we have been reading zarf's site for thirty years. it's partly responsible for us being who we are.
of course we always knew censorship would go after unambiguously socially positive stuff at some point, once it got established. that was always the clear policy objective. still. very angering.
diffusion of responsibility furthers censorship@ireneista oh, this made us realize that diffusion of responsibility is totally a thing in censorship
like companies do this, right? or so we've read 🐈
so censorship of umabiguously good things probably doesn't look like one person being like "let's censor this thing" but more like. one person being like "lets grab web pages that contain the word 'fuck'" and put them in this list. and another being like "let's run some statistics on the web pages in this list". and a third being like "let's censor the web pages whose statistical values are like this". and a fourth being like "oh it seems acting out this decision from the higher-ups means censoring this particular web page, let's do that". maybe being like "wait this doesn't seem to need censorship as per the guidelines" but not wanting to go against their bosses or whatever so they do it anyways
in practice i bet this is done with llm:s and such so theres no risk of a human intervening and preventing random stuff from being censored. because random stuff getting censored furthers the goal of having a system that can do censorship of anything and when trying for that you dont want a human getting in the way by trying to uphold some kind of principles or rules or accountability or morality
(i bet there are still relatively few individual humans responsible for shaping the systems in these ways, though)
diffusion of responsibility furthers censorship@transoptimal well said. we agree with almost all of that. (we suspect Apple is using small models rather than large ones for this, they're better suited to the task and the company hasn't yet fired everyone who knows that)
re: diffusion of responsibility furthers censorship@ireneista@transoptimal I'm so glad that at least one company can competently build the torment nexus
