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Comment by makosdv | Hacker News Reader

The thing that troubles me the most is the hubris of Facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes. It is their site, so they can do what they want, but I can also do what I want and not use it. Given Facebook's massive drop in stock price this year, it seems like their investors think Facebook is following the wrong path as well.

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“...the hubris of facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes?”

What about this is hubris? Wouldnt you argue they have a responsibility to try? Wouldnt it be hubris to build such a powerful platform and not think to care about minimizing the amount of damage malicious actors could do with it?

Lord no, I would not argue that they have a responsibility to try to enforce speech codes.

Facebook thinks it can push its own moral standards for speech on users while at the same time repeatedly compromising the privacy and data of users.

And Facebook does this without a hint of recognition that such imposition will be (and already is) being used as a political weapon against dissident voices.

That's hubris.

I feel like you’re personifying “facebook” itself a bit as a sole entity when in reality its composed of thousands of individual people each with their own ethics and viewpoints so its not really like those are the same people working on privacy and suppressing hate speech, which I feel like would be somewhat of a necessity for your point. Really, everyone at that company is doing their individual best at their respective responsibilities to varying levels of success. But that really isn’t a coordinated calculated effort beyond what each person brings to the table.

No, FB is controlled primarily by Mark Zuckerberg, and then secondarily by the Board of Directors.

Major corporate policy such as what we are discussing is dictated by them, in that order.

The hubris is in doing it extralegally.

They should work with legislatures and law enforcement in their respective countries of operation to figure out what those countries (and their people) actually want them to do. Some countries have strong hate speech laws; some have strong freedom of speech protections. Ideally, this should be reflected in their communication platforms. One size doesn't fit all.

While I completely agree that one size doesn’t fit all, you can’t deny facebook might run into some problems if the governments of each country they are working with aren’t exactly pushing for what facebook thinks are some of the most forward thinking morals like individual freedom of speech or lgbtq rights or gender equality. It puts you in a rough precedent and a likely banning from a country to start working with some governments on rules and not some with others. I think I agree with some of the aspects of your statement but there should be a larger body responsible for defining the base set of ethics for the digital world but on a global scale and something more like the geneva convention. I think its often unfair to all the people that work on these problems that truly care about finding solutions to imply that there is an easy alternative they are somehow incredulously ignoring.

> you can’t deny facebook might run into some problems if the governments of each country they are working with aren’t exactly pushing for what facebook thinks are some of the most forward thinking morals like individual freedom of speech or lgbtq rights or gender equality.

At that point, they have to decide if operating in a country that demands this sort of thing is morally acceptable or not.

These global sites, which have now been told it's not acceptable to just throw up their hands and say "it's not our fault, we're just a platform!" are now trying to ham-handedly manage the content we've told them to manage. I don't know what the answer is, but I wouldn't call this hubris. I'd call it... reluctant compliance?

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