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Comment by sg0 | Hacker News Reader

This is a case of government authorized genocide. I just don't understand how shifting blame toward Facebook as a data sharing platform solves the problem. If someone sends hate filled letters to public via USPS, is USPS complicit? Yes, FB could have probably done better by monitoring the content, and muted hostile posts. I hail from a small industrial town in eastern India, where very recently racial tensions erupted between pockets of Hindu/Muslim communities. One of the first things local government did was to turn off internet (data and ISP), to control proliferation of rumors and anything that could incite further violence.

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If they get credit for the Arab Spring, they should get credit for this, too. This is not solving a problem, this is a part of understanding how the world is changing and what is contributing to it.

If we don't identify and understand what is going on, we won't have an informed response.

> If they get credit for the Arab Spring, they should get credit for this, too.

Facebook shouldn't get credit for the Arab Spring. They didn't start it, they were just one of many mediums used for its organization and dissemination.

What they and all social media get credit for is existing as a communications platform that's largely uncensored.

If the government controlled in what order you saw things on television, or whether or not you saw some of them at all, would you call television largely uncensored?

Why does Facebook's algorithmic ranking of feed content get a free pass, here?

Television is censored. So is radio. In exchange for the use of spectrum, media companies agreed to restrictions on content. Even beyond the injunctions against certain behavior (swearing, nudity, etc.) broadcasters are subject to positive responsibilities about how they use their airtime. TV networks are legally obligated to run news programming.

The FCC is insulated enough from partisan politics that its censorship doesn't run along partisan lines, and is therefore not very controversial. But TV is absolutely censored.

Broadcast television is probably censored everywhere, but we're talking about Myanmar (and in this subthread, India) so the FCC is not highly relevant.

> credit for the Arab Spring

Is it still viewed as a positive event? Any countries where it lead to improvements instead of instability?

Crediting technology platforms with the Arab Spring is a really misleading and troublesome narrative that a lot of people blindly accept.

"Credit" confuses causal importance with (human) responsibility.

Normal Borlaug engineered a variety of wheat that fed a lot of people and saved a lot of lives. What deserves credit? The wheat or the inventor? Or Mendel et.al, for pioneering the principles of genetics that Borlaug used in his work? Even if "someone else would have done it if Borlaug didn't", he is still (one of) the most important human actors responsible for averting the crisis. The materials/products used are causally important; not humanly-responsible.

In this case, humans were responsible for the Arab Spring. For the most part, social media platforms were causally important to the process.

It gets much harder to draw that line, though, when the platforms are behaving in activist ways (e.g. $literally_any_technology_headline_in_the_last_week).

*Norman Borlaug. Not "Normal".

In retrospect, they might not want credit for the Arab Spring either.

If Facebook delivered every single piece of content to every single recipient, the way the USPS does, then maybe the analogy would hold. But they don't. They use algorithms to determine what to show and what to hide, and IMO they are responsible for that.

Imagine if the U.S. Postal Service could keep track of which pieces of mail get opened or read, and then they decided to only deliver the mail that made people the most angry. Sound like a good postal service?

USPS has rules about what can and cannot be sent, and it seems like they can open your mail if they suspect it contains something illegal [1].

[1]: https://gotogreatpanes.com/blog/2014/02/03/can-usps-open-my-...

That seems pretty different from what Facebook is doing. Facebook is pretty obviously curating content, but USPS is not.

That's because people can ship dangerous things in the mail. The post office isn't controlling information sent in the mail.

There's a big difference between opening something up (many times needing a warrant, as your link says) because it may contain a weapon or biological agent or invasive seeds of a plant species, vs controlling what information is passed or not.

This isn't an academic debate over who is technically responsible. It's a genocide, happening right now. Facebook should be doing everything they realistically can to use their position to save lives.

There is no genuine moral outrage here, anybody with half a brain knows that Facebook is no more to blame for this genocide than the printing press was to blame for the holocaust. Governmental institutions are currently making a concerted effort to falsely blame social media for society's woes in an attempt to rally support for state regulation and control of social media platforms.

Actual comment from the article:

"A colleague acknowledged that the service had helped people in the country communicate with each other."

It leaves me dumbfounded that a journalist can write that sentence and not see anything wrong with the whole argument.

> Facebook is no more to blame for this genocide than the printing press was to blame for the holocaust.

The printing press was a physical machine. How anyone can posit this as an argument with "half a brain" is beyond me. These are completely different scenarios.

Facebook can and has a long history of curating content. That immediately makes it different entirely from the printing press. Comparing it to a newspaper is fair-it curates content. Sometimes it is biased, willingly or not.

It's a shame that on HN, whenever the industry has issues, it's immediately ignored and shuffled under conspiracy theories/government takeover/etc. There are valid concerns here-never-mind the fact that entities like Facebook and Google are essentially becoming governing bodies.

I think hate speech on Facebook is just the most visible problem. A more sinister use of Facebook is to use friend lists to identify people to target in real life. A bad actor might not even leave any record on Facebook itself that they're doing anything wrong.

To work off of your post office analogy, consider if it were possible for random third parties to inquire of the post office who some particular person has corresponded with in the last several years and consider how that could be abused in a dysfunctional society where being friends with the wrong person could have very bad consequences.

I don't know if there's a solution to that, other than for Facebook to be much more restrictive about who can see a user's list of friends. However, that would interfere with the way people ordinarily use Facebook.

USPS declined to carry leftist periodicals during the Red Scare. It's no bastion of free speech.

In the case of a government authorized genocide, however, it's likely the whistleblowers who would be silenced by government regulation of political speech.

What a lot of Facebook defenders on HN seem to be ignorant about is the context of the finger pointing. FB stopped being a "data sharing platform" when it muscled its way into becoming synonymous of "the internet" in much of the underdeveloped world. In many of these countries (including Myanmar) people can get a really cheap plan that offers next to nothing beyond "Facebook Free Basic", FB's walled garden (e.g for 3$/month you get 100mb of data + unlimited facebook). This is effectively a two-level Internet with FB being the obvious default. It's not as if FB was unaware of the potentially detrimental effects, they just chose to be blind to them https://www.mmtimes.com/business/technology/20685-facebook-f...

> In 2015, researchers evaluating how Facebook Zero shapes information and communication technologies usage in the developing world found that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. 65% of Nigerians, and 61% of Indonesians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet" compared with only 5% in the US. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#User_experience_re...

Facebook certainly isn't the main responsible, but it's an effective catalyst.

Consider that people in Myanmar have been isolated from the world for the better part of the last 40 years. They're effectively playing catchup with the rest of the planet. The country is already afflicted by all the symptoms you can attribute to dictatorship, tribalism, various conflicts, lack of information, lack of education, superstition, lack of infrastructure, etc. Take that as the base context and then introduce the population to technology (smartphones) and "the internet" (mostly via FB). Step back and watch bad things happen... much faster.

Regardless of the article not pointing all fingers to all culprits, what's concerning to me regarding specifically Facebook is their recklessness especially in some of these emerging countries. Maintaining peace in many of these places is already difficult and the various agreements are fragile, but FB in their pursuit for growth and profit has maintained an attitude of continuous and utter denial when it comes to their product's potential as an instrument of propaganda. That to me is to some extent almost insulting.

There's a cost (both time and money) associated with spreading knowledge through USPS or similar physical mediums. The cost of spreading ideas is virtually free on social media so there isn't much of a barrier to prevent the ideas spreading like wildfire. Good or bad.

What about the costs of having the platform centrally regulating the content on the platform based on an arbitrary, context-free, highly politicized, and ever expanding definition of 'socially unacceptable' content?

We all knew that when FB and Twitter started to centrally control content well beyond the obviously really bad stuff (ie, gore, child porn), that mandate would forever expand and expand, where it's almost impossible for FB to not be criticized for not doing enough ...Absent a massive expansion of content controls, which means massively expensive, which mean incentivizing a) simply limiting the ability for people to communicate on the platform AND/OR b) automation. Which ultimately means countless false-positives and examples of bias by machines trained by the most vocal special interest groups deciding what is okay and not okay to say to another person.

The future is going to feature some interesting trolling to see who can game algorithms to get topics banned on social media through phony media outrage campaigns, false reporting, and social engineering.

It's especially depressing because the U.N. was founded to prevent this very thing from occurring, and they have nothing to say about it but to blame an American company.

> One of the first things local government did was to turn off internet (data and ISP), to control proliferation of rumors and anything that could incite further violence.

It's so good to hear that there are some responsible governments out there with respect to the dangers that Internet rumors can bring in volatile situations.

> I just don't understand how shifting blame toward Facebook as a data sharing platform solves the problem.

Isn't this a bit of a red herring, though?

First, "shifting blame toward Facebook" is not the only thing being done. People are finally allowing themselves to become somewhat aware of the toxicity and perils of data[0]. Facebook is just the first (and one of the biggest). Many people (esp. on HN) already knew, but even among them, a lot preferred to believe it probably wouldn't happen, or just not think about it much (like climate change; faced with a problem of impossible magnitude).

Second, that it doesn't solve this particular problem (immediately), isn't a reason to dismiss placing blame. In fact, the act of placing blame doesn't solve problems by itself, usually.

However, putting a spotlight on the data hazards concerning social media may help solve some of the problems caused by pushing the corporations farming these networks to come up with better solutions. The effect on Myanmar will be small (but what do you expect? damage has already been done), but it's totally worth it for the combined effect of putting up a barrier, even if it merely lessens the odds that stuff like these large attack surfaces for propaganda-based exploits of the human psyche can happen anywhere in the world.

And it is currently happening in a lot more places than we are aware of (or perhaps even expect).

It has to be. I've seen technical presentations on security and privacy (from CCC, etc) speculating about these ideas since at least 15 years ago, "What if governments got a hold of all this data and used it for nefarious purposes?". What they didn't always predict was groups other than governments doing that, sometimes implied. Interestingly, I definitely can't remember predictions about it being offered as commercial services by shady analytics companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Probably/maybe they're being covered by more recent talks, I haven't been keeping track as much. But it's accelerating the problem in a bit of an unexpected direction. Question, does anyone know, are those services not technically black market? (or partially)

[0] I don't want to single out "data sharing" as the big problematic thing either, there are lots of other dangerous things that can be done with data from user-tracking. In fact, just like radioactive waste, I'd argue it is still dangerous when at rest (or worse, you can't always know if no copies remain).

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