Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

The problem that Facebook, Twitter, et. al have run into is this: curating, moderating, (dare I say, policing?) our own feeds of information. This gives them a share of the responsibility for what's posted on their platform, which is something they can't take on -- both practically, and logistically.

Back in the day, if you ran an IRC server, you generally ran the service laissez faire. Your chief concern was providing the service. If someone was sharing illegal content, that wasn't your responsibility any more than state governments sharing culpability for roads that facilitate robberies. And behavior? Who cares what you do, unless you're attacking the service?

Channels themselves could come up with their own set of rules, if they wanted. You want to restrict swearing? No problem. Only registered accounts? Fine. No discussion of politics? Who cares? If you came crying to the server administrators, because you were unfairly banned from #atheism/religion/linux for walking in and trying to have an honest debate, they'd shrug their shoulders. Not their problem!

What a ridiculous state of affairs to have the service administrators make a network wide rule: "No saying untrue things", or "Don't be mean, but only to certain groups of people". It isn't their job to decide what is true, or what is hurtful.

"Oooh, but bjt2n3904, the First Amendment doesn't apply to Facebook! There's this great XKCD comic where he shows mean people the door, and..." -- Yes. I get it. But the fact remains, the 1A is a good principle to adhere to, even if you aren't the government. Policing your own little channel of the internet is feasible, if you so choose. Policing the entire internet is madness -- especially when it comes to subjective things like "hate".

Everyone has a different level of tolerance for putting up with jerks on the internet. One person might feel they're being targeted with harassment, another might just call that "Monday". The solution isn't to have Twitter declare how everyone should behave, the solution is for Twitter to push that decision to the user, and provide them with effective tools for filtering and blocking people.

That and trying to get people to understand that "free speech" as a concept is separate from the First Amendment.

Facebook is trying to abide by the principles of free speech. Yes, they could try to censor their platform, but they choose not to in most cases.

And make no mistake, it _is_ censorship. Censorship is not limited to government intervention.

Censorship isn’t a bad thing if it isn’t a government doing it. Facebook has no power to tell you what is or isn’t appropriate to write on your blog, they can’t stop you from writing a book or from publishing an article via any other medium that isn’t their platform. You have a right to say whatever the hell you want to, you don’t have any right to other people’s help in disseminating that point of view.

You are correct, that no one can require Facebook to share their point of view. However, no one is claiming that right! (And certainly not me!)

What I am saying, is that this quagmire the article references is a direct result of Facebook trying to decide what is "hate speech", and bad for society. It's best for them to not to try.

It's bad for society if the media the people need to effectively express their first amendment rights is preventing them from doing so. In which case freedom of speech loses its meaning. Why even have it if businesses can take over the channels of communication and limit them for profit gains? What kind of principle is that to stand for?

You're choosing to comment on HN, and compared to many forums, it has rather heavy handed restrictions on what's acceptable. That's something I (and presumably others) find appealing much of the time. Doesn't mean it's perfect, but that doesn't mean what it needs is more laissez faire.

The thing I don't like about Facebook is not that it may restrict people acting badly, but that it shows you all the worst posts of people you know, in order to create engagement. What I would like is for all non-objectionable posts from my friends to appear in chronological order. Facebook's algorithms seem to have an emergent behavior in which they synthesize a toxic persona by selecting the posts which get the most reaction from everything a friend posts. Except when you go to a friend's page to see everything they posted recently, you get a very distorted view on your own feed. I don't think Facebook has come to terms with the monster they've created.

If HN was the equivalent of Facebook, or Google, or the phone company, I would agree with you. But it's nothing close to a de facto communication channel for personal and business use; it's an industry forum.

Your expectation of Facebook is very unrealistic, at least for now, because who is to say what is and isn't objectionable? Although I can't really make much more of a comment than that since I just don't see that many toxic posts from friends on Facebook. If my friends were really that toxic, I'd probably not be friends with them or at least just block them.

Facebook already supports a chronological feed. It just has to be turned on by the user, and it seems to untoggle itself after a while. But it's there, and that's what I tend to use. I otherwise just don't befriend toxic people, although I've blocked a few people who just post repetitive crap I don't agree with. Everyone has the tools to control their feed right in front of them, but they're not using them either because they don't know they're there or because they're afraid they'll miss that one meme post from their otherwise toxic friends.

As far as I know, the chronological setting has to be reset every time.

As far as blaming people for the toxicity of what appears, I don't think that's right. Salt is toxic in large quantities, essential in small amounts. Systematically placing it in wounds adds a whole new dimension. Context has a huge effect on the meaning of events. Suppose someone made a video of dozens of brief instances where you were at your worst, and sent it to everyone you know. That would not be the truth about who you are, or your fault. Selecting one of 10 or 100 posts for how intense a reaction it gets, is creating a toxic narrative, and the emergent result of the algorithms is not to be blamed on the source of the data. Systematically manipulating the context of interactions with people is an incredibly destructive, harmful thing to do - traditionally, it's the bread and butter of tactical politics, but Facebook has brought it to ordinary people.

I'd say that not all censorship is technically bad.

If I start a forum for discussing a particular subject, then disallowing discussion of other subjects is technically censorship but not bad per se, because it keeps the focus of the forum where it should be.

Many times lately I've referenced Frederick Douglass' "A Plea for Free Speech in Boston." It's a speech he gave after being heckled/deplatformed by proponents of slavery. It's an acknowledgement that the First Amendment is not enough, protection from the government is not enough. Socially, culturally, we must protect the principle of free speech among ourselves.

Here's the speech if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w2i5CnZ9Xo

Did IRC have a targeted advertising platform built in? Do you think Facebook should allow paid antisemitic advertising or should this be restricted platform wide?

I care less who Facebook takes money from, and what advertisements they put out. There's too many services I'd have to bail from based on what advertisements they put out, I simply don't care.

I care much more when I share a link, and Facebook tells me they've flagged it as "untruthful" and won't let me share it. That's what my root comment is about.

"..curating, moderating, (dare I say, policing?) our own feeds of information. This gives them a share of the responsibility for what's posted on their platform"

Is this actually true? I've seen it mentioned in a few places. Why isn't "obviously we can't vet every comment prior to it appearing but we do our best with a combination of humans and scripts to remove stuff that breaks our rules" an adequate defense?

If someone logs onto an IRC channel, and posts a racist statement, does the channel operator or system operator share responsibility?

On the other hand, what if a newspaper posts an editorial that "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong (TM)"? Do they share more responsibility than if someone comments on the system?

Facebook is trying to decide whether it's an IRC server, or a newspaper. I think the problem is that they want to be both.

> Facebook is trying to decide whether it's an IRC server, or a newspaper. I think the problem is that they want to be both.

You hit the nail so hard on the head with this statement, Facebook has come to a point where it cannot just be a "traditional social network" if it wants to continue to expand within the stock market and grow globally--it needs to be THE ONE TRUE source of information, discussion, media, news, politics, small community groups, advertising.

What used to be a cool place to check on your friends, their interests, and what they are doing has turned into attempting to be a little bit of every single site so much that users "shouldn't have to" go anywhere else.

I'm not talking about IRC or newspapers though. I don't care any IRC and me posting something on Facebook is clearly not even remotely close to a newspaper running an article. I've already got my own opinion on the matter, I was wondering if anyone here knew of any relevant legislation or precedent in the matter.

I find myself in a very nuanced place with these sorts of discussions. I don't know what the right answer is.

I _don't_ think the right answer is anything goes (even if you attempt to let the community police that with voting). I've seen many small forums self-destruct due to the dedicated action of a few committed individuals to ruining it -- either explicitly (due to a grudge) or implicitly (a commitment to getting their way at any cost). Misinformation is terribly difficult to combat, and can lead to real harm to real people.

I _don't_ think the right answer is heavy moderation. I even feel like hacker news goes overboard sometimes (though I do enjoy the irony of comments here railing against calls for moderation on FB). A ministry of truth is never a good idea because it creates a clear path to corrupting the truth by controlling an entity.

I do think it is reasonable, however, to consider certain things to be settled facts. Humans breathe air, the earth is round, the holocaust happened, slavery is bad, racism is bad. Of course I have no answer about where the line is drawn between what I just said and a ministry of truth.

In my experience, the most successful communities are intelligently moderated, however, including IRC. Though the moderation was more about banning people and keeping channels on-topic than suppressing certain ideas.

The best answer I have so far is social consequence -- disagree vocally & publicly, block early, block often. Of course there are a whole slew of downsides here too, but I haven't seen anything better.

> I've seen many small forums self-destruct

Too bad, so sad. The health and growth of your channel is not the network's problem, unless downtime and latency are your issues. If you can't solve the squabbles in your #furry/lgbt/conservative/socialist sub community, you can't expect me to come and declare you "the winner of the internet fight" and banish the losers. Do that yourself, if you're the chanop. If you aren't, start another channel.

> Misinformation is terribly difficult to combat.

Still not the network's problem. Last I checked, my role was providing a service, not arbitrating truth.

> and can lead to real harm to real people.

Mmn, aaand still not the network's problem. (If said harm even exists. Most times, it's just "emotional distress", or some indirect butterfly effect we want to blame for things like Trump, instead of looking at the direct causes.) If there is harm, it's the local, state, and federal government's problem. Not the service administrators.

> A ministry of truth is never a good idea

But it's what you're calling for. You try to make it seem virtuous by limiting the scope to certain "undeniable facts" like racism, slavery, the holocaust. Or worse, I've seen people trying to push it off to some Mechanical Turk, like Machine Learning. The computer will tell us if it's racist! It will soon grow to include vaccines, global warming, and a litany of other "social ills to be fixed" that just need to be accepted as truth.

Agreed. And how do you define racism? Sure, it's discrimination based on race. What if I oppose affirmative action? Then I'm called a racist!

> If there is harm, it's the local, state, and federal government's problem

When people living in the jurisdiction who elected that government will have enough, the government will shut down, block, or heavily regulate these networks. The internet is global, they can’t prosecute users.

When that will happen, it will become the network's problem.

Even if the networks themselves don’t feel any moral responsibility for that real harm, it’s in their best interest to do something.

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