Facebook and Twitter pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Why is this bad? Because hate speech is not clearly defined. What may be fine today may qualify as hate speech tomorrow. Eventually posting anything not super positive or encouraging could be considered "hateful" or "triggering" and get you in trouble.
One of my favorite quotes on people being mean on the internet, courtesy of Tyler the Creator: https://twitter.com/fucktyler/status/285670822264307712?lang...
"I hate you, you stupid [insert bad word] and I am going to come to your house and attack/kill/rape you" - get out the ban hammer.
And are you really sure the sure the line will not be moved after ? Because this is such an opportunity for politics. But also just for any entities with a moral or economic agenda.
And will the censorship be done by humans ? Or will machine will stop a quotation from a book or a movie containing it ?
If it's a "box," then frankly, that box was opened long ago, long before the internet or computers.
> Or do you think the threat is less credible if given online?
Do you not?
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1937_en.htm
... so "the line" is basically whatever European Union says is "illegal hate speech" as per this announcement. (The announcement makes it seem that it is largely targeted at terrorism and racism, at least for now).
I agree with you, though, in that personally I'm not the biggest fan of "hate speech" laws. They seem like a ripe target for political abuse.
What? It is already is in several places around the world.
That's a problem with big companies. They need to please a mass of people that are very different with each others. Eventually they settle with the lowest common denominator, and eliminate more and more things that can offend.
Among them you will find:
- new ideas which you can't know if they are bad or
good yet and need assessment but will feel
inconfortable.
- old ideas becoming relevant in our new context
(or that we are evolved enough to accept now)
that have been put asides for long because
of habits.
- ideas that are important for a part of the
population and unsettling for another part.
- distrupting or creative things, arts, that just
need to exist for humanity to keep grow, even
if it's not always good.
- bad things that people need to know exist.
You can't exercice criticism if you don't have
the material to criticise. People need to be
able to read "Mein Kampf" so we can argument
against it.
I don't get why people feel the need for Facebook or Twitter need to host those items on their own servers?
Do people not realize that these are private companies with editorial discretion?
The issue is that its hard to get the message out with a few brands dominating the internets. How will one get the message out about a website if she or he couldn't blog about it on a platform like Twitter or Facebook?
p.s. I might be reading you wrong here
So, in order to prevent that situation, we allow one company a monopoly on the market. In exchange, that company is forced to follow common carrier rules, such as not interfering with speech.
We all agree to use the same company for infrastructure, just like we all agree to use the same couple of companies for social media. It's just when the social media companies do things that are bad people pop up and say "they are private companies in a free market they can do whatever they want" because these companies are new and cable companies are old.
Having said that, their right to exercise editorial controls on their platforms does not mean they are somehow above criticism when they elect to do so in stupid ways. As the original comment in this thread suggested their moves in regard to speech are short-sighted and detrimental to the overall health of society, especially given the pervasiveness of use of these platforms. Still, I can recognize their right, and call them out on their foolishness, at the same time. I only cross the line when I demand force to be used against them (meaning a law written to force their hands); then I would be in the wrong. They don't have a responsibility to further discourse and I don't have a responsibility to hold my tongue when they fail in this regard.
I would argue that anyone who takes it upon themselves to become the central hub for most discourse (or to organize the world's information) has an implied responsibility to act as a good steward of the empire they seek to control. We have no obligation as members of the public to accept whatever controls a land-grabbing (I use this term here non-judgmentally) empire builder wishes to impose; they sought to turn us into members of their empires, so we should at least have the right to demand they behave equitably, and perhaps even beneficently.
When we use a Facebook or a Twitter, we (the public) accept the product they offer. True enough, if we find out we don't like the deal we can threaten to walk away if there is no change. But these companies don't have a responsibility, implied or otherwise, to better us, cater to any of us, or fulfill someone's vision of social good. It would be nice if they delivered on these things (of course my vision of what that means) but it is not their responsibility to do so. If I don't like that with sufficient intensity, my one valid recourse is stop using their services.
The source of the implied responsibility of beneficence is the fact that without assuming such a responsibility the acts of a corporate empire are likely to be destructive to the long term interests of the society. By (for example) controlling the social network, they leave members of the society with limited choice not to participate, and thus the implied responsibility of beneficence in exchange for that removal of choice.
The difference is that nobody is asking for these companies to be banned or to cease operations. They are free to do what they want and we are free to ask what we want.
These quips about PC culture miss the mark. The rise of social networks / platforms catering to people who express their distaste for certain speech stems from their desire to further their revenue streams. I haven't heard of anyone leaving a platform because there wasn't enough offensive content.
Expect this behavior from every site that harvests user data and relies on adclicks to pay their shareholders. The monetezation of self expression -- a concern that dates back to at least the Usenet era -- is the culprit, not the speech criticizers.
I have left both Twitter and Github recently, not because there "wasn't enough offensive content", but because I find thought-policing even more offensive than the allegedly "offensive" speech.
If it weren't for the fact that Facebook is used by many of my older relatives, I'd be out of there, too, and it won't take much more to get me to leave.
So... now you've heard of someone. I do not think I am unique.
When those that agree with you start affecting said companies' bottom line, we'll call it a movement. Until then you appear to be in the severe minority.
The Internet is not governed, it is bought and sold; if you have any intention of affecting change, you do better to acknowledge that, at least as a start.
Realize, too, that the ability to "leave" these services is something of a privilege. Every job I've ever applied to in the tech world asks for a LinkedIn and, I've observed for programming positions, at least a presence on GitHub. It's hard to explain your free speech objections on your intro letter.
The majority don't care about health and trade a healthy body for a cheeseburger everyday.
The majority don't care about ecology and trade pollution for saving a walk everyday.
Decision affecting the humanity cannot be based on the majority behavior. It should be based on the majority vote, because then you give people an occasion to step back and think. To discuss and argue. But don't base on status quo.
I've never seen any job that asked for a LinkedIn account, nor am I acquainted with anyone who ever got a job through a LinkedIn account. While there are undoubtedly exceptions, I don't personally know of any. In fact, that's why I left LinkedIn (long before I left Twitter and GitHub) -- way too much company spam, not enough actual usefulness.
"Realize, too, that the ability to "leave" these services is something of a privilege"
Is there anything that isn't a "privilege" nowadays?
"It's hard to explain your free speech objections on your intro letter."
There's no need to "explain" anything. Just refer them to your own public code repo, which any programmer worth his or her salt should be able to set up in a short time using an Amazon S3 bucket and one of the many utilities that exist for manipulating those buckets. Presumably the company you're applying to just wants to see some code samples. There's nothing magical about GitHub.
Consider that certain people's freedom of speech is already stifled.
What should we do about that?
Want to trade places with them?
The parent poster said he was for defending free speech, why would he want to switch places to somewhere where it's restricted?
What is your objection even? That because free speech is restricted in e.g. North Korea we should start restricting it elsewhere?
Or are you implying that oppressed demographics(e.g. homosexuals, black people, etc.) are having their freedom of speech stifled and therefore restrictions in free speech as a result of the 'safe space' movement are justified?
That's the only reasonably understandable(albeit flawed in my personal opinion) interpretation of your comment I can really make.
Care to clarify?
It's funny to see people get bent out of shape at the idea that they might have to watch what they say when the consequences of saying something offensive are just that a platform might not let them publish everything they want to while there are large groups of people who already have to watch what they say because the consequences of saying something that another group disagrees with are rape threats, death threats, and harassment campaigns.
I strongly believe in free speech and I will absolutely be 'bent out of shape' when people or groups try to stifle it.
>there are large groups of people who already have to watch what they say because the consequences of saying something that another group disagrees with are rape threats, death threats, and harassment campaigns.
Please provide me a modern day example of this in the US.(where these companies are located)
Are you claiming that safe-space movements that stifle free speech are justified, because someone else's free speech was stifled?
Please give us an example with details of what exactly you are talking about.
Safe spaces do not stifle free speech. Just as your ability to limit who enters your home (if you have one) does not stifle free speech, safe spaces do not stifle free speech.
I would argue that they actually increase freedom of speech, because they give certain individuals freedom to express themselves without fear of retribution. Something that can be rather difficult achieve for some people.
Of course, there are problems with the safe space movement. For example, they often highlight racial/ethnic/gender differences between people. In my analysis, it seems that marginalized people have realized the world is not going to change any time soon, and that they will continue to be marginalized – which is the motivation for creating a safe place.
Should Facebook/Twitter be a "safe space"? Probably not – but Facebook has been very succcesful at creating such safe spaces with their Groups platform, which seem to be gaining more and more traction.
But first, since you're defending the concept, how would you define a safe space... and how is the space kept "safe"?
Yes, they do, by definition.
The definition of a "safe space" is one where free speech is not allowed. We have had safe spaces for centuries, they are called homes. At home, you are free to shield yourself from whatever speech, ideas, or behavior you find offensive. The whole crux of a free society is the freedom to be boorish, crude, or otherwise offensive. That's what freedom means. It means there is no authority that decides what forms of speech or expression are not allowed. We already have laws against assault and harassment, and those are enough.
Yes they do. If you would like I can provide countless references and videos that showcase just how much they stifle free speech.
A space where you can't say certain things doesn't stifle free speech.
Care to explain?
Most of the internet we choose to use is a collection of walled gardens. People can kick you out of their garden, that's how it works.
We're discussing a normative conclusion that even though "people can kick you out of their garden, that's now it works", perhaps people shouldn't choose to kick others out of their "garden" because of disagreements and free speech issues (though they're always welcome to do so).
Godwin-evoking private forum moderators exercising their right to police their turf aside, I always find self-moderating upvote/karma systems on forums interesting. Ostensibly the point is to allow users to control the tone of the site, and promote interesting, relevant content. In practice it is used to bury unpopular opinions and register distain.
Some comments are justifiably downvoted for being of spectacularly low quality, whilst many others are hit for not reflecting prevailing opinion - essentially we (internet commentators in general, not specifically HN, although it's hardly exempt) actively squash Free Speech on a daily basis.
And remember, most of the stuff we're talking about here are twitter eggs saying they're going to rape someone's family to death because a video game was delayed. No reasonable person would consider that protected speech.
The question at hand is: do we want to be permitted to hear hate speech? Twitter and Facebook (and the law in some jurisdictions) are saying: "no, you may not encounter these subjects where we have the power to stop you, because it may inspire bad things within you -- either personal pain, or worse yet, radicalization."
Your second point is that none of this content is any good, anyway -- that we're better off getting rid of it.
FB and Twitter can do what they like, and there is something to be said for removing low quality content in order to achieve a better product. But "hate speech" seems much broader than that.
In Chaplinsky (a terrible SCOTUS decision that has been abandoned in practice), a WWI-era court decided that an anti-war protester couldn't disseminate anti-war rhetoric to his fellow immigrants (in Yiddish, btw). This was "like shouting fire in a crowded theater." Some things are just too dangerous to say out loud.
Are we so certain of our current taboos that we really don't want to hear from the fringe? Are we really OK with giving up our right to hear controversial viewpoints and decide their merits for ourselves? Because that's what these rules/laws do -- they don't force you to hear anything. You are always free to block, ignore, etc. They prevent you from encountering the content in the first place -- someone gets to decide for you what is and isn't "safe," because they're afraid you'll be influenced by it.
For me, I don't want to be kept ignorant of something because someone decides I'm better off not hearing. Even if that speech is violent, racist, conspiratorial, or just plain nutty. I can decide when divert my attention. It's part of being an adult -- learning that words can't hurt you.
Where did I even indicate or hint to that???
Having freedom of speech is not the same thing as forcing someone to listen to you.
If tons of people are self-censoring or avoiding speaking at all for fear of being doxxed and getting death or rape threats, do we really have free speech?
"You will be judged by the company you keep" is starting to bite these platforms, and they're trying to do something about it.
Yes we do. If you self-censor because you are afraid of the consequences of your speech, that makes you a coward. Far better for cowards to cower in fear silently then for everyone to be forcibly silenced to placate cowardice.
Because banning death threats is forcibly silencing people?
Please tell me I'll reading that wrong.
You answered your own question. Its already a crime to make death threats. If you are afraid to speak your mind or otherwise do what you think is right because you are afraid of the consequences, whether they be crimes or not, you are a coward.
There's a cottage industry of throwing rhetorical bombs and trolling 4chan in order to get threats. The people complaining the loudest about threats are reluctant to actually get the police involved, and they never stop trolling because they realize the threats aren't real.
tldr: Internet threats are no reason to even consider curtailing free speech.
Do they:
Block all the nasty tweets?
Set their account to private?
Ignore it?
Nothing wrong, except those tools don't exist today.
>When you draw really clear lines in the sand at a site like Reddit, “there will always be some a—–,” Huffman said, “looking for loopholes.” He eventually came to the conclusion that virtually every other major social site has come to: that content guidelines for online communities work best when they’re “specifically vague,” giving the contours of clarity on what sort of content is forbidden, while affording those in charge of enforcing the rules some leeway with when, precisely, the rules apply.[1]
That's the CEO of reddit saying that selective enforcement should be the default, and that users should not lean on the actual, written rules to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable.
[1] Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...
This policy about removing hate comments didn't exist yesterday and is still not in place. By your logic it isn't a solution either and can't be discussed because it's not yet in place.
When enabled, the 'Notifications' link/page disappears from the UI and the user no longer receives messages from anyone who they haven't messaged before.
Not hard to do at all.
The more I talk about this the more it sounds like a score file[1]. Obviously it would need to be made more user-friendly to be really effective.
Ideally, people wouldn't send death threats/hate speech. This seems practically unenforceable from Twitter's side.
So what if Twitter had a special feature where it could detect if you are receiving an unusual spike in notifications (and possibly even use sentiment analysis). Then it would present you with a nice, warm message:
"We noticed you're receiving an unusually high number of notifications. These messages may be abusive, hateful, or triggering."
Then provide options for turning your profile private, or a special new setting that completely hides @-notifications from people you don't follow.
I agree that there are ways around that, but there will always be ways around it. Pretending that filtering speech will make the harassment go away is pretty naive.
EDIT: I see what you mean. I think there's a huge difference between temporarily choosing to not engage in public discussions, and being shut out of said discussion.
This comic sums up that situation pretty well: http://imgur.com/aF8eTQf
The network effect works the way it does because we have granted super-restrictive monopoly rights that prevent competition.
There was once a company that tried to allow you to export your data from Facebook. It was called Power Ventures. They were sued and shut down by Facebook. The corporate veil was pierced and the founder was found personally liable for $3 million in supposed damages.
The technology exists, but we've made laws for companies like Facebook to make sure that their monopolies are not threatened.
Networks exist because not everyone is an admin and web developer and wants to build their own website, and unless you own the pipe to the servers, the servers themselves, the software running on the server, and so on you have exactly whatever rights your provider of choice says you have and not one iota more.
>Networks exist because not everyone is an admin and web developer and wants to build their own website, and unless you own the pipe to the servers, the servers themselves, the software running on the server, and so on you have exactly whatever rights your provider of choice says you have and not one iota more.
That's not technically correct, but we'll accept it for purposes of argument because it's not super far off for some access modes. I'm saying that it doesn't have to be that way. A lot of people hear about these things, acknowledge the injustice and weirdness in them, and then just move on with their day, seemingly believing that it's something that can't be altered. We can alter it. We don't have to grant Facebook an arbitrary monopoly. We don't have to allow them to restrict us from gathering the data that we rightfully own just because we've shared it on their platform. Let's change it.
It's difficult to change and difficult to make people aware of this situation because, obviously, incumbent interests want to keep their monopolies, so they spend and lobby and produce and proclaim to try and keep them, and to make people think that there's nothing that can be done about it. It's not that way in real life.
-RFK, "Value of Dissent" (21 March 1968)
The problem is that of blindness and group think. Every major advancement of human rights has been against the "terms of service" and were extremely uncomfortable ideas for the majority of people.
Getting your feelings hurt every now and again can be used as a catalyst for personal and moral growth just like exercising causes pain but increases health.
> Why is this bad? Because hate speech is not clearly defined.
Legality by which jurisdiction?
If someone posted the 1-line perl script for DeCSS, would that be blocked? In Turkey, I believe posting anything defamatory regarding AtaTurk is illegal. What about posting Nazi Propaganda in Germany?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/former-miss-turke...
Do you advocate this approach for Hacker News too? If not, why not?
My inclination is this is still a good thing to do. Facebook doesn't need to provide a public forum for hate mongers.
They are not in the business of providing a platform for free speech. Just look at reddit for an example. The quality of their product has suffered because they allowed (and continue to allow) racist and misogynistic subreddits to proliferate. Thus, these segments of their user base also proliferate. At various points, they decided to take action. Whether those actions improved their product or not is debateable.
Social media platform users have no right to free speech on the site. They do have a right to start a competing website that allows free speech, though.
And then the new website becomes popular, and then authoritarians start demanding that the new website ban speech they don't like, and then people who want free speech say that we don't want that and you come back to tell us that they're a private company that can do what they want.
They're also a private company that can do what we want.
Identity politics is normally associated with the nominally "left," but really it's the right and especially the religious right who have been experts in the weaponized use of identity politics in the last few decades. The entire Reagan and Bush eras were built on the use of identity politics to mobilize the "base" and keep critics on the defensive.
Liberals invent identity politics plays, but conservatives take it to production at scale.
I expect to see right-wingers totally co-opt this bandwagon real soon now.
The Larry Flynt principle still stands: the measure of freedom of speech is the freedom afforded the most offensive or idiotic speakers. I don't support haters, but I support their right to spew it. Unfriend and block exist for a reason.
I was recently hanging out at some nightlife spots, casually talking to random millennials at bars and such and realized that nobody was using Facebook or Twitter. They were all using SnapChat, almost compulsively.
I asked them why and they said it was because their mom was on Facebook (!public). They also liked that everything disappeared after 24 hours (!persistent) and it alerts you if people screenshot your posts (!persistent). They also liked the fact that you couldn't repost stuff, only show pictures that the app took and you only shared with your friends (!viral) and only had to look at their stuff if you actually wanted to (!feed). It didn't come in on a feed.
I think Facebook and Twitter are going to be cleaned out soon except for self-promotion and commercial information. At this point I assume that Facebook is public too. People desperately want privacy. I think a rising trend in the industry is the notion of forgetting. People want services to forget. They want to live in the present and not have everything remembered about them forever. They also don't want to be bombarded by feeds since they are full of distraction, advertising and ideology. The only thing they are interested in posting to these public services is things that they want to share publicly, like self-promotion or commercial/job related stuff.
I don't know if the app is designed to intentionally hide features to create some sort of "discovery" experience, but there's a lot more to it than is obvious at first glance.
They are all different components to what people want with some audience cross over.
I don't use SnapChat, mostly because the CEO killed off the 3rd party app for my platform of choice (Windows Mobile.)
You just can't add it to your public timeline. It can only be sent to your friends/contacts list. But if you wind up doing select-all on the friends list, it pretty much works out the same way as sharing to the timeline view.
This is a mindset I'm having hard time understanding. For me it's the opposite - I'd love to have everything I interact with a) persistent, and b) searchable by me. I dislike the idea of ephemerality, of stuff that happened going away, without a way to recollect them. Maybe I'm the weird kind who still has his SMS archives from 10 years ago somewhere on his computer...
It's closer to wanting to be able to archive every letter you receive in the post, not the post office keeping every letter and you having to rely on them for the safety of your messages. A lot of these services also keep changing the rules of inclusion to a community over time, where things were private they are now not private or people just need to restart and get going again in a new social group.
I am nearly 40 and don't want my nightlife posted on Facebook where my ex-wife, parents, child, or potential employers might see it, either. Why do you expect millennials to behave differently?
I can't speak for all millennials, but I am currently attending university and have many millennial friends and contacts. Almost to a person, they all have Facebook. The only two people I can think of that don't are a 30-year-old and a guy in his 50's who is a conspiracy theorist. Facebook is used as a way to add soft social contacts as well as to coordinate and interact with a larger group of people. Facebook is the "public" social face, with things like Snapchat offering a more private face. And I don't think that difference is specific to millennials. My 50-something ex-girlfriend and my 23-year-old current girlfriend use these services almost identically, as do I.
And with stuff like the trust and safety council on Twitter and the news topic biases on Facebook (as well as documented examples where they worked with governments to remove speech the government didn't like, such as that about immigration in Germany), I suspect it'll just cause yet more political divisions and drama on these sites.
More substantive comment: why do we care about a person's race or gender when they use particular words?
I'll not go into that concept further for fear of igniting another tired flame war.
Sure it's complex, convoluted, and controversial.. but as long as we put the right people in charge to make the decisions for us, it will all work out fairly.
Similarly, if a white person publicly says something discriminatory against black people, it's a much different context than if a black person says the same thing. As an simple example, imagine a two black people in a room of 40 white nationalists: If one black person says to another, "hey n-!", that's much different for the person hearing it than if one of the white nationalists says the same thing.
There's a lot more to that word, including black people taking power for themselves and away from racists by using it (really a brilliant, innovative way to push back), but that's too much to write here and now.
I think there are cases that should be easy on both sides and I would hazard a guess that they simply aren't dealt with the same. Sure, hate being removed is objectively good, but if only one side of the hate is removed, it will cause friction.
Said groups could however be characterized by a mob mentality that leads to attacking peoples livelihood, harassing peoples families, sending death threats, etc, usually driven by social media, and hopefully something we could both agree is over the top, unacceptable, and indeed openly hateful.
My comment was ridiculously measured. I didn't even pick sides in the actual topic. I definitely didn't pick sides politically. You seem to have chosen one for me, although I regret to inform you you have assumed incorrectly.
Your comment was not measured. You made it impossible to have or continue a productive conversation. If I would have been the person you apparently think I am, you would not have won me over. You would have alienated me further. But I suspect that's part of it all. Some people don't care about productive conversation. They care about being "right" in front of other people who also want to be "right".
This actions are made BECAUSE OF right-wing hate on facebook/twitter where people post that they should kill other people, politician, refugees. That's why they focus on this problem right now. Does this mean left-wing hate speech at the same level will not be deleted? I don't think so.
Do you have data showing this? The last thing this debate needs is rumor and speculation.
Consider:
- Twitter is structured in such a way that direct censorship can't be differentiated between somebody's finger on a button and technical difficulties. (Did this hashtag disappear from autocomplete because someone removed it, or because the backend index is messed up?)
- Differentiating between "left" and "right" political posts is not possible from an objective, programmatic standpoint.
Political identity doesn't work either. Someone who's an unabashed Republican tweeting about, say, abortion, there's a very high likelihood that whatever they say about it is negative regardless of the content of the message, but how do you get a computer to understand that without a lot of false positives?
- Nobody from the companies is ever going to admit to hiding/removing content for political reasons. (Barring whistleblowers of questionable veracity, c.f. Facebook)
That only leaves generalities and user reports to work from, which have their own reliability problems. We're talking sociology/political science at the end of the day, and it's opinions all the way down, with very little hard data.
> Twitter is structured in such a way that direct censorship can't be differentiated between
Twitter provides data to researchers, at least in some situations, and may provide data about these events.
> Differentiating between "left" and "right" political posts is not possible from an objective, programmatic standpoint.
AFAIK, there are well-known methods in political science for defining left and right.
> AFAIK, there are well-known methods in political science for defining left and right.
Small problem: political science isn't computer science.
Small problem: if the data they provide to the public can't be trusted, then why would the data provided to scientists be any better?
The parent comment is valid. hackuser isn't asking for a double-blind study with p=0.05 and n=[all Tweets ever produced] ; she or he is asking for any evidence whatsoever to substantiate the claim.
I predict that more people will want to visit if they see it as the only outlet where they can freely express their opinions on a topic. The vast majority of people don't seem to be able to sustain silence when they have a differing opinion, they need an outlet.
If they cannot express that on Twitter/FB, they Will find another way.
Funnily enough this will have a much larger negative effect on the "hate speech" movements goals than the existing presence of so called "hate speech".
I've yet to meet the democratic nominee who refers to an entire ethnic group as "rapists and murderers".
Maybe twitter removes a lot more posts from the right because those posts are actually racist.
He was claiming the Mexican government was purposefully or tacitly sending their problems across the border.
You can disagree with this claim, but don't misconstrue what his message was.
He's also cited this article[0] in reference to the point he's trying to make.
http://fusion.net/story/17321/is-rape-the-price-to-pay-for-m...
One side of the spectrum goes out of their way to spew hate and abuse and incite violence. The other preaches tolerance and respect. You can't really play the "there are two sides therefore the two sides are equivalent just opposed" game here, I think even if you still could manage to do it pre-Trump, Trump killed it by choosing to be objectively worse by all measurements and accounts.
Wait, the Catholic Church is a political party now?
Here's an ArsTechnica article on climate change[1] where the very first comment advocates the murder of those who disagree with the liberal position. It has a positive score and many others in the thread defend it.
Liberals can dish it out too, and moderators let them get away with it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/climate-hustle-wants-...
The nuance in the US is that this is censorship by corporation, not by government, so extant laws against censorship (which are aimed at the government) don't apply.
I think it's past time that corporations for social media of a certain "size" be recognized as public fora, and a body of law be developed regarding their behavior and responsibilities. Facebook, Google, etc, should not be censoring. Where this gets tricky is that both the corporation and the internet tends to span borders, so jurisdiction becomes very complex. Someone in country A uses a service in country B to interact with someone in country C. Which country's laws apply?
That is the problem. In the absence of legitimate power, illegitimate power is operative, and today that is Facebook and Twitter; they are serving de facto as quasi-governmental entities regulating interactions between citizens, since real governments have been unable to do so.
However, we live in a world that focuses violence on specific individuals, depending on their race, class, gender, religion, and a number of other factors. Our everyday actions are part of that system. Sometimes we help focus that violence, usually without realizing it. This is true of victims of violence as well as those who are not targeted.
What is our responsibility? Ignore the situation?
I'll tell you this: Feelings do get hurt, but the problem is not hurt feelings. The problem is the poverty & oppression baked into our system. A system that supports some people (definitely me) while making life incredibly hard for others.
Is removing hate speech going to stop these problems? Absolutely not.
Would I have any problem removing hate speech from the discussion community I run? Absolutely not.
Would the good people at Ycombinator have any issue removing hate speech from Hacker News? Absolutely not.
Does that hurt your feelings?
There is no slippery slope, it's a... grippy slope, because of all the... eyeballs.
Extremely interesting to find those who look upon those same Evangelicals with contempt and hatred are following the exact same path.
* inb4 someone who's never been to an evangelical church service tries to claim evangelical christianity is mainstream
...which describes pretty much all of them.
What's the difference?
Interestingly enough, they're more of a political identity in some circles as beyond a few (relatively minor) theological differences with denominations like Baptists, Methodists, or "non-denominational" groups they mostly identify based on social/political issues (gay marriage, abortion, religion and government, etc. etc.) rather than theological ones (although they do their best to tie the two together).
"Evangelical" is a label that was adopted by a specific group within Christian Protestantism that was reacting against specific elements that were seen as problematic within Fundamentalism (it was essentially a dissident offshoot of Fundamentalism) -- the term had some prior use, which in part inspired the label selected, but that's now pretty much its exclusive use when used to describe a subset of Christianity.
In some respects, some of those disagreements have faded over time; there's a lot of overlap in terms of both religious ideas and relation of religion to civil society between Fundamentalists and some subset of Evangelicals, though the range of Evangelical views is still broader. Its not uncommon for people outside of either movement to use "Evangelical" and "Fundamentalist" interchangeably.
The "evangel" is the "eu-angel", the "good news", the "gospel". Or, more specifically, the gospels, the first four books of the New Testament.
To evangelize, to be "evangelistic", is to attempt to bring the "good news" to others. It's a matter of what you do.
To be "evangelical" is (so at least members of the groups that go by that name would say) to be grounded in the "good news", the gospels, the New Testament. (As opposed to, say, later church traditions.) It's a matter of what you believe and where those beliefs (purport to) come from.
The term "evangelical" has a complicated history, going back to Martin Luther and beyond. It's pretty much always denoted a strain of Protestantism, and in the modern-day US it means roughly "fundamentalist but not too fundamentalist". (On the other hand, in non-anglophone parts of Europe it mostly just means "Protestant".)
Evangelicals tend to be evangelistic, not least because the New Testament tells them to be. But you can be evangelistic without being evangelical; as you say, that would describe any church that tries to expand its membership, or any individual Christian who tries to persuade others to convert.
That's the real danger with censorship. Anyway, Facebook as the social platform is on its way out, but the brilliant fucker that Zucks is, he is buying up everything that remains relevant.
It's trivial to exert political and social pressure globally. I'm not trying to be polemic nor alarmist but, when you centralize the primary social exchange for almost 2 billion people on one network, these are the effects.
People need to start thinking for themselves and see that by using a service like these they are only seeing part of the whole.
To be fair, most people probably won't care too much about what's outside the walls of the garden. And further, the walls of the garden aren't terribly high nor hard to come over. It's easier and simpler than ever to start a blog. It's easier still to make a Facebook account.
People who care enough to make the trivial amount of effort to publish outside the system should and we as developers should make it even easier, safer and lower friction. Let's Encrypt, cheap and easy static hosting, static site generators, etc.
"This could be used to silence opposing viewpoints!"
"You mean like rape and death threats? Why do you support that? You're a disgusting racist bigot!"
As if that's the only type of free expression the naysayers are talking about. It's kind of sad really.
Imagine the surprise when some of these people supporting such things find out it's their turn to have their opposing viewpoint stifled.
"Twitter and Facebook aren't violating your free speech rights. They just think you are an ahole and are showing you the door."
> public incitement to violence or hatred ...
http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/
"With the right of free speech comes the responsibility to extend that right to others. Because if we leave who is heard to simply 'who can speak the loudest'... we won't find out when we're wrong."
I feel like this is covered in the link I posted!
https://heatst.com/entertainment/angry-video-game-nerd-james...
But Twitter et al. support that sort of hate speech, while my opinion would be happily suppressed because of all of the hate people would stamp onto it.
For example: Not liking a gathering of wives of KKK members is not the same as not liking all women.
The first trailer was terrible. I think almost objectively terrible. It's clearly a ghostbusters movie, but it didn't seem to give me any reason to want to see the movie. It made it look like a cash-in-remake.
The later trailers have looked much better and give me some hope. We'll see what reviews say.
The original movie is a pretty great film, and I enjoyed it. I loved the cartoon as a kid, so I'm interested in seeing what happens with the franchise.
If you're not interested in the movie because you don't want a remake, or you thought the trailer didn't look good, that' fine.
If you're expressing that you hate the movie only because they changed the cast for this iteration... then you start to fit into the 'angry-man-boy' category. Same if you fit in the previous category but use lots of sexist terms and slurs to describe the new movie.
And then there is group three, the worst of the groups. These are the people sending hate messages, death threats, rape threats, etc. You can call for a boycott for whatever reason you want, people will probably think you're childish. But if you're sending death threats because someone changed a fictional character in a movie you haven't even seen yet? Yeah, you've earned that label.
As for AVGN, I haven't watched the video. Given everything that's happend around the movie it certainly immediately raises my "angry-man-boy" suspicions, but again I haven't watched it. At this point the nutcases are getting so loud over this (and every other topic) that it gets really easy for people with more reasonable viewpoints (especially if not presented well) to end up lumped in.
Solution? Ban the nutcases. No one needs to be able to send death threats via Twitter. No one needs to be able to receive them. Death threats aren't free speech, they're already exempted (assuming they are in any way reasonable).
There is plenty of room for subtlety in discussions of this kind of stuff. Can white people use the n-word? What if group X suddenly decides that phrase Y is evil?
I don't care. We can decide that later. For now, let's just ban the death threats, physical abuse threats, etc. and see where that gets us. I bet it improves things a ton.
I'd say I want to see someone make a good case for allowing death threats but this is the internet and I really don't, because someone will try and I'll think that much less of humanity.
What does this even mean:
"The companies also agreed to promote "independent counter-narratives" to fight hate speech, including content promoting non-discrimination, tolerance and respect."
Are they trying to stop ISIS or please offended snowflakes? Doing both is a heroic task which will leave millions disenfranchised. Will this open the market for new social media platforms?
It's still a bit vague, but it will give you a better idea. I think the focus is terrorism and outright racism more than offended snowflakes. From the release: "The European Court of Human Rights set out the important distinction between content that 'offends, shocks or disturbs the State or any sector of the population' and content that contains genuine and serious incitement to violence and hatred. The Court has made clear that States may sanction or prevent the latter."
People need to be told that their ideas are wrong, not given a new playground where everyone agrees with them. Kudos to Twitter for saying death threats and jihadism are wrong and not supported on their platform.
For a blanket solution I would suggest a "safe feed" default where tweets flagged as hate speech are removed from your feed. Also have a hate counter in profiles so the number of hate tweets is public information. Then if the user wishes to delete them and have no hate on record, they can. What the manual mod team would need to do is review unflagging requests. Flagging can be done by the community, and most of them will be right. Unflagging and malicious flagging is the right problem to focus on, not whether or not to delete something (minus cases where it's the law).
I would just add that my ideal system would have a plethora of highly objective, undeniable flags for a variety of potentially disruptive behaviors; posters would be required to disclaim or "pre-flag" their own posts; and readers would have the ability to toggle which flags they're willing to view at any given moment. The punishment for failing to disclaim a flag would be a period of probation (increasing with repeated violations) where the user's posts are automatically disclaimed for that flag. The punishment for malicious flagging, as judged by a group of users with a long history of proper use of a particular flag, would be probation with regard to the ability to use that flag on others' posts.
I expect that the "off-topic" flag, along with the ability to rigorously define the topic in any given context, would get a lot of use, as would "name calling," "assigning motives or attributes to a group" (aka "broad brushing"), and "expressing incredulity" (aka the starting-your-comment-with-"Um..." flag).
Result: A group of mildly-dedicated trolls can pull anything they want from Facebook and Twitter by bombing them with flags. These events are miniscule in the grand scheme of millions of posts per day the sites get, so nothing will ever be done about the abuse, leaving those that complain to look like a loud, perpetually-dissatisifed minority.
Hate Speech is now the Worst Thing Ever® on the internet, so Facebook and Twitter now get to claim "Look! We did something! Witness us!"
* 1 - 2 last mile providers per area.
* google virtually entire world search engine (pagerank variations used in every major one)
* facebook controls most of the worlds personal account info / verification
* twitter realtime sentiment and data broadcast.
facebook and twitter are less dangerous than time warner and google, but facebook is still massively dangerous because a real fb account is more proveable than a ssn. its 10 digits vs, 10 years of your digital life, including any part of your life that ws important to someone else. I still don't get this:
> I have a backup of my application data on aws in several regions, I also have a replicated backup on azure, and I push to tarsnap every quarter just in case.
This viewpoint considered pragmatic and best practice.
> We should allow Google & Baidu to essentially control the onboarding, searching, verification, security, document storage, mobile, transmission, DNS, and CA on the internet.
this is fine. If you don't like it, use duckduckgo or bing's version of pagerank.
- everyone
What is legitimate speech should not be determined by whoever is in power. Europe has tried that on several occasions. It never goes well. Just imagine if Donald Trump could declare what speech was considered legal and illegal. Perhaps we're getting a preview from Erdogan in Turkey right now.
This situation appears to be an attempt to suppress dissenting views (largely on immigration, border control, and refugee/asylum policy) following shifts in public opinion away from European integration and establishment incumbents like the CDU/CSU and SPD and toward nationalism and political parties like AfD in Germany, FPO in Austria, and FN in France. Since November Merkel has been pressuring Facebook to sanitize the platform of negative views toward migrants. It is troubling that leaders can punish their citizens for views that break from their policies. State police have even conducted house raids on those promoting "incorrect opinions" toward migrants on social media (citation below). We are not talking about physical threats, we're talking about opinions. Facebook and Twitter should not enable what has become, in a very literal sense, thought police.
If there are window-licking asshats posting nonsense on social media, let's challenge their views and win the debate. Democracy is about more speech, not less. I hope Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft haven't drifted so far from their original principles that they've lost sight of that.
http://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-raid-homes-in-crackdown-o...
I'm all for free speech, but US companies should follow the local laws. US tech companies aren't above the law, especially when they do business in foreign countries (selling ads is doing business). It sucks but going against the laws doesn't work in the long run. You can get away with it when you're a young US start up and you don't have offices in France,Germany or Austria, but as soon as you do, you are effectively subject to local laws.
That's hilarious. You basically said "People who don't have the right opinions should go to jail!". Maybe if your governments had attempted to explain why the far-right is wrong instead of suppressing them, they would have been less radical. You can't just sweep the thoughts and emotions of your people under the rug, even (especially) if they are unpalatable to you, and hell, to me as well.
It would be bad enough if censorship, fascism, and bondage were being inflicted upon us by domineering overseers using violence and sheer force. It is far more disgusting and disheartening that so many of my fellow human beings are actually embracing and endorsing this authoritarianism. Unfortunately, it looks like the human race is going to get what its asking for.
Said another way -- when a community needs to have an immune system to produce the result it wants, the community has already failed.
One possibility might be to allow users to set a rate limit on replies to a particular message for people they haven't white listed.
(So, like, if more than 20 "strangers" reply to a public post that one makes, it wouldn't allow further replies. But only if the person who made the post wanted it like that.)
Other possibilities include checking if many people went to an account from the same other account mentioning it, which, there would be ways around that, but, it seems like it could still help. (also as an optional thing)
Some of these are kind of weak but I think some things could be done.
Note that none of these prevent anyone from saying anything to anyone who wants to listen. It just makes it harder for people to say things to someone who doesn't want to hear them.
This seems like a fairly safe thing.
Bro.
southerners?
people who "cling to god and guns"?
Americans?
Fundamentalists? Catholics? Mormons?
the NSA?
Trump?
Brussels sprouts?
ISIS?
NAMBLA?
Adolf Hitler?
Assuming the messages could be accurately detected, wouldn't it make more sense to allow them to continue and flag them for spying, and find the people sending them? If they're blocked from Twitter, they'll just move on to some less easily accessible platform.
Meanwhile, Facebook threatened to block "Kein Mensch ist illegal", a 122k-liked pro-refugee page, and its administrator got suspended for 30 days for posting a sourced, valid image (http://kein-mensch-ist-illegal.org/fb.jpg) which shows that 90% of religious muslims like democracy and 28% of right-wing AfD allied people hate democracy with further 61% being frustrated with democracy. All in all, nothing that violates any FB rule. It took mass-media outrage for FB to rescind the block.
As long as FB repeatedly and openly rather allies with neo-Nazi illegal crap and instead bans admins and pro-refugee pages (because Nazis regularly organize "flagging" contests), I won't trust them.
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
So I think banning is more Orwellian. But sure there are a lot of people who wouldn't care about censorship on the internet, even if it would affect them too.
Facebook is usually fast to act on any reports, so I've been able to test what they allow and what they have removed.
A black girl making fun of Asians and calling them stupid and "chinky ass" was left up.
A white guy calling black people "ghetto" was removed.
A white guy calling Mexicans "wet backs" was left up.
I'm not sure what they are counting as hate speech, and what they aren't, as those posts appear to have been moderated by an actual human. I guess it depends on the time of day, and the attitude of the person judging the content.
http://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-raid-homes-in-crackdown-o...
And one on a "mainstream dissident" that's quite controversial: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/15/europe/germany-erdogan-joke-pr...
Also, while we're on the topic of "slippery slope": http://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-suspends-darthputinkg...
... what then!?
I guess the cry-bully crowd will be happy once the west and the civilization and peace and prosperity it has brought to the world and provided them is left in a crumpled heap an we are all so fortunate as the rest of the noble savage world that does not indulge in the "privilege" of freedom, liberties, free speech, individual rights, self-determination, competition, etc.
The blessings of socialist nirvana will soon be upon us and we will all be equally destitute once everything has been torn down in an infantile fits of social rage and tantrum akin to what led up to the dark ages.
And yet you've given us quite the example already!
Don't worry, I don't expect you to understand that and very much expect the same kind of defensive reaction you just exhibited. Don't worry, you can continue fooling yourself into believing you are correct.
(We've also banned the other account for breaking the HN guidelines egregiously in a different thread, even worse than in this one).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11807079 and marked it off-topic.
Taking the company public only revealed their financials for everyone to see and confirmed it.
> The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.
The phrase in italics is bounded by the phrase "making of any law". The bill of rights operates only against the Federal government, except those rights incorporated against the States by the 14th amendment, and things which were applied to private action by the 13th amendment.
Brief overview: http://lifehacker.com/5953755/what-exactly-is-freedom-of-spe...
Facebook and Twitter have no ability to make laws.