One note on that "final posthumous work" epithet. I'm told that Graeber left behind a *mountain* of unpublished work, in various degrees of done-ness, ranging from notebooks to unpublished articles. I'd be *very* surprised if this was the last work of Graeber's we see in print.

eof/

Before I tell you about how HSBC just announced it wants to literally render the planet Earth unfit for human habitation, I want to talk about HSBC's other crimes. Remember the LIBOR scandal? HSBC was neck-deep in it, costing the world's public coffers *trillions* through fraud?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-23/banks-are-ordered-by-court-to-defend-libor-antitrust-lawsuit

1/

.., getting involved with community radio, venturing to New York City to drink papaya juice and learn mystic secrets from a junk-store owner, and, ultimately, resolving an existential threat to human civilization based on weaponizing a large cohort of Civil War ghosts (she gets help from an ancient witch).

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/25/dwergish-girl/#you-are-a-pickle

2/

"Crazy in Poughkeepsie" is Daniel Pinkwater's standalone, demi-sequel to 2020's "Adventures of Dwergish Girl," a YA novel about a sort-of Catskills leprechaun girl whose coming of age involves moving to human civilization, learning the art of pizza-making....

Some of the phrases Facebook's moderation tool failed to catch:

* "The current killing of the [slur] is not enough, we need to kill more!"

* "They are very dirty. The Bengali/Rohingya women have a very low standard of living and poor hygiene. They are not attractive"

11/

Facebook used legal threats to terrorize accountability groups seeking to hold them to these promises, stating that its in-house tools were sufficient to address its epidemic of paid political disinformation.

13/

Facebook has claimed that:

a) It will filter out messages that promote genocide against Rohingya people;

b) It will subject paid ads to higher levels of scrutiny than other content;

c) It will subject political ads to the highest level of scrutiny.

12/

If you forget and evaluate your model using some of its training data, you're not measuring whether the model can evaluate *new* input correctly - you're just checking to see whether it remembers seeing this input it's already seen.

Incredibly, FB seems to have done the opposite: they've produced a filter than *can't recognize the input it was trained on.*

15/

A common newbie error in machine learning is to forget to hold back training data to evaluate the model with. Training an ML model involves feeding it a bunch of data (say, "messages that foment genocide against Rohingya people") so it can build a statistical model of what its target looks like. Then you take some of that training data - a portion you didn't use to train the model on - and see if the model recognizes it.

14/

Facebook's leadership are accustomed to commanding a machine powerful enough to construct reality itself. That's why they nuked Crowdtangle, their own internal research platform that disproved the company's claims about how its amplification system worked, showing that it was rigged to goose far-right conspiratorialism:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth

4/

All of this is the absolutely predictable consequence of Facebook's deliberate choice to "blitzscale" to the point where they are moderating three billion users' speech in more than 1,000 languages and more than 100 countries. Facebook may secretly like failing at this, but even if they were serious about the project, they would still fail.

6/

And while Facebook claims that it wants to purge its platform of disinformation, the reality is that disinfo is *very* profitable for the company. Ads for financial fraud, identity theft, dangerous scam products, and political disinformation are disproportionately lucrative for Facebook:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness

5/

No one who understands machine learning (except for people extracting fat Big Tech salaries) takes this nonsense seriously. They know ML isn't up to the job.

But even by the standards of machine learning horror stories, the latest Facebook moderation failure is a fucking doozy. Genocidal, even.

8/

Whenever Zuck is dragged in front of Congress and they demand answers about what he's going to do about the open sewer he's trapped billions of internet users in, he always has the same answer: "The AI will fix it."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/ai-will-solve-facebooks-most-vexing-problems-mark-zuckerberg-says-just-dont-ask-when-or-how/

This is the pie-in-the-sky answer for every billionaire grifter (see also: "How will Uber ever turn a profit?").

7/

The human rights org Global Witness tried buying ads on Facebook for eight pro-genocide phrases that had been used during the 2017 genocide. Facebook accepted *all eight ads*, even though they duplicated the messages it promised it would block in the future (Global Witness cancelled the ads before they could run).

https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-bangladesh-myanmar-united-nations-f7d89e38c54f7bae464762fa23bd96b2

10/

Remember when Facebook management sat idly by as its own staff and external experts warned them that the platform was being used to organize genocidal pogroms in Myanmar against the Rohingya people? Remember Facebook's teary apology and promise to do better?

They didn't do better.

9/

Facebook's attacks were truly shameless. They told easily disproved lies (for example, claiming that the plugin gathered sensitive personal data, despite publicly available, audited source-code that proved this was absolute bullshit).

Why was Facebook so desperate to prevent a watchdog from auditing its political ads? Well, the company had promised to curb the rampant paid political disinformation on its platform as part of a settlement with regulators.

2/

In the fall of 2020, Facebook went to war against Ad Observatory, a NYU-hosted crowdsourcing project that lets FB users capture the paid political ads they see through a browser plugin that santizes them of personal information and then uploads them to a portal that disinformation researchers can analyze.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#son-of-power-ventures

1/

Facebook said that its own disinfo research portal showed it was holding up its end of the bargain, and the company hated that Ad Observatory showed that this portal was a bad joke:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

3/

Those of us with roots in Ukraine and Russia have a somewhat different picture of events as they unfold. In addition to viral videos, OSINT, pundits, and even sensible commentary, we're also part of heartbreaking conversations with our families.

My own roots are in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Romania. The messages I've received from my cousins aren't for public consumption, but suffice to say they've been haunting and frightening.

1/