The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?
I don't think the two are comparable at all. Labor is fundamentally scarce while copying or streaming media is almost free and not intrinsically limited.
And sadly, lots of rich folks with influence buy slaves. Look at what Epstein was doing. Where was he finding those he abused? There must have been a market.
The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.
I don't know why you are saying this, because all I did was say we should stop slavery. Whether or not we protect copyright or whatever, we definitely should stop slavery. Taking down a post isn't stopping slavery, it's insulating elite Westerners like myself from being aware that slavery is actually happening.
Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.
I really wonder what sort of information sources people are exposing themselves to for "slavery still exists, and tech platforms are used to facilitate it" to be a revelation.
I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.
Last I heard, today’s global slave trade makes the Transatlantic Slave Trade at its peak look like a drop in the bucket. I don’t know if that comparison is accurate, but slavery never died in the world, it merely became illegal.
Has anyone succeeded in blocking copyright though? I havn't illegally downloaded anything for years, but I've never been in a position where I couldn't find a copy of copyrighted material if I wanted it.
With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.
No. The copyright issue has not been solved. It's probably easier than ever, but enough friction has been removed from legal access to content that the vast majority of people will pay.
Because the crime of "breaking copyright" can be solved by blocking and removing the offending content. Yes, they can move it to another platform, but then again, "breaking copyright" is a crime in on itself, there is no other "root crime" that is the real issue. Every time you remove the offending posts and links, you solve an instance of this crime, which sounds fairly simple.
The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
> The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it!
The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.
Slavery is so illegal in the developed world that it's not even an issue. When people engage in human trafficking, the law enforcement apparatus puts the full brunt of its power into punishing the perpetrators. The government spends substantial sums of money preventing these sorts of abuses.
The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them.
The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody.
Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.
Right! Sites like this and bitcoin could be handing criminals to the authorities on a silver platter. Why are they shutting them down? They should be intentionally creating sites like this as honey pots.
If I understand it correctly, in simple terms, it is only entrapment if you are doing something to make a person commit a crime he wouldn't have done otherwise.
For example, if you are an undercover cop and pressure a random taxi driver to be your getaway driver for a robbery, it would be entrapment. If you just host a honeypot website, post links to it in a few shady places, and people end up using it to do illegal things out of their own volition, it wouldn't count as entrapment.
A couple journalists fairly easily find these listing on public platforms - and you're telling me the platforms could not do easily a lot more to capture and report these folks?
> Of course we don't want social media enabling that.
Eliding that it not only "enables" it in a binary way, but also "enables" it in a that creates exponential reach and growth of the market. This explosive mechanic is one of the things implies by the phrase, "tech boom." Your response reduces social media's role to a one-sentence hand-wave.
> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
Is your point that you can't do the latter if you do the former? Because that's not the case in any way.
> These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked.
You're _technically_ right in the very narrow sense that there will likely still be some kind of market for chattel slavery even without Instagram. But again you are minimizing Instagram's (I'm using Instagram as a stand-in for all the companies involved) role and responsibilities in this situation for some reason.
When we talk about these companies we use phrasing like, "huge tech platforms," "tech giants," etc. To my mind you are defending these "tech behemoths" from the very idea of public accountability.
The response to the question you raise of government & law enforcement enforcing the law is so obvious it barely merits response, but: yes, obviously the government should govern and law enforcement should enforce the law. Bringing it up at all seems to me like another deflection away from "Instagram"'s responsibilities in governance on & public accountability for their platforms.
> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
I agree but on the other hand they should play an active role. Not an expert on this one, but speaking about hate related posts on Facebook, they did turn a blind eye on that. That makes me think they don't care about < 1% content that might be a problem.
If they don't play an active role, they are facilitators. Probably in most jurisdictions this makes people guilty as well.
Moreover it gives law&order proponents arguments to just watch literally everyone. And in any case the law enforcements get only aware of a small percentage of crimes happening. Basically they are no more than a crutch to mend torn fabrics of society.
So this is like the business method patent. It is new - it uses a computer! - it is new is uses an app/hashtag!
The system in the gulf has been there for decades. If you weren't outraged five years ago - no reason to be now. If you were - keep the fire burning and try to do something.
As long as the system for abuse is in place, people will communicate with smoke signals if needed to facilitate the involuntarily employment change.
Does anyone honestly think that removing fb out of the equation would result in any kind of improvement? Or are people simply disgusted because this is happening on the service they also happen to be users of?
the problem is jurisdiction, in this case Kuwait, not freaking fb which in a matter of minutes can be replaced for alibaba or tictoc or something else you and bbc journas never heard of
It’s not like this is only happening in private - Shitbook is outright giving them a storefront for selling slaves.
Now I agree that the problem can’t be 100% eliminated as at least some of it happens behind closed doors, but it would sure reduce the scale of this business if Shitbook & co weren’t around to provide a free platform for trading slaves in the open.
They should be prosecuted for complicity and not be allowed to hide behind the excuse of the “algorithm”. If your algorithm isn’t good enough to filter out this behaviour then go back to the drawing board and find a better solution. Human moderation works pretty well on forums. Oh it doesn’t scale? Well that’s a shame but it’s not a right to be profitable - if you can’t figure out a sustainable business model then don’t be in business. It’s like starting a very cheap rental car business and stealing cars for your inventory because you can’t actually afford to buy them...
HN is not the place where I expect such clickbait articles.
The domestic workers market in many gulf countries resembles slavery in some sense and has been in existence for a long time. Instagram might be one of the tools that is being used by these people just like I am pretty sure they use airlines, roads, telephones and postal services.
I know the article focuses a lot on Instagram/Android/iOS, but the underlying story is utterly ridiculous. This isn't a small group of criminal gangs who are doing this. It's the middle class and upper class of a first world nation, who are literally recreating slavery in the 21st century.
I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner - no normal person would risk doing it if they faced 10-20 years imprisonment for human trafficking. Simply pass a law that all domestic workers have to report to a police station for 5 minutes every Sunday, alone, during which time they will be asked if they are being held against their will. This would likely eliminate the vast majority of human trafficking currently happening over there. It blows my mind that the government is doing so little about something so abhorrent.
While I absolutely agree that this needs to be crackef and every perpetrator personally punished, let's not forget that this is undercover also happening in other countries. Blood farms in India (look it up, horrifying), brick kilns in Pakistan where entire families are enslaved for generations, labour and disappearance camps in China and many forms of illegal slavery even in Europe, America, Australia, ...
Romanians in slave-like conditions on Italian farms, African refugees and economic migrants enslaved in North Africa and Spain, Mexicans and trafficked people in slave conditions across the US, forced prostitution in America, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, ... - of locals and foreigners alike. I've heard thanks to the refugee influx you can get a prostitute in Athens for 10€. And all this nightmare is not even counting all the 'arranged marriages' between 12 year old girls and 62 year old 'husbands'.
This is a human problem, and one that far too few resources are spent on. Child abuse gets much attention but factually still too few resources (ask the 9 year old Filipina prostituting herself on Skype - although probably she's still better off than her neighbour trafficked to Thailand). But beyond this, even in what you would consider the most developed countries, you still find slaves. Because neighbours don't notice or care. Because the police is understaffed or doesn't care. Because even when they are saved there are no resources to truly save them.
We all close our eyes and ignore these crimes when they happen in broad daylight. If you are anywhere in a big city ANYWHERE there's a good chance you're not far from a slave. We ignore the rampant poverty that leads to all this. We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.
'Frre the Slaves' estimates that, in absolute numbers, there are more slaves today in the world than at any point in history.
Don't ask me how to resolve this. I just know that somehow we are all complicit.
> We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.
Another take on this is that, by making uncontrolled immigration illegal, we make the potential immigrants think twice before coming here and potentially becoming a slave etc.
“Under what is known as the Kafala system, a domestic worker cannot change or quit her job, nor leave the country without her sponsor's permission.”
That doesn’t sound like the a law that is intended to prevent slavery like conditions for domestic workers. And very much encourage abuse in general and confiscating passports specifically (can’t leave the country without the sponsor’s permission sounds like a pretty implied permission to take someone’s passport).
It's not dissimilar from a sponsorship system in the US, where you need your employer to sponsor you so that you work and reside in the country. It is against the law to take someone's passport.
>>>This isn't a small group of criminal gangs who are doing this. It's the middle class and upper class of a first world nation, who are literally recreating slavery in the 21st century.
>>>I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner
Your second paragraph's question is answered in your own first paragraph. The power structure in the country isn't going to undermine a system that it directly benefits from. Especially given the culture in that part of the world, that has a very non-Western perspective on things like "submission" and "human rights"....
Well it's condoned by a major world religion and most of the countries that espouse that religion. Good luck changing the opinions of a billion people.
I've once spotted a (Latin American) slave trader on a image sharing platform during a technical due diligence. They were pretty shameless about it too, uploading the photos of the girls from their own IP. All the easier for the authorities to go after them.
Please take careful note: If you do not do proper risk analysis of your platform you WILL be used to perpetrate crime and if you find that you did not do what you could have done to stop it you may end up being an accessory to that crime. More so if you ignore warnings or flags by other users of the platform. This goes for anything that allows the uploading and further distribution of user generated content (especially 1-1) and for anything that deals with money.
Your nifty platform or weekend project could easily become the vehicle for someone else's crimes.
That’s one of the many reasons I don’t implement a bunch of my side projects, because it inevitably leads to me trying to figure out how to police and remove gross content from whatever website I build, and I don’t want to have to deal with that.
Spot on, it is also the reason I shut down two websites that I ran for years. You really need to be on the ball, preferably 24/7 so many things that would be nice side projects simply can't be left up and running without oversight. It's a rotten world.
But no, I think for the most part it was pretty benign. It looks like they were planning on doing some kind of maybe SEO gaming or something using my de.licio.us clone I made almost a decade ago. I had about 23,000 accounts with .ru and .lv email addresses, many repeats, almost none of which interacted with the app at all.
Many recently created, even today. I think there must be a script that loads in users or something like that.
Ok. Happy to see it is that kind of trouble, and not something far more disturbing. Good on you for taking immediate action after becoming aware of the problem.
Regardless of what the actual situation is, I wonder what people think it should be, and how far towards either direction (anarchy and whatever the opposite is) we'll go.
For example, What if you sell someone some pencils and they stab someone to death with them?
If I run a forum about gardening and someone is using the PMs as a slave market, am I responsible for not monitoring every single message on the platform, and should I be?
What if I own an office and I rent it out for people to have meetings, and they meet there in person and hold a slave market, am I also supposed to be monitoring their in-person meetings?
If you have trouble telling all these apart I suggest you don't start anything online. One thing is for sure: sticking your head in the sand and pretending there is no problem isn't going to work in the longer term. See TFA.
2. If someone asks where to draw the line along the sequence of a|b|c|d that does not mean they cannot tell these apart, it means they are pondering which of these are ok and which are not. Distinguishing things and bucketing things are not the same activity.
As to (1), I've seen these so called thought experiments used more often than not to try to defend inaction. This includes free speech and all kinds of other important principles that then get stretched into the most warped definitions on order to justify acting in a way that benefits the bottom line. See Mark Zuckerberg's recent performances for some samples.
As for (2). It's simple: there is the law and there is ethics. Anything illegal you should work hard to stop and collaborate with LE to get it stamped out on your properties. Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Ethics come at a cost.
1) Your assumption of bad faith is unfair, baseless, and runs afoul of HN guidelines [a]. I see nothing but attempt to discuss and understand where we should stand on these things. Are you reading whitewashing into those questions?
2) Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Seriously? You do not think one should be discussing boundary of ethicals choices with one's peers? Please explain.
[a] Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The key points could be how you react when other users report these activities to you, or you have tangible signs that would be suspicious to an average reasonable person.
These problem would be the same if you had a hot dog stand and customers reported to you a child prostitution ring massively buying your hot dogs for the kids. What would you do ?
> What if I own an office and I rent it out for people to have meetings, and they meet there in person and...
If you are the property owner, taking care that the people on your property is safe.
As a steward of the land that’s your job. By purchasing the land you are saying: no one else has title to watch over the people on this land, only I do.
We review companies from a technical point of view for investors so they have some idea of the risks associated with the company prior to investment. Very interesting but super intense work.
> Your nifty platform or weekend project could easily become the vehicle for someone else's crimes.
We might as well all pack up and go home then. God forbid some group coordinates an atrocity using the comments section of our blog, for want of proper risk analysis.
Best leave it all to the oligarchs. They know what they're doing. They'll look after us.
If you see packing up and leaving it to the oligarchs as the only workable solution to adress the valid point the parent raised, this says more about you than the argument at hand.
The thing with weekend projects is: they tend to lie around unused and unchecked. If you are aware of this, people can mitigate it by adding propper monitoring etc.
> If you are aware of this, people can mitigate it by adding propper monitoring etc.
And what is an acceptable, reasonable solution? Even FB with their near-infinite resources gets in trouble all the time for illegal content and they still spread all kinds of it. Is the only possible solution to be a big corporation?
What would be your opinion in building a nifty side project platform upon keybase.io or other services that provide authenticity verification to a certain degree?
> Please take careful note: If you do not do proper risk analysis of your platform you WILL be used to perpetrate crime and if you find that you did not do what you could have done to stop it you may end up being an accessory to that crime.
Since we're talking about image hosters (I built one some years ago): how do you solve the dilemma that a) you can be sure that at some point somebody will upload images that are illegal to host and look at, b) in order to identify and remove them you'll have to look at them or pay someone to look at them.
What we did (before ML became widely available/easily usable, not sure if there are ready-to-use models for filtering all illegal images out there these days - nobody would want to train one themselves using illegal content...) was to look at access logs and remove all images that had suspicious hostnames in the "Referer" header. It wasn't enough apparently, it got my successor into trouble and a new dilemma (take down the platform immediately, or operate it as a honeypot to help authorities who asked for it, potentially incriminating themselves for not taking down illegal content after being made aware of it... [police can't give you a carte blanche for operating a honeypot, a DA/prosecutor can still prosecute]).
Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that if you incidentally stumble upon an image you're not allowed to look at that it is not something that you could be prosecuted over? That is, as long as you weren't going looking for that specific type of image it should be okay.
Possibly, it's for the judge to decide. How can you prove that it was accidental and not intentional? And how to do find an employee who doesn't mind checking questionable material (even pre-filtered/flagged by a ML model) every day?
>How can you prove that it was accidental and not intentional?
I imagine that if you happen across it while moderating then you won't really know what you'll find, because you're relying on reports or random browsing to find offending content. That is, as long as you're following reasonable procedures for moderating then that should be good enough, no?
So, what is a reasonable procedure? Look at content reported to be illegal yourself (possibly already illegal since you had prior notice it was illegal, certainly not good for being able to sleep at night) and then delete it? Or delete it without checking whenever it gets reported and thereby giving users a tool to sabotage other users by misreporting their content (fun for political discussions etc.)?
That seems a bit harsh. If I own a building and somebody sprays an antisemitic or jihadist message on its wall, am I now complicit for spreading racial hatred (assuming in Europe, in US it's probably protected by constitution)?
And if I, for whatever reason (for example, am broke and can't afford it) don't want to? Am I complicit then? It would be interesting to ask lawyers, because it's a very similar case.
Then you are derelict in your management duties. If you are broke then you don't own a building. If you do own a building then you are not broke and presumably can pay for upkeep. Even so, in many municipalities if someone vandalizes your property the municipality will do the cleanup.
The bigger problem is that it's not a crime to take someone's passport away and prevent them from leaving the country whenever they wish to. None of this would be possible if an employee could quit and go home at any time.
If you are the citizen of a first world country, you can just go to your embassy without any id and they will sort it out.
These workers origin countries also share the blame, they refuse to help them. In many cases they turn a blind eye to this slavery since these enslaved workers send currency to their origin country.
Not in the UAE. The embassies are very aware but helpless. The women (maids) and men (builders) are told they'll go to prison or worse if they try to run.
There are girls that were raped being publicly lashed for having sex or in some cases even for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Easy to draw scenarios to keep them.
Or the typical Eastern European or African slave: they get a simple message: "if you complain we kill your little sister (or send her over to take your place!!)".
But it seems to me that accusing Apple/FB/Instagram that those platforms were used for it is exactly the same as accusing Toyota/Nissan/Ford that vehicles they made were used for transporting slaves.
The difference is that, if Toyota tracked your car usage after purchase and possessed the ability to match patterns of behaviour with crimes (wow, just after this bank was robbed that car zoomed northwards at high speed), they too would be held accountable.
Facebook/Apple/Instagram capture insane amounts of data from their users in exchange for various services. Those services are being used for human trafficking. It behooves these companies to regulate these practices.
Completely agree. It should be safer to not know everything. Collecting personal information should be a massive liability. If they insist on collecting huge amounts of data they shouldn't be able to claim they didn't know anything when authorities find that crimes were being committed. They had the data, failed to analyze it and their negligence enabled the crimes to occur. They are as much at fault as the criminals themselves.
That ought to end the pervasive monitoring of users for marketing purposes.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread<insert enraging thing here > uses the internet. This is the absence of new information masquerading as journalism
So, less efficiently?
That's probably a net benefit. Even when you can't eliminate a problem, making it less frequent is a win.
A phpbb board will do just fine and as efficient.
Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag. I'm dubious that that's the best they can do.
When I think about the global scale and social/political/economic scope required to responsibly run Facebook, and compare that to the skill set of Mark Zuckerberg it's just, like, insane that he's in charge of it. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is truly brilliant and capable of becoming a great international leader. No doubt. I just don't think it should be, like, his first job. Lol. It's truly absurd.
We have the responsibility to insist on better from our institutions.
Zuckerberg is certainly ill-equipped for this. So is every other person on the planet, but at least Zuckerberg has enormous financial and public relations incentives to figure it out. I do not envy his job.
Their only announced action. It would be nice to know more, but it's really common to not announce your strategy so people can't easily avoid it. I hope they're doing more and it's just not public.
If the same goes for the communication tools, maybe we should regulate them too? Software is like the wild west when it comes to regulations and unfortunately, regulations will come because the software developers fail spectacularly to regulate themselves.
Does your software act as a perfect tool for genocide or a decline in the health of a society? You won't be able to stand with straight face counting your money saying "not my problem" simply because a business is supposed to create more value than it takes from the system and if the opposite happens the system will eject that business. Commies will take over, something will happen before people die off for the ideal of the free enterprise. That's why we don't have free organ market.
Anyway, this doesn't mean that Instagram or any other app makers are evil, it simply means that there's a problem that their business enables and some people are asking questions.I hope they don't say "not my problem" because that's how revolts begin, commies take over or guillotines become street attraction.
Social platforms are given a hard time for being walled gardens, but they are clearly getting to a kind of scale where they are hard to police, almost like the internet at large. If they weren't owned by a single company maybe this would be seen differently?
Actually, yes - you’ll have a hard time obtaining SIM cards to use your cell phone without giving ID, precisely for this reason.
Seriously, hardware is regulated. Check it out.
It's all about response to some kind of abuse and it's different everywhere. In some places regulators mandate that the alcohol bottles must have special plugs that let out alcohol but cannot be re-filled easily because at some point someone started bootleg alcohol business by re-filling the consumed bottles.
Different places have different problems enabled through different technologies or goods, therefore different regulations. The place is huge and devided to about 200 parcels all with different approach of handling issues, check it out here: https://www.google.com/maps
Instagram obviously can't single-handedly prevent things like slavery, but they can absolutely police their platform to try to stop it.
If you're leasing out equipment, you better have reasonable tracking/prevention mechanisms of your equipment. This is much like tracking car leases, computer leases, apartment leases.
2. Go rob a bank with it.
3. The rental car company is liable?
According to this logic, if you checkout a book from the library, hit someone on the head with it, then the library is liable....
Society will stop functioning in this case. Google would have to start requiring background checks to open a gmail account...
If FB/Instagram was: 1. Actively promoting that illegal activity, or 2. Turning an blind eye / not removing posts that are clearly doing illegal stuff, then they might be liable...
The point is that there are hundreds of millions of accounts in FB/Instagram, and it is almost impossible to monitor everything that goes on it.....
3. The rental car company is liable?
No. The rental car company should
1. Do driver record check 2. Contain enough info about drivers to aid law enforcement
I believe it is faster to sign up for an instagram account than getting a rental car.
Social media cannot prevent everything. On the other end of the spectrum, they can't just brush themselves off of the responsibility either. This is simply, to protect children and vulnerable.
They need to be ok with losing fake users, bots and illicit activity accounts from their MAU counts.
This is the problem with those who rant against social media's invasion of privacy. They also demand these social media companies spy on users more.
You can't have it both ways.
This title is close enough to the truth that it is making me and the rest of HN uncomfortable. Make HN safe again.
Of course we don't want social media enabling that. But the bad guys are the people who are keeping others as slaves, and the law enforcement that turn a blind eye. The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. A single dev could mock up a replacement, "like craigslist, but for slaves".
Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery?
Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this.
But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.
The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?
The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.
Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.
I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.
https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-...
With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.
The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it!
The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.
The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them.
The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody.
Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.
Would that be entrapment? Catch a predatoresque?
For example, if you are an undercover cop and pressure a random taxi driver to be your getaway driver for a robbery, it would be entrapment. If you just host a honeypot website, post links to it in a few shady places, and people end up using it to do illegal things out of their own volition, it wouldn't count as entrapment.
Eliding that it not only "enables" it in a binary way, but also "enables" it in a that creates exponential reach and growth of the market. This explosive mechanic is one of the things implies by the phrase, "tech boom." Your response reduces social media's role to a one-sentence hand-wave.
> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
Is your point that you can't do the latter if you do the former? Because that's not the case in any way.
> These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked.
You're _technically_ right in the very narrow sense that there will likely still be some kind of market for chattel slavery even without Instagram. But again you are minimizing Instagram's (I'm using Instagram as a stand-in for all the companies involved) role and responsibilities in this situation for some reason.
When we talk about these companies we use phrasing like, "huge tech platforms," "tech giants," etc. To my mind you are defending these "tech behemoths" from the very idea of public accountability.
The response to the question you raise of government & law enforcement enforcing the law is so obvious it barely merits response, but: yes, obviously the government should govern and law enforcement should enforce the law. Bringing it up at all seems to me like another deflection away from "Instagram"'s responsibilities in governance on & public accountability for their platforms.
I agree but on the other hand they should play an active role. Not an expert on this one, but speaking about hate related posts on Facebook, they did turn a blind eye on that. That makes me think they don't care about < 1% content that might be a problem.
If they don't play an active role, they are facilitators. Probably in most jurisdictions this makes people guilty as well.
Moreover it gives law&order proponents arguments to just watch literally everyone. And in any case the law enforcements get only aware of a small percentage of crimes happening. Basically they are no more than a crutch to mend torn fabrics of society.
The system in the gulf has been there for decades. If you weren't outraged five years ago - no reason to be now. If you were - keep the fire burning and try to do something.
As long as the system for abuse is in place, people will communicate with smoke signals if needed to facilitate the involuntarily employment change.
Now I agree that the problem can’t be 100% eliminated as at least some of it happens behind closed doors, but it would sure reduce the scale of this business if Shitbook & co weren’t around to provide a free platform for trading slaves in the open.
They should be prosecuted for complicity and not be allowed to hide behind the excuse of the “algorithm”. If your algorithm isn’t good enough to filter out this behaviour then go back to the drawing board and find a better solution. Human moderation works pretty well on forums. Oh it doesn’t scale? Well that’s a shame but it’s not a right to be profitable - if you can’t figure out a sustainable business model then don’t be in business. It’s like starting a very cheap rental car business and stealing cars for your inventory because you can’t actually afford to buy them...
The domestic workers market in many gulf countries resembles slavery in some sense and has been in existence for a long time. Instagram might be one of the tools that is being used by these people just like I am pretty sure they use airlines, roads, telephones and postal services.
I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner - no normal person would risk doing it if they faced 10-20 years imprisonment for human trafficking. Simply pass a law that all domestic workers have to report to a police station for 5 minutes every Sunday, alone, during which time they will be asked if they are being held against their will. This would likely eliminate the vast majority of human trafficking currently happening over there. It blows my mind that the government is doing so little about something so abhorrent.
fuck them all, we should have let them burn in 1990.
"Ok, we have a target that we need to suicide"
Romanians in slave-like conditions on Italian farms, African refugees and economic migrants enslaved in North Africa and Spain, Mexicans and trafficked people in slave conditions across the US, forced prostitution in America, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, ... - of locals and foreigners alike. I've heard thanks to the refugee influx you can get a prostitute in Athens for 10€. And all this nightmare is not even counting all the 'arranged marriages' between 12 year old girls and 62 year old 'husbands'.
This is a human problem, and one that far too few resources are spent on. Child abuse gets much attention but factually still too few resources (ask the 9 year old Filipina prostituting herself on Skype - although probably she's still better off than her neighbour trafficked to Thailand). But beyond this, even in what you would consider the most developed countries, you still find slaves. Because neighbours don't notice or care. Because the police is understaffed or doesn't care. Because even when they are saved there are no resources to truly save them.
We all close our eyes and ignore these crimes when they happen in broad daylight. If you are anywhere in a big city ANYWHERE there's a good chance you're not far from a slave. We ignore the rampant poverty that leads to all this. We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.
'Frre the Slaves' estimates that, in absolute numbers, there are more slaves today in the world than at any point in history.
Don't ask me how to resolve this. I just know that somehow we are all complicit.
Another take on this is that, by making uncontrolled immigration illegal, we make the potential immigrants think twice before coming here and potentially becoming a slave etc.
That doesn’t sound like the a law that is intended to prevent slavery like conditions for domestic workers. And very much encourage abuse in general and confiscating passports specifically (can’t leave the country without the sponsor’s permission sounds like a pretty implied permission to take someone’s passport).
Unlike this where the worker cannot go back home.
>>>I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner
Your second paragraph's question is answered in your own first paragraph. The power structure in the country isn't going to undermine a system that it directly benefits from. Especially given the culture in that part of the world, that has a very non-Western perspective on things like "submission" and "human rights"....
Please take careful note: If you do not do proper risk analysis of your platform you WILL be used to perpetrate crime and if you find that you did not do what you could have done to stop it you may end up being an accessory to that crime. More so if you ignore warnings or flags by other users of the platform. This goes for anything that allows the uploading and further distribution of user generated content (especially 1-1) and for anything that deals with money.
Your nifty platform or weekend project could easily become the vehicle for someone else's crimes.
edit: oh no.
But no, I think for the most part it was pretty benign. It looks like they were planning on doing some kind of maybe SEO gaming or something using my de.licio.us clone I made almost a decade ago. I had about 23,000 accounts with .ru and .lv email addresses, many repeats, almost none of which interacted with the app at all.
Many recently created, even today. I think there must be a script that loads in users or something like that.
For example, What if you sell someone some pencils and they stab someone to death with them?
If I run a forum about gardening and someone is using the PMs as a slave market, am I responsible for not monitoring every single message on the platform, and should I be?
What if I own an office and I rent it out for people to have meetings, and they meet there in person and hold a slave market, am I also supposed to be monitoring their in-person meetings?
2. If someone asks where to draw the line along the sequence of a|b|c|d that does not mean they cannot tell these apart, it means they are pondering which of these are ok and which are not. Distinguishing things and bucketing things are not the same activity.
As for (2). It's simple: there is the law and there is ethics. Anything illegal you should work hard to stop and collaborate with LE to get it stamped out on your properties. Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Ethics come at a cost.
2) Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Seriously? You do not think one should be discussing boundary of ethicals choices with one's peers? Please explain.
[a] Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Sorry, but you're the one not assuming good faith to begin with.
These problem would be the same if you had a hot dog stand and customers reported to you a child prostitution ring massively buying your hot dogs for the kids. What would you do ?
If you are the property owner, taking care that the people on your property is safe.
As a steward of the land that’s your job. By purchasing the land you are saying: no one else has title to watch over the people on this land, only I do.
So yes, you then have a responsibility to do so.
I'm wondering if machine learning could be used for this.
We might as well all pack up and go home then. God forbid some group coordinates an atrocity using the comments section of our blog, for want of proper risk analysis.
Best leave it all to the oligarchs. They know what they're doing. They'll look after us.
The thing with weekend projects is: they tend to lie around unused and unchecked. If you are aware of this, people can mitigate it by adding propper monitoring etc.
And what is an acceptable, reasonable solution? Even FB with their near-infinite resources gets in trouble all the time for illegal content and they still spread all kinds of it. Is the only possible solution to be a big corporation?
Ethics in CS is important just like any other field. I think just taking a class to be aware of it helps a lot.
Since we're talking about image hosters (I built one some years ago): how do you solve the dilemma that a) you can be sure that at some point somebody will upload images that are illegal to host and look at, b) in order to identify and remove them you'll have to look at them or pay someone to look at them.
What we did (before ML became widely available/easily usable, not sure if there are ready-to-use models for filtering all illegal images out there these days - nobody would want to train one themselves using illegal content...) was to look at access logs and remove all images that had suspicious hostnames in the "Referer" header. It wasn't enough apparently, it got my successor into trouble and a new dilemma (take down the platform immediately, or operate it as a honeypot to help authorities who asked for it, potentially incriminating themselves for not taking down illegal content after being made aware of it... [police can't give you a carte blanche for operating a honeypot, a DA/prosecutor can still prosecute]).
Edit: it doesn't seem to be available for my country, but a service like https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-... might help nowadays.
I imagine that if you happen across it while moderating then you won't really know what you'll find, because you're relying on reports or random browsing to find offending content. That is, as long as you're following reasonable procedures for moderating then that should be good enough, no?
Clean the building.
These workers origin countries also share the blame, they refuse to help them. In many cases they turn a blind eye to this slavery since these enslaved workers send currency to their origin country.
The embassy will then confirm your identity (there are various ways).
There are girls that were raped being publicly lashed for having sex or in some cases even for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Easy to draw scenarios to keep them.
Or the typical Eastern European or African slave: they get a simple message: "if you complain we kill your little sister (or send her over to take your place!!)".
But it seems to me that accusing Apple/FB/Instagram that those platforms were used for it is exactly the same as accusing Toyota/Nissan/Ford that vehicles they made were used for transporting slaves.
Facebook/Apple/Instagram capture insane amounts of data from their users in exchange for various services. Those services are being used for human trafficking. It behooves these companies to regulate these practices.
That ought to end the pervasive monitoring of users for marketing purposes.
Just Google "خادمات للتنازل" and you will find these ads on Twitter, Pintrest and lots of dedicated sites. :(