Facebook to Remove Misinformation That Leads to Violence
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have no strong opinions on this.
If I have to choose one of your suggestions to put time and effort behind having properly defined by governance, I'm going to go with Facebook's authority in determining a "potential for violence" threshold.
It's not ok to try to create a platform where people don't incite violence by lying. It is ok to create a platform where people can't express anything of a sexual nature.
It's cultural of course. After all in the US it is ok to have games where you shoot prostitutes but not where you sleep with one.
This continuous grasping at straws by FB, Twitter, google, whomever really - of determining what is acceptable in the realm of opinion/1st Amendment speech is really exhausting and will mean the death of their platforms.
SCOTUS rulings shape lower courts abilities
Like here for example, HN can remove dick picks no problem
People are free to avoid those platforms if they don’t like the rules
Once you start looking at those effects... makes you wonder, right? Speaking of dick pics, I don't think you can post one on HN. You could do a link to one, but it'll get greyed out/downvoted..not removed, unless I'm mistaken.
We instead are saying that it would be a bad idea for them not to do so.
Facebook is free to make whatever mistakes it wants. That doesn't change the fact that it is a mistake.
I am certain they all disagree with me ;).
edit: the hardest thing when faced with offensive (personally to me, or someone else) content is to ignore it and let it die without a response in the case where it is legal. What was that saying? Do not feed the troll....?
It's not hard to adjudicate that Trumps ambassador to the Netherlands is lying when he talks about politicians being burned to death in the Netherlands due to immigration. But having the claim repeated over and over still creates the impression that there is some truth to it.
And that in turn hurts immigrants and makes it harder for people to come to rational decisions.
Your reasoning basically presumes that all humans are infinitely rational and have infinite time to investigate facts (the reader gets to decide). Neither of these assumptions is true, or a useful approximation. Otherwise user interface design for programs would look extremely different.
As people have all sorts of cognitive fallacies built in, and have extremely limited time to investigate facts, we need to build (and maintain) a society that makes it easy to come to rational, reasonable decisions. The Internet has disrupted the social structures that performed this function in the past, and new ones are only slowly emerging.
The 1st Amendment, which I admit I treat as the 'gospel' of free speech in these cases, allows for both. It just seems private enterprise in certain geographic areas of the world tends to skew more toward one view of the internet while leaving out the other in the cold... I'm trying to put this is mildly as I can :).
For the scope of the 1st amendment, I sometimes feel there is some nuance missing when this is invoked, as if this was the only thing written in the constitution. The SCOTUS recognizes that the right to free speech competes with other rights, and thus there are limits. You can't lie in advertisement. You can't provoke someone with "fighting words", you can't say things that are the IP of others, NDAs are honored, you can get fired for what you say on facebook outside working hours, really the list is endless.
In fact, as I just discovered, and as is very pertinent to this discussion:
In Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court decided that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
No, Facebook obviously realistically can remove anything it wants. The idea that a private (and international) information distribution segment only ought to remove content that is specifically illegal under US law, and has no right or legitimate interest in removing any other content from it's platform, is somewhat bizarre.
It's usually fine to let police handle threats, but they can quickly spiral in places on the brink of erupting, or in populations the police aren't always good about protecting.
We have good laws that cover these situations already.
no... there are laws on the books targeting threats. If you make a bomb threat you can be prosecuted.
Note well: This is post is not an actual threat, nor is it a call to violence.
In fact, such illegal speech was ALREADY being taken down by Facebook, for it's entire history of existing.
There is no need to change any policies to cover your example.
To try to satisfy both of you: "Hey, everybody, stale2002 bought a Kawasaki tractor instead of a John Deere!" - in a context where people in that community have been recently beaten up for buying the "wrong" kind of tractor. It's not an explicit call to violence, but it is an implicit one.
Note well: This is also not a call to violence. I have no actual information about stale2002's purchasing habits, whether tractors or anything else, nor would I consider it grounds for violence even if I did have such information.
To assume that even most cases would be as objectively apparent as your example (which I will argue is not demonstrably an implicit call to violence) I think is over zealous.
No, it's not ceding authority, because no one else had that authority over Facebook's private property to start with, and Facebook isn't exercising authority over anything but what it chooses to relay using its private property.
No, FB is (to continue the use of book-centered metaphors) choosing not to distribute certain books through its book distribution network.
Censorship of one's own platform is a central element of free speech.
> it's impossible for anyone to have an unbiased opinion.
That's true, but doesn't support the preceding claim.
ISPs can make the same argument against Net Neutrality.
Anyone can claim anything leads to anything. This is nothing but a blanket censorship policy for Facebook to stifle any speech it wants and claim that it could possibly have led to violence, which is entirely impossible to prove or disprove. Not at all surprising give the track record of Facebook.
Thank goodness FB is not the real Internet. Imagine winding up on the wrong side of a secret rule-making group who marks your free speech as unacceptable.
Actually, you don't need to imagine, this happens every once in a while in India.
If Facebook wants to be responsible for curating content on their platforms (Which they absolutely do, wrt, say, pornography, stalking, harassment, etc), then they can't shirk that responsibility, either.
Not that different from the pizzagate bullshit back in 2016. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689...
The problem, as history has repeatedly shown, is that speech has consequences. Even simple jokes have lead to violence.
If someone makes an explicit call to violence, that is already illegal and should be covered under our existing laws.
No need to change any policies when the existing policies work well enough for stopping the obviously dangerous content.
Edit: This is no different than, say, a shopping mall saying that they will kick out anybody who tries to spread information that incites violence.
It is a higher order advanced PR technique. Only the best do things like this.
In this case they are masking the documentary about far right groups being allowed to exist on Facebook.
So the counter is to make a low value, obvious announcement to bury the documentary news or counteract it with other news.
I actually am mostly on Facebook’s side here. I think the media are generally out to get them and they deserve to ensure free speech of all kinds happens.
Let’s be clear though: This is a classic non concession to mask other news.