Un-Facebooked
jonathanspyer.com
jonathanspyer.com
Note that Facebook isn't saying they blocked him for that most recent post; more likely that something in that comment triggered a human review of his history, and that review concluded that he should be blocked.
Now he's asking us to evaluate that review (ok, good) and consider the repercussions of Facebook's overagressive filtering on free speech (sure) but this is very hard with only a 2-line summary of what he posts about in his account, and no direct quotes.
I do think this is a likely a completely legit complaint; but it's still very open to the risk that his style of posting was much more noxious than he represents.
(Alt: maybe if he posts too much detail, then the conversation veers into discussing those details rather than the free speech issue, which is more important than his single case).
I thought that the Internet was the greatest empowerment of free speech in history. Now that so much communication happens through private services, it seems like free speech is effectively being damped.
Can you imagine decades ago, the phone company revoking your phone number because they didn't like what you said to your friends over their wires?
This is true, and a big problem. We need new laws to enforce free speech in private companies that provide means of expression and are in a position of near-monopoly.
"Justin" shouldn't get to decide what is hate speech and what isn't.
Forcing Facebook to allow whatever pre-approved speech is "protected" (and who gets to decide that list?), besides being a violation of their rights, is probably worse for the users than doing nothing at all, because it gives users the illusion that Facebook is a platform for free speech. Users should be fully cognizant of the fact that they are not free to speak their mind on Facebook, as this provides encouragement for people to seek freer platforms.
The courts, obviously. As the law stands today, you can't sue FB for closing your account for a perceived violation of their ToS (you can maybe sue, but you'll lose); with different laws you could sue, and the matter would be decided by judges.
The fundamental problem is that companies like FB consider user-generated content as a free resource, much like a river onto which they build dams to make money from its flow.
But speech is fundamentally free (and, arguably, public property); the medium it uses to express itself shouldn't get to regulate it.
> This is true, and a big problem.
This is not true, it is a product of people confusing two different things:
> the first amendment to the constitution of the United States
> the unalienable right to freedom of speech
The american tradition is founded on the principle that there are natural rights that can never be given (as people are born with them), only taken away. Among these rights it's the right to freedom of speech and of assembly.
The first amendment (along with the rest) only clarifies the role the founding fathers intended to the government they created: one that shouldn't be allowed to infringe on these rights by legislation or otherwise.
The first amendment doesn't give the right to freedom of speech, only prevents the government from infringing on it, that's right. But it doesn't follow from that that private companies cannot infringe on anyone's freedom of speech, it is a non sequitur.
Private companies can and do infringe on people freedoms of speech and assembly all the time, and what happened to this reporter seems to be another example of that.
The thing is: it is perfectly in their right to do so, as it is very clear in their terms of service that they reserve that right, the right to control what can and what cannot be published on their properties.
The confusion comes from the fact that most of these companies (social media companies) like to pretend that's not the case, that they are proponents of freedom of speech even when it is inconvenient to the powerful.
For an example of that see the Arab Spring, what was publicized in those days as "a revolution powered by social media", "a media where people can freely express their thoughts and exercise their freedom of assembly without government interference".
As we came to realize in the subsequent years is that it was only true because 1) governments underestimated something they still didn't fully understand and 2) there was a temporary alignment between the position of these companies and that one of the revolutionary.
This alignment is over now. Governments worldwide pressure and succeed in making these companies to remove inconvenient speech from their services (examples abound).
In other cases perfectly valid forms of speech gets removed, suppressed or banned from their services for no other reason as they don't align to these companies goals. It's their right to do so and they exercise it.
The important thing is: let's not pretend they are not suppressing speech, curtailing freedom of assembly only because it's their right to do so.
They do curtail freedom of speech (on their premises), they do ban speech that is valid but inconvenient to their goals and objectives. As is their right. It is just that they lose the claim to be (as in the case of a particular service) "bastions of freedom of speech" when they do so.
My only objections are:
1) freedom of speech has absolutely nothing to do with the government or its ability to curtail it.
It is a natural right, one that everybody is born with and one that cannot be given, only taken away.
2) social media sites are private property of their owners and, as such, they can impose any limit they want within its (virtual) premises.
The solution to the problem is not regulating it (that in my opinion would increase the ability to curtail the freedom of speech) but to revert to the descentralized web of links that used to define the World Wide Web.
People can self publish and should do it, be it video, audio or text.
People should also, if they want to compete, to invest as much resources trying to be heard as these companies invest trying to be gatekeepers.
We agree in general, just not on these small points.
Illegal content (threats, etc.) isn't a problem: it can be moderated out / censored, and if someone's unhappy about it, they would sue, and if they're right they'd win.
I'm not sure "trolling" can be defined with objectivity; contrarian opinions are what makes freedom of speech interesting.
What's difficult is spam: of zero value, extremely undesirable, and yet not illegal.
The way HN traditionally did this, was to "kill" comments without erasing them; one could still read dead comments if one wanted.
My point is there should be some kind of an appeals process in those matters. The moderators can't also be the judges of last resort.
One-to-one communication isn't the same as mass communication, and people have generally enjoyed a great deal of leeway when having private conversations vs mass media. Very little on Facebook is private - that's the point of it.
The right to free speech, if literally nobody agrees with you enough to help distribute your media, protects nothing more than your right to stand in a busy city square with a megaphone. That has always been the case - it's not a new phenomenon with Facebook. Those with radical ideas have always been silenced, and still are on a regular basis.
This has nothing to do with free speech. Just like when you go to a publisher and they tell you they won't print your book. You can still print the book yourself or somewhere else and this is exactly the same situation with things on facebook, twitter or reddit (on reddit you can even just go to another subreddit with different moderators).
So this is not a free speech issue, but an issue that websites like facebook twitter and reddit have lots of power that they could abuse. They actually don't look like they're abusing it, but are sometimes a bit overcautious in removing stuff that's not supposed to be endorsed.
Fixed it for you, at least in putting it in historical context, if you're willing to entertain the concept that Facebook et. al. have reached public accommodation status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations), for which as least as strong a case can be made as that they're an old fashioned media publisher, which is a stretch when their customers provide 99% of the content on these sites.
And while it may have nothing to do with "freedom of speech" as those words of art are used in the US, it has everything to do with the more fundamental principle of freedom of expression. You may not see a problem today, but those of us on the right see our access to the public square, the "soap box", being systematically proscribed on these essential platforms, and we will not suffer that forever, one way or another.
It's not an analogy, it's a comparison between technologies. The underlying principle of unrestricted communication is what is important. If I were to use an analogy, I'd say telling people to use obsolete methods to communicate is like telling a radio station to broadcast in analog to a world with only digital receivers.
removing stuff that's not supposed to be endorsed
This comment, among others you made, is exactly the kind of ideology I find disturbing.
Totally different technologies. Facebook can be used and was used in this case as a platform to publish things. Telephones can't, they're a one to one communication medium.
If you want to compare facebook with the telephone, you have to compare the part that is providing the same, namely the messenger function of facebook, which is unrestricted in what you can write.
> This comment, among others you made, is exactly the kind of ideology I find disturbing.
It's not even about hindering people to publish their horrible things, it's about not supporting them.
It is, but facebook is not. The empowerment of the internet is that you can publish a website saying something and no one can stop you[1].
However, if you publish via facebook, you give an additional (and unregulated) party control over your publishing. Basically, you should stop doing that.
Even if you're not willing to host your own services[2], there's a lot of benefit in spreading your publishing between multiple providers, preferably smaller ones, so that a decision from one person cannot muzzle you.
[1] This is not quite true, a government order can get you disconnected from your ISP. However, removal of a DNS entry does not in fact stop you from publishing, and enormous tracts of the web are made up if sites that can only be accessed by IP address.
[2] Which you totally should, especially for the easy stuff like file syncing
There are pros and cons to each situation, but it's probably good that Facebook is a private company and that they can ban who they like (so long as they're not doing it to discriminate against protected characteristics).
So as Facebook never fails to boast about their important platform for human expression, they do the same.
Hypocrites.
But market forces only work well when there's a lot of competitors. Facebook, on the other hand, is very close to being a monopoly — and just like relativistic speeds break classic mechanics, just like that the monopoly status breaks the classic market forces. And they should decrease the amount of freedom the company enjoys as well.
Of course, there's a question about how we define "monopoly": there's a lot of counter-arguments to this, and a lot of them perfectly valid. There's Twitter, there's self-hosting, there's all these forums around the internet... But at the same time, isn't it strange that "monopoly" as we understand it is a binary category? I think it's reasonable to think about it as a continuum; and Facebook today would certainly be very far on that axis.
Every time I meet a new acquaintance, we add each other on Facebook. If I tell them about my music project, they search for it on Facebook to like it. If I go to a party, I search for the Facebook event, and so on. After disabling my Facebook account for half a year, it became painfully evident that I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with a lot of family and friends without it. Of course, it's their voluntary choice — but at the same time, depriving a person from access to this website could seriously decrease his quality of life. It's not just commercial product that you can choose to use or not anymore; thanks to the network effect, it's a necessity.
And a commercial entity that becomes so essential to everyday life should not enjoy the same freedom in wielding the ban hammer as "some website on the internet".
> Of course, there's a question about how we define "monopoly": there's a lot of counter-arguments to this, and a lot of them perfectly valid. There's Twitter, there's self-hosting, there's all these forums around the internet... But at the same time, isn't it strange that "monopoly" as we understand it is a binary category? I think it's reasonable to think about it as a continuum; and Facebook today would certainly be very far on that axis.
Interestingly, Charles Munger has spoken quite extensively on how market dynamics can often favor consolidation and "winner takes all" phenomena such as the Facebook example you describe. Indeed, he discusses newspapers as follows:
"The most obvious one is daily newspapers. There's practically no city left in the U.S., aside from a few very big ones, where there's more than one daily newspaper. And again, that's a scale thing. Once I get most of the circulation, I get most of the advertising. And once I get most of the advertising and circulation, why would anyone want the thinner paper with less information in it? So it tends to cascade to a winner-take-all situation. And that's a separate form of the advantages of scale phenomenon."
Similar things happen with the Internet. Indeed, I find it extremely surprising that anyone would think that the Internet would be different in this respect.
> After disabling my Facebook account for half a year, it became painfully evident that I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with a lot of family and friends without it.
There were methods to keep in touch with family and friends before that have not gone away. Anyone who I regard as a close friend would certainly understand when I explain to them why I don't use Facebook and how to contact me (via email, etc). Maybe this is a bit harsh, but for me if someone I know does not understand this and spend the minimal effort to contact me via other channels, after I explain to them in copious detail, I don't bother keeping in touch with them.
As for business stuff, this is where the centralization does get annoying. For instance, for a musician these days it definitely helps to have a Facebook and/or Twitter account and/or YouTube channel. On the other hand, the music industry has been plagued by these issues for a long time - before it was the album makers as the gatekeepers, now it is Apple with iTunes, Google with YouTube, etc. Most of what has changed are the names of the gatekeepers and means of distribution, not their existence.
Judging from the tone and the writing style I am heavily leaning on one of the option of my(loaded) question though.
Sites like this have become a 'punitive tease' -- it's hard to know when the rug will be pulled out from under you, yet you're lured into using it because "all my friends are on it."
There really is a need for a neutral Twitter, a neutral FB. It won't happen though due to entrenched network effects.
I suspect the only way FB and Twitter could be killed off is if they:
1) listed all the banned users and the reason each was banned
2) disclose the current "reasons to ban" list
3) and freely admit that banning is a subjective choice for these websites, that the "reasons to ban" list is not fixed.
It's only anecdotally we hear about someone being banned, we have no idea the numbers of users, the scope, involved.
If you were invited to a dinner party but were given a list of reasons why you'd be asked to leave ('talked down about person X', etc.) and also told "our list of reasons to kick a person out of our dinner party is evolving and is subject to change without notice" -- hey no one's putting up with a manipulative, baiting host like that, no one's going to that party.
FB and Twitter, were they to be transparent about the scope of their banning, their DAU would crash.
Five years ago I published a large collection of public domain documents that had been, before then, locked up behind a high priced paywall by jstor; along with a brief manifesto ( https://github.com/thejeshgn/philosophical_transactions_brow... ) decrying the restriction of important academic work by third party publishers (work which was often publicly funded or is legally in the public domain).
All links to my release or the write up were silently hidden everywhere on facebook, hidden in public feed, hidden in private messages. People who sent them were not informed that their contacts did not receive them.
As a private service Facebook is within their right to behave this way. The only answer is to minimize your reliance on private services to carry your communications. But it seems their billions of users do not understand or care about the control over the lives and, really, minds that they're handing this private corporation. I don't doubt it will change, but it won't happen over night.
> The last posting which I made on my profile related to recent events in Europe.
> I wrote that I considered the wave of terror attacks in Germany and France to indicate that a ‘low level Islamist insurgency’ was now taking place in those countries.
> A few hours after placing this posting, my account was ‘disabled.’
It is sad that the promise of a media that facilitates worldwide free exchange of thought and speech was voluntarily dismantled.
Instead it was transformed in another unidirectional media tightly controlled by corporations.
It happened because:
- the content creators traded freedom for convenience
- the audience preferred centralization to the web of hyperlinks
There is still time, unlike radio and television there is still no legislation or regulation preventing people from hosting, creating and broadcasting their own content.
It may be hard and ir may be almost too late but is reversible.
No company will ever live up to the ideals of freedom of speech, assembly or otherwise. Companies have a goal, and it is to advance the objective of their owners.
Anything they may do that give people the impression that they are fair and good is just an artifact, a momentarily alignment between whatever gives that impression and their short term interests.
Facebook have been removing some, but not all, content from the Lions of Rojava, the YPG and the YPJ.
It's inconsistent what gets left up and what gets taken down.
https://www.facebook.com/Lions-Of-Rojava-1702231736666880/
At a guess anything that says "come and join us, and this is how to get past border control" gets taken down.
I see a dark future.
This is very scary for the freedom lovers, humanists and liberals. Mainstream media already practices self-censorship when it comes to discuss the topics related to the vicious ideology of Islam as described in mainstream Islamic scriptures Quran and Hadiths. The social media also following similar practices. It's sad how Facebook is behaving here.
The liberals/critical thinkers have attacked earlier and do attack now also various bad and evil aspects in other religions (Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism) and our free society never suppresses their thoughts. Islam should not be an exception and hence Islam should not be given special treatment. Else we may have to lose the hard earned values that we cherish so much.
I guess, some Islam apologists (whether bought and paid for or not) are hunting down any thoughtful and legitimate criticism of Islam, its prophet Muhammad. They are using various types of pressure tactics for this. For example, labeling any criticism of Islam as racist attacks on Muslims or Islamophobia. Who knows Facebook may have been threatened with some financial consequences by fanatical Islamists (e.g. some Saudis) with deep pockets.
The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [1], [2], [3]
The USA and the west now must also invest similar (if not more) efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology as those that they invested to fight another vicious ideology called communism. We must realize that this is an ideological war and must be fought on the ideological war-front. This can and must be done by supporting liberal minded humanists (like, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) who are exposing the viciousness of the ideology of Islam and upholding the modern humanist values like freedom of expression and separation of 'mosque and state'.
It should however be noted that there are many people who have been Muslims just by birth and they do not necessarily follow the vicious ideology to its core.
So the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E1u9lQeAsY
What he is demanding is there should fear-free, public discussions about various evils of Islam: e.g. pedophilia practiced by Islam's prophet Muhammad, Allah's misogyny and Allah's very existence and so on.
How does this justify your claim?
edit: removed quote copied from parent.