[HN Gopher] XCheck at Meta: Why it exists and how it works
___________________________________________________________________
XCheck at Meta: Why it exists and how it works
Author : nindalf
Score : 196 points
Date : 2022-10-16 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nindalf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nindalf.com)
| smrtinsert wrote:
| oars wrote:
| I would love to work at a FAANG in the future to gain exposure to
| these interesting problems and systems at huge scale.
| philjohn wrote:
| They're interesting problems for sure; it's equal parts fun,
| technically challenging, and then you get to throw in having to
| quickly react to adversarial responses.
| civilized wrote:
| > Maybe after 5 or 10 or 100 reports, the system will
| automatically make the reported content invisible.
|
| This explains why so much "moderation" on sites like Twitter
| seems to lack any rhyme or reason.
| numair wrote:
| I think that the key takeaway from the entire Wire vs Meta fiasco
| is that there is a lot of absolutely weird Spy vs. Spy behavior
| going in the Indian political and media industries.
|
| I was initially extremely sympathetic to the story presented by
| The Wire, because it's quite believable that Meta/FB would go to
| extreme lengths to try to distance themselves from such a
| situation, but the facts ... just ... don't add up. As Alex
| Stamos has noted, there is little debate regarding collusion
| between Meta's "government relations" people and policy groups,
| so that's not really much of a scandal -- it's not like Meta will
| deny that Modi was treated like a divine being when he visited
| their campus, so the idea that his people can easily call in a
| favor to crush a social media post won't really surprise anyone.
|
| The bulletproof evidence with DKIM authentication and a video of
| a logged-in admin instance doesn't look so bulletproof after all,
| based on the credible reports from those who know how Meta's
| admin tooling actually looks and functions, and those with other
| DKIM authenticated emails from the fb.com domain.
|
| So, the question is, what's the agenda here? Why would someone go
| through all of this effort, to create a scandal out of something
| that is not very far from the truth? What's the point of this
| entire thing? Maybe this is like Nick Denton and Gawker losing
| their entire business over the stupidest sex tape story ever; or
| maybe this is part of something else that requires domain
| knowledge regarding Indian politics and media to understand (do
| page views monetize _so_ well that this mini-scandal is going to
| be super-profitable to The Wire? Highly doubtful, right? What
| could they possibly get out of this?).
|
| The whole thing is just really weird. It's also a major
| distraction from the very real problems that Meta doesn't even
| try to hide. Meta's relationship with the governments in various
| countries -- including the United States -- is way too close for
| comfort, and absolutely toxic on multiple levels. If this story
| turns out to be fake news, it'll do a lot to help the company
| deny, deflect and discredit the next _real_ scandal. I think this
| is what the wacky conspiracy theorists call "4D chess," but I
| don't think that's what's happening here.
|
| The true story behind all of this is bound to be very strange,
| and very stupid.
| moomin wrote:
| I'm nitpicking, but the reason Gawker went bust was because
| someone went out of their way to make sure they did. Sure the
| tape was the proximate cause, but if it hadn't been that, it'd
| have been something else.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| I'd speculate this is part of an "Opposition research" move by
| a political party that might benefit.
|
| The extreme lengths that these people seem to have gone to is
| shocking. Whatever it is, FB has the evidence on their servers
| as Alex Stamos points out since they created a Workspace
| instance.
| nindalf wrote:
| Based on my conversation with the editor of the Wire, he seems
| sincere in his belief in this source. He is a respected
| journalist with decades of experience so he wouldn't trash that
| just for a few clicks.
|
| My read is that he wants this story to be true so much that
| he's ignoring evidence to the contrary.
|
| As for why the source is doing this, I couldn't say.
| numair wrote:
| Thanks, this is very helpful. It would be wild if this was a
| very carefully crafted campaign meant to bait The Wire into
| blowing itself up over an almost-true but totally fake news
| story. Now I _really_ want to know where this all ends up.
| sa1 wrote:
| If the story is false, it's not just the source, at least the
| tech person making the videos at Wire is in on it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Normally such content would be taken down after sufficient
| number of reports were received.
|
| I can't be the only one who sees a problem with this. No content
| should ever be taken down automatically just because a bunch of
| random people report it.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > No content should ever be taken down automatically just
| because a bunch of random people report it.
|
| Serious question, why not?
| fragmede wrote:
| Because you have no idea if those reports are at all genuine,
| or if the reporters met up elsewhere (online or off) in order
| to brigade and mass-report said content, with the intention
| of getting it taken down despite breaking no rules.
| Sometimes, the coordination isn't even necessary, it just
| needs to be the right target posting something online. (Eg
| someone's gone and reported every post by a politician you
| dislike for hate speech and inciting violence.)
| ummonk wrote:
| That's why politicians tend to get X-Check.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| So I work at Meta and just got MetaMorphized s/@fb/@meta/g.
|
| When I started, my personal account was banned twice on the
| condition of adjusting 2FA. It was sorted out. I had a past
| account that I could no longer access as email domains changed,
| so it looked like I was trying to maintain duplicate accounts.
| Why it triggered on adjusting 2FA didn't make sense. Then, it
| wanted me to verify my identity in a way that created a Catch-22
| of wanting a login from itself or to a device that didn't have a
| valid login session. I set the options for better security and
| left it, rolled all of my personal passwords, eliminated public
| data, canceled unnecessary social media accounts, and enrolled in
| security features like Google's Advanced Protection Program. I'm
| hesitant to make changes risking getting locked-out again.
|
| I recently spoke with someone in Readiness who works with hiring
| human verifier contractors around the world. A primary issue is
| scale. You would need to hire the entire world's population to
| moderate the content being produced. Still there will be bias and
| misinterpretation of sarcasm, and varying standards of
| acceptability and decorum. AI is a force-multiplier to an extent,
| but it takes human judgement to rectify mistakes and data to
| identify brigades, scammers, terrorists, and political
| manipulators seeking to exploit an imperfect system. Sadly, the
| humans with the best judgement typically have better career
| options that they couldn't be paid to do social media moderation.
| It can be made better, but the ultimate realization is with even
| great care, good intentions, and attempts at making things
| sensible and fair, there are always going to be mistakes. It's
| trying to minimize mistakes and not enable genocides, election
| sentiment manipulation, or product scams. It's doable to minimize
| mistakes, but it take persistent vigilance, wisdom about human
| nature, and creative solutions to deter and prevent harm while
| avoiding harming innocent persons. Mistakes are bad and
| disappointing and it feels bad when they happen.
|
| In case anyone were wondering, the security is the inverse of
| Twitter's. Everything is logged and access requires a business
| purpose for a limited time, narrow scope, and approval to get
| that access. Almost no one has access to production data. PII is
| taken very seriously. There are no laptops with copies of user
| data. All laptops are encrypted, just in case, and for general
| principles. Password complexity requirements are insane. I can
| see my work/personal FBID user object in the graph, but as soon
| as I try to prod any links to other users, big warnings appear.
| There's an army of insane genius security researchers and
| practitioners who create and deploy defense-in-depth tools for
| broad and specific solutions to prod, corp, and endpoints that
| reduce our risks to being compromised, data being exfil'd, and
| security "oops"es from happening.
|
| Work users who transit through certain "hostile" countries lose
| some security credentials and access. I'm actually wondering why
| laptops aren't spot-checked for malware implants and
| hardware/firmware modifications. I would assume employees with
| critical access who travel internationally with their work
| laptops and phones are prime targets.
|
| PS: I wonder if people would pay $X / month (say $199) to have a
| high-signal social media service that requires a level of
| "vouching" invitation, names with faces profiles (not visible to
| the wider internet), sensible/proportional mediation and
| civilized feedback, politically-neutral, and free speech-loving
| to increase the sense of community and reduce the potential of
| anonymous bad actors. 37signals/basecamp accumulated research
| that showed that smaller communities with faces and real profile
| names lead to nicer interactions. I don't recall the source, but
| communities that are defended in terms of politeness and
| boundaries tend to endure while undefended communities drive away
| users and tend to disperse.
| itake wrote:
| I wish they would explain what xcheck is and how it works before
| the talk about the problems with it. This reads like a blog post
| to other Integrity FB engineers that already know that system.
| nindalf wrote:
| It's explained later on but I could be clearer.
|
| XCheck is a system that supports tagging specific accounts with
| tags that exempt that account from certain integrity
| enforcement. In the post I give an example of a tag that used
| to exempt accounts from the fake account checkpoint. Applying
| these tags is usually a manual process and usually carefully
| vetted.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Can you explicitly state that those tags are not used for
| _ANYTHING_ else?
|
| ie, is it possible that there are classifiers you may not be
| aware of that take this tag into account while taking down
| other accounts? Are there _ANY_ safeguards to ensure the
| visibility or use of these tags is restricted to this one use
| case alone?
|
| You and I both know the answer to that based on Privacy
| documents leaked earlier where engineers explicitly stated
| what a mess the data control and accountability systems at
| Facebook were[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21716382-facebook-
| da...
| nindalf wrote:
| > Can you explicitly state
|
| I can't explicitly state that because I can't look at the
| code right now. What I can say is that I would be very
| surprised if it was. XCheck isn't meant to be called
| explicitly by integrity detection. Detection should make
| its own decision and take the action on the account or
| content. During action enforcement XCheck is implicitly
| called.
|
| But anyhow, if you're looking for an employee to explicitly
| state that XCheck isn't used this way, here's one
| (https://twitter.com/guyro/status/1579835594980864001)
|
| > The stories are simply incorrect about the cross-check
| program, which was built to prevent potential over-
| enforcement mistakes. It has nothing to do with the ability
| to report posts, as alleged in the article.
| mox1 wrote:
| Your asking him to prove a negative, of course he cannot do
| that...
| swores wrote:
| No, they're asking for a negative to be claimed not a
| negative to be proven. "Can you
| explicitly *state* that..."
|
| "State" meaning to say or write a claim, no proof
| involved.
| tourist2d wrote:
| Trying to "gotcha" someone being helpful and replying to
| comments is quite rude. No one working at Facebook would
| reply yes to that comment, which makes it quite worthless.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| SilverBirch wrote:
| It makes sense from a technical perspective why you'd build a
| system like XCheck. The problem is that once you build XCheck you
| actually need to say to your C-suite and PR department "Actually
| no, you can't say we treat everyone equally, we're manually going
| in and exempting certain people from scrutiny, and that's
| entirely within our discretion."
|
| The problem isn't technical, it's legal - you can't build a
| system that operates one way and then publicly misrepresent it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Legally, their TOS probably allows them to be completely opaque
| and arbitrary.
|
| And any system which involves reporting from the public will
| need to build a "this account gets lots of false reports of
| category X, to save time assume they're all false" system. As
| well as "all the reports made by this user are bogus".
| yeasurebut wrote:
| 8note wrote:
| I think the tag based system infers everyone is treated the
| same. Everyone can get the tag.
|
| That's opposed to an Id or different account types, where if
| you didn't register with a specific type, you cannot be granted
| that same exemption
| etchalon wrote:
| There are no laws which say a company has to be transparent and
| accurate when discussing its moderation systems.
| lmm wrote:
| Given that people pay to advertise on facebook, any false
| statements they make about their moderation systems via the
| internet almost certainly constitute wire fraud.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| > "Actually no, you can't say we treat everyone equally, we're
| manually going in and exempting certain people from scrutiny,
| and that's entirely within our discretion."
|
| Isn't that literally what Twitter does as well? Making
| exceptions for Politicians and Government Representatives? Or
| does HN's bias towards Twitter exempt it from any form of
| scrutiny?
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't think this has too much with celebrities, but about
| exempting "problematic people" from being repeatedly banned
| by algorithmic and applied AI systems. IOW, they don't have
| controls over internal mechanisms of so-called algorithms,
| and a separate suppression system is used to reduce harm.
| nl wrote:
| > Isn't that literally what Twitter does as well? Making
| exceptions for Politicians and Government Representatives? Or
| does HN's bias towards Twitter exempt it from any form of
| scrutiny?
|
| What a completely bizarre comment.
|
| No one mentioned Twitter, there is no "HN" general viewpoint,
| and if I had to say I'd say most comments on HN about Twitter
| are negative.
|
| I'd say this could be the worst case of "Whataboutism" I've
| ever seen, but it is such a weird thing to use "what about"
| regarding.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| When it comes to India, Twitter is typically at the
| forefront of mainstreaming propaganda and selectively
| applying rules. So my perspective comes from that (since
| this article concerns feud between Meta and The Wire which
| covers India). Whenever Twitter gets mentioned (atleast in
| HN) concerning its role in policy with regards to
| politicians it mostly gets a pass.
|
| Let me put it this way: what you feel Meta is doing in the
| West, is what many in India (like me) feel Twitter is doing
| here. And the sentiment I see is mostly anti Meta and
| mostly pro Twitter here.
|
| After all it is my perspective and I could be wrong (as I
| obviously don't have statistics to say if HN definitely has
| a Twitter bias or not). But I believe I have a right to
| express my opinion on what I feel is HN sentiment towards
| big tech censorship (which mostly circles around Meta but
| rarely around Twitter).
| 8note wrote:
| I haven't seen twitter getting a pass? When trump finally
| got the boot, the comments were along the lines of "the
| only thing that can't get you kicked off of twitter is to
| run an insurrection against the US government"
| caslon wrote:
| [deleted]
| crmd wrote:
| Legal will certainly advise leadership they can continue
| claiming that the system treats everyone equally, because scope
| of the word system includes the entire Trust organization
| people + automation, and "equally" can mean almost whatever
| Mark needs it to mean.
|
| "Senator, thank you for the question. We treat everyone
| equally. To be clear this means every single user on our
| platform is subject to the same terms of service they agreed to
| when signing up."
| lazide wrote:
| Why can't they exactly?
| xani_ wrote:
| As facebook shows you can, and get away with it.
| localhost wrote:
| This is an excellent piece which really does a good job at
| explaining the nuance that exists in this challenging problem
| domain. Thank you for writing this. It's a great piece to point
| to whenever the next scandal gets "exposed" by click-seeking
| folks on the internet.
| asah wrote:
| "The number of reports number in the millions per day. That's too
| many for human moderators"
|
| Isn't Reddit the counterexample?
|
| A dozen of us moderated a controversial sub with 2M users, no
| problem.
| HiJon89 wrote:
| With 2 million users, I imagine it would be on the order of
| thousands of posts per day, and maybe hundreds of reports?
| otterley wrote:
| > a system that exists and mostly works is preferred to a
| hypothetical perfect system that is never built.
|
| At any sufficiently large scale - especially with a product
| you're not paying for - this is the best you're likely to get.
| Once you fully understand and embrace this, your stress levels
| about imperfection tend to go way down.
| trasz wrote:
| bagels wrote:
| What is an example of "this" being done properly?
| pilgrimfff wrote:
| > this has been done properly numerous times in the past
|
| I'm genuinely curious if you have any examples of this. I'm
| not aware of any modern product at scale that doesn't suffer
| from these same issues.
| trasz wrote:
| Every newspaper and pretty much any other medium over the
| past century or so. That's what editors used to do.
|
| Scaling is not the problem - profits scale with the number
| of users, the cost of moderation would too, in the worst
| case. The problem is company's unwillingness to pay
| anything at all. Their profits didn't came from offering a
| good product, but from discovering a new way to offload the
| costs of their operation while keeping the income. In this
| case - by pretending to be a part telco, part newspaper
| (which brings income), but without taking their main
| responsibilities (which cost money).
| [deleted]
| nl wrote:
| A little unclear what analogy you are using here.
|
| Newspaper editors don't have to deal with large scale
| attempts to publish material as journalists on the
| newspaper's staff - or insofar as they do have to deal
| with it they just ignore unsolicited submissions. That's
| the closest analogy I can see in the newspaper business.
| djohnston wrote:
| When people say that I imagine them thinking about a web
| forum with 200 monthly visitors.
| yardstick wrote:
| > That works well for about two weeks until users figure out how
| to exploit this. They form groups that agree to coordinate to
| report content. Now reports become lower signal than before, but
| still somewhat useful. We use the reports, but try to limit
| exploitation.
|
| What about human employees reviewing users reports, especially
| randomly picked samples from those that resulted in successful
| takedowns. If the content was found to be sound under the rules,
| penalise the reporters. Suspend their ability to make reports
| (probably in the form of silently ignoring them).
|
| Ie some human moderation should still be done at this scale, but
| using a combo of random sampling and system-flagged-suspicious.
| xani_ wrote:
| I remember Dota2 (video game) did this, people fake reporting
| had less reports and they counted for less, while people that
| were consistently reported players that got punished got more
| reporting power. Only one report per match "counted" too so a
| group of player couldn't gang on reports on one player.
|
| Of course that could be abused as well,but you'd have to make a
| group of people that first got the good rating then reported
| same people and that would be significantly harder
| qualudeheart wrote:
| So that's why I was never banned from Dota even though I
| sucked at it.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Well that just sounds like Bayes's theorum with extra steps
| coredog64 wrote:
| This is Slashdot's meta-moderation system from 20(?) years ago?
| Logged in users would randomly be selected to check moderation,
| and accounts that abused their mod points were flagged.
| Granted, you probably couldn't do that today as you could see
| meta-moderation brigades out in the wild. Employees should be
| better, although there's still the chance that an employee
| might use their position to punish opinions they disagree with.
| MBCook wrote:
| I remember that. After a while I was "randomly" chosen to
| meta-mod all the time. But I know others were almost never
| chosen.
|
| Clearly the actions were reviewed so people's percentage
| change could be adjusted based on seeming fairness.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| dang wrote:
| It's a nice impulse to try to explain the background to this
| story, but the gratuitous flamebait you tossed in is bad, and
| bad outweighs good in these things.
|
| Please eliminate nationalistic/political flamebait from your HN
| posts. It leads to nationalistic/political flamewars, which are
| hellish and exactly what we don't want here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| navigate8310 wrote:
| > run by a US citizen of Indian origin who hates India, the
| current government and probably himself as well.
|
| Seems like an insightful thought straight from Reddit.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| The background about Meta and The Wire, along with Alex Stamos'
| great thread about inconsistencies can be presented without
| resorting to conjecture on your part about the motivations of
| the owners of the publication.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| > can be presented without resorting to conjecture on your
| part about the motivations of the owners of the publication
|
| Why not? Are journalists different from politicians that we
| should not hold them accountable? We know these journalists
| quite well and we know what their political leanings are.
| This is not the first time they have done this. Won't be the
| last either. So calling them out is not a wrong thing.
| random_ind_dude wrote:
| You know, someone not liking the current Indian government
| doesn't mean they hate India. To those in the US, Meta meddling
| in politics and turning a blind eye to those who used the
| platform to peddle misinformation isn't news.
|
| Ankhi Das, a top Facebook India executive left the company in
| 2020 over allegations by the WSJ that the company favoured the
| ruling party when it came to removing posts that violated its
| hate-speech rules. So putting business above integrity is
| nothing new for Facebook in India either.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| > Meta meddling in politics and turning a blind eye to those
| who used the platform to peddle misinformation isn't news.
|
| But Twitter doing the same is perfectly fine right? I see the
| hypocrisy in HN when it comes to how it treats Meta vs how it
| treats Twitter.
| webartisan wrote:
| I don't get this Whataboutery? The news story and the
| article is about Meta - why bring Twitter or any other
| media into discussion, unless you want to distract from the
| topic at hand.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| Because I have seen this bias on HN. I feel the need to
| call it out. Why is it bothering you? Can't I have my
| opinion? Or should I be forced to conform to everyone's
| opinion here? I'm no sheep. I have my own independent
| thinking and I base my opinions on that. I am infact
| against Big Tech censorship as a whole. What I find
| amusing is that Big Tech on HN gets preferential
| treatment based on which side of the political aisle one
| is on (as the Company you support or are against depends
| on the Company's overarching political leaning).
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > who hates India, the current government and probably himself
| as well ... As someone who dislikes both Meta and The Wire,
| this is a source of great entertainment.
|
| As an American it's fascinating how the tone of HN completely
| changes whenever the merits of cancel culture, the Internet
| Archive, or the current government of India comes up. It's an
| odd list.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| Because, believe it or not, plenty of Indians are satisfied
| with the current Government in India. We have had shit
| Governments for more than 70 years. So don't be surprised if
| Indians don't support Western media narratives on Indian
| Government (which is mostly fabricated/fake).
| webartisan wrote:
| I think you should speak for yourself instead of for all
| Indians. You believing or not believing something has
| little effect on facts. Bullying everyone into believing
| your unquestioned love for the present day government is
| rather disenginious.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| LMFAO I'm the only one on this page defending the current
| government. Please don't talk of "bullying" especially on
| HN which is anti Indian Government for a very long time
| and anyone who dares to raise a counterpoint gets down
| voted to oblivion or worse banned. No comment against the
| Government goes unchallenged for the most part. I'm in
| the minority here. And i did not speak for "all Indians"
| nor did i claim that anywhere. I said "plenty of
| Indians". Don't expect me to compensate for your lack of
| reading comprehension.
|
| Facts state that the current Government enjoys sizeable
| vote share and that is purely for its policies and
| performance. And that definitely is the ground reality
| whether you like it or not. It won't change facts because
| you despise the Government for whatever beliefs you hold.
|
| And i saw your earlier comments. Typical anti Government
| propaganda that I have come to expect on HN here. No
| wonder you guys aren't getting the votes needed to win
| elections.
|
| As far as facts is concerned, the fact is this Government
| will get re-elected in 2024. No matter how much
| propaganda you wish to spread. It has little to no impact
| on the ground as people are fully aware of what is
| happening. We are not fools here.
|
| > "Has little effects on facts"
|
| Exactly. Prove your facts. The Wire has been caught with
| its pants down fabricating a big lie. It's not the first
| time either. We all remember Rafale deal. How Rahul
| Gandhi screamed on top of his lungs "Chowkidar chor hai".
| What happened to that? Why did the issue die down?
|
| Has the Opposition ever taken any accusation it levelled
| against the Government or Modi to logical conclusion?
| Nope.
|
| Lost in public debates, lost in elections, lost in Court
| and now losing even in Media propaganda as well. For how
| long will you keep blaming everyone else except
| yourselves for the electoral debacles? From EVM hacks to
| Rafale corruption and everything in between. None of
| these issues were taken to logical conclusions. Just wild
| accusations and then dropped just as easily.
|
| If I could earn a dollar for every accusation the
| Opposition has levelled without taking it to resolution,
| I would be rich by now. Accusing is cheap. Anyone can
| accuse anyone of anything. Proving it is the hard part.
| And Opposition has failed miserably in proving any of
| their accusations. Even in the Court of Law.
|
| What India needs is a serious Opposition that actually
| works for the people and has its ears to the ground.
| Sadly we do not have a good Opposition. Opposition is
| only thriving on propaganda and fly-by-night operations
| that involves making wild accusations without
| substantiating it. I remember one Opposition supporter
| talking about NRC draft (during Anti CAA protests - more
| like riots) when such a draft did not even exist nor was
| it tabled in the Parliament of India. This is the reason
| why Opposition doesn't get enough votes to come to power.
| It's not serious about anything.
| wiml wrote:
| This is a mildly interesting post only because of how it comes up
| to, but avoids ever talking about, the central flaw in the system
| it describes -- they're conflating several things without ever
| really acknowledging that they're different. Theres "integrity",
| which is a Meta-internal term; verification of ID, which is a far
| deeper rabbit hole than they're going to go into; abuse; and
| undesirable behavior. They're all different things.
| zug_zug wrote:
| nindalf wrote:
| Thanks for the email. But I think it should be fine.
|
| I haven't said anything that could be exploited by bad actors.
| As for competitors, there are no competitors in integrity. The
| entire industry goes to great lengths to share knowledge on
| what works and what doesn't. We all win when we combat abuse
| well.
| hitekker wrote:
| You should be fine. The GP seemed to have forgotten they're
| not posting on FB"s internal workplace.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Well now my interest is piqued 1000%!
| navigate8310 wrote:
| 10th Oct: If BJP's Amit Malviya Reports Your Post, Instagram
| Will Take it Down - No Questions Asked
| https://thewire.in/tech/amit-malviya-instagram-meta-xcheck
|
| 11th Oct: 'How the Hell Did Document Leak?' - Meta Internal
| Mail Belies 'Fabricated' Charge Against The Wire
| https://thewire.in/tech/meta-xcheck-internal-email-watchlist
|
| 15th Oct: Meta Said Damaging Internal Email is 'Fake', URL
| 'Not in Use', Here's Evidence They're Wrong
| https://thewire.in/tech/meta-andy-stone-email-xcheck
|
| Basically, ruling party in India is exploiting XCheck program
| to curb any dissent.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Yeah right.
|
| Looks like The Wire got fooled by their source OR is lying.
|
| https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1581407731159748608
| nindalf wrote:
| Like I mention, all of the evidence The Wire has used here
| is likely fabricated. Not by the Wire themselves, but by
| the source they're relying on.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| > Basically, ruling party in India is exploiting XCheck
| program to curb any dissent.
|
| LMFAO. The only problem supporters of the ruling party in
| India (includes me) have with the ruling party in India is
| that it does literally nothing to curb dissent (or acts so
| late it is practically useless). The so called "Farmers
| Protests" (mostly carried out by rich farmers of Punjab,
| Haryana and UP backed by Khalistani Terror Organizations in
| Canada) ran for more than a year. They even blocked main
| roads and highways. For an entire year. So much so that
| Modi had to backtrack on the Progressive Farm Laws that had
| been enacted by the Parliament and set back India's
| Agriculture by 2 decades. So much for "curbing dissent".
|
| Compare that to how quickly Trudeau crushed dissent, within
| weeks of it flaring up, by freezing bank accounts of
| protestors and censoring them. If Modi had done half of
| what Trudeau did (for both Anti-CAA protests and Farmer
| protests) he would have been labelled the "Progeny of
| Hitler" by the media cabal.
|
| The Western Media propaganda has been in full swing for
| past 2 decades against not just the ruling party in India
| but also Modi. And it won't die down as long as there are
| people who will continue to keep spreading this propaganda.
|
| As for the voters in India? The ruling party will come back
| with even bigger majority in 2024.
|
| The West, their media cabal (both in and outside India) and
| their favorite Opposition Party (The Indian National
| Congress) are so disconnected from reality and totally
| missing the real pulse of the people on ground. Only to
| their own folly.
| _micheee wrote:
| Why?
| bagels wrote:
| If they worked at Facebook/Meta they violated their nda and
| put themself in legal peril.
| nindalf wrote:
| I think I'll be fine.
|
| My reasoning is two fold - I haven't shared anything that
| could be exploited by anyone. And second, Meta and others
| in the industry try to share information about how their
| integrity efforts work so we can learn from each other.
| nomel wrote:
| "Legal peril" and "I think" are not compatible, for a
| rational person. "I know" is where you want to be, before
| putting yourself in front of one of the largest
| collections of lawyers on the planet.
| dapids wrote:
| This is not some general blanket approach you can take to
| talking about internal implementations. You are either
| right, or wrong. There is no middle ground or "I think".
| If you've signed an NDA around these internal
| implementations I would wager that NDA came with a clause
| to not discuss it without consulting Meta, even after
| your departure.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And it's obviously BS that companies can abridge a
| citizen's freedom of speech after the employment
| agreement ends. If this individual wants to be the case
| on the lawsuit that's a long time coming, more power to
| them.
|
| This Supreme Court is not big-tech-friendly; good time to
| shift up the precedent.
| nindalf wrote:
| I feel like your concern is genuine. But maybe overblown.
| I haven't shared any trade secrets so I'm confident I'll
| be fine.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| technical people want technical confirmation
|
| that does not exist, they can't understand that
|
| you are fine, thank you for the post
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Have you never seen https://engineering.fb.com/? Engineers
| there blog about their tech tools all the time. "Legal
| peril" sounds like a bit of a stretch.
| bagels wrote:
| Those blog posts likely go through legal, privacy and
| marketing review.
|
| If you think that Facebook wouldn't enforce an NDA,
| especially on something sensitive like this, I think you
| are incorrect.
| wrigby wrote:
| These posts are all thoroughly reviewed by comms and
| legal teams. In onboarding, it's thoroughly communicated
| that you need to go through the proper channels to
| publicly publish anything with technical details.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Keep in mind there has to be damages to be in legal peril.
| Otherwise there can only be social consequences.
| bagels wrote:
| Many NDAs include liquidated damages.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Anecdotally none of the NDAs I've signed included one.
| nvarsj wrote:
| This kind of internal tooling and workflow is almost always
| under NDA.
| doliveira wrote:
| Do you at least get extra money for snitching on a fellow
| worker like that?
| tjpnz wrote:
| https://archive.ph/AK0zi
| crmd wrote:
| He doesn't work there anymore[0]
|
| Also, nobody likes a tattle tale.
|
| [0] https://uk.linkedin.com/in/krishna-sundarram-17a76954
| timzaman wrote:
| How is it people are allowed to blog about company internal
| implementation details and numbers barely a year after they
| leave?
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems unsurprising to me. If you, as a company, want ironclad
| confidentiality from people after they leave, that wouldn't be
| free or automatic. None of what was shared seems to qualify as
| a trade secret, which would have some protection.
| extr wrote:
| I've never worked somewhere that didn't have me sign some
| kind of broad NDA-esque clause saying I wouldn't share
| proprietary or non-public info for a certain period after
| release (imo, completely reasonably). This blog post is
| literally nothing BUT non-public proprietary info. Like the
| parent I'm really surprised the blog author feels comfortable
| sharing all this. Even if it ended up being technically
| legal, I have to imagine this kind of thing is extremely
| frowned upon.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Not to be unduly cynical, but any Public Relations 101 course
| will introduce the importance of third-party messaging, because
| statements coming from outside a company directly involved in
| some (apparent) scandal or other will always carry more weight
| with the public than an official corporate statement.
| Additionally, this kind of distance removes certain concerns
| about legal liability if more insider information is leaked
| later.
|
| [edit] I have no knowledge or opinion on this story, never read
| the Wire, and never use Meta or any of its products. It does,
| however, seem rather clear that governments and corporations
| concerned with controlling message and image do view social
| media platforms as the most important battleground in the
| information wars these days.
| Kiro wrote:
| Why wouldn't they?
| extr wrote:
| Have you ever read your employment contracts? I've never
| worked somewhere that would allow something like this to be
| shared so soon after departure.
| [deleted]
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