I'm not sure what the answer is but something should be done about Facebook's part in the problems in Myanmar. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/business/facebook-misinfo...)
> “Kalar are not welcome here because they are violent and they multiply like crazy, with so many wives and children,” he said.
> Mr. Aye Swe admitted he had never met a Muslim before, adding, “I have to thank Facebook because it is giving me the true information in Myanmar.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/world/asia/myanmar-rohing...
I found this chilling when I saw it on Twitter.
I mean no offense, but this comment coming from a user named "IBM" is a bit ironic considering that IBM provided infrastructure support to both the US Japanese internment camp programs and the Nazi concentration and extermination camp programs.
How are governments supposed to deem what's appropriate when -this very- article states that the fake posts were shared by government accounts.
Facebook is comprised of people, all with moral compasses, but when your user base is increasingly growing to be the entire population of earth...it's hard to moderate. People act like Facebook, Google etc could just flip a magic switch and instantly stop disinformation through social media, which is virtually an impossible task.
On top of that, even if it -were- possible, you create moral hazards of who decides what is real or isn't real...and if you had it over to world governments, that's when you get into much deeper shit.
But I was wrong, facebook doesn't just post what you say, they choose what you see. So it's not necessarily that you're seeing stuff that people said of their own volition, it's that perhaps facebook is _choosing_ not to show you contradictory claims because it would make you use facebook less, and cost them money.
So then perhaps yes, some kind of regulation about what kind of choices facebook is allowed to make when choosing what will be shown to whom, and some oversight that that actually happens.
Still, though, it scares me to try legislating speech, since legislation is easy to pass and hard to repeal; hard to get right, and not debated long enough by smart enough people hardly ever.