Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

If you get hit by thousands of trolls at once it's not trivial to block them. Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.

No, if people are going to try to push goatse or other shock images into my field of vision then I'm going to assign blame to them.

>Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them.

I don't buy this. If an internet forum like FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever allows increasingly toxic behavior it eventually spills into the real world. For example, unmoderated forums facilitate doxing and incitement. What happens when an online harasser posts someone's home address, work address, and childrens' schools online with a call to real world violence? Should the victim just not care? What if online trolls set about smearing your professional or personal reputation? What if they decide to out you as gay to your parents or in a country where being gay is illegal?

And don't tell me you can simply avoid going online, that isn't practical. Its precisely places like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc where marginalized people can find a supportive community. Also the internet should be for everyone, not just the most horrible, hard, and callous among us.

Each individual sock-puppet may be easy to block, but in aggregate they can overwhelm any attempts to constrain them individually. If you instead employ a whitelist, you miss out on conversations with people who tried to contact you but couldn't get through because you had no way to distinguish them from trolls.

Offloading contact curation on each individual user doesn't solve the fundamental problem of identifying malicious users, it shoves it where someone else has to deal with it.

People by default care about what others think. It starts before kindergarten and is normal human psychology. No training is necessary of that.

Neverthess, thinking the issue is just about insults is naive. The actual uncensored (especially anonymous) forum means hardcore bdsm porn posted for fun in the discussion about gardening or child raising. Or very disgusting pic of vivisection of animal. Or calls for another holocaust along with floorplan of your house.

It also means most 'normal' people leave elsewhere due to above. Cause most people dont need above in their lives.

Moreover, insults have meaning and it matters. If you ignore them, you are more likely to become target of bullying or mobbing. Because people parrot what they see and the more you allow it, the more people join on that to look like members of stringet group - to get popular. Or they simply feel it is socially ok.

In the work, it affects your ability to push for ideas, to get leadership position, to get raise, to be trusted and given a bit more autonomy. All of that matters.

> Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them.

Humans are social animals. We care about what others think by default. Maybe you're an outlier, that's nice for you, but please don't think your experience is normal.

The pollution analogy might be useful. Specifically: "The solution to pollution is dilution".

Now, that mantra has been mostly rejected for environmental pollution because there's a far better option: Gather the pollutants, process/eliminate them, and work to eliminate the sources.

Back in our context, hopefully the elimination of people with unsavoury viewpoints is not on the table. We must fundamentally agree that humans being what they are, free thought being what it is, these ideas will never be 'gone'. So accepting that, perhaps "the solution to pollution is dilution" applies.

Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. Obvious example: 4chan/8ch. Less obvious example: People's minds.

By avoiding chasing these things into the shadows they remain open to challenge. While the mind of the person you're challenging might not be changed, when its out in the open all others that come past and read that interaction get to judge it on it's merits and make their own judgement call.

Without that, folks end up in echo chambers. When newcomers get to those places, they are not exposed to a balance of viewpoints and the opinions they themselves form will tend to conform to the leanings of the echo chamber where they spend their time.

Don't use the word 'force' when no force is involved. On the Internet, if you "attack", you send words or pictures. You send ideas. A bomb blows people apart. You do not have to, either intentionally or accidentally, train yourself to respond negatively to a bomb. A bomb blows you apart no matter who you are. An idea does not. Only you can control how you react to any given idea.

And I don't think it's likely that if everyone could cause indiscriminant destruction it would be likely to occur because that is already the case and has been for a very long while. Killing people is NOT hard. Just look at what people do with a car when they want. How many cars are there? How many angry, desperate people with access to them? And how common is it for them to drive it into a crowd and kill and injure people? Run the numbers. You're more likely to die from being hit by a meteor, so concern yourself with that instead.

What extreme risk? I mean, I'm a skinny weakling. I've pretty much always been a skinny weakling. I've had threats, but always been able to talk my way out of things. I don't really base my personal view so much on the fact I've never been in a fight, or that I live in the world with the lowest incidence of violent crime since the advent of agriculture or any of those sorts of things. I base it on neuroscience. We're built to NOT hurt people. We have to be pushed pretty far to be made to hurt people, and even then we usually can't go through with it. Mirror neurons work. They reflect what you do to others on yourself, and it doesn't feel good at all. If you're trained to kill on reflex, as soldiers are, and your body goes ahead and does it before your conscious mind can catch up... once it does, that causes a neurological cataclysm that manifests as PTSD and can take years to recover from.

The 'producing sustainable organizations' changes the topic completely. Human beings, as individuals, are absolutely and fundamentally different from human beings as a group. America went to war with Vietnam in the 1960s. That is a true statement. Even though there were tons of protestors who had no desire to fight Vietnam. Talking about groups and about people as individuals is starkly and completely different. People in groups can be easily driven by 'mob mentality', especially if they have been trained to be especially susceptible to this by things like team-based competitive sports in their formative years. Acting in a group 'disables' a great deal of a persons individual moral code. The same is true of people in a position of subservience. "I was just following orders" makes sense to the person pulling the trigger because they earnestly feel no moral responsibility for their actions - it's how they protect themselves. It's a dangerous defense that needs to be consciously acknowledged and resisted by all people. Failure to do so makes people very dangerous. And it is not an easy thing to do at all.

Organizations also pretty much always form to facilitate some form of control. And control is poison. It is inherently harmful, regardless of either the aim, intention, or end result of it. It is also, I think, cumulative. There's no one law that turns a country into an oppressive regime, it's an accumulation. And it doesn't matter if every single one of the restrictions is "for your own good". Unless the 'good' produced by the restriction outweighs the cumulative damage it does by inflicting the control upon each individual in the society, it is overall harmful. People often ask ridiculous questions like "Why should X be legal?" which pre-supposes that everything ought to be illegal unless there is a 'good reason' to permit it. They ask "Why should you be allowed to X?" as if every action a person takes needs to be justified as beneficial in some meaningful way. It's a very dangerous mindset that has undone many societies in the past. And control poisons not just the people being controlled, but those dishing it out as well. I'm uncertain whether their damage is greater than the damage to those controlled or not. As far as I know it's not been studied and that sort of thing would be hard to quantify. I mean, prison guards are killing themselves in massive numbers and always have for a reason, obviously, but the prisoners are tattooing themselves, joining gangs, and fighting as well, so which is having more harm inflicted? They're both responding in pretty extreme ways (ways identical to how people in oppressive nations, in oppressive cults, in high-control prisons everywhere, and increasingly in American high schools respond).

>is this statement based on some kind of study?

It's based on the law. They punish crimes after they have been committed. Where is the law that doesn't say "if you murder, you go to jail" but instead sets things up so you physically can not murder?

>not terribly convincing... 'crimes happen' doesn't seem to sufficiently demonstrate that 'deterrence doesn't work

Yeah, the part you cut out is the important bit. Sure you could argue 'oh well people are willing to steal a pair of shoes because they only get punished with 3 days in jail so they make a value judgement' if that's what we were talking about. But it's not. I pointed out the case of extreme punishment, death, not even THAT being capable of preventing the simple stupid crimes like stealing a pair of shoes.

>some aren't. some are much, much worse.

'Some' are individuals. I was speaking of humans overall. They're two very different things. Individually humans are impossible to predict, in groups they're among the most predictable things around. 'America went to war with Vietnam in the 60s' is not false simply because there were a bunch of protestors that opposed it. A statement about a group is not a statement about all of the individuals within it, and language would be incapable of functioning if that was the standard you attempted to apply.

Moderate the 'spam' per-user rather than globally. The main problem that I and most other users have with the anti-free-speech practices is bad categorization. Give users the tools to moderate their own experience (with defaults, so long as they can be disabled, and heck, disable the ability to change them in more repressive countries) and you basically have the problem solved.

I don't want these companies making the "disappear this" judgment calls anymore. They've shown that making those calls dispassionately and objectively isn't all that important to them.

I live in Myanmar. A regular HN reader and a non-believer. I have never written comments, but there is so much misinformation going on regarding the current crisis. The recent major terror by Islamist group (ARSA) attacks on thirty police outposts left a dozen police dead and a government office and a Buddhist monastery burnt. That was not the first time that happened but the biggest and deadliest we know of in the recent memory. All ethnic groups had to flee, including Rakhine Buddhists, Hindu, Myo, Thet, and Dinet. Very few knew. The international media seems to have slept through that episode and woke up when some Rohingya villages start fleeing once the army arrived to track down the villages where terrorists were sheltered. How many terrorists do you think are needed to attack 30 police outposts at the same time? One instance a Rakhine village was surrounded by hundreds of angry Islamists. Another instance, it is a Hindu village that was brutally attacked.

Video links for the voices of the victims ignored in the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQf4DxgowbY&list=UUBwU9jzFLZ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jB8K0pVAe8&list=UUBwU9jzFLZ...

My parents used to live in the conflict zone. I have been to the region several times. Tensions can be traced back over decades, but there was sectarian violence between Rohingya and Rakhine. Many of the times, the conflict started with initiating attacks by Islamist terrorists in the community. There were major attacks in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The affairs are far from one-sided bullying. That genocide claim is a stretch by a thousand miles. Two of my relatives, Buddhist Rakhines, who used to live there until a month ago, had to run and fled home due to the increasing threats of militant Islamist groups, and they do not ever want to go back the area. The other side of the story was never been heard in the media.

One blatant lie is that of majority Buddhist persecuting the minority Muslims. I wonder if those journalists writing about the issue ever step a foot on the region. There is too much propaganda going on out there. I cannot believe what is going on. What you have to understand is that a conflict is happening in a remote and very isolated land even from other areas in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The sole mode of transportation is by river boats. The population of Rohingya Muslims outnumbers the combined population of Rakhine Buddhists, Hindu, and other ethnic groups by the ratio of six to one. Rakhine Buddhists were the majority in the region half a decade ago. Muslim population tripled since the 1980s. Islamist terror attacks have been more and more frequent.

I am not here to downplay the plight of Rohingya, but framing the complex issue into a simplistic version to drive an agenda and demonizing the other side is evil. I am in the camp of giving citizenship to people who have legitimately lived there for generations. Leader Aung San Su Kyi has been working along with UN to draft guideline for citizenship and resolve this issue. Everyone is suffering. The rise of know-nothing activists, ivory tower commenters, and increasing radicalization in the region have made life very difficult for everyone in the region. The bottom line is that it is not one-sided bullying and people who have been to the region and studied the issue are very much aware of it.

I have never been more disappointed in the integrity of the news media. If you want to learn nuanced and balanced analysis from an outsider who had actually been there and studied the issue, I recommend this article by Jasmine Chia, a Harvard student who did research in Rakhine State. http://thediplomat.com/2016/03/the-truth-about-myanmars-rohi...

How about the interview with a US diplomat who used to work in Burma. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1MoehFI3io

I'm not sure, a lot of people seem to want speech free beyond even American norms. And "legal where?" is an important question.

Or a lot of tribalism?

Being a religious extremist and a nationalist with the support of a military junta behind him, probably.

I imagine it is the same thing that drove other acts of genocide, or for that matter, what lead to Heather Heyer's death: the politics of dehumanization and weaponized tribalism.

To try and be charitable to the poster, I think a better example would be "Would you be okay burning witches if they really did curse people?" than the Nazi example.

I think another way of saying phrasing the same idea. Let us assume that Muslims are intentionally having as many kids as they can to become a demographic majority in the future. How does that affect how we should act?

The above phrasing I count as very different from defending rhetoric of a genocide perpetrator because the answer to the above question is not "Kill all Muslims".

I think you'll agree that I am not advocating genocide, I'm just curious about the facts. I like to learn. I want to vet everyones' claims.

What I don't understand is why are you arguing your position? What do you propose I do with respect to the acquisition and spread of knowledge?

Yeah, thinking that slavery is bad is better than enslaving people.

Omg.. are we really debating this?

Each utility fought a real battle when being initially established. It's very interesting history. For awhile I was researching it pretty deeply, interested in whether my ideas were total lunacy or what and possibly considering writing a book about it. I started off with the question: What criteria was used to say 'yes, water should be a utility, natural gas should be a utility, electricity should be a utility, telephone should be a utility', etc? How did that actually come about?

The question weighed for those things in the past turned out to be a fairly simple one, but which can be tricky to approach honestly and fairly for both sides: Would the benefit to society be greater than the damage caused by the elimination of competition in that space? To judge it correctly, one does have to attempt to quantify and judge how much damage would be done by eliminating the competitive aspect, because that would have to happen. Then one lines up the benefits society would garner by having it available ubiquitously and cheaply.

Personally I think the call isn't even close. The Internet meets the requirement of providing more social benefit by being cheap and everywhere by miles, much moreso than some of the other public utilities even do. (First off the bat, you can get rid of the phone utility. And the TV quasi-utility.) You can actually close a gigantic number of government offices and let their employees work from home. You can tell people to 'do it online'. You can't DO that, ever, in law if universal access is not guaranteed and it remains a luxury. Small businesses would get huge with it, no longer chained to a "business class" connection that bleeds them dry and hosting companies that manipulate them, they could just run their servers themselves on their own lines. There are all sorts of other benefits to having a guaranteed-present communications network which is not a luxury but a basic service.

And sure, the companies like Comcast that originally made their money from distributing media and then got into the ISP market to try to stop or destroy or control it to prevent the threat to their cash cow will go nuts about it. Their death warrant was signed the day the Internet came about. Distribution is a solved problem. Sure 50 years ago if I made a video and wanted to show it to 10,000 people I'd HAVE to sign up with a distributor and beg and scrape and HOPE they only skimmed 99% of the value out of that transaction. Distribution was flat-out the single most valuable economic activity and dominated the entire global economy from the advent of factories (it made factories possible) up until the Internet came along (computers helped). Now distribution is something a clever 12 year old can do in their spare time for fun. And most importantly, the 12 year old will do it faster, better, and at a radically lower cost compared to the established gigantic players who feel entitled to still be kings. They love capitalism and the free market until they're stuck holding a huge order of buggy whips and watching everyone driving around in automobiles. Suddenly they wish their lobbyists could get the government to require cars to have a buggy whip installed before they'd start up.

Thanks for your personal donation to the Rohingya Muslims fund! You are a very generous person.

Do you apply the same standards to your own life? I bet from your presence on this site that your income or potential income is above the median. When a drunk husband across town starts getting abusive towards his wife, do you open your house to the wife? If no, why not? Are you shouldering your share of the burden?