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from the operation-google-2:-electric...google-fu dept.
Every year, millions of images, videos and posts that allegedly contain terrorist or violent extremist content are removed from social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. A key force behind these takedowns is the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an industry-led initiative that seeks to "prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms."
[...] Hashes are digital "fingerprints" of content that companies use to identify and remove content from their platforms. They are essentially unique, and allow for easy identification of specific content. When an image is identified as "terrorist content," it is tagged with a hash and entered into a database, allowing any future uploads of the same image to be easily identified.
This is exactly what the GIFCT initiative aims to do: Share a massive database of alleged 'terrorist' content, contributed voluntarily by companies, amongst members of its coalition. The database collects 'hashes', or unique fingerprints, of alleged 'terrorist', or extremist and violent content, rather than the content itself. GIFCT members can then use the database to check in real time whether content that users want to upload matches material in the database. While that sounds like an efficient approach to the challenging task of correctly identifying and taking down terrorist content, it also means that one single database might be used to determine what is permissible speech, and what is taken down—across the entire Internet.
Countless examples have proven that it is very difficult for human reviewers—and impossible for algorithms—to consistently get the nuances of activism, counter-speech, and extremist content itself right. The result is that many instances of legitimate speech are falsely categorized as terrorist content and removed from social media platforms. Due to the proliferation of the GIFCT database, any mistaken classification of a video, picture or post as 'terrorist' content echoes across social media platforms, undermining users' right to free expression on several platforms at once. And that, in turn, can have catastrophic effects on the Internet as a space for memory and documentation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Friday August 28 2020, @07:01PM (8 children)
No one's complaining. The KKK is free to hold gatherings and distribute literature as well. People are free to do as they want in their domain. We are also free to laugh at them and shit all over them in every way possible.
I don't believe soylent deletes any content or bans accounts. When did this happen - it was the only reason I left slashdot and don't use reddit or hn. Are the random ramblings of the 10 users of techdirt the only free space left now? Seems like we don't need some huge database to censor speech then - people do that all on their own.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 28 2020, @07:15PM (1 child)
They have the legal right to delete users and/or their content, and their administrators have the technical ability to go into the database and delete users and/or their content. It's true that they have never, to the best of my knowledge, exercised that right, but that was a business choice Soylent made about their own policies, and they can change it any time they like for any reason they like.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Friday August 28 2020, @08:44PM
And for some reason you have no right to complain if they do? People are free to do as they may, but why in the world do you think you have no right to complain about it? I definitely have a right to complain, shit on them, and not donate. The iphone doesn't let me own a device I paid for - I complain about it, I make fun of iphone users for not being to install an app I can install, and of course I don't buy an iphone.
Are you a cuck of some kind? Do you enjoy watching your wife get railed by a big juicy blm monkey, but have no right to complain, because she prefers to actually get off once in a while, while you pay for the roof over her head?
I kid, I kid. But seriously, are you a cuck of some kind?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday August 28 2020, @11:15PM (5 children)
IIUC, they may be legally required to do that in certain instances. And they *do* have the capability. So the posting may be free, but have consequences later. If I were to post somebody else's banking information, I'm rather sure it would quickly be removed. So I was free to post it, but the first consequence was removal of the post, probably followed by many other unpleasant consequences.
Free expression doesn't work in a large group. Sorry, but it doesn't. You always need rules about what it permissible. And breaking the rules will have consequences, if only some of your prior friends refusing to talk to you. (Here I'm thinking about some of the early bulletin board systems.)
And it turns out, the larger the group of communicators, the clearer and more enforced those rules need to be. Because SOME member of the group will always be pushing against the boundaries, either mildly or strongly, and in a larger group, there will be more extreme communicators.
And then there's dimensions of flexibility. You don't use EBCDIC on a UTF8 system. You adhere to proper timing, etc. The analogies in human communication are largely built-in by biology. Social distancing, though, is cultural, and we're currently experiencing how difficult that is to change. But it has effects that echo back into biology. Cultures that have greater social distance are emotionally colder. This echo probably accounts for a lot of the resistance that requirements for social distancing are meeting.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 29 2020, @02:09PM (4 children)
Aren't there UTF-8 encodings for EBCDIC symbols? And even for the symbols in all the variants of EBCDIC that have appeared over the ages?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 29 2020, @08:49PM (3 children)
If you encode EBCDIC in some other coding, it's no longer EBCDIC. EBCDIC specifies a bit pattern to symbol correspondence.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 30 2020, @12:55AM (2 children)
Correct.
But EBCDIC also consists of a number of different character sets. Converting from some popular EBCDIC variants (such as the one for the TN print chains) to other character codes was difficult before Unicode and UTF-8.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:41AM (1 child)
I always wanted to use the TN print train.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:41AM
I got to use the TN print chain for my Phd thesis back in 1974. I think mine may have been one of the first Phd theses at the university to have been produced by a document compiler.
Nowadays of course I'd use a laser printer with TeX or some other free software.
-- hendrik