I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I was solely addressing the fact that both are violence, and asking for either is advocating for violence. Exercise for the reader to decide if they think either is moral or just, which is a completely different issue.
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.
Of course one can advocate for violence without participating in it directly. For example, you could call for a riot. Or for the death of someone directly.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
I guess I’m not a reasonable person then? Advocating for state sanctioned killing is no different to me, in terms of advocating violence per se, than advocating anyone else do the killing. There are surely other distinctions to be made, but “the state should implement violence” isn’t categorically different from any other actor in the same configuration.
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 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.
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.
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.
That's why the analogy is so good! The police car and ambulance were the most obvious ones to me (other than the Honda Civic); surfboard and ice skates were much tougher. It shows how we're really seeing things through our own lenses, even when they seem so obvious that no one could conceivably disagree.
Also interesting: the fact that 50% more people described a skateboard being used as a vehicle than a skateboard being carried.
It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
think the fundamental difference is that “vehicle” can be broken down into a number of concrete subcategories that cover the vast majority of vehicles that people use in practice, while “hate speech” and “speech glorifying violence” are often very nebulous and hard to define.
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
- A bike? No.
- A moped? No.
- An unpowered scooter? Yes.
- A powered scooter? No.
- A skateboard? Yes.
- Roller skates? Yes.
- A wheelchair? Yes.
- A powered wheelchair? Yes.
- A car? No.
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.
And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”. If you look on any social network you’ll find you can report people for saying things that clearly fall under those categories. Like if you’re calling someone a slur, or threatening them, or telling them to kill themselves, those are all pretty clearly out of bounds!
And, I mean, to be clear: there will always be weaselly “oh-but-I-didnt-technically-break-the rules” comments like that Donald Trump tweet. But the whole point of this is that you’ll never be able to make a rule with an objective definition! These are not mathematically defined sets; someone will always need to make a judgment call.
> I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”.
what if this was a forum that rebels to the gov't are using to discuss how they will form the revolution? Is that now disallowed, because what they discuss could be considered hate speech?
What if this group of rebels (or freedom fighters as they call it) is someone you personally want to support?
What if this group are labeled terrorists by other governments?
It's not so black and white tbh. It's only black and white when you imagine yourself to be the authority.
Can you not with the victimhood mentality? There isn’t a single major social network — let alone many — on which explicitly calling for genocide does not run afoul of the moderation policy, and we both know it.
>
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
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But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
The crux of this really is about whether the ambulance is violating the rule "no fahrzeug in the park".
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
> If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
What are A and B here? Points in space? Distinct venues? Are we counting the primary use or any possible use? (e.g. most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure). These things are why I agree with the above poster that mode of transportation is practically more ambiguous than vehicle
> most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure
Via going by skateboard, a transportation happens. Whether you do it recreationally or not does not have anything to do with whether a skateboard is a mode of transportation (or not).
A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
Full on pedantry here, but a snowmobile will still work without snow, perhaps not long, but while it works it will be faster than walking. A motorcycle goes faster than walking without gas downhill. You can also use it as a really heavy dandy horse.
You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles," they are usually things like "no hateful language," which is so vague, that "no vehicles" is beginning to look pretty cut-and-dry by comparison
> You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles,"
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
Is it? It seems there's a clear majority that vehicle = operational motor vehicle. The only two that are even close to 50/50nare the non functioning memorial tank, and the bicycle. I guess that shows a disagreement between those assuming functioning is a requirement, and those reading into the intent (which is devices operating at human scale in pedestrian spaces capable of achieving a speed that would cause injury). But neither of those interpretations are surprising
I don't think you do get the point - the point is that unless you define every single word in a rule (like how legislation has a definitions page), it's very hard to do simple content moderation in a way that everyone agrees
This is silly, though? Rules and legislation is also usually layered in such a way that other rules can supercede.
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
Regardless of whether you do actually get the point, when multiple comments indicate that they think that you didn't get the point that tells you that you have failed to communicate that you got the point. Doubling down doesn't help
I do not know how to communicate "I got the point" more than "I got the point". Please tell me how to communicate "I got the point" better than saying "I got the point".
They think I didn't get the point, but they're wrong. Hope that helps!
It's definitely a rhetorical challenge, and even if TFA is using a poor analogy, it does serve to illustrate this problem, which feels to me like part of what it is trying to communicate.
I have a lot of experience thinking that I get the point of someone else's argument, and then realizing later that I didn't actually get the point, or not in a way that was useful to both parties in the conversation
When I don't feel understood it's usually because the counterparty hasn't said things that allow me to recognize that they have internalized what I'm trying to communicate
Changing tack a little, I think that this is one of the things that I admire about some legal writing, that they are intentionally addressing the act of communication in addition to the substance of what they are communicating. In addition there is a recognition that their words have consequence
This whole debate is funny because it's exactly what the game itself is about. Everyone sees this as a very clear, unambiguous thing, and the other side must be misunderstanding it. If only I explain it the right way, they'll be forced to concede to my point of view. It's the only valid one! They can't possibly understand it and come to a different conclusion!
In this case, there are just three angry internet commenters who want to tell someone else they're wrong. It's not GP's problem. I agree with GP -- it's a bad metaphor. GP doesn't owe you litigating that in depth.
Do content moderation rules define "violence" or "harassment"?
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
> the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
>In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
> This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
> For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.