I was banned from Reddit after a short stint of posting to r/askgaybros recently. The person to whom I was responding (1234ideclareworldwar) had just got done telling me that I either had AIDS-related dementia or was mentally retarded because I somehow had a chip on my shoulder. I have no clue how those even relate to each other. He had previously said that he wouldn't date somebody who was HIV positive because they were in effect reckless barebackers including all of the people who died at the beginning of the pandemic. My crime was to point out that there was no such concept of "barebacking" back then -- it was just gay men having sex with each other -- and that he'd either be the type of person who abandoned his friends as social pariahs to die a painful death alone, or he could be one of those who died a painful death alone himself.
Poof! That was it. Assumedly enough of the people of his persuasion (and there are lots of hateful young gay incels just like him) reported me and that was that. The content while somewhat graphic was certainly not harassment -- it was the literal truth. I was only trying to explain in a pointed way what the situation actually was to somebody who was clearly Monday morning quarterbacking, and full of the yummy privilege of hindsight.
The coup de gras, however, was me retelling this story on Facebook as a comment on a friend's posting, I was put in Facebook jail as well. I had just described what happened and my experience with the legions of gay incels that seem to populate that subreddit and their clueless hatefulness. Apparently as a gay man I am not allowed to use the F word (and I probably can't even say it here because Google's AI's are probably no better) in any context even though as a gay man I have been actively trying to reclaim that word as our word. It's not as easy to tell with Facebook, but I doubt that any of the original poster's friends reported me to Facebook. This was most likely Facebook acting as net.nanny on its own. When I appealed, it said that it might not get reviewed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but in fact it "reviewed" it a few minutes later with the same results. That says that it was not, in fact, a human but some poorly trained bot (read: egrep) making the decision.
Ok, enough of the pity party, it's just a concrete example of something that is happening on a widespread basis without doubt. The larger problem is that these poorly trained bots (I hesitate to even call them AI's because they seem to be at the level of egrep) allow people with bad intentions to game the system. These poorly trained bots in fact are punishing the people they are intending to protect. Since they do not have the capability of understanding context -- and even human moderators generally just do peephole scanning -- they are enabling people to use that lack of context to retaliate against speech they do not like.
I should point out that this is fine for moderated groups/subreddits who have their own rules. Moderators can be a pissy bunch, but in the end it is their group to be pissy about. You are always free to create your own group with its own rules. The problem is with platform-wide moderation where it's it is painfully obvious that it is not up to the task of providing a fair and even moderation service. In the Reddit example, the user whom I supposedly harassed is still posting away with complete impunity. I was dished up more vile and harassing -ist (fill in the blank) in those 4 months by young gay men than I ever was by homophobes on Usenet's unmoderated soc.motss in the many years I participated. While Reddit does not disclose its moderation algorithms (security by obscurity!), it's pretty obvious that it is heavily influenced by the number of reports. While that may seem reasonable since homophobes coming into a gay group is not very desirable, it can have the perverse effect that the young gay men in my example who reflexively dislike older gay men -- this is common as dirt -- can game the system to get rid of them. The platform-wide bots that enforce this are clearly not up to the task. Yet enforce it they do anyway -- poorly and unevenly.
In the case of Facebook in particular, it is even more egregious. When a marginalized group cannot talk about their marginalization in frank terms, the platform is reinforcing that marginalization. As far as I can tell, anybody can report a comment if they can see it. While that is good for actual bad actors, it can be weaponized by bad actors to report content to retaliate against people they dislike, often for reasons of victim's marginalization. Facebook is in particular awful because you can't even try to give context while appealing the punishment. I suspect that it because either the bots cannot do anything useful with it, or it makes human moderation too costly. Reddit has pretty much admitted the latter. So basically this moderation is nothing more than a glorified egrep for the most widely used social media platforms on the planet.
Topically, I can almost guarantee that people have already been put into Facebook jail for making fun of Trump's dangerous and insane suggestion that people ingest cleaning products to protect or cure themselves from Covid-19. Since they can be trivially reported by Trump supporters as incitement to harm or fake news, it is up to the bots to detect irony. Irony is extremely context sensitive and on Facebook writing on your own or a friend's wall it often comes down to actually knowing the parties of the conversation and whether it's irony or not: "of course he doesn't mean it literally, it's $FRIEND". Bots or even human moderators surely have no clue. Since the jail message to me mentioned Covid-19 as being a reason for a possible delay for review, I'll bet a buck that it is because their bots cannot distinguish people rightfully lampooning a dangerous charlatan president from the morons who actually take his idiocy at face value and pass it along in all seriousness. Putting even one person in Facebook jail for spreading the word about yet another dangerous and incompetent thing that Trump is touting that should be avoided is bad. Very bad. Forbidding this kind of speech is an existential threat to our democracy as it gives the bad actors a trivial way to game the system by silencing the very people the platform claims to protect. Just as I am not allowed to call out ageism in the gay community on Reddit, people who fear that our democracy is coming apart in real time are silenced on Facebook by the people who cheer that on.
And that gets to the biggest problem of all. Platform-wide moderation is a cost center. There is little incentive to do anything to it other than reduce its cost. Being accurate and fair is almost certainly way down the list of priorities. Good moderation is extremely expensive because you have to hire and train people who are then given an endless supply of judgement calls -- a huge amount of which they are absolutely unqualified to judge. Do you think that people at moderation centers in Morocco have any clue about the subtleties of gay male culture in the US? Of course they don't, and that is putting aside the cultural biases of the moderators. Since even bad human moderation is expensive, social media has been deploying even more clueless "AI's" to keep costs down. The "AI's" deployed are even less equipped to deal with the subtleties of human speech and interaction. For all the hype, AI's are dumber than shit.
This sets up a huge dilemma: cyber-security -- and maybe security in general -- is asymmetric, where the bad guys have a huge upper hand. Bruce Schneier wrote a great blog post about exactly that asymmetry. It is trivial for attackers to slice and dice up Facebook's population -- that's the service for which they make their ad money after all -- and target them for reporting. Even assuming that there isn't an API to automate the reporting task, there is a huge effort difference for, say, a human given a list of general things to report the target for, than for the moderation task itself. Perversely, the more virtuous the social media platforms try to project, the easier it is for attackers to subvert its moderation since the bar is much lower, sweeping more and more people into the false positive pile.
The long and short of this is that while punishment for harassment might be a good idea in theory as with Potter Stewart's famous quip about pornography and "I know it when I see it", "seeing it" does not scale to internet scales. It's also clear that we have no clue how to solve that any time soon. Given that it is trivial to subvert on a small scale, it should cause people to shudder at the thought of censoring weapons being used at a nation-state scale, either for its own population, rivals' populations, or more likely both. It would be ironic in a horrible way that the go-to way to stifle dissent is to is to use the tools of virtue as a weapon by those who have none.
The silver lining of all of this for me is that I have been cut off from the horrible people I have been dealing with, and it's feeling pretty good thus far. Fuck you Facebook. Fuck you Reddit. I am not your product anymore. I have no need for you. I have no use for your enabling hateful Trumpanzees who are the poster children for Dunning Kruger Syndrome. Nor do I have any use for hateful young ageist incel gay boys who think that it's a good thing we died of AIDS as they bask in the moral superiority of hindsight. The joke is on them: you'll end up being be old, gay, and hated and wonder what happened. And best of all, the Trumpanzees will all be dead from Evolution in Action as they infect each other with the Covids, and munch on Clorox Chewables as a cure. Life is good.
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