UN blames Facebook for spreading hatred of Rohingya

Eh? "Public" companies have always moderated speech. I can't think of a time when they haven't. Even if you restrict that to internet companies then even Facebook already does moderation (although it seems wildly inconsistent). Heck 4chan has some moderation albeit of a very limited kind.

Any successfully productive and civil online community has in my experience been community moderated.

If you want to participate then you follow some simple guidlines and contribute in a positive way, which can include differences of opinion.

All of the platforms failing to provide productive and civil discourse are those that have no community moderation, or worse, are just personal soapboxes with an effortless virtue signal button.

I think the platforms are broken by design, and humanity figured out a long time ago that there are limits to uncivil discourse and you need to recognise them.

The great thing about the internet is if you feel passionate enough about your idea, you have probably thought hard about it and you can go make your own community.

The issue with effortless virtue signalling and the no-consequences soapbox is that you don't have to think that hard about something so long as it sounds like it's up your alley, and you can be led very far astray before realising you're in a toxic conversation, potentially one with a subtext you didn't recognise.

Could you please elaborate? What's the difference between "they're responsible for what they host" and "they should decide what people can or can't say on their platform"? (Or, if I misunderstood, what are you calling "not quite the same thing"?)

Set showdead to true? I almost forgot that was a setting, must have been ten years since I changed it. Looks like you've been here a decade too though (as of yesterday! (didn't realize they changed days to date joined on here...))

I dunno. I mean yes in theory, but we don't need the theory, this has been tried multiple times and there two basic ways that it ends up:

- Factual correctness and overall decency loses out to popularity— making a funny, low-effort post will in many communities get you a lot more magical internet approval points than doing the work of engaging with an issue, seeking alternative sources, etc. Yes, there are counter-examples of this, but the long term trend is always toward a low quality of dialogue. - At a certain scale, posts are simply concealed from a user who is likely to disagree with them— basically pre-moderation. Being challenged on a viewpoint requires energy, and people don't like to do work.

Flagged items disappear for a reason: to not give free rank to shitty articles.

When FB and Google don't moderate enough, they're publicly criticized by authority figures, wide news coverage, demanded to respond, occasionally threatened to be brought in line. On this occasion, they're implied to be complicit with genocide.

When they moderate too much, we all shrug, less coverage, growing pains, cannot be expected to be perfect all the time, it's-their-platform-they-have-the-right.

That incentivizes them to moderate more, always more.

> On a real-life social network, there are safeguards that prevent blatant lies and angry-mob-like behavior to be contained

Sadly, no. It just lacks "reach". It's harder to meet up with like-minded sociopaths and get a good angry mob going when every meeting has to be in person and every lie must be repeated verbally, but it's still very possible.

Again, I recognize there is a big problem. Also, I recognize that I am not at this time contributing a proposed solution. But I hope to convince that the solution we're sleepwalking into is really, really bad.

> Also, showing people only what they want to see leads to echo chambers

Not sure I agree with this. The internet made it possbile for the whole world to see information coming from all kinds of sources. Before, in history, you had to rely on local news/newspapers, or even less information. Much more bubbly than this modern age.

Again: I think the reason those bubbles appear have to do with society and the urge to belong to a group, Facebook is not to blame here. Facebook reflects people and society, not the other way around.

This isn't a cop out. Anything different and Facebook would be blamed for censorship. This is a difficult problem to solve. It's practically human nature to form a mob and group think. It's one of the first things that kids do in pre-school.

I think the only solution to this problem is education.

That's a terrible analogy. Unless there's a cabal of restaurants with a plan to poison people, it's probably an accident. Spreading hate like this however, is deliberate, and if there wasn't facebook, people doing this would most certainly find a different venue.

They simply provide a way to communicate between people. When a newspaper incites hatred, we might blame the editor, the writers, or the readers, but we don't blame the paper company.

What I mean is that the service provided by Facebook is somewhat trivial - it can easily be replaced by emails, chats, or any of the countless ways to communicate via the internet. Shutting down Facebook will not solve the problems in Myanmar.

Ironically that seems to have happened with reddit - there are a couple of competitors which are "just like it with a bit more calls to violence against minority groups".

Those responsible for the propaganda against the Rohingya used the radio before, now they use Facebook and after that they'll use something else. Education and a proper government that would censor the hate groups could help solve the problems in Myanmar, but eg shutting down Facebook would not change anything.

I heard a story in Singapore. I don’t know how much truth there is to it but basically: there was conflict going on in China, and every time the news told the story the issue grew worst. China asked singapore for advice and LKY said to stop posting it the news and no one will know about it, and it won’t grow and it will die down. So China forced the media to stop talking abou it and the conflict died down in a few days.

> they choose to use that power to censor boobs

Do they, or are they forced to do so?

And as I said: I don't like Facebook. I think they're shifty and probably do have an agenda. However, it's untenable to attempt to force them to censor anything that a government doesn't approve of, or hell, society doesn't approve of. Facebook has 2.2 billion active users which make post 510,000 comments, update 293,000 statuses, and upload 136,000 photos per minute. It is impossible for a company to go through all of them in order to censor those which break whatever law of the country it was posted in.

That ignores the entire history of South Africa but go nuts.

Context matters. South Africa has the largest inequality in the world. Colonialism created a society where the descendenantd of armed invaders control 80% of th farmland. Whites generally live a comfortable middle class life, while the native population often lives in abject poverty.

South Africa is also a glorious example of reconciliation, overcoming a history of injustice without violence.

But the farming community simply has not used the chance they had in the last 20 years to become part of this historic process: while universities and many other groups and institutions have de-segregated, that conservative community has dug in and defended their privileges at all costs. They invited the government to eventually force their hand.

Expulsion is obviously a bridge to far. And Zimbabwe stands as the obvious example of what not to do. But some sort of legislative land reform is now inevitable.