Oh no. Oh no, someone forgot the negation somewhere. Oh dear. - ThreadSky

rahaeli.bsky.social • 11 hours ago

Oh no. Oh no, someone forgot the negation somewhere. Oh dear.

*cw violence*

New: An "error" suddenly turned people's Reels feeds into neverending scrolls of murder, death, animal abuse, and violence.

Truly horrifying stuff, one of the worst things I've seen happen to random consumers of the internet.

www.404media.co/instagram-er...

Comments

i-am-j.ag•10 hours ago

Ohhh... Don't _don't_ bother Luke.

ramblindragon.bsky.social•9 hours ago

Looks like it's fucked up on Facebook too.

coffinsneeze.bsky.social•10 hours ago

this is extremely fucked up

AND

this comment made me howl

frandroid.bsky.social•11 hours ago

My take on this is that Facebook developers are writing a lot less tests since the job cuts

boombutton.bsky.social•11 hours ago

I've seen people claim that AI is great for writing tests because so much of test code is boilerplate

This causes me great pain

ruthsteen.bsky.social•5 hours ago

In my experience it's great at writing tests as long as you don't actually need those tests to run.

wkrick.bsky.social•10 hours ago

That's going to work out fabulously when they train the AI on code from programmers who don't know how (or don't care) to write good tests. And then the AI starts training on output from other AI and it's a race to the bottom. What could possibly go wrong?

nippymobisto.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Fuck #Meta

edgaillard.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Or somebody decided to create Ken MacLeod's _The Execution Channel_.

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

On any site, there's a subset of content that's not violent or upsetting enough to be a Terms of Service violation, but that a large number of people will find upsetting or distressing. Like everywhere, Meta uses machine learning to identify that content and not show it to those people.

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

(Yes, there are also people who want to see it: there are lots of reasons why that don't include making judgements about the viewer. For instance, a war reporter might need to search for frontline videos, which are often violent and upsetting to people, etc.)

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

"Violence and danger" is one of the hardest categories to moderate, because there is very often a public interest reason for it to exist, and public interest reasoning tests are *incredibly* difficult to balance.

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

It's also difficult because, as I've said a million times, people rate content from people they like and agree with as less violent and objectionable than content from people they dislike and disagree with, *even when it's the exact same content*.

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Sites attempt to classify content to the degree of violence it contains and filter out violent content so it isn't shown to people who don't want to see it. It's not a perfect system, which is why sometimes you see stuff that you don't want to see, but if it was suggesting ALL violent content?

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Yeah, somebody fucked up a change that does the first-pass filtering and it was selecting FOR the violent content, not against it. Which makes me wonder if people who trained their algorithm to show them just violent content were getting kitten videos.

marshviper.bsky.social•10 hours ago

What's puzzling me is that people who didn't want to see the content were *watching the videos*

like... what? they didn't stop clicking through the filter thingy or just close the app after the first one or two?

People mystify me sometimes, honestly they do!

benwolfevision.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Waves in “studies on-road hazard detection”

marshviper.bsky.social•10 hours ago

well that suddenly sounds like a much more disturbing field now that you put it that way

benwolfevision.bsky.social•10 hours ago

So, I study how drivers perceive their environments... which means we use videos of near-crashes to understand visuo-acquisitive processes

gojiraspouse.bsky.social•11 hours ago

What the FUUUUCK??? So glad I’m not on Instagram.

I only use Facebook messenger to chat/video chat with close friends/family.

hypercalcium.bsky.social•10 hours ago

You joke but I could almost believe it, since there was that incident on Google where a misplaced forward slash marked every single website as malicious
But shouldn’t testing have caught this?
Can you imagine the video equivalent of EICAR?

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Yeah, despite the joke, the systems are a LOT more complex than a single negation and it's often very difficult to test until you get real-world examples of recommendations!

hypercalcium.bsky.social•10 hours ago

“Black Canary” testing but the canary is stuff that will mess you up for life

natanael.bsky.social•7 hours ago

Because there's so many possible classifications you need a lot of test videos, and if anybody forget to set "and also, the test video" in a filter, or even sets the wrong one, it can fail in the very same way.

Another option is multiple hierarchical or parallel filters

rich.lafferty.ca•4 hours ago

"WHY AM I GETTING GORE ON MY RACISM APP" omg i am dead

kitauthor.com•11 hours ago

Is it an "error" though? I noticed Facebook reels/shorts whatever they're called are increasingly more morbid and awful and like "why would someone make a video of this?"

rahaeli.bsky.social•11 hours ago

People have always been making that content, it's just usually filtered out before it gets to you. I'd imagine that most sites are struggling with the upswing in angry, depressed, or nihilistic content in the last month: a lot more people are posting way more of it.

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Sites like Meta properties that do heavy algorithmic manipulation of timelines have accounts sorted into bins of what content they usually produce, in addition to sorting the actual content. The sorting the actual content moves quickly, but the bins your account is assigned to change more slowly.

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Example: I might be in the theoretical "posts about technology" bin, among others. If I renounce technology and go to be a llama herder, it will take a long time for the sorting to take me out of that bin, because I have years of content about tech.

ebrillblaiddes.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Also, that might be plagiarizing Shep's life plan.

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

"Renouncing technology and going into animal husbandry" is a surprisingly common tech burnout route!

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

The site will keep showing my posts to people who have indicated interest (by interacting with) in content about tech for a while, because a few weeks of not posting about a specific topic isn't enough to make them reclassify you.

rahaeli.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Likewise, usually a few weeks of *posting* about specific things won't be enough to make them reclassify you. So if someone who was exclusively posting cat pics switches to posting exclusively about politics, it will take a while for the classification system to catch up.

natanael.bsky.social•6 hours ago

This reminds me of a hilarious sentiment spam filter almost-issue on a Lemmy server, there was a filter which filtered out certain bad content based on being very distant from the majority content - and increasing volume of posts could accidentally flip the sign and invert the filter effect

rahaeli.bsky.social•5 hours ago

Yup! It's very common -- autodetection breaks very often when there's a sudden influx of new people or what people post shifts suddenly.

sarabcmtl.bsky.social•11 hours ago

My insta has been pushing racist, violent, and religious stuff on me for a few hours yesterday. It's an interesting combination if you ask me.

saffship.bsky.social•6 hours ago

so glad i bailed months ago.

natanael.bsky.social•7 hours ago

Every filter can be inverted, example 46743238

waketosleep.bsky.social•10 hours ago

I’m so glad I don’t use Instagram anymore because reading the list of brief descriptions of all the snuff videos that poster saw made me a little sick

gengarro.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Oh my God, Meta actually made the Torment Nexus

eschneider.bsky.social•10 hours ago

VIdeodrome as documentary.

alexsavard.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Move fast and break things, eh?

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