Facebook Censors User for Mentioning Censorship | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Censors User for Mentioning Censorship

heatst.com

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. While Facebook is legally allowed to censor what they please (at least in the US), they present themselves as a neutral platform. Their CEO was just speaking with political pundits concerned about just this kind of behavior.

Beyond that, Facebook is much closer to a utility than a single media entity these days and it's disturbing to see them wielding political power in this way. They hold a great deal of power over nearly every online media publisher around the world. Even in a case where I agree with their political slant, I don't want to see this happening.

It pains me to say it but due to their monopoly power over the social graph, it might be time for more regulation.

You're trying to make a comparison to the regulation of common carrier utilities but you're missing an important distinction. Regulation of certain utilities is justifiable because those utilities enjoy a natural monopoly granted and empowered by the government (usually due to the limitations of land based infrastructures which naturally prevent market competition). Facebook enjoys no such monopoly. Other digital social networks can and do compete with it. If you don't like what facebook does, you can personally regulate it by deactivating your account.

> "If you don't like what facebook does, you can personally regulate it by deactivating your account."

Likewise if someone didn't like the way AT&T's monopoly operated in the 70s, they could simply deactivate their account. However, then as now with a Facebook account, it would have been a self-limiting choice.

Once a communication network has the majority of people in a region on it, it becomes nearly impossible to compete with directly and it also wields great power in relation to its users.

It's not the same thing though. The anti-competetive behavior of a company in the telecommunications industry is grounded (literally) in the natural barrier to entry that comes with the immense investment and government authorization involved in land based infrastructure. These are necessary 'practical' monopolies that are purposely created by the state in order to regulate them as public utilizes and because it is impractical to allow multiple overlapping land infrastructures.

Facebook does not fall anywhere close to this category of communications network. There is no barrier to entry created by Facebook's existence. Multiple other social networks can and do exist, and not only that but you can simultaneously participate in all of them. They are not mutually exclusive. Facebook is not a monopoly, it's just really popular.

Finally, Facebook is not a monopoly for the very simple reason that you are not a customer of Facebook. Facebook does not provide you any service that you have paid for in an economic exchange. Facebook's customers are advertisers, and the advertisement industry is anything but a monopoly.

"Facebook" in this case is most likely other users reporting her content. See for example:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/277657-hill...

http://occupydemocrats.com/2016/04/26/hillary-trolls-just-go...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

corollary: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by a automated abuse-prevention system (in this case, people flagging posts) doing what it was designed to do with zero human intervention.

Almost definitely. Hopefully there won't be a HN story every single time a story is flagged as offensive by a large # of users and automatically disabled.

This is tinfoil-hat rubbish - all it shows is someone who was a) banned from posting from Facebook, b) posted some conspiracy gobbledigook, then assuming b) was the reason for a).

The banned user could have been posting racism, abuse, publicy, privately ... without knowing all of her previous conduct it's impossible hard to tell. But unless lots of other people corroborate their own posting bans with "talking about censorship" it's not really convincing.

(This story written by the woman who thought Twitter's search autocomplete was a reflection of what was posted on Twitter, rather than her own muck-raking search history! http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/louise-mensch-blame...)

If you take out the tinfoil hat rubbish jab this is an informative post. There's no reason to bias the reader against your opinion before they read it.

EDIT: It looks like some people are not seeing the screenshots that really explain the ban. If they are not showing up for you, then I apologize for assuming you didn't read the post.

If you'll RTFM, you'll see that the "abusive" posting was quoted and is plainly not offensive. The block is also quoted and is an automated system that blocks based on the number of individual posts which get blocked.

Yes, the user may be a troll who has previously said bad things. But in this instance, that is plainly untrue.

The fault is obviously in having automated systems for dealing with abusive posts with no controls in place. Would be nice if Facebook had a look at abuses of the abuse system like this, and banned users from reporting abuse if they have abused the abuse system.

Good. Facebook is doing her a favor. Why not self-ban herself from Facebook for life? Or to put it in a nicer way, ban Facebook from her life for ever.

I am not a lawyer, but I don't think it is illegal for Facebook to censor and deny service to anyone they want. (Somebody can correct me if I am wrong). And in similar fashion, everybody is perfectly free to use Facebook and comply with their rules, or choose not to use it.

Maybe it is me, but I am having really difficult time understanding why people take Facebook so seriously and add so much value to it. It is just another cheap entertainment website. There are so many more.

>Maybe it is me, but I am having really difficult time understanding why people take Facebook so seriously and add so much value to it.

Yeah, it's you. Spend more time thinking of it and you'll realise there's a big chunk of the population that gets their news from Facebook. Then you'll realise how this is sort of a big deal, in its own way.

Remember way back when people had a blog with an RSS feed and anyone could subscribe to your blog with their browser or some app to read what you had to say instead of going through Facebook or Twitter? Remember when all that slowly went away because people went to Facebook and Twitter? Well this is what you get when people collectively decide apps and platforms with walled gardens are better than the open web. Enjoy your nice and tasty shit sandwich. It's all our own fault really.

I don't really think people made that choice consciously because they thought walled gardens were better, there was a major push to redirect people and content creators to those platforms.

I was very happy with the way things were until Google pulled the plug on Reader and made it harder to follow "decentralized" content.

> there was a major push to redirect people

Would love to hear more about this theory. Who was behind this push? How did the achieve it?

They made the move because walled gardens are much easier to use, require far less effort and have nicer friendly UIs built by large teams of UI/UX people who have the goal of keeping people captive via browser sessions and their mobile apps.

I am in complete agreement with you. If you care about something, publish it yourself. The sad fact is that Facebook's walled garden allows people with literally no technical clue whatsoever to set up a 'page', it's not nearly as difficult as buying a domain name and paying $5/mo to a hosting company. Then when the magical friendly service they're paying nothing for and have no service contact with disappears, goes bankrupt, gets acquired and shutdown by a larger company or decides to block them for arbitrary (automated abuse prevention) reasons, the first cry is "censorship".

Liking pages on Facebook is easier than adding RSS feeds to an RSS client.

People getting theirs news from Facebook are not people who, in the absence of Facebook, are magically going to become functional people.

Thinking about it, lead me to a question: "Why? Why is there a big chunk of the population that gets their news from Facebook?"

We are talking about the internet here, where anybody can put up a server and publish anything they want with a very limited budget. It is not like TV, where you have to have a license, and only so many can be issued. Or a newspaper, where you need a large budget.

So I wonder why these people you mention choose to get their new from Facebook?

Is it that the don't care enough about politics to get them from another source?

Is it that they are uneducated and easy to manipulate?

Something else?

It sounds to me like Facebook is the symptom and not the disease.

It's because people crave social approval at a very basic mammalian level. If you live in Portland and are a vegan political science major, your Facebook news feed will reinforce your world view through most of the posts coming from your friends. And vice versa for other locales and perspectives. At a certain point it becomes an echo chamber of endlessly repeated "news".

It is still socially acceptable to be "not any good with computers".

Being on the absolute user side of the knowledge spectrum for any ecosystem, technical or otherwise, will completely control your interpretation, use, and comprehension of that system.

Cars come to mind. If you are exclusively a user of automobiles, you will happily pay for someone to fill your washer fluid. To anyone with even basic automotive literacy, that would seem almost crazy.

"It is still socially acceptable to be 'not any good with computers'."

Getting access to high-quality journalism on the web isn't difficult. How much do you need to know about computers to open your browser and go to www.nytimes.com, or to install the NY Times app on your phone?

I know your question was rhetorical, but an example is that a portion of Facebook users specifically do not even know they are on the internet. This level of domain knowledge, or slightly better, is the norm not the exception.

http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-ide... http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/20/facebook-touts-its-ec... http://lirneasia.net/2012/05/facebook-internet/

Because there are numerous studies showing how tweaking search results and the media around you - without your knowledge - changes your assessment of topics, candidates, etc:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

Facebook absolutely must write and enforce its own policy. Unfortunately, they've shown time and time again that there's the written policy and there's the wink wink nudge nudge policy that only applies to certain groups.

If companies are going to start banning people for political opinions and affiliations, things are about to get really bumpy as everyone is forced to choose sides.. and get blacklisted by the other side.

* I've logged into Facebook once in the past month to see a friend's new baby. My life is better without it.

In the banking world you can get too big to fail.

I wonder if in the social media world you can get too big to allow censorship?

Well, you can see how it worked with Twitter, which had the same breakdown with right wing people.

I wonder that too.

It's clear that even though the Net is owned by private interests it 'feels' like a public space.

It's advertised and designed to "feel" like a public space, in an effort to disguise the truth of the ownership. Lack of a true public alternative is sad.

I can't quite agree with that.

The Net felt like a public space long before advertising existed on the Net.

It is still also true though that people have an illusion of ownership over their emails in their Gmail accounts. That's why I switched away from them.

I think there does exist a role for truly public entities on the Net e.g. Estonia's attempts but I also don't believe a normal government is capable of providing these.

Can you take seriously an entity that can be swayed by Momsnet?

That's like running US chamber of commerce proposals past 4chan.

> ... Mark Zuckerberg’s message hasn’t got through to Facebook’s employees.

What is this referring too?

Mark's not removing individual claims himself...ostensibly it was an employee. However, Zuckerberg's recent message (https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102830259184701) seems at odds with the behavior witnessed.

Well played on the video proof

The video proof only shows that's she's banned. It doesn't proof what she was banned for. Based on the screenshots I believe her for the reason why she was banned, not the video. Maybe a bit of a semantic quibble, but it's the screenshots, not the videos that are damning.

I don't see the damning screenshots. They don't seem indicative of "you are banned", but not why. It does say she has been banned for 30 days for "posting things not allowed". That could be anything. Are you seeing something I am not? Banning for political opinion is definitely wrong even if not unconstitutional since it isn't the gov (and I am liberal -- doesn't matter the side you are on). However if she was also posting hate speech then it would be understandable. I am not sure it is poorly conceived moderation/censorship on Facebook's part or scapegoating on her part the reason for the ban. Neither the screenshots nor video clarifies that.

The video doesn't even show that. Most people on this site could construct a web page that acts that way.

Like you, I believe her. It's just hard to prove things.

Article talks a lot about Zuckerberg but I'm unconvinced that he's working up some big conspiracy to censor conservatives.

Definitely disappointing that this happened on FB (regardless of what is legal - the law can't be made to fit all cases), I just doubt there's a conspiracy going on.

On a side note: this looks like a really well written, balanced and trustworthy source.

Check out some of the other submissions for heatst.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=heatst.com

It's some wingnut site.

Hey, you know, Facebook isn't obligated to publish anything. It's a 'free' service. If you want to publish something run your own httpd. There is absolutely nothing preventing anyone with $20 from buying their own domain, setting up DNS on it and running a webserver through a bulk hosting company. Oh wait, that's too hard for you? I can hear the world's smallest violin playing.

Remember you said this if they ever decide to censor someone you agree with.

Oh I'm very much aware of it. Anyone's relationship with Facebook is governed by their TOS, nothing more. Because it's a 'free' service, you're not owed anything by it. In fact, you're the product. Facebook wants to be the world's largest walled garden and their entire revenue model is based on keeping everyone trapped inside it, for the purpose of selling advertising. I would never encourage anyone to rely solely on Facebook to publish anything they care about, no matter where it is on the political spectrum.

You can use it as a tool to reach more people but don't become utterly dependent upon it, that's just foolish.

Expect and plan for anything that you pay $0.00 for to disappear at any time, for any random reason.

> "Hey, you know, Facebook isn't obligated to publish anything."

Who is claiming otherwise?

I see this form of argument pop up whenever a corporation censors somebody, but I rarely see anybody actually claiming some sort of obligation exists.

Criticizing a corporation for doing something that they are legally allowed to do is... not exactly unprecedented.

If you're not paying money to publish content on somebody else's httpd, and have no contractual relationship with them for services, you have very little recourse if the publishing platform suddenly disappears for any reason. Business failure, server failure, corporate censorship/policies, whatever.

> "If you're not paying money to publish content on somebody else's httpd, and have no contractual relationship with them for services, you have very little recourse if the publishing platform suddenly disappears for any reason."

Again, I don't see anybody claiming otherwise.

Am I the only one here who thinks facebook's content is pure garbage? Really, what is the point of the world's biggest social networking platform worried about misc. BS posts? Right, no offense, it's pure garbage to begin with, imho.

I don't disagree with you, but I also don't see what your comment has to do with mine.

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