Canadian Sikh Facebook users receive notifications that their posts are being taken down because they’re in violation of Indian law

Canadian Sikh Facebook users receive notifications that their posts are being taken down because they’re in violation of Indian law

    • Poob@lemmy.ca
      54·
      1 year ago

      Wow, I didn’t think “Facebook sucks” would be such a controversial statement on a place like Lemmy or kbin

    • tripfiend@kbin.social
      135·
      1 year ago

      I wonder if people would have the same reaction if the person in question was a known Islamic Terrorist. If there were Facebook groups praising the legacy of Osama Bin Laden, would Meta be then justified to carry out similar censorship?

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
        251·
        1 year ago

        This guy isn’t a terrorist, or at least is not demonstrably so.

        His only crime is wanting to create a place for Sikhs. Maybe he uses violence but I don’t see that in a Google search.

        Besides which, if india had credible evidence he was a terrorist…. Chances are solid that he’d have been extradited long before now. It sounds like he wasn’t actually a citizen, but a refugee

        • sleepunderatree@lemmy.world
          220·
          1 year ago

          This guy is a wanted terrorist in India. I agree he wanted a place for Sikhs but on what cost? He wanted to split the nation and it is unacceptable. He created so much violence inside the nation for that, many people were killed. It is like those proud boys want to split America and make Texas a country.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            28·
            1 year ago

            And if the leader of the Proud Boys moved to India, I wouldn’t expect Americans to assassinate him, nor would I expect that to be tolerated.

  • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
    526·
    1 year ago

    So they received a take down request from the Indian government, mistook the users for being in India, followed the law that they’re required to follow in India, and when it was brought to their attention that those users were actually based in Canada they went back and allowed the posts. This doesn’t seem as malicious as people are making it out to be, they should probably work on their geo-blocking, but with 3 billion users in 150+ countries with their own local laws it’s probably safer to be aggressive when it comes to removing content when requested.

    • blackfire@lemmy.world
      41·
      1 year ago

      I think this comes under the ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’ Hanlons razor

    • bobman@unilem.org
      85·
      1 year ago

      ‘Guilty until proven innocent.’

      Glad corporations get the power to make these decisions.

      • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
        32·
        1 year ago

        Well they don’t, hence why they’re taking down posts as required by the countries they operate in and willing to accept a noticable false positive rate to do it.

        • bobman@unilem.org
          15·
          1 year ago

          What are you talking about?

          What requirement is there in India for Facebook to ban Canadians?

          • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
            32·
            1 year ago

            and willing to accept a noticable false positive rate to do it.

            It’d probably help if you fully read the comments you’re replying to lol

            • bobman@unilem.org
              35·
              1 year ago

              So… guilty until proven innocent.

              Like I said. From the very beginning.

              • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
                11·
                1 year ago

                Your first comment was incredibly vague… I was responding to this part:

                Glad corporations get the power to make these decisions.

                However, a high false positive rate is different than assuming every post is “guilty until proven innocent”, and they aren’t mutually exclusive either. Current example here would be the automated removal of CSAM on Lemmy. A model was built to remove CSAM and it has a high rate of false positives. Does this mean that it assumes everything is CSAM until it’s able to confirm it isn’t? No. It could work that way, that’s an implementation detail that I don’t know the specifics of, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it does.

                But really, who cares? The false positive rate matters for site usability for sure, but the rest is an implementation detail in an AI model, it isn’t the court of law. Nobody’s putting you in Facebook prison because they accidentally mistook your post for rule breaking.