Coda: Fleeing Russian bombs while battling Facebook. A Meta problem Ukrainian journalists did not need.. “Facebook says it’s fighting disinformation and blocking Russian propaganda. But independent newsrooms in eastern Ukraine say they’re being restricted under the same rules.”
Small Wars Journal: Russia’s Floundering False-Flag Narrative. “Given the resounding unified international condemnation—to say nothing of Russia’s mass protest demonstrators, numbering in the thousands–and with no major super-global power supporting Russia at the moment, it appears its false-flag narrative has floundered. This essay reflects on some of the Kremlin’s current blunders to date in setting conditions in the information environment for a successful false-flag narrative that should have preceded its false-flag operation. These blunders should caution U.S. defense planners that those who ignore the impact of a hyperconnected global information environment on modern conflict do so at great peril.”
Museums + Heritage Advisor: Do museums deserve more freedom on social media?. “As The Charles Dickens Museum becomes the latest museum to suffer at the feet of heavy-handed algorithms, Advisor asks if it is time to allow cultural institutions more scope to police their own content.”
New York Times: Facebook’s Unglamorous Mistakes. “…ordinary people, businesses and groups serving the public interest like news organizations suffer when social networks cut off their accounts and they can’t find help or figure out what they did wrong. This doesn’t happen often, but a small percentage of mistakes at Facebook’s size add up. The Wall Street Journal calculated that Facebook might make roughly 200,000 wrong calls a day.
Boing Boing: Youtube removes video of woman playing harp with a distortion pedal because it “endangers children”. “Last week, Emily Hopkins ruled Youtube for a day after attaching a roaring distortion pedal to her harp and performing enchanting and extremely hardcore melodies thereof. YouTube removed it citing its ‘child endangerment’ policy.”
Reclaim the Net: Patreon deplatforms censored video archive altCensored for “hate speech”. “altCensored, a platform that archives videos that have been censored or limited by YouTube, has been booted by the fan-funding platform Patreon for ‘hate speech.’ The platform has received around 500,000 unique monthly visitors over the last year, according to estimates based on web analytics company SimilarWeb and altCensored’s server logs.” Platforms like altCensored do important work. YouTube content removal often leads to unintended consequences like removing evidence of war crimes.
BuzzFeed News: Instagram Labeled One Of Islam’s Holiest Mosques A Terrorist Organization. “Instagram removed posts and blocked hashtags about one of Islam’s holiest mosques because its content moderation system mistakenly associated the site with a designation the company reserves for terrorist organizations, according to internal employee communications seen by BuzzFeed News.”
EurekAlert: AI may mistake chess discussions as racist talk. “‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ the recent TV mini-series about a chess master, may have stirred increased interest in chess, but a word to the wise: social media talk about game-piece colors could lead to misunderstandings, at least for hate-speech detection software.”
KWWL: Local nonprofit believes Facebook took down their page by mistake. “Just 4 days before Giving Tuesday, the largest day of giving worldwide, the nonprofit Table 2 Table Food Rescue sees an impact after Facebook unpublished their page.”
CNN: YouTube is banking on tech to clean up controversial content, as moderators stay home. “YouTube said Tuesday that it is increasingly relying on technology to moderate content, resulting in a sharp rise in removed videos, including some that didn’t violate its policies. The Google-owned company said that between April and June it removed more than 11.4 million videos for violating its policies. That’s more than double what it took down in the previous three months.” Oh, why not. Auto-regulating content HAS WORKED SO WELL SO FAR…
Yahoo News: Facebook deems baker’s pie ‘too sexy’ for social media. “Wellington baker Niels Reinsborg started his business, Crafty Pies, to supply the baked treat to cafes, but when the coronavirus hit New Zealand shortly after he opened, he had to get creative and began offering his pies for sale on Facebook with contact-free delivery to homes. Business was booming and he was selling hundreds of pies each week until he posted an image of the Cypriot Shepherd’s Pie, filled with lean lamb cooked with fresh ginger, cumin and cinnamon…. The description and image was apparently flagged and deemed inappropriate. He received a Facebook message explaining the platform could not be used to sell ‘adult’ items, and his account was closed.”
Techdirt: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra’s US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines. “The film, which gives a US government-approved history of the lead up to World War II includes a bunch of footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Obviously, it wasn’t done to glorify them. The idea is literally the opposite. However, as you may recall, last summer when everyone was getting mad (again) at YouTube for hosting ‘Nazi’ content, YouTube updated its policies to ban ‘videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology.’ We already covered how this was shutting down accounts of history professors. And, now, it’s apparently leading them to take US propaganda offline as well.”
Techdirt: EU’s First Attempt At Building A List Of Evil Pirate Sites… Lists Non-Infringing Sites. “In mid-January, the EU is hoping to finalize the EU Copyright Directive, including Article 13, which will effectively create mandatory copyright filters for many internet websites (while, laughably, insisting it creates no such burden — but leaving no other option for most sites). One of the key arguments being made by supporters of Article 13 is that it’s crazy to think that this law will be used to block legitimate content. This is pretty silly, considering how frequently we write about bogus DMCA takedowns. As if trying to prove just how bad they are at properly classifying infringing content, the EU recently released its ‘Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List’, which is a sort of EU version of the USTR’s ‘notorious markets’ list.”
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