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Comment by prolikewh0a | Hacker News Reader

USA is doing this too, but it gets reported on entirely differently. Facebook & Twitter are banning domestic American citizen accounts for simply acting like "Russians", whatever that means. They aren't claimed to be hate accounts either, it's just raw censorship. They won't provide example accounts so we can research what they're banning specifically.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks this is OK, but coddles their cozy propaganda blankets when China is doing it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...

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Twitter and FB are private businesses, China is a state. The US state is not deleting nor forcing or requesting deletion of accounts.

Russian propaganda bots are that, propaganda bots. Hate speech is a different issue.

In the USA we let capitalism do our dirty deeds so that gov't doesn't have to :-)

Exactly. These are enormous private governments at this point and should be treated like government.

They partnered with the Atlantic Council which is essentially a board the most evil capitalistic & imperialistic motherfuckers from past US government to decide what to censor. It's essentially state censorship and it's worrying to me.

I'm not sure how to fix such without getting the gov't involved, except maybe splitting Big Media (BM) per anti-trust laws. Either you regulate BM by policing their speech filtering or you regulate them by splitting them. And splitting BM won't guarantee their smaller versions won't do the same thing.

>Russian propaganda bots are that, propaganda bots.

What is Russian propaganda though?

A mishmash of whatever currently serves the Kremlin's interests.

"When Facebook took down 559 Pages in October, the reasons for why each Page was removed were not made clear. [...]

After looking into the historical Page data I had collected back in September a second time at the end of October — nearly a decade’s worth of analytics for several of these Pages (shown below), I’d argue that for the some of the most prolific of the removed Pages, “censorship,” or the fact they might have posted inaccurate and/or misleading news articles and links at some point in the past were not the reason for their abrupt removal in October.

The likely reason why several of the largest of these mostly conservative and politically fringe news Pages were taken down is because they appear to have been gaming the platform’s metrics for years. The pages I show in the following section had put up Facebook interaction numbers in the billions. Similarly, many of the videos consistently showed engagement in the tens of millions of views."

https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-2018-facebook-midterms-part-iii...

Facebook, Twitter and others are partnering with organizations like the Atlantic Council to brazenly censor content [1] with little to no pushback. There is no basis to affect outrage about some far off country.

Thousands of accounts have been removed with no evidence, due process or transparency. Anything can be labelled as 'fake news', bots, propaganda etc and censored.

These new 'ministry of truth' structures are being used to delegitimize dissent and create an environment of conformity and suspicion where dissent and anything that challenges the status quo is tarred and banned.

It sometimes feels people are more interested in demonizing China and others and holding them to standards they do not hold democratic governments to.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/09/facebook-allows-gove...

You glossed over the meaningful difference. In China it is the government, in the US it is private companies which enjoy freedoms to associate with whomever they want. I happen to disagree with all these banned accounts, but I still believe in freedom to be an asshole (posting as one, or running a company as one).

This is false in the practical sense of having board member commitments plus court cases interacting with the big corporations. At that point the will between corporation and government may be in tension, but they should not considered separable that we can say either are actually "free" to act how they want.

Western liberalism, by tradition, is a lot stricter on governments than on corporations.

At some level this makes perfect sense to me. I can have a website where I let you publish but not Emily.

OTOH, in 2018 a handful of corporations control most of social media. Banned from Twitter and FB is "silenced" to a meaningful extent. Also, these are mostly open platforms where most people get to publish if they want. This makes their "content policies" censor-esque in ways that bother liberals on instinctive freedom-of-speech grounds.

I agree, and I think that this is an issue we need to solve. FB is the most important media platform in history. Civil wars are being started on FB. Elections are won on FB.

I think it's a problem that needs a solution, or freedom of speech loses meaning.

But... it's not surprising that liberals are freaking out about a "government acting like a corporation." The principal is basically "government cannot just act like a corporation."

I can't believe how abstract and myopic people can be! The end goal of Chia or Rus*ia is to implement their policies on the world. If you aren't able to, or can't, answer clearly who you want to live under: psuedo-communism, or Western liberal democracy, and if this indecision and miscomprehension of what is at stake, is representative of many other people then, we are all in trouble!

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