Open Letter from Sandy Hook Parents to Mark Zuckerberg
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614082
Timing it to see if/how long until flagged again.
The biggest problem I have with Facebook is how it evolved from a great place for me to keep up with my more distant friends and family to... whatever it is now. I know I'm an outlier, but I quit Facebook around 2010 or so when I noticed it was being too aggressive in pushing my account to be more public; increasing my curated circle of interest to include friends of friends, and their friends too.
When I found I was spending more time negotiating the byzantine system of settings to keep my page private than actually using the site, I knew it was time to go.
Is it really such an important website that it must change to suit these folks rather than them finding another way to network with their contacts? It's 2018, and there are options.
Perhaps I'm wrong and having a Facebook account is more important in society than I realize?
From the article, it seems fairly reasonable to determine that these families have stopped using Facebook. The problem is that the groups that are spreading this propaganda are also spreading the private contact information of the families, a practice known as doxxing. People influenced by the propaganda are then able to use non-Facebook mediums (phone/mail/in-person asshattery) to continue their harassment.
Isn't the doxxing the problem then? It seems like the focus is in the wrong place.
Don't we already have laws on the books to stop harrassement? Don't we have laws to stop from inciting violence? If we need to strenghen them then that's an opportunity for discussion. Do we need to talk about our free speech laws? I frankly think it's time to have that discussion, and not quite because of the reason you may think.
Neither of those discussions is this discussion though, and that's my issue here. Facebook is (as another more eloquent commenter said) a megaphone. Why are we blaming the megaphone?
Facebook is taking the stance that spaces (pages) that promote and spread this information must be protected. They are slow to take action against people (and their bot networks) that incite harassment.
>Don't we already have laws on the books to stop harrassement? Don't we have laws to stop from inciting violence?
Local police departments are not equipped to deal with internet harassment, even credible threats of violence. There are cross-jurisdictional restrictions on their ability to act.[1]
>Why are we blaming the megaphone?
Facebook is the entity that directly profits from the presence of these people on their platform. They optimize for engagement. If harassers keep your eyes on Facebook, then Facebook optimizes your feed to see more harassment. Hate-clicks are just as revenue generating for them as any other kind of click.
Well, I don't really see it as winning and losing. After all, you simply cannot win against crazy people. What's the old saying? About never getting in an argument with an idiot?
My point I suppose (assuming I even have one) is why they would feel the need to stay, rather than just leaving. It didn't impact my life at all to delete my account, and I'm asking whether there were some development since that makes one NEED to stay. I know loads of people have accounts with FB, but the question I asked, and think they should be asking themselves is "why?"
But that's not really a position that has basis in reality. To those doing the harassing, getting the people they target off of social media is, for them, a win.
"My point I suppose (assuming I even have one) is why they would feel the need to stay, rather than just leaving."
Because they want to use FB and social media like everyone else is able to?
"It didn't impact my life at all to delete my account"
I'm glad for you, but you're not everyone.
"and I'm asking whether there were some development since that makes one NEED to stay"
NEED doesn't come into it at all. If they want to continue to use the platform, they should be able to without dealing with that kind of harassment, plain and simple.
"but the question I asked, and think they should be asking themselves is "why?""
And I think you should ask yourself why that question has any bearing on the situation. Why they should have to consider whether they can continue to do the same things that most other members of society get to do.
That being said, you are coming off a bit aggressively. Perhaps I'm reading you wrong, but I'm asking a honest question and you are (it seems) just calling me selfish and thoughtless. These questions are not rhetorical, if that was unclear.
Can you tell me please how you use facebook in your daily life personally and professionally? It may not have bearing on the greater discussion but I do want to know, as someone who hasn't used it in years.
- my mixed sport team has a group page, where we discuss the next game time, who can make it, etc. We don't need to Friend each other, or sign up to another service. We all have FB, so we just add/remove people very easily. Helps organise and track conversations easily. A new post each week, and everyone just comments on that. - my sister and brother live in other states of Australia. FB helps me see what they're up to (photos, videos especially). I call them regularly, so FB is just value-add.
- I have a young (under 2) son, and keep most photos off him off FB. However, occasionally (once every 2-3 months) we will share something so people in our wider network can get an update. It's not for us, it's for them. - I have a lot of friends I met through a time in my life (university exchange overseas, growing up, living in different cities). FB is a very casual, easy way to stay in touch. The barrier to entry is very low (literally, just click the 'like' button on their post).
- FB messenger: I use this a LOT. I also use SMS (via Signal), Hangouts and WhatsApp. Yes, they overlap considerably, but FB Messenger has the functionality, and critically the contacts, I need. Lots of group chats about different things (social events, family, etc.) and things like location sharing when I'm on my way home from work.
I don't endlessly scroll through updates on my feed page, and I don't get my news from FB. If I read the feed page (with the updates from friends, etc.), about 50% of content is secondary (meaning someone has shared a viral video, or something) and the other 50% is original content (holiday photos, though of the day, etc.).
Can all of the above be done on systems other than FB, yes. Do other systems have the low barrier to entry now that all of my friends are on FB, no.
[Edit] Formatting
cheers and thanks for the explanation.
Because they want to be on there. Maybe they have family on there. Whatever their reason, IT DOES NOT MATTER.
"That being said, you are coming off a bit aggressively. "
Because I am sooooooo tired of seeing people like you rush to blame the victim, in this case, put the blame on these people for still being on Facebook, rather than on the people that are actually doing the harassing, or Facebook for enabling it.
"Perhaps I'm reading you wrong, but I'm asking a honest question and you are (it seems) just calling me selfish and thoughtless."
And I really don't think you are. Why on earth should it matter at all if they do or do not have a concrete "need" to be on Facebook? Why is blaming the victim an acceptable tactic?
"Can you tell me please how you use facebook in your daily life personally and professionally? It may not have bearing on the greater discussion but I do want to know, as someone who hasn't used it in years."
I personally don't, but I'm not going to sit on my high horse and go, "You don't really need Facebook." when someone has a serious problem like these people do.
You probably haven't been a victim of such a mass-scale harassment.
> Why is it so difficult to leave this particular social network?
It doesn't matter that much whether they are using it or not, these folks will track them down and harass in all other ways.
Subjective morality enforced over 100 people on an optional forum? Meh
Subjective morality over billions on a platform that many consider essential (I know, I know) to daily life? Oooof
But that's not the only way to do it. Banning certain types of speech doesn't necessarily lead to a slippery slope. For instance, in Germany, you can't deny the holocaust and they haven't become some sort of dystopian Orwellian society. I would argue Facebook needs to move more toward that model. Conspiracy theories and misinformation are spreading right now. Hell, I personally know someone who I considered a pretty normal person who's become caught up in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering. Banning groups that promote that kind of garbage make them seem illegitimate (as they are) and no, doing so doesn't infringe on any rights. They're free to make their own website somewhere and spout nonsense. But hey, maybe those kinds of things shouldn't be getting hosted by big media companies like YouTube and Facebook. That just makes them seem legitimate.
With great power comes great responsibility. Right now, it seems to me Facebook (and others) want to have the power, but not the responsibility and that's leading us into a new era of propaganda and idiocy.
What honestly makes me most leery about the movement towards "Sanctioned Speech" is as we can even see in HN itself. A sister response to yours, eloquent and advocating the questionable outcomes from policing speech, is downvoted past visibility despite a very functional discussion following from it.
For whatever reason, I've noticed a global (far broader than HN) decline in the quality/willingness to engage in good-faith discourse. This is extremely scary to me, and I fear having gatekeepers for discussion and "truth" only further pushes these underlying bifurcations further apart.
Absolutely. And I have no idea what to do about it, even within my tiny sphere of influence.
I see people (metaphorically) putting on armor and actively building barriers just in the _anticipation_ of defending their beliefs. It almost seems like a lack of empathetic imagination. When I imagine the motivations, beliefs, fears, desires, etc that might be behind opinions that I am strongly against, it is usually followed by the empty feeling that hardly anybody else is taking the time to put themselves in anybody else's shoes.
Even if that Facebook group has 100 people or 100,000, it still makes sense for the owner to ban content they think doesn't fit the community, such as conspiracy theories. But it doesn't make sense for Facebook The Company to ban conspiracy theories, in my opinion, unless those specific conspiracy theory posts are shown to be likely to directly result in someone's imminent physical harm.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-the...
While the First Amendment protects public speech, that doesn't mean I have to allow somebody to stand on my lawn and spew. They have to be 'in public'. An interesting question for me is, should Facebook be considered 'in public'? Is there an argument that it's a venue that is not public? If Mark Zuckerberg invited everybody in America to a party at his house, he wouldn't be obligated to tolerate speech he didn't like. And the people saying awful things have the opportunity to say what they went in various public forums. Their own blogs, the street corner, email. Suppressing speech in every possible forum is clearly a violation of the First Amendment, but what if it's only suppressed in some forums?
The first amendment doesn’t remotely apply no matter how hard you want it to.
So I have sympathy with Facebook because I don't think these issues are easy to solve (yes, of course, ban Infowars. It's a toxic dump. But others will be more debatable). But they also knowingly and deliberately put themselves in the position they occupy today. This mess is making them an obscene amount of money, they should try harder to clean it up.
Facebook continues to confuse me.
I think the last decades have been an unprecedented experiment in massively scaled two-way communication. People don't really seem to know how to handle the current stage of this experiment. It was a little easier back when it was much smaller communities on Usenet, or even IRC, and most of the time you recognized the same names and could work things out like everyone had got together for a slightly uncomfortable family dinner.
But it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for quite a while. The scale and speed of things is just hard to fathom now, and we really aren't equipped for it.
Facebook has shared some responsibility in ethnic atrocities [1] [2] [3]. Different groups are now exploiting Facebook's advertising platform to stir up more social unrest [4]. Facebook isn't the only source of trouble; Reddit and other sites are radicalizing youth [5] and struggling with self-policing their most toxic bits [6].
Everyone's concerned about the loss of free speech. I'm pretty far left politically, I get it. It's a big step, maybe the last, towards tyranny. I've been opposed to forcing websites to police copyrighted content (DMCA, SOPA, PIPA). I've been a little less opposed to forcing them to police sexually exploitative content (FOSTA and SESTA -- although I don't love the execution of it).
For people on the political left, who tend to both support free speech and recognize the danger of unregulated firearms, it might be time to take a more careful look at the damage done by massive social networks and ask: what makes this different from gun control?
And is there any way to effectively reduce the spread of misinformation, radicalization of people, and incitement of violence on massive social platforms, without suffocating the free exchange of ideas?
[1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-...
[5]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-amer...
[6]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...
> what makes this different from gun control?
In my mind, nothing. Gun control and speech restrictions should be applied with great care, but when there is something that threatens someone, steps need to be taken.
I don't really mind that much if you have an assault rifle in your house. You talking in your living room about Sandy Hook conspiracies is deplorable, but not generally harmful.
If you take to Facebook and start trying to find these parents, get their addresses, where they work, license plates and spread them around, that's a different story. We need to have restrictions on intent to harm. Same as when that assault rifle gets loaded with the intent to shoot people.
But somehow since they’re confused they seem to be perfectly fine with allowing hate groups, abusers, and doxxers run wild on their platforms, even though even the first amendment doesn’t protect them in real life. As part of some collective twisted libertarian dream, these companies give this scum a platform again and again because they profit from it, but hide behind the ideas of libertarianism.
I hope they come to their senses sooner rather than later. IF not, I honestly hope we start looking at changing the law to making these companies liable for crimes committed on their platforms.
That doesn't mean FB can't ban them, mind you, since as you rightly point out, it's (mostly) a restriction on government, not private companies.
1. https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...
Almost every time I hear someone advocate for speech policing, they mention obviously awful speech (e.g. Nazi Germany, Sandy Hook conspiracy theories) as an example. And I agree, that speech sucks, most of us can agree about that because we have hindsight to educate us. In reality, speech is really murky. From what I recall from history classes, "Nazi" ideas like Eugenics weren't Nazi ideas, they were popular at the time everywhere, including in the US. Anti-semitism was not Germany exclusive (and still isn't). When you find yourself inside a society, it becomes very difficult to separate yourself from its collective delusions. In this, it becomes dangerous for a central authority to police speech: how to agree on which speech is acceptable (past the generally abhorrent speech like that mentioned above) is difficult and bound to either be abused in the worst case or best case many mistakes will be made.
Historically, because of the issues mentioned above, I feel against most speech policing in general theoretically. Admittedly, however, I also demographically don't really feel the effects of hate speech, so it's easy for me to take this emotionally distant stance.
The best solution I can come up with here is, especially online, a series of filters: bifurcate platforms like Facebook into a feed where content is moderated, and give users options to opt into unmoderated streams (unmoderated to the extent the law allows).
Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists are some of the most poisonous things in the modern discourse, but the right answer is not to ban all mention of them. That's how they grow stronger.
An ability to opt-in to a heavily moderated version of their feed seems reasonable, as long as it's opt-in and not opt-out.
And remember, this is just western fake news. In the east, fake news has resulted in people murdering completely innocent strangers with somber regularity.
Sadly, it can get worse. I could definitely see a world where a zero-tolerance ban on mass-shooting conspiracy theory discussion by Facebook, Twitter, and reddit leads to these parents receiving even more targeted harassment.
>In the east, fake news has resulted in people murdering completely innocent strangers with somber regularity.
Yes, that's where things become more difficult. Any threats and any content that leads to a chance of someone being physically harmed has to be banned, full stop. Obvious hoax stories (not the same as "fake news") should probably also have a prominent Facebook label that it is a hoax. But it's an incredibly nuanced subject.
As soon as you decide that some content is forbidden and off limit, people that want to have a debate about that content will now be in a group that is viewed as "fringe and off limit". This can only lead to group thinking, civil war and civil unrest.
The only good way to address this is to let people speech and prove them wrong by having a civil debate.
Then we cross that bridge when we get to it. But I find this idea that they'll leap straight from banning people harassing the survivors of mass shootings to banning all gun content absolutely idiotic. Like, far beyond the "slippery slope" stuff that normally gets thrown out.
"The only good way to address this is to let people speech and prove them wrong by having a civil debate."
I'm pretty sure the last 10 years or so have proven that false. See: GamerGate.
From what I've seen, a lot of GamerGaters actually did leave the "movement" after civil and reasonable debate. I personally know several such people. In fact, partly as a result of civil debate, the movement effectively died, with the only people remaining being the most diehard misogynists and alt-righters. Those people's minds may never be changed regardless of what they're participating in, but many of the more moderate people who participated definitely did shift their opinions and abandoned it.
The idea that you shouldn't engage with people you disagree with (let alone that such people should be banned from platforms you use) because they're irredeemable is usually quite wrong. Obviously there will be certain people out there who are so extreme and so indoctrinated that it's nearly impossible to change their mind, but even then, it happens. Daryl Davis, a black man, befriended KKK members and convinced over 200 to leave the KKK. Phelps family members have permanently left the Westboro Baptist Church Louis Theroux's after calmly debating people on Twitter. Louis Theroux's documentaries might interest you, because things like that are basically his bread and butter.
The post you're replying to is making a pretty ridiculous leap (pro-gun content isn't nearly as controversial as school shooting conspiracy theories and would not be banned in pretty much any hypothetical), but their point is that the best response to speech you disagree with is more speech, not banned speech.
Personally, while I can certainly see why people don’t like to be offended, policing speech is a slippery slope, because there is absolutely nothing objective about what is offensive/hate speech and what is not. There is no perfect solution for it, but I would personally take the freer of the approaches, come at the cost it will.
Side-note: I don’t understand why anyone would downvote this. It’s articulate, thought out, and constructive.
Which undermines your leading point that you think that it isn't unpopular.
One of the reasons bad free speech is so common on the Internet is because of anonymity. A lot of it like death threats, inciting violence, libel, and more are already illegal. They just cannot be enforced due to anonymity.
I would like for speech on the Internet to be just as free as off the Internet, and have the same consequences socially and legally.
I'm in support of something like the South Korean solution. Tie online identity to real identity.
To be less obtuse, harassment is exactly free speech. No one has a right to not have their feelings hurt and trying to prevent that is a fools errand that can only end badly, usually in death.
Every psychologist that treats patients knows you don't help people by making the world be nicer to them, you help them by teaching them to be stronger and more resilient.
Plus, you yourself said "the idea of safe spaces doesn't fly with [you]," which indicates that you're against them. If you're only wanting to talk about government enforcement, then you might want to say that.
No, it is not. It is not free speech at all.
" No one has a right to not have their feelings hurt and trying to prevent that is a fools errand that can only end badly, usually in death."
Last I saw, those doing the harassing are usually the ones to try and kill others. See: PizzaGate. Further, you're basically saying that no one should be able to get by in life without being accosted by harassment, so we should give up and all be miserable.
"Every psychologist that treats patients knows you don't help people by making the world be nicer to them, you help them by teaching them to be stronger and more resilient."
And part of that treatment is having people constantly tell you that your children who were killed in a tragic assault were 'crisis actors' and that the whole thing didn't happen?
It's an illustration of the unfortunate: "liberty for me, but not for thee." Fighting intolerance by being intolerant. And all the same things people do in history which enables tyranny too many times.
However, when I post comments that all should have civil liberties, it's sometimes controversial.
Anyways, I'm glad I had the fortune of living in a country where there is at least effort to afford them to everyone.
But I poorly worded my comment. However, it's been the case that America has generally given even the worst scoundrels their liberties--and that is the unfortunate part about defending civil liberties, that those who do end up defending scoundrels.
But today, even to great expense to the taxpayer they are afforded due process. And that's the way it should be. You don't want to live in a nation without due process or free speech or the rest of your rights.
I kind of think we're there. I'm an ethical utilitarian (well, mix in some contractualism) and I think generally what's best is what benefits the most people most of the time. Maybe that's limiting the voices of those who are trying to deceive people and breed hate.
Edit: argumentative.
Once they are doing that, what's the problem with deemphasizing obvious nonsense?
Then they just stand back and try to maximize engagement and total time spent on their service, and have a ratio of moderators to users that’s so low it’s a rounding error. It’s like having a classroom of a million people with two grossly overworked, underpaid, and traumatized teachers trying to keep a semblance of order. Everyone is free to speak, to be drowned out by sheer volume of numbers and volume.
Plus half of students are robots who do nothing, but shout at superhuman rates 24/7.