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Facebook Reminds Publishers That It Is in Complete Control of Their Livelihood

babylonbee.com

85 pointsexolymph21 comments

For some context, Babylon Bee is a satire site, best described as the Onion for Evangelicals.

The publisher of the Bee has tweeted a warning from Facebook, threatening to throttle traffic to the site, because Snopes.com says obvious satire isn't true.

https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008

Thank god this is Satire.

But that said, I've worked on/at many (many, many, many) projects/companies that are dependent on someone else's ecosystem to be viable. Sometimes it's about traffic. Sometimes it's about behavior (e.g. they change an API without giving you a heads up). There's money to be made in those ecosystems and often times the owners of that ecosystem care a lot about their partner network...until they don't.

Worst of all, they really aren't beholden to keeping your lights on and you should realize that when entering a (often implicit) relationship with them. It's just the way it works.

Yes, there is often times a lot of money to be made (see Buffer and their dependency on the Twitter api). People say you shouldn’t start a business depending on a 3rd party, but what if your only profitable idea depends on one?

> Thank god this is Satire.

The best satire has a grain of truth to it.

On the plus side, Babylon Bee has at least one new reader because of this. The CNN story was a little lame, but they grabbed me with "Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy'".

On the downside, really, Facebook? You sending warnings to The Onion, too?

I worry that next Amazon is going to start denying affiliate links to political opponents and many blogs will be faced with a desperate existential threat. The politics of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are so narrow and similar and yet they by themselves can choke any video maker or writer to death.

The social media bigs aren't attacking political opponents, they're attacking hate groups.

If your political ideology is hate, then you should expect to be increasingly ostracized and driven away into the shadows.

How many political ideologies are you willing to tolerate as not "hate"? Facebook is partnering with SPLC, which I perceive as a once noble organization turned into a hate group. Yesterday I delivered food to a group of nuns that were labeled as hate group members by the SPLC. SPLC's justification was that a now-dead man had sold an anti-Semitic book back in the 1980s. SPLC has no due process and no fair way of getting unlisted, even if the listing was for something completely unconnected to the organization's reason for being. Local Jewish congregations told the SPLC they had no problems with these nuns this millennium, but the SPLC would rather keep hating than forgive or overcome ignorance and get to know what some groups actually believe. By smearing loving and peaceful groups of people, putting themselves on the same level as the worst and most dangerous groups, the SPLC shows itself to be quite prone to the harmful generalizations it was founded to oppose. There are all sorts of hate still allowed by social media companies, but they are the kinds you like.

> Yesterday I delivered food to a group of nuns that were labeled as hate group members by the SPLC. SPLC's justification was that a now-dead man had sold an anti-Semitic book back in the 1980s.

This seems highly improbable to be the sole basis for such a designation, and would be readily verifiable (or falsifiable, either way) if you identified the group, since the SPLC publishes details of the designated organizations and their activities that led to the designation online.

Speaking as a donor to SPLC, they are getting a bit ridiculous lately. Just reading the literature they send and everything they identify as hate is looking more like they are reaching too far. Pretending they are an unbiased arbiter of hate is just being dishonest. They clearly have a political bias and strong views. Nothing wrong there, but it's good to call a spade a spade and not something else.

The meaning of the word "hate" in that sense is very vague and very much in the eye of the beholder. You'll have to be more specific, preferably with examples, if you want to successfully communicate anything about what you actually mean.

For instance, I know people who'd classify the Republican Party as a hate group, is that what you mean?

>The social media bigs aren't attacking political opponents, they're attacking hate groups.

Same thing. If we have unofficial rules that you're only allowed to use your market dominance to suppress hate groups, pretty quickly your political opponents are "hate groups" now.

> The social media bigs aren't attacking political opponents, they're attacking hate groups.

They classify their opponents as "hate groups" and think this basic trick is going to fool anyone?

What is hate? Is there an unbiased 3rd party that acts as a hate checker? Alternatively with a few rhetorical tricks I can turn anyone's beliefs I don't agree with into "hate". I like wearing blue shoes, so anyone wearing red shoes are blue shoes haters - ban them!

> The social media bigs aren't attacking political opponents, they're attacking hate groups.

Who defines what is a hate group? So if saudi arabia labels atheist groups as hate groups, should social media ban atheists? If china labels democracy groups as hate groups, should social media ban democracy groups?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506887

What about political groups who hate trump? Should they be banned from social media? What about socialists who hate capitalism? When russia labeled lgbt groups as hate groups, you agree with them banning lgbt groups from social media?

> If your political ideology is hate, then you should expect to be increasingly ostracized and driven away into the shadows.

Wouldn't you want to shine the light on hate groups? Isn't that the last thing you want to do? To push hate groups into the shadows where they can fester?

What happened to liberalism? It's something every college student learned about when I went to school. Free speech and why it is fundamental to defend "hate speech" or ideology/speech you find offensive or disgusting in order to protect free speech. It's philosophy 101. Is logic and philosophy no longer taught in schools anymore? This is basic stuff.

> Wouldn't you want to shine the light on hate groups? Isn't that the last thing you want to do? To push hate groups into the shadows where they can fester?

thank you for saying this, as it seems to be often forgotten these days. you want "bad" sites to be out in the open like trash collectors so law enforcement can use them as honeypots.

> What happened to liberalism?

There's a reason the far left identifies as "progressive" now rather than "liberal". It's no longer about increasing freedom, it's about furthering an agenda.

So would it be safe to say that they "hate" those subjectively-defined groups, and that they themselves are therefore a hate group?

"When done right, satire is virtually indistinguishable from truth" - erikig

Satire

https://youtu.be/ntICHMV-WMA

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