Comment by iherbig
3 years ago
I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
In the US legal system, probably elsewhere as well, we have the concept of an "affirmative defense." That means "I committed the crime, but it's OK because of extra facts." That's different from denying one or more elements of the crime.
Example #1: I didn't poison Joe. I was out of town when it happened.
Example #2: I poisoned Joe. He had been sentenced to death, and my job is prison executioner. That's why I injected him with poison.
The second example is an affirmative defense. A murder occurred, but it was not illegal because it was authorized by the state.
I have a feeling that lawyers who took this quiz were more likely to answer yes for the ambulance and police car, but nonlawyers would answer no. That's because most people were answering the question "would they get in trouble?" But lawyers might have been thinking "is there a valid defense to a violation that actually did occur?"
In your example, calling for the death penalty isn't advocating for violence because executing someone in the justice system is legally permissible (let's not get into ethics or morality). The Reddit rule is generally understood to cover only illegal violence.
It specifically notes that some jurisdictions might have exceptions to this sort of rule, but that in this case there isn’t one.
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Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
All rules have countless unspoken caveats and are inherently only able to be interpreted in a cultural context; rules cannot be made so specific as to remove the need for that context. Problems come in when essential parts of that context are not shared by everyone who interacts with the rules.
> Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
Having rules against advocating for violence means that you want to prohibit such calls (otherwise you would have written down such exceptions and admit that calling for violence is sometimes OK).
Let me put it this way: what Reddit secretly wants is not standing up against advocating for violence, but avoiding the reputation risk that might happen if there exist to many post that advocate for violence in a way that causes an outcry.
In other words: the hidden problem is rather Reddit's "secret" agenda behind the rules.
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For whatever reason, it seem like people usually exclude acts undertaken in connection with the state’s monopoly on violence from the scope of these things.
The spirit is that governement is an extension of "the people" and as such this violence is an extension of their own - i.e. in a healthy society the violence perpetrated bt the state is fully known and sanctionned by its citizens.
Like having prisons or letting police use lethal force on dangerous people, some things fit this description - but at some point lines have to be drawn and the leashes have to be reigned in if the violence is not agreed upon anymore - institutionalised racism and the likes.
> Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone.
Note that taking it literally even calling for imprisonment is advocating for violence (unless convict accepts imprisonment voluntarily and not under threat of legal violence by law enforcement).
But what if the statement is in context of jokes, like:
A: *saying something stupid as a joke B: "I hope the country will impose death penalty to those who support it"
Or when it's used as discussion, like this, is it violating the rule?
Strictly speaking, I think calling for the death penalty is advocating for a legal ruling. The violence following such a ruling is a second-order consequence.
"Calling for someone to be shot is advocating for a lever to be pressed. The violence following such a pressing is a second-order consequence."
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It's calling for the state to kill someone. Doesn't seem any less an advocation of violence than advocating for a vigilante killing or advocating for some specific person to do the killing.
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By that logic, no one is advocating violence unless they intend to participate in the violent act directly. It’s a logically consistent position, but it’s also a highly implausible one.
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Now the interesting question is, what would happen if I was to ask for the death penalty on a crime that does not carry the death penalty? Or only carries the death penalty in countries with legal systems that we object to, like Iran?
I doubt their mother sees it in such bloodless terms.
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I think what's being noted is slightly more nuanced than what you're responding to. The analogy is slightly flawed because a few additional indicators remove a lot of the ambiguity, which is possibly not the case at all with moderation, which is often about far more nebulous things. In that way, the comparison is flawed.
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
I mostly thought it was easy to tell if the rule was being violated (the vast majority disagreed with me), but where it gets much more complicated is deciding if a rule should be allowed to be violated. I think most people don't want rules that are blindly enforced without consideration to circumstance/context. We carve out exceptions to rules everywhere in life.
I do get the point, I'm saying that the analogy was bad. The point could have been made better.
it's a nearly perfect analogy for a laymans view of what content moderation should look like.
"my children will see no violence" looks wonderful on paper but there are a great many edge cases where this simple rule is plainly broken all the time in harmless ways.
in reality, what crosses the line one has in mind when they create the simple rule is created is far, far more complex than anyone who makes these rules is prepared to admit.
there is so little "black and white" in these things; it's almost entirely "grey" areas. that's what this quiz is meant to convey.
it is extremely effective at this.
> it's a nearly perfect analogy
People are saying that it's not, and that it's a strawman for what a layman's view of what content moderation should look like.
Heh, I thought the quiz was almost entirely not grey areas. It seems like the police car and ambulance were about as gray as it got, the others seem pretty obviously non-gray.
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