The "struggles" of tech companies blocking the NZ video is not giving them enough credit. I only know about Facebook's 80% preemptively blocked rate but to be frank, that figure is impressive. A new video, with millions of not tens of millions of people posting it, editing it, cropping it, flipping the image and doing everything they can to avoid the filtering algorithms and Facebook still managed to preemptively block 80% of attempted uploads. To me, that's an impressive feat and a sign of just how much investment the company had made to block bad content.
Copyright filtering isn't a good example IMO. Lots of people consistently claim that the content ID algorithms are crappy and have high rates of false positives.
> I only know about Facebook's 80% preemptively blocked rate but to be frank, that figure is impressive.
I read an article the other day about the Australian response to the New Zealand shooting, which had this choice gem:
'He said it remained online for 69 minutes. "That is a totally unreasonable period of time and represents a complete failure of Facebook's own systems," he said.' [0]
That was a very senior government minister and they are about to start legislating on the subject. That has to be one of the more breathtaking expectations out there - this is asking a media company to judge what the community standard is and deploy widespread containment measures in under 60 minutes. That is comparable to the response time of our emergency services (~10 minutes) in a life-or-death situation.
I can't really grasp what it is people think that Facebook is doing wrong here that requires a response of that precision; accidentally watching a video simply isn't comparable to having a heart attack or being on fire. I was hopeful that the response time would be something out of the ordinary and measured in hours or days, I'm doubly impressed that Facebook managed to respond in 70 minutes and surprised at how well developed filtering mechanism to control communication on their platform.
I'm not arguing with you any more. I'm a software engineer who works on web applications and I know for a fact what you are saying is bullshit. You are arguing in bad faith. These are the most profitable companies of all time. Your argument is unreasonable. Later days
I'm a software engineer working on web applications as well. My company handles data in the exabyte scale. I've spoken in depths with coworkers tasked with filtering illegal or prohibited content, and have done limited amount of work on this system (to be fair, mostly refactoring logging and other orthogonal tasks - I've never introduced new heuristics or changed the filtering logic itself).
It's easy to do when it's the same files or data trying to be uploaded, or when there's a way to consistently identify it as prohibited. It's hard when people are actively trying to evade the filtering algorithms. Here is one easy example: a lot of copyrighted work like to shows can be found on YouTube where the copyrighted video is displayed on a smaller section of the screen (e.g. a rectangle in a corner with some animated stuff around the rest of the screen). This is because such editing makes it harder to detect. Maybe YouTube has beaten this countermeasure by now - it's a cat and mouse dynamic by nature.
To be fair, this is just my perspective. If someone with greater authority on this subject can give me technical explanation as to why Facebook's 80% preemptively blocked rate is not good I'm happy to hear it. But from what I know, an 80% preemptive block rate on an hours-old video with a significant number of people actively trying to avoid the filtering logic is an impressive feat.
Copyright filtering isn't a good example IMO. Lots of people consistently claim that the content ID algorithms are crappy and have high rates of false positives.