Previously
> Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform
That is exactly what censorship is.
> Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform
That is exactly what censorship is.
You can dress it up, but Facebook is a private website. They do fancy stuff with information they collect about you and use it to sell you ads. They have terms of service that define acceptable behavior, and they have no SLA / guarantee about what you share reaching others or what others share reaching you. That is the deal.
If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals.
Now, what the article described, "Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds." <- This is completely censorship. Governments censor.
Facebook saying it doesn't want a bunch of Macedonian fake news click bait stories crapping up it's platform is a business decision by a private company.
What is the definition of censorship?
>Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.
How does this not fit under said definition? Whether or not the act is done by a "public" or a "private" entity is irrelevant to the definition.
Government can use force (the very real threat of jail, fines, etc) against you to suppress your speech. All Facebook can really do is prevent you from using their site, in the end. Naturally, if they work with a government, Facebook becomes a kind of arm of the government, but that's a separate context (but it is also what this article is about).
Is free speech a thing worth keeping or not? If it is, than anything that realistically threatens it on a global scale needs to be kept in check.
Now, let's not pretend that the only way to suppress speech is to use violence. Governments have a long history of using much subtler and sometimes more efficient tactics like blacklisting. For example, in Soviet Union many "inconvenient" people were free to live as they chose, except they had no chance in hell of getting decent housing or a good job, and were ostracized by many out of fear of "political contagion".
So it's not about violence. It's about power. And companies like Google and Facebook have "soft" power rivaling many nation-states.
There are concerns that I have about the level with which some of these companies cooperate with state actors, especially when we're unaware of it. When these companies become partners of government in secret, the state security apparatus is accordingly expanded in ways that do threaten us.
Censorship is something the government does. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private entities. Private entities are not obliged to provide a platform for whatever opinion you feel like spewing.
This topic has devolved into ridiculous flamewars.
The first amendment is not the definition of censorship.
The Chinese case is obviously censorship. I don't think anyone disputes that.
How do you draw the line? What would you do if a politician ask you nicely?
We're well past "shirt and shoes required" sophistry spin.
Your definition (accepting for a moment the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia article on censorship as a "definition") can be logically reduced to, "Suppression of information which may be objectionable by a group". That, for instance, describes HN comment and article moderation. It is so overly broad as to be able to describe practically anything.
No one in their right mind thinks Facebook policy's are their rights. Facebook can openly start censoring news if it wants to. I view Breitbart as a publication that actively censors leftist news and NYT as publication that censors libertarian news. They are both good businesses but albeit far tinier than Facebook.
The moment facebook starts "dealing with fake news" I am going sell off my FB shares. Just like I sold my twitter shares long back once they banned account of my favourite blogger for criticizing Islam.
Yes that is my point. It is indeed and absurd way to look at it yet the underlying principle is the same i.e. a business selecting only specific type of things to show because it makes profits for them. Facebook can use the exact same principle to deny their platform to some group of news just because it reduces their profits.
I take a very dim view of saying that a creator of original content is censor by simply choosing not to create something. Censorship inherently is a veto over someone else's work. Facebook, because it is the middle man between the creator and the audience, is in a position to censor.
And therefore, you could decide as a society that you want to forbid Facebook to do that.
It assumes you are in a democracy. China obviously is not. But if you're lucky to live in one, then you don't have to accept what Facebook does, at least in your country, because they are a private company.
Communication platforms are an oligopoly. When they each have censorship baked in the cake, the free-market-user-choice argument doesn't hold up very well.
If Facebook prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I simply post it elsewhere and distribute it there.
If the government prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I have no outlet for it that does not come with the threat of violence, in the form of jail.
Very different outcomes.
At the point in which Facebook = Government in terms of state monopolized communications channel with government enforcement mechanisms then this definition would fit. It is however, despite it's popularity, nowhere near that nor reasonably possible.
It shouldn't be our concern if conspiracy theorists decide to share misinformation among themselves. It becomes our concern when they take advantage of human emotions and insufficient algorithmic filtering to manipulate their way to the top of the newsfeeds of major social sites.
I personally think that there is legitimate censorship (child porn, detailed instructions for constructing weapons of mass destruction, etc), but that the vast majority of 'fake news' and even outright false information doesn't fall into that scope. Even there I have to hedge though, since some false information can cause very harmful panic.
I agree with your examples, of course. I'm not against common sense restrictions. But, I think these should be decided upon up front with a transparent review process for adding new categories. To leave that open ended would inevitably lead to abuse.
I would much prefer that such things weren't in demand; it'd be great to live in a world where every adult person had reliable bullshit detectors, so we wouldn't be swamped in logical fallacies and ancillary nonsense, but in the meantime the speed and connectedness of our social technologies has vastly outpaced the general population's ability to digest the available information, and so the disease of populism has broken out again as the new media go through their adolescent stage.
There's no quick fix for this. It's going to take a generation or two of concerted education from an early age in critical thinking, and somehow I doubt making people question what they're told is going to be a priority for the next four years.
This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying: News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
"This article is mostly false according to Snopes. Are you sure you want to share it?"
Then if you think Snopes got it wrong, you can post it anyway.
Or how about: "This article is satire. Are you sure you want to share it?"
There's nothing wrong with posting satire if that's what you meant to do. If that's not what you meant, it saves you some embarrassment for posting it as fact.
Seems like that's what a (semi-)intelligent assistant should do, right?
Websites like Weibo/QQ/Wechat will display a banner text saying some tweets (or microblogging cards as you call it) contains a mis-information.
Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution.
The result? Authorities fight mis-information with half-baked and premature refutes. In practice refutes can be 100% arbitrary even fake. You can't refute a refute because they are final, non-debatable and in-reversible. Remember the refute mechanism is to stop the spread of "mis-information" so debate refutes are dangerous and would cause Streisand effect.
The best part, the process is 100% manual, so PR firms totally lobbied website admins, officials in power, this corrupted industry is multi-million dollar business today.
So who watches the watchmen? It's a twisted long path ahead.
I think the key point here is making sure your intelligent assistant works for you. Unfortunately, currently available assistants all come from powerful companies.
Seems like a BIG difference.
Banning a fake news post is moderation. And if someone would pay Facebook to block or promote some content it would be neither of those.