Facebook to ban white nationalist content
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
Do we wait until it can be shown that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. influenced elections because they refused to serve information from a candidate they didn't like? If we aren't already there, it's not long before it is.
What do you think would happen if these "private companies" with such deep hooks into our communication infrastructure suddenly decided to remove all data associated to the Republican Party? For that matter, the Democratic Party?
It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are trying to have it both ways. They can choose to police the content provided by their users but can't be held responsible for said content? Are they a publisher or a platform?
I don't think comparing old thinking based around old methods of communication compares to what we have today, it requires new thinking. These aren't like newspapers sold by kids on the corner in a city that can have dozens of newspapers countering each other. Imagine if there were only three newspapers in the entire country, soon the world, controlled by a small group of people who wish to use their publishing for their own agendas.
Tim Pool is right, at this rate, sooner or later, the Feds will come knocking and will shut that party down.
In fairness to Google and Facebook, etc. TV networks have always been super biased and had far more reach than internet platforms - and it was actually conservatives who shut down (with good reason) the "fairness doctrine" that would have forced them to carry content they didn't necessarily agree with.
Repeating a previous study, which had shown bias in the 2016 election, Dr. Robert Epstein shows that bias in the 2018 election pushed voters towards democrats. Approximately 4.6 million undecided voters are likely to have flipped. Numerous districts, particularly CA 45, are likely to have been flipped by Google's weaponized bias.
There has also been an awful lot of bans of beginner politicians, all on one side, often corrected after the election (damage is done) with a lame excuse about algorithms making mistakes.
[0] https://www.theepochtimes.com/another-way-google-manipulates...
[1] https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_2018-Manipulating_minds-...
For example, he is quoting Hillary Clinton instant search debacle as an example of bias, which was debunked as being technical illiteracy:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/google-manipulate-hillary-...
They wouldn't do that, because there would be justified public outcry. Luckily, as moral agents, we humans are capable of differentiating "general political party" from "white nationalists", and can target the latter and not the former.
Nazis in Greece like their country or what they perceive as “their country”.
Note how you will never hear the term "ethnic supremacists" used by conventional media. It's too accurate and does not push the borderless agenda.
That’s different from saying things like “get that Spanish off the menu, this is America”, “go home foreigners”, and “immigrants are criminals”.
I’m sure you can see the difference.
I don't really care what FB does, I prefer it to have all the rope it needs, but this normalization of taking and modifying the meaning of terms to fit the anti-borders narrative is dishonest and manipulative. Again, it's not even remotely a new thing, the anti-borders crowd has been gunning against nationalism time eternal.
Your comment suggests you have internalized the idea that nationalist and racist are the same thing. Or were you really thinking I wanted to use "white nationalist" (or any color) in some other context?
What do you think "it's an inherently dishonest frame" means?
Frames are important, it's why I asked why you thought I was bemoaning the loss of a phrase when I was really describing how the phrase itself is dishonest.
Lets take your question as true for the sake of discussion. Do you take your language cues from these people? I don't. I don't see why you would let people you strongly disagree with decide what language to use. Are you concerned you might offend them by not using their preferred terms?
Might you be opening yourself up to some rather trivial social engineering opportunities?
Anyway... def don't talk about frames.
But even setting aside your specific example, I don't believe that ambiguity should paralyze us into inaction. I think it's fair to say "OK, we'll ban anyone who advocates distributing political power based on race, with the white 'race' getting the most power... when people cross that line won't always be clear, but we'll do our best." For private action especially, we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Is it?
Or is this a deliberately conflated term promoted as an 'official' label in public discourse in order to dissuade association with those favoring the more benign meaning?
Agreed that ambiguity shouldn't create inaction - but it just as well shouldn't promote incorrect action either
Why would you use the term white and nationalist together? Being white has very little to do with being a nationalist unless you believe it has everything to do with it, in which case you would be racist.
Oh her? don't listen to her, shes a 'white nationalist'.
Also, if, assuming this confusion to be true, having the term 'white nationalist' existing in the discourse as a negative, those who are not aware of the nuances between 'whites who happen to be nationalist' and 'those promoting a white nation' are pre-biased via faulty discourse to discount the words of 'whites who happen to be nationalist'.
Any popular terminology which deliberately overlooks subtlety and dismisses it when it is pointed out in the discourse is problematic. It's effectively a subtle smear campaign against the non-problematic nuances.
See also the strangely similar situation with the term 'skinhead' -
Initially this was a mostly apolitical working class subculture, most listened to soul music and smoked pot and listened to reggae, and many were apolitical or left/socialist leaning. Genearlly mildly populist, mostly white, but yes somewhat 'dangerous' in that it was a popular social movement of unconventional rowdy people of all stripes. (much like the 'disenfranchised trumpians' that the media is happy to highlight as contributing to the rise of the so-called 'white nationalism' we're talking about here)
Cue one politically motivated overtly racist subgroup acting up and stealing all the headlines, and now the entire term/culture is essentially taboo..
One can argue that this group just got the press and 'messed up the term', but at some point editorial bias is a factor.
For god sakes this is 'hacker news' I shouldn't need to explain this.
Many right-wing people claim that in practice, there's not: they're accused of being "white nationalists" for being "white and a nationalist".
Edit:
If people downvoting me think I'm wrong, explain why people like Jordan Peterson, who merely espouse non-leftist positions and happen to be white, routinely get accused of supporting the alt-right and neo-Nazis.
For the people who doubt what I'm saying -- here's a video of Jordan Peterson. This is who the leftists routinely call "neo-Nazis" or "alt-right": moderates who refute their positions and calmly assert values like personal responsibility over collectivist victimhood culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2bFzK2EdIo
Edit 2:
I'd originally written "conservative"; I'm not sure Mr Peterson would describe himself in such terms. I've made it more neutral.
I've just assumed it was a vague insult aimed at non-nominal conservatives.
To quote Merriam Webster:
"one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation"
I am not of the opinion that white nationalism has no real meaning.
And this applies to both ends of the political spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlZiWK2Iy8
I’d say it’s even closer to “people I disagree with”.
Stephen Colbert would disagree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nk0dUjYUNI
"You know why you're not supposed to use that word [nationalist]? Because it's the second half of 'white nationalist'. Chopping off the first word doesn't change what it means in our minds."
But this isn't what will happen. Expressing skepticism about immigration - a fairly normal and mainstream opinion in the 1990s and early 2000s - can easily be construed today as "white nationalism" by many on the political left. It's not you who gets to define what your views are on these platforms, it's the "moderators".
Welcome to not having a safe space anymore.
We’ve done this kind of thing before, and we’ll do it again. Facebook responding like this IS the marketplace of ideas reacting.
They'll crow and gloat about how the scene isn't a safe space, that it's founded in hate and intolerance. But as soon as well-known nazi/NSBM-related bands or members of the scene are deplatformed and antagonized for their views, the tone goes straight to "get these leftists out, this is a right wing scene! This is censorship!" and so on.
Apparently only right wing radicals should be allowed to have safe spaces... /s
This will be an ongoing project and will require constant tweaking and adjustment, but I’m all for their removal from the public sphere.
There are underlying economic and social issues leading to the reemergence of this worldview that need to be dealt with urgently and with peacemaking intention. Still, in the meantime this kind of thought if unchecked leads to genocide and must be stopped.
i dont consider myself republican, but the slippery slope seems all too real in this case.
Facebook banning outside ads for the Ireland abortion referendum comes to mind, as well as the case where a Christian satire site was threatened with a ban for spreading false information because Snopes had fact-checked one of their articles as false. Susan B. Anthony List had a bunch of pro-life ads banned; I think most of them were restored.
https://stream.org/328684-2/ this is a more recent case that follows a familiar pattern: Flagged, rejected appeal, then mysteriously overturned appeal some days later.
Hopefully, you also don't doubt that there are also many examples of Facebook censoring liberal/left/non-Republican whatever stuff, and then overturning on appeal, many times mysteriously so, after initially rejecting the appeal. (This post presents like a dozen examples in the genre of black activists being banned for discussion of racism, such as uploading screenshots of racist and sexist harassment they received. You might also want a warning that these examples are interspersed with the author's strongly opinionated and bellicose comments. https://medium.com/@thedididelgado/mark-zuckerberg-hates-bla... )
Due to their scale and the shittiness of their algorithms and processes at this kind of thing, surely you're not surprised there are tons of examples on every side. (This article documents more examples on all sides, including exemptions for a prominent Republican: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens... )
What reason do you have to believe these mistakes always seems to hurt conservative causes or that you tend to see conservative stuff get caught, disproportionately more than non-conservative stuff?
If you want to convince me that it's more of a "establishment/fringe" divide than "left/right", that ProPublica piece goes a long way towards making that case.
Somehow saying "yes, these multinational corporation could exert undue influence over a political system, but they just wouldn't" does not seem sufficient. I feel that such an attitude is like saying "The US government would not spy on its on citizens -- they wouldn't do that, just imagine the public outcry!" Perhaps that is a bad analogy, but the issue here is that we are nearing the point where "oh, they wouldn't do such a thing" becomes untenable.
The CFO of Google said, in the leaked video[1] of the TGIF immediately following Trump's election, that they would use "the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values." Going by the reactions of everyone in that meeting, their efforts are certainly not impartial or apolitical.
Why white? The CCP is running concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims right now, yet I see no ban on the only party that can be called National Socialist today, just because the nation they are supporting is yellow.
Not sure if CCP has a FB page, but that far is obvious.
> The CCP is running concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims right now, yet I see no ban on the only party that can be called National Socialist today, just because the nation they are supporting is yellow.
I don't see any way to infer this as saying that Facebook has banned the CCP–what am I missing here?
Also, if Facebook has indeed banned the CCP, well, turnabout is just fair play–after all, the CCP has banned Facebook from China.
I don't think they should, but I also know that if they didn't, Trump and others would get banned and the cries from the fake free speech worriers, (who are quiet as heck on ie BDS), would be a lot louder.
This is highly debatable. There are plenty of examples of benign movements and opinions that have been stifled violently by society and the state.
You can find with little effort plenty of people today calling for censoring or even being violent towards harmless liberal or conservative people because they are "communists" or "fascists". People are not good judgement and measured response.
Facebook and Twitter have become a digital public commons for discourse today. The check and balance is "what Facebook decides". That doesn't exactly seem like an adversarial check and balance system to me.
Absolutely correct, however, they aren’t the only places for public discourse. People have never been able to demand a newspaper print their article or that a magazine must include their story—people have always had the choice to start their own newspaper or their own magazine and build their own audience and this is still true today, in fact it’s much easier than it’s ever been.
People who’s business is access to human inputs, whether they are newspapers, music venues, theaters, magazines, etc.. have almost always had the freedom to set their own standards and it isn’t clear to me why business owners shouldn’t have this freedom anymore.
Small comfort if they are the main places for public discourse - so cutting people and ideas there essentially means relegating them to far less reach.
Strange how when some foreign state censors FB or Twitter it's an outrage, but when FB or Twitter sensor people directly "there are other places".
Not to mention the monetary deplatforming (e.g. Mastercard, PayPal, Patreon and co not allowing funding), in which case there are no "other places" (not many in any way, and not reputable for someone to go pay there).
>People have never been able to demand a newspaper print their article or that a magazine must include their story
Which is irrelevant, since newspapers and magazines where always top-down affairs, written and curated by a specific team. Social media and platforms were supposed to be open to society (hence "social"), not only for a select team of journalists to have an account there.
Because a government has a monopoly on violence, while a private company has freedom of association. You're conflating two different situations that are only superficially similar.
> Social media and platforms were supposed to be open to society (hence "social")
Yep, and that didn't work out so well. Hence, the bans.
A government choosing what information you have access to IS censorship.
There are many organizations, anyone can start one. There is only one government and you can't escape it.
The same sort power brokers that would drive censorship in a place like China are the ones who fund political campaigns, found think tanks, control media empires, and choose advertising spend, and use this leverage to drive censorship on social media.
In the end if the rich and powerful have effectively squelched dissent does it matter if it was through government mandate or some more complex mechanism though private means?
If a group of users explicitly want access to white nationalist content, they should be able to get it. So I would oppose blogs, webhosts, and cloudflare deplatforming anyone for any reason besides the outright illegal.
Facebook and Twitter are not just about serving content to those who have the intent to view it...infact the whole point of these social networks is that they expose content to NEW people who didn't initially have any intent to view. This is promotion, not access, and I have no problem with private entities choosing what they want to promote.
I would apply this same test to payments. Users who have explicit intent to financially contribute to objectionable content creators such as Alex Jones should still have a way of doing so. When Patreon, Matercard, etc etc deplatform him it closes the door to those who already have intent. Of course, I'm all for FB and Twitter shutting down the campaign so the word wouldn't spread nearly as far.
As a moderate liberal who finds sexual content over-censored, yet am disgusted by right-wing and anti-vax (anti-vax is often leftist!) conspiracy theorists, I think this test "honor their intent" test is a great way to keep the internet relatively sex positive, and extremist content relatively niche.
But at the end of the day, aren't the companies who are providing payment processing or website hosting profiting off of extremism and hate? If you'll recall, the reason why they started deplatforming individuals to begin with was that large swaths of people boycotted their services until they chose to no longer do business with said extremists.
Isn't that voting with our dollars? Isn't that the Free Market of Ideas in action?
From McCarthyism, to J.E. Hoover, to MLK, Gary Webb, to WMD, to the Patriot Act, to Snowden, to the "collusion" BS, to today's de-platforming, the establishment and the media easily stomps on whoever they don't like with impunity.
Or have we already built the pinnacle of society at some past point, and everything we ever do in the future is doomed to be as bad or worse than what we already have?
I'd like to choose optimism here, personally.
Banning ads would also be another good start, but I don't see the idea getting very popular.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/facebo...
That's called freedom of association: the right for an organization or individual to not wish to associate with someone.
That Voat?
Somehow I'm skeptical this is a viable approach short of Torrifying the entire internet.
Take it up with New Zealand, which has very strong laws about hate speech and promoting extremist communities.
> whilst Facebook, which also hosted it, was left alone?
That content makes up a microscopic amount of the content on Facebook, and it was removed when reported. That content makes up the vast majority of the traffic on Voat, however.
It seems like you're moving the goalposts here, though. We're not talking about governments banning websites, we're talking about the government forcing websites to host content that they don't want to host. That's what's at play here.
And the fact is that you are free to start a public or Tor-based community of your own, unless you're in countries where Tor is blocked, in which case I think you're in far deeper shit than this discussion is focused on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...
Are you going to suggest that people start their own ISP?
At some point, private actors can carry so much economic power that their private rules effectively become laws. Much of Jim Crow was implemented in this manner, in addition to actual legislation.
But even then, VPN or Tor? The internet is built to route around damage. Has Mastadon, IRC, or ICQ ever been blocked?
Again, just because white nationalists don't have the platforms they want doesn't mean they can't get their message out. But what they want is mainstream acceptance, and that is most certainly not going to happen.
Letting paranoid xenophobes roam, recruit and incite violence on Facebook is bad. And its ill effects are already felt, and it has significant potential for doing a lot more harm in the future.
Whereas allowing a quasi-public-forum to be controlled and basically censored by an unaccountable entity (FB) is problematic - especially if said control is co-opted by the very same ideology that in the first place that particular control mechanism was supposed to, well, control.
It feels like the problem is that hate speech and other kinds of populist nonsense is currently the tool that easily leads to more and more authoritarianism, more and more xenophobes and isolationists getting into power. But censorship itself is also a great tool for power consolidation.
If Facebook and Twitter suddenly decided to de-platform and ban any discussion praising, defending, or favoring a political party, where would the outcry happen? On Facebook? Sorry, it’s banned!
Journalists would be absolutely salivating at the thought of writing about Facebook's new policy, especially if it was that blatant.
FB and Twitter are not the entire world. It's good praxis to be involved with people in the real world.
For instance in the UK Facebook banned the pages of a political party and very little was said because the same kinds of people who control Facebook also control the mainstream media, so they're almost always in agreement, except that journalists would really love Facebook to ban even more stuff to achieve the 'right outcomes', as they see it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/359847/facebook-bans-far-right-uk...
There's that conspiracy language again!
And then you go on to link a piece of "mainstream media" that writes extensively about it! Did you mean to prove yourself wrong?
It's hardly a conspiracy - the worldviews of these people are formed in the same crucibles and result in the same outcomes. They want to manipulate the narrative to ensure the right outcomes, in their view.
You're comparing apples to oranges. What's it's ranking among tech/PC websites?
How about the Guardian?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/14/facebook-bans-...
How about BBC?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746601
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43398417
How about Wired?
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-britain-first-far-r...
Is that mainstream enough for you?
> They want to manipulate the narrative to ensure the right outcomes, in their view.
Prove it.
Look, the original comment I was taking issue with said this:
"Journalists would be absolutely salivating at the thought of writing about Facebook's new policy [of de-platforming and banning any discussion praising, defending, or favoring a political party], especially if it was that blatant."
That clearly isn't the case because it's happened already and journalists didn't salivate over it - they reported the event once and then it was never brought up again.
Really? Because from the citations I've given, it looks like a lot was said.
> That clearly isn't the case because it's happened already and journalists didn't salivate over it - they reported the event once and then it was never brought up again.
Because it was uneventful. It was a universally reviled thing that got banned, and rightfully so. There doesn't have to be "another side" to a story when that "other side" is filled with nothing but hate.
They're the British equivalent of the NSDAP.
This is an argument for mob rule. I'm not sure that's as comforting as you intended.
Where would the outcry happen?
There aren't that many public platforms with any reach, and they're all adopting similar policies.
In [blocked] no one can hear you scream!
In practice, the distinction between banning a subject and banning a conversation about a subject ban, is easy to make. For example, Germany bans racist speech, but does not ban speech about whether racist speech ban should continue (and this particular debate is definitely alive and well in Germany). Even in the US we've banned certain words from broadcast TV for many years, but this never limited people from discussing whether the ban should continue!
Apparently not for Facebook’s moderators/censors workforce. Just they other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/111040092879067... The day before that they banned a local satirical comics and this keeps popping up regularly.
And equally easy to abuse, something which has happened time and again:
Complain about the "ban of X"? Discussion shut down as supporting X.
At FB, Twitter, Snapchat etc, whoever happens to work in the subject banning division arbitrarily makes these decisions, unless overridden by top management.
Okay? Private organizations are under no obligation to provide you with a platform to spread your message.
If you want, you can start your own social network or host your own blog.
We’re also good at being boiled slowly, like frogs.
Doesn't matter what they believe or say: Sam Harris? Alt-right. Tim Poole? Alt-right. Jordan Peterson? Alt-right. David Rubin? Alt-right. And that's just the leftists!
edit: Tim Pool for example was already accused. It will clearly be used to shut down unwelcome dissent.
That said, I absolutely agree that leftist positions do get censored. Even if I currently like to underline my dissociation with its authoritarian excesses and general dishonesty on certain subjects, the problem is a general one.
However not everyone thinks that it's so great.
I don't know, and it's probably not something we can just settle easily.
It's usually true, that a society cannot simply rely on "laws" to save it, and when the power imbalance get too extreme, then laws won't save anyone anyway. Though it seems having some kind of policy and publicly agreed way to stop serial inciters is not a bad idea. After all information censorship generally happens through claims of potential national security hazards and other gag orders, not by a too wide interpretation of hate speech laws. (But of course human creativity is pretty limitless when it comes to suppressing others.)
Which ones, specifically?
There are many, just some off the top of my head.
Who/what de-platformed Jimmy Dore (here's his YouTube channel; [1])? Or the rest?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3M7l8ved_rYQ45AVzS0RGA
His channel is not 'deleted', (as is the case with the majority of right-wing commentators as well btw), but it is very much 'shadowbanned'/blacklisted, (economic ruin).
I for example regularly notice the recommendation algorithm skews a lot more towards the centre & right actually even when I am specifically looking for Jimmy Dore videos.
People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.
On Twitter, a lot of them don't even come up in the search results, effectively shadowbanned.
Of course, none of them would be invited on mainstream TV because their viewpoint is not allowed in 'polite circles'.
This is why I have a huge issue with the right simplistically equating D.C. Democrats with 'the left'. I suppose the division is as to what do you care about, social leftism, (identity politics), which is easy & lazy and what many on the right focus on vs economic leftism, which is what many of those I named discuss and is not really allowed on mainstream media.
Contrast that to "Limbaugh", for which Rush Limbaugh is the (buried) #11 result, despite having 2x the followers anything else.
In Moments, there's a lot of other people talking about him, so that's what's shown, (also a lot more notable Limbaughs, as that's a pretty common surname), whereas Dore is pretty much just him, not that many other people are talking. That's how Moments always worked, nothing shady there. It's also true if you put i.e. 'Taylor Swift' in Moments, her actual Twitter account is fairly buried, because there's lots of other buzz that the algo deemed more relevant.
If anything, it speaks to his popularity.
And that's despite him not having a verified account, which are deranked for everyone over verified ones. Type in ie 'Sean Hannity' and you'd see his verified account right up.
Perhaps it's time to admit that the simplistic narrative of 'left censoring the right' is not really true and it's more complex than that. It's really the establishment silencing alternative voices.
The right is more than happy to censor the left on BDS, for example, (with the help of the Democrats even(!)) & cement that into law. I don't see any of the right-wing 'free speech worriers', like Ben Shapiro talk about how wrong that is. In fact they very much support it.
On the other hand, you have left-wing channels like Dore & Secular Talk constantly bring up how it's wrong to censor right-wing voices, even doing long rants on specific cases.
And, as we all know, nobody ever made money off of extremist political commentary before YouTube, right kids?
FFS he has his own website and show. Just because YouTube doesn't give him money doesn't mean he's persecuted. He can feel free to host his videos elsewhere.
> (economic ruin).
Hyperbole alert!
> People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.
Please cite some sources. I'm not really finding any info.
Feel free to do so whenever. Be sure to indicate when that has resulted in serious consequences for the "victim".
> Tim Pool for example was already accused.
TBF Tim Pool pulled the whole "I'm so neutral" act when dealing with a bunch of actual white supremacists. What "dissent" was unwelcome there? That he was pretending like these were totally fine people who just happened to think that genocide was okay?
All I could find was this: Peter Thiel once spoke at a libertarian conference. Libertarians, being libertarians, permit racism (read: not the same as "support racism"). THEREFORE, PETER THIEL IS A WHITE NATIONALIST.
Are you fucking serious? I pushed back on my leftist friends with what I found. "Duhhhhh, errrrrr, ummmmm, well... everyone just knows he is!" Oh, really.
Bullshit, repeated often enough as truth, becomes evidence for itself.
Really? How about plain nationalists? How about communists? How about separatists? How about traditionalists? How about "Occupy Wall Street"? How about "nationalists" in e.g Iceland, a country where nationalists would be predominantly if not exclusively white in the first place?
If your idea of "general political party" is Democrats and Republicans and the occasional third candidate, ie. the bland two-party consensus that agrees on almost everything (foreign policy, more money to big money, etc), but disagrees on token issues (and that increasingly less), then sure.
But the movements and parties that change things up historically were never welcomed as "general political parties" by the establishment and the "good people" of the 10%.
I'm from a generally center-left-leaning country, where e.g. Reagan would be considered the epitome of nationalist and/or imperialist. Would it be OK for Facebook to censor Reagan (or some modern politician with the same ideas) on those grounds?
Are they talking about racial genocide? No? Then they're a-okay.
I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for people to understand: If you're advocating genocide or violence against a people, you're gonna get banned. Pure and simple.
What party? The government is gonna come into a private organization and tell them they are obligated to spend money to preserve, host, and broadcast hate speech that doesn't align with the company's values?
Please tell me how this differs from telling small business owners they can't refuse service.
I'm pretty libertarian in respects to market regulation, but when it comes to mopolistic industries you need regulation.
They're welcome to censor to editorialize, but they lose their protections from copyright suits for relaying copyright material uploaded by their users.
For Facebook to be immune from copyright liability for my uploads, when they display them to others publicly for profit, they cannot express prior restraint over my upload. Such commercial copyright violations carry heft penalties, in the thousands of dollars per view: Facebook and Google can't operate in an environment where they're liable to such a degree for uploads.
The government recognized this about internet services, and granted them immunity to copyright related suits in exchange for supporting the American value of free speech on their platforms. (This is a law.) They're free to not accept that deal, but they're liable for their commercial copyright infringement in that case.
Is this a 'A therefore B' thing due to the way the laws are written, or is this explicitly called out someplace?
> The government recognized this about internet services, and granted them immunity to copyright related suits in exchange for supporting the American value of free speech on their platforms. (This is a law.)
I did a bit of looking (though not a lot) to try and find some sources on this but I wasn't able to really uncover anything that supports this.
Do you have any source available? I'm interested in reading into this idea further, I find it rather fascinating.
In fact, it links to another page which states:
Wow, is there anything Section 230 can't do?
Yes. It does not apply to [...] intellectual property law
Which directly contradicts your implication that Section 230 is the law that grandparent was referring to when they stated:
The government [...] granted [internet services] immunity
to copyright related suits [...] (This is a law.)
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict
access to or availability of material that the provider or
user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable,
whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
https://www.lawfareblog.com/ted-cruz-vs-section-230-misrepre...
Sure, but it (1) doesn't apply to copyright—that's the DMCA safe harbor not the CDA one, and (2) was specifically created to eliminate the added liability web hosts were then subject to if they engaged in content moderation, not to require them to abstain from moderation to secure the safe harbor.
No, it's not. You seem to be mixing an inverted understanding of CDA Section 230 (which was instituted to avoid discouraging host moderation of user content, because prior to 230 exerting any such editorial control risked a host being treated as a publisher rather than distributor, with greater liability exposure for the user content) with the DMCA safe harbor (which, unlike CDA 230, applies to copyright claims.)
I read and re-read both the DMCA 17 USC § 512 and Section 230 of the CDA, and as far as I can tell, the DMCA only requires responding "expeditiously" to DMCA takedown notices and court orders, and the CDA has no conditions at all but doesn't protect from copyright liability in the first place.
In fact, the CDA explicitly states that its liability protection DOESN'T require neutrality, and extends to “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected”. See https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230
So we'd have to pull relevant case history. You can't just look at the words in a statute. Each single term of art could have a chain of cases arguing over the specific meaning of that term.
An anthology is not exempted under 512.c.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/ted-cruz-vs-section-230-misrepre...
Come over to Australia, that is what our traditional media has been like for years!
> It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are trying to have it both ways.
Of course Facebook and Twitter are trying to have it both ways, and, indeed, all ways — there are many more ways for people to communicate, or stances to take, than “both”.
Platforms like FB and Twitter hope to be the communications backbone of the world. The problem is, the world has opinions on what kinds of communications are acceptable. These platforms try to stay neutral, but the people are not.
Neutral does not exist. It's all relative.
In a polarized world, a neutral platform will die because either side won't like it. In a more interesting world, it might still die because people don't like people who don't think like them.
The problem with FB is that they have built a system that rewards polarizing opinions. Edward Deming said that your system is perfectly set up to give you the results you are getting, so if you want different ones, you need to change your system. Incentivize quality, disincentivize "viral-ness". Maybe limit viral-ness. Optimize for something besides addictiveness^Wengagement. Admit that people think, say, and do harmful things and build a system that is robust to it. Add some kind of negative feedback for posts.
Essentially, you have no control so the only solution is to not participate or appeal to a higher authority. Both are terrible.
In a weird tangental side-thought: The Internet is to Western Capitalism what Glasnost/Perestroika was to the Soviet Union. The opening of information, while allowing many great things through, also removed the filters that kept harmful content on the margins. In the Soviet state, it was the authority of the State that dictated content. In the Western world, it's mostly those who own/control large media platforms. Since liberalization, each situation found The Authority under acerbic attack from these new wellsprings of content, both legitimate and illegitimate.
That's an interesting question. What if Google and Facebook would secretly demote and hide articles about one political party and promote articles about another party? Theoretically they are absolutely free to do so but how do you think, will it cause a Congress investigation or not? Those people made noise about much smaller things.
Also, what if Google would start demoting its competitors and everyone who deals with those "untouchable" companies? That would be interesting to see.
I think people don't realise what power these new media have. The monopoly of Facebook or Google is a serious issue and we should not believe that they will always stay neutral.
You can only remember the lessons of the past if you understood them in the first place. And frankly, arguing for more content controls by authorities is an insult to anyone actually having an understanding of those times.
When they censor opinions that the top 10% agrees with, since those are that control the media and what's acceptable.
As for liability, here's why the laws intentionally shield them;
https://www.lawfareblog.com/ted-cruz-vs-section-230-misrepre...
And finally, there's nothing forcing you to use them. Convenience (or lack of it) is not a sufficient argument for regulation.
Could you explain how this is any different than the handful of television companies for the past 70 years?
As best as I can tell, the older demographics seem to be the ones primarily watching the news, and it shows in polling data. Their opinions and narratives are easily manipulated by the "news" networks they are faithful to. Companies run by a "small group of people."
In practice, how will this actually work out?
True story. I have a friend who got a temporary ban from Facebook (I think 90 days?) for commenting on a story about a Texas billionaire paying to hunt endangered animals, "How much would it cost to hunt Texas billionaires?" That was considered a violation of their anti-bullying stance. Knowing her, it wasn't. It was sarcasm.
Moving on to this policy, I'm happy to see neonazis and the KKK have a hard time. But there are people in the UK and EU who would see Brexit as being a separatist cause motivated by racial animosity. Will we see discussion of a future such measure banned by Facebook on such grounds? And remaining banned even for people who support it on economic grounds because they think that having to follow EU policies on GDPR, copyright, and so on will be a net negative for the UK?
Facebook is going to have some difficult conversations ahead. And the more of these lines that they draw, the more difficult boundary cases they will run into.
Obviously there are other kinds of content that Facebook could ban, but merely because those things exist doesn't mean this shouldn't also be banned.
I believe private companies are usually better, but still highly dependant on size and a number of other factors.
I definitely don't have faith that FB will wield this well, and the worse part is it will probably pretty hard to find out from the silenced parties when they f!@# up until much later.
The whole point of defending speech you don’t agree with is it promises that arbitrary rules won’t be used when YOUR speech runs afoul or someone else’s feelings.
Let me phrase it to you like this... if Mark Zuckerburg who you may generally agree with leaves Facebook and is replaced by let’s say Donald Trump and his assistant Mike Pence; do you still think it should be Facebook as a service provider’s policy to gauge what offensive speech is?
Maybe it’s not Facebook’s job to ban legal things you personally don’t agree with.
Because I'm not a white nationalist? Facebook already bans child pornography, pro-ISIS content, and doxxing. Does anyone seriously believe that Facebook is slippery sloping to banning all speech?
But let's say that Trump and Pence do indeed take over Facebook and make it so they ban all users that don't loudly praise Trump. If they do, honestly, so what? Facebook can't imprison you or legally remove your property. The worst they can do is ban you from their platform. Which, well, that sucks, but there's lots of sites on the Internet. In fact, you could go ahead and legally make a non-censorship Facebook.
...of course, sites like that already exist, in this world, not in the Trump/Pence Facebook world. And they're dominated by child pornography, white nationalism, and doxxing. No one at large uses them because they're horribly toxic and disgusting. Almost like some rules about content are actually helpful for sites on the Internet.
But I beleive my comment said legal things. Having a different opinion is still legal, for now. You jumped to all sorts of illegal things.
And my context was what if “the bad people” are suddenly running these services or in positions of power and relative to them, you are the one with hate speech? Perhaps it shouldn’t be up to them, or you, or anyone to police what someone else MIGHT find offensive.
> Perhaps it shouldn’t be up to them, or you, or anyone to police what someone else MIGHT find offensive.
You have got to be kidding. If it's on a platform I control I can make any kind of legal judgments about the content I find acceptable. And if you're banned, again, so what? Facebook is not a government or even a government-adjacent entity: I have no right to participate on the site, and they have no obligation to platform my speech.
I think it's foolish to wring your hands over the arbitrary machinations of a multibillion dollar corporation's online platform. They don't care about you or me and frankly they have no obligation to do so. This logic is akin to complaining that McDonalds puts too much lard in the fries, maybe that's true, but if that's the case then don't give McDonalds your business; the fact that there is a McDonalds on every street corner doesn't mean they are obligated to modify their business process to be within the parameters of your approval.
> if Mark Zuckerburg who you may generally agree with leaves Facebook and is replaced by let’s say Donald Trump and his assistant Mike Pence; do you still think it should be Facebook as a service provider’s policy to gauge what offensive speech is?
That's Facebook's prerogative. I don't really use Facebook, but if I felt like Facebook was unfairly targeting me I'd stop using their platform, if they elected Trump to the board of directors I'd stop using their platform. The solution to all these Facebook problems is very simple: stop using it.
I don't.
My view on this action is a view on this action, not every potential future action Facebook might take in the future that is loosely analogous.
> if Mark Zuckerburg who you may generally agree with leaves Facebook and is replaced by let’s say Donald Trump and his assistant Mike Pence; do you still think it should be Facebook as a service provider’s policy to gauge what offensive speech is.
Yes.
I also think that they would do a horrible job of it, and the board of Facebook should not choose them for that job. I also think Donald Trump does a horrible job directing the policy of the executive branch of the US government, but I don't think that fact means the the President of the United States should not direct executive policy.
If I thought that no one should have any responsibility or authority if Donald Trump would fail in the responsibility or misuse the authority, then, well, I wouldn't allow anyone to do anything.
> Maybe it’s not Facebook’s job to ban legal things you personally don’t agree with.
It's absolutely Facebook's job to decide what messages they are willing to relay on their platform. That's a direct consequence of the First Amendment.
The problem is not that I personally disagree with white supremacy. The problem is that white supremacist organizations are a significant and growing terrorist threat, and they are using Facebook to recruit new members. This is no different from the various platforms that banned ISIS.
3 of the 4 graphs against time showed right-wing extremism increasing, in Western Europe and North America, the UK, and the USA, respectively. The only graph that didn't show that right-wing extremism is a growing problem instead showed that it has been consistently bad in Germany, worse than the other two categories combined (in that graph, the other two categories were left-wing attacks and "Not Identified").
What's arguable about it?
The poster is pretty much correct.
Take email for instance: first class mail is protected by the 5th amendment, and a warrant is required to open and read first class mail. Move communications to a private digital platform and the presumption of privacy is completely flipped into a presumption that all your emails will be read and stored for future reading. When all communications go online that leads to a very significant change in how the law applies to private communications and that is exploited by the government just as much as it is exploited by the corporations. After many years of there being a free-for-all where law enforcement and intelligence claimed they could view anything online without a warrant there was finally some push back by courts to reassert the rule of law, but email still has substantially less privacy than first class mail.
Speech on public forums is a similar case. The 1st amendment applies to the town square but if a corporation creates a digital town square then it gets the right of censorship. Then the government applies pressure on the corporation to censor on their behalf and the government begins to exercise a power it did not previously have. That was not a problem when online platforms were small and inconsequential, but when they grow to billions of users globally, then the power to censor speech on those platforms becomes quite influential on the exercise of real world power.
Corporations do not have police powers but they are subjects of governments that do, so once they get power they can always be made tools of the people that hold power over them.
The framers of the constitution could certainly have included a requirement that private institutions follows the same rules as the government. There were certainly big and powerful non-governmental organizations at the time -- the Catholic Church, for example.
That line is grey and I'd argue that your friend's comment, while obviously hyperbole, does not respect human life.
There was an article posted about cyclists that points out the danger ous dehumanizing others; that comedy / hyperbole help group think achieve it.
In practice, we've seen a lot of examples across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter where things are blanket deplatformed under the guise of policies like these, and it's concerning.
One thing is for certain - Facebook can't possibly do a worse job than YouTube has at policing content.
Did she know that the person she directed that comment to did not know her?
Surely?
On the other hand, there's bound to be people who believe fair-trial-judicially-decided capital punishment would be fair retribution for anyone who intentionally kills endangered animals.
I'm going to say something like: I'm against capital punishment because it tends to kill innocent people at least occasionally, not because it isn't often deserved.
What is the parallel? In both cases, people who did not recognize the author's point took offense. (And yes, a lot of people were seriously horrified by Swift.) And in both cases the author's actual point was close to the direct opposite of the one that those people thought. Some people found obvious, others didn't. To people who found it obvious, it can be surprising that it wasn't obvious to others. People who didn't find it obvious think it a horrible thing to say.
In this case the comment is directed against the justification that the billionaire offered that it is OK for him to kill the animal because he paid lots of money to do so. And her point is that just because you pay lots of money to do a wrong thing, doesn't make it OK to do that wrong thing. To see it, put the billionaire in the animal's shoes. How much money would it take to make hunting OK? Obviously no amount of money would suffice! Just as the billionaire's having paid lots of money didn't make his hunting OK either.
That said, this one actually gets complicated. The money from these hunts goes to anti-poaching efforts. So the billionaire kills one animal, and his money saves others. Which still makes the billionaire a shitty person, but there is a utilitarian argument for allowing it.
That said, how would you feel if we were talking about hunting children dying in a famine instead of black rhinos on a preserve? The same utilitarian argument applies, but I think most would be for putting the billionaire in jail. How you feel about that is likely close to how that friend feels about what actually happened.
I am quite sure that Texas billionaire Lacy Harber does not know her.
I am also quite sure that the person who shared the post she replied to about his hunting an endangered black rhino did know her.
It would also be a safe bet that some friends of friends who saw that comment did not know her.
I would say that she "directed that comment to" the second. It is impossible to tell who reported her, or what they thought.
Wouldn't Facebook know these things?
Under what circumstances do we have a right to confront our accusers?
Which means that anyone who has created an anonymous complaint system has traded off your right to confront an accuser with the accuser's right to not be intimidated and decided in favor of the accuser.
However there is usually another counterbalance, such as having the accusation silently disappear unless a neutral third party thinks that there is a point to the accusation.
Even if someone commented that as "sarcasm" it would look pretty bully to me.
That's what bullies usually say when you confront them.
We've had Nazis and Klansmen effectively shut out of public discourse for decades. They aren't on TV. Their ads don't run in newspapers. If you go shopping in a pointy white hood and a swastika armband, the store (or the shoppers, more insistently) will likely ask you to leave.
Facebook (and similar) are the ones with the odd new 'principle' thing they tried which is 'it's ok for the hyper-overt bigots to shit everywhere with no consequences'. In practice, it has not worked out well so they are belatedly changing it.
I also oppose it on general grounds in that I'm a big proponent of freedom of expression. Facebook can do what they want, we're not talking about the government here and I understand that, but I would rather they didn't go this route. I don't want to live in a society where what can and can't be said is strictly regulated either by force or by general consent. I seem to be one of the few that feels that way, though, any more.
There is also the practical concern of what happens if the ideas of what is acceptable and what isn't changes over time? Who knows which opinions that you hold now might become anathema at a later date. For example, the opinion I'm expressing now used to be a lot more common than it is today.
Is that true? Would we have the anti-vax movement if it weren't for Facebook & co.?
And if it were banned, they'd just spin it as the pharma companies paying to suppress the truth. It would only further confirm their beliefs.
Through all of mankind we had strong mechanisms to form consensus, including social repercussions. Those don't work anymore, since what would have become outcasts in earlier generations can now easily (for example on facebook) find like-minded communities and fulfill their social needs/get approval/etc. It'll be interesting in how different realities people can believe in before society breaks apart. I'd prefer we wont let that happen.
The question is what actually works. Censoring them might reinforce their believe, but I can accept giving up on some if it does effectively stops the spread.
And throughout history people lived to be 30 and died of plague wallowing in their own excrement thinking the devil did it.
If your ideology needs thought control to work it needs to be taken out at the back of the sheds and shot. The second a society stops discussing ideas openly is the second it starts sliding towards a new dark age.
So, you're saying this mechanism is a good thing? Because mechanisms that reinforce the current social consensus, whatever it might be for that era, tend to maintain the status quo. And a desire to maintaining the status quo is a big chunk of the philosophy of, yep, that's right, ... conservatives.
I've often said progressives aren't liberals because they don't agree with liberal philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Their "maintain the current societal consensus" argument is the strongest evidence of that yet.
Make them pay a material cost: link vaccination to welfare benefits/family tax rebates, works well in Australia (search no jab, no pay). Also make an up to date vaccination record a requirement for enrolment into schools.
They will complain and might keep on spouting shit, but at the cost of ~$10k/child/year they'll change their actions pretty quick.
This is a dangerous, dangerous path to go down to if you belong to any kind of enlightment inspired ideology. What kind of things were supressed the hardest? Sexual Deviancy. questioning authority. Questioning relgion. You really want this kind of society? I think maybe we can stand some antivaxxer ...
Mechanisms to form consensus does not necessarily mean rule by mob, quite the opposite. Positive consensus mechanisms can be trust in the scientific method, institutional credibility, and acceptance of reason. These mechanisms can support an enlightenment ideology, not prevent it.
"Freedom of speech" is not an accident. Enlightenment thinkers have been pondering this for 200 years and more and objections have been successfully adressed over and over again. It's as much of the type of consensus you describe as we will ever have. 'But computers' is not sufficient to just do away with it.
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-a...
But what actually happened were those numbers were inflated by his followers and without the echo chamber of the larger base he had on YouTube his numbers eventually plummeted. Instead of being a regular in the news he occupies a small corner of the internet without access to the larger impressionable ever refreshing base he once had.
He has now resorted to trying to sneak videos back on to you tube.
“Most of your peers consider this post racist neonazi propaganda.”
That's a win in this case. It already festers somewhere else. White nationalists would like to spread their ideology outside of their normal bubble. They often talk about "redpilling normies." It's harder for them to do that if "normal" people have to explicitly seek out that kind of speech.
excluding people from a conversation doesn't help them learn why/how they think is wrong.. those "hidden" places that let the wrongthink fester only create more actions brought by wrongthink (guess what they talk about? wrongthink).
i dont understand the logic of removing someones ability to converse if they dont understand why they're wrong.. they cant ask questions
someone explain to me how banning content/people = deradicalizing
I don't think I've ever seen someone already radicalized reason their way out of it through conversing on the internet. I'm guessing the calculus is that exposing this content to people makes it easy to be suckered in, but we don't see the opposite affect.
That said, I think I generally agree that conversion via social media is unlikely. Still, I’m also not sure about my position on banning people. But the above article is a great read.
I've been in fb group chats with holocaust deniers etc. (mans literally inboxed me a youtube video, I never bothered clicking the links he sent but it was funny)
"banning white nationalist content" is a cute headline but doesn't hit the problem of seemingly benign normal users that would never "reveal their power level" slowly radicalizing their friends with content not on their site lol
The Rhetoric Tricks, Traps, and Tactics of White Nationalism https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...
the overt white nationalism content you think of doesn't really exist, i guess maybe if ur a boomer it still lingers? idk
its less orchestrated and just friendly until a point
thats how quick it can take to slowly expose people to content and how useless it is to "ban white nationalist content"
v cute headline tho
That isn't so clear: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=139661
Let's prod at this:
- Should ISIS recruitment videos and propaganda be allowed (nay, encouraged) because deplatforming them will make them put their recruitment pamphlets elsewhere? Where else do they put their recruiting materials?
- Should we publicly and loudly encourage people to self harm, ideate suicide, etc. because if we don't, they'll just find secret places to do it?
- Should we consider white supremacist recruiting materials "dialogue" at all? If we're talking about dialogue, as in a formal debate between Richard Spencer and pretty much anyone else, one on one, that's potentially interesting (also embarrassing for Spencer). On the other hand, a video posted by a white supremacist isn't dialogue. It's even less dialogue when they can delete comments they can't aptly respond to, and when the people there are already interested (Richard Spencer videos weren't ever going to cross my feed). You're calling this dialogue, but it's really a one sided dog and pony show with maybe some unlucky sacrifices. Perhaps we shouldn't ban dialogue between white supremacists and normal people, but you're not advocating for dialogue, your advocating for Facebook (and whomever else) to support (distribute, platform, etc.) white supremacist propaganda and theater.
>I don't want to live in a society where what can and can't be said is strictly regulated either by force or by general consent.
How do you propose to create a society where people aren't allowed to dislike you? That's what you're asking for, essentially. "Freedom from consequences" is the common way of putting this, but really what you're asking for is an infringement on my freedom of association. If you piss enough people off, that'll come back to bite you. What's the alternative? That people can't hold you accountable for your previous words? That quickly devolves into a society of 4chan, which, well, I'm not sure why you'd want to live in that.
>For example, the opinion I'm expressing now used to be a lot more common than it is today.
How certain of this are you? Did black people or women have the freedoms you suggest 100-150 years ago in the US? Was anyone advocating for that?
If we are to judge by social media companies past behavior [1] it’s regular conservative and liberal opinions that will be considered hate speech or white supremacy
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxbusiness.com/technology/...
You really don’t need hate speech and white supremacy policies to prohibit speech that is already illegal, but you need it to suppress speech that some people might disagree with when they want to abuse their power to suppress it.
How do you think about the false positives?
SPLC also say they are the same: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideo...
These orgs provide the best definition we can get right now due to Facebook relying on others to define it instead of providing clear definitions, and these orgs is an authority to Facebook. If there was ever an attempt at using power while abdicating responsibility that is it.
The reason while any action build upon this is bullshit is that these orgs doesn’t relate it to truth and evidence, use their power to slap this label onto anyone that disagree with them and punish people for things they didn’t do.
To figure out if we disagree where it matters the most, do you think it is justified to ban or suppress content on social media from people that SPLC/ADL view as part of the radicalization process? Eg jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin.
To pre-address your other comment, neither white nationalist propaganda nor ISIS propaganda necessarily includes calls to violence. So the incitement of violence standard applies to neither.
If not, what differentiates ISIS from White nationalists? Both are violent groups that wish to kill people different from them. As far as I can tell, one just looks a lot more like me. They're both dangerous, and we shouldn't let either recruit people on facebook. What is the flaw in that line of reasoning?
As for that case, it was dismissed earlier this month[1], apparently because the plaintiffs didn't actually have any examples of wrongdoing on the part of companies, and just filed the suit to raise awareness of freedom watch's advocacy[2].
[1]: https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/25495855/FREEDOM_WA...
[2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/distric...
On the other hand what is being called alt right and white supremacisrs by mainstream organizations is bullshit:
- The economist called Ben Shapiro alt right today https://mobile.twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1111248348114...
- The guardian says Jordan Peterson is supposedly alt right https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/201...
- Bret Weinstein is supposedly alt right
And ridiculously enough Ben Shapiro is a Jew that is the biggest hate target of the alt right, and Jordan Peterson is hated by the alt right such as Richard spencer and Vox Day.
White supremacists also advocate violence against other races often to subjugate them. This is highly similar to isis.
Or are you claiming that all members of the alt right are white supremacists?
SPLC also say they are the same: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideo...
The opinions of SPLC and ADL is especially relevant because mainstream media and social media companies such as Facebook seem to have relationships with them as well as similar orgs to define actions against people.
So no, we are taking about the same poorly defined term because these orgs is an authority to Facebook.
The reason it’s bullshit is that these orgs doesn’t relate it to truth and evidence, use their power to slap this label onto anyone that disagree with them and punish people for things they didn’t do.
Unless you're of the opinion that "racism" and "white supremacy" are synonymous, the ADL does not define them as the same.
>So no, we are taking about the same poorly defined term.
To be clear, the "alt right" isn't white nationalist, it is, however, a white nationalist recruiting tool. Sort of like how you don't just start out as a random person and then the next day you become Jihadi Jane. You're slowly radicalized. The alt right to full-on white supremacist pipeline is the same way.
You start off interested in self help, so you read 12 rules for life; then get caught up in Peterson's weird ideas about western culture; then pretty soon you're seeing not just his youtube lectures, but other lectures about western culture; and then videos about the decline of white/western culture; and then you're watching Richard Spencer; then you shoot up a church.
Now absolutely, granted, not everyone follows the entire path, very few people end up radicalized, but while I'll absolutely agree with you that Peterson isn't a white supremacist, he's absolutely a useful idiot for them.
But again, let's stick to people who have been accused of being "White Supremacists" since you're the one using the term alt-right, not Facebook. Which innocent people are getting accidentally confused for "white supremacists" specifically?
> White supremacist Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, a tiny white supremacist think tank, coined the term “Alternative Right”
Or from the SPLC source:
> The racist so-called “alt-right,” which came to prominence in late 2015, is white nationalism’s most recent formulation
Both clearly use them in the same breath.
We can argue semantics about one being the tool for the other etc etc. But that doesn't change the fact that they are being tightly related by organizations that is an authority to Facebook.
SPLC and ADL is very aware of its power, and has related much of the prominent dissenters of wildly different ideologies to what they claim is alt-right; Maajid (an arab muslim, they lost a lawsuit on this one and apologized), Jordan Peterson (an individualist liberal), Ben Shapiro (a pretty normal conservative), Dave Rubin (a classical liberal) etc etc.
SPLC and ADL are by this evidence too often bullshitters that don't relate what they say to truth, but instead relate it to their ideology that is not preoccupied with truth-seeking. It is really a shame their views are elevated like this as a justification for Facebooks and other organizations abuse of power.
Again, Facebook didn't use the word already right. They're talking about white supremacists. You're arguing that these are the same thing. So if that's the case, you should have ample examples of people calling Jordan Peterson a white supremacist also.
If not, then maybe they aren't the same thing, and your equivocation is unwarranted and you should stop attempting to confuse the subject.
I've also shown that even the authoritarian sources Facebook trusts use alt-right and white supremacist in the same breath when defining the terms. These articles are no accident, this is what they believe.
This is not fear mongering. This is people that don't mind using their power to accuse viewpoint opponents for things they didn't do and with no evidence claiming they hold reprehensible viewpoints.
Edit: can't reply due to message depth limit, but the debate here is about facebook suppressing people like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin using arguments made by SPLC and ADL such as the one in [1,2]. Why do they have the right to suppress other peoples viewpoints on dubious grounds with no recourse?
It is pretty clear from your arguments that you agree that they are related or as you say "a white nationalist recruiting tool" regardless of how you otherwise view them. The process facebook institute will therefore suppress these viewpoints based upon no evidence and by subjectively mischaracterizing their viewpoints, with no recourse for this power abuse.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/06/07/prageru%E2%80...
[2] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/08/25/whose-alt-rig...
Once more: please give an example of someone calling Jordan Peterson a white supremacist, or admit alternatively admit that no one has done so and you were fearmongering.
Not saying jbp associates with white supremacists, or serves as a useful idiot for white supremacists. That's all well known. You claimed that people called Jordan Peterson a white supremacist. You still haven't justified that claim, and that's because, quite simply, it's false.
You're fearmongering. No one has called Jordan Peterson a white supremacist. That's just a factually incorrect statement. They've said he unintentionally helps white supremacists, he occasionally associates with them, take selfies with them sure, but for all your trying, you still haven't been able to find someone actually call jbp a white supremacist.
So perhaps, just maybe, your worry is misplaced.
I certainly do, but evidence (e.g. historic enforcement patterns) indicates that Facebook does not.
Note that my opinion on this isn't global and without nuance. There are things that Jordan Peterson does and says that aren't, at all, controversial and are even occasionally interesting and thought provoking. Not everything he does radicalizes people. Same with, I assume, Rubin and Shapiro, although I don't pay them enough attention to know or care either way.
However, that's all beside the point. Facebook *doesn't appear to thing that they're worth censoring. I'm not sure why my opinion is at all relevant.
You still haven't given me that example, by the way.
Shouldn't the same argument apply to the videos that radicalized those murderers?
Does that answer your question?
That's not only wrong it's highly offensive.
I googled for "extremism murder statistics": This is only the US [1], and I have not looked at methodology, but it supports GPs claim, not yours. Please discuss, but do so using substance, not master suppression techniques.
Just to give you another source from the same people which seems to agree with Wildgoose's parent atleast with its reasoning (albeit by making a few qualifiers on the dataset that bend it to be in favor of that reasoning) [2] from 2001-2016 in the US.
[1](pdf): https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO... [2]: https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_ECDB_IslamistFarRightHo...
Unfortunately trying to control others viewpoints hurts yourself as much as anyone else because you are making yourself and what you can learn from others less adaptive to reality.
Marketplace of ideas is not about throwing out unfounded claims and with a high likelihood have others treat them like a proposition founded in truth seeking. Rather it will be treated as the bullshit it most likely is unless you supply evidence to the claim.
How do we define "white supremacist recruiting materials? A significant number of people have said to me, un-ironically, that opposition to immigration is an instance of white supremacist speech. Same with opposition to affirmative action (they even called a crowd full of mostly Asians opposing affirmative action white supremacy in action). And I live in Bay Area, same place where Facebook is headquartered. That's the problem with trying to define ideological blacklists. Once you put a category onto the blacklist, everyone will try to push their political opponents into that category. This is how you get things like "learn to code" becoming a ban-worth offense (but only when directed to journalists).
Nowhere on the page linked in the original post does Facebook define "white nationalism" or "white separatism".
Do they define ISIS? That didn't seem to cause as much concern.
As for the rest of your post, I'm baffled that you somehow think that "preventing people from trying to kill people" is somehow a negative thing that should be criticized.
I also think that if I were consistently being mistaken for a white supremacist, I'd think about why that were happening, and probably try to distance myself from the things that were causing those mistakes. Your view appears to be that it's better to just prevent people from voicing their confusion.
ISIS is (or was) an explicit political group, an organized proto-state. It literally called itself a State. It was very clearly defined.
> As for the rest of your post, I'm baffled that you somehow think that "preventing people from trying to kill people" is somehow a negative thing that should be criticized.
"Preventing people from trying to kill people" was already against their terms of service. The whole point of this announcement is to announce the fact that Facebook is expanding their prohibited categories beyond "preventing people from trying to kill people".
> I also think that if I were consistently being mistaken for a white supremacist, I'd think about why that were happening, and probably try to distance myself from the things that were causing those mistakes. Your view appears to be that it's better to just prevent people from voicing their confusion.
As I stated earlier, multiple people have told me that desiring stronger border security and building the border wall is white nationalist. Others have told me that supporting any expansions of immigration restrictions is white nationalist. A few have even told me that opposition to affirmative action (even among groups in which Asians are the ones primarily opposing it) is white nationalism. I did not get the sense that they were saying these things ironically or in jest. Are these views tantamount to "preventing people from trying to kill people"? I live in San Francisco, which while not exactly the same environment as Menlo Park, is still in the same metro area as Facebook's HQ. There's a significant possibility that folks with similarly liberal definitions of white nationalism exist at Facebook.
Also the way you say you would "probably try to distance myself from the things that were causing those mistakes" really makes it sound like the chilling effect this has on discussion is a feature, not a bug. As significant number of people suspect that tech companies' expansions of prohibited speech is becoming a means of partisan manipulation. Statements such as yours likely reinforce this belief.
> Your view appears to be that it's better to just prevent people from voicing their confusion.
I am not trying to prevent anyone from voicing anything. The issue is that a significant number of people do confuse (or deliberately label) mainstream political views with "white nationalism" and "white separatism". Thus, Facebook's banning of these things is very likely to be seen as - and perhaps actually be implemented as - a means of suppressing legitimate political discussion. It probably would have been better to keep their prohibited categories the same, and perhaps more aggressively police certain circles and keep their policy - as you put it - "preventing people from trying to kill people"
There's already enough suspicion that Facebook is acting in a partisan manner, and more stuff like this is going to inspire ever greater calls to enforce stiffer regulation on tech companies and perhaps even breaking them up. This announcement seems like a shot in the foot for Facebook.
Are you suggesting that groups like the daily stormer, the national policy institute, etc. are not organized political groups? The national policy institute is quite literally a lobbying organization.
>As I stated earlier, multiple people have told me that desiring stronger border security and building the border wall is white nationalist.
Like I said, if I were being confused with a white nationalist with any regularity, I would take steps to correct that perception, perhaps by trying to understand why people think such things. Through conversation, directly, with those people, or on my own with research. Not by trying to appeal to some higher ethics that the people who think I might be a white nationalist are wrong.
Something about everywhere you walk smelling like shit and all.
Facebook's announcements do not specify these groups in particular, and do not seem to indicate that its definition of "white nationalism" and "white separatism" will be nearly as clearly defined as banning recruitment to the Caliphate.
> Like I said, if I were being confused with a white nationalist with any regularity, I would take steps to correct that perception, perhaps by trying to understand why people think such things. Through conversation, directly, with those people, or on my own with research. Not by trying to appeal to some higher ethics that the people who think I might be a white nationalist are wrong.
> Something about everywhere you walk smelling like shit and all.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but calling people white nationalists almost certainly isn't going to change their views. Quite the opposite, all it accomplishes is lessens the severity of these terms and makes it such that people roll their eyes when they see the label thrown around. And it further alienates people like me, who do support immigration and affirmative action etc, but are increasingly turned off by the every diminishing threshold at which terms like these get thrown around. Furthermore, it makes it even harder to distinguish between actual white nationalists and legitimate views that people are trying to make socially acceptable by painting them with the white nationalist brush.
Something about crying wolf and all.
On the other hand, banning white nationalism as a whole would be more like banning Salafi Islam as a whole, instead of specifically ISIS, al-Qaida, al-Shabab, Boko Haram etc.
This is not correct. It is not illegal to be a member of, or recruit for, Atomwaffen. Its illegal to commit crimes. But associating with a group isn't a crime (for good reason!). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't take steps to keep people from associating with people who will cause them to commit crime.
Or like, should we just go whole hog and encourage MS-13 to post recruitment videos on youtube too.
As for salafism, no that's akin to something like the WBC, which while reasonably considered a hate group, hasn't been banned from anywhere as far as I know.
\* Which did stir up some controversy, but is not all that surprising. The precedence for this dates back to the US Civil War, it would be ridiculous to claim that the Union Army criminally murdered hundreds of thousands of US citizens on the battlefield without trial when the latter were fighting for the Confederacy.
1. Get exposed to $radical_group on social media
2. Go searching for $radical_group because their ideas are intriguing/edgy/whatever
3. Find the actual site of $radical_group, and now they control the entire process.
Think of it this way: you see a poster for some cool band that says "RadicalPandas's music will change your life. We have concerts, but they're secret and we can't tell you where they are because the man wants to keep us down". If anything, that sounds even more edgy and intriguing. So instead you just have to tear all of the posters down.
The actual planning and such happens on private sites with secret forums.
As a real-world example, a Danish right-wing nationalist network called ORG was exposed in 2011, after having allegedly been active since the mid-80s. Its members counted a number of well-to-do individuals, as well as members of the police and known violent white nationalists. The group ran and had control over several sports clubs, including martial arts and gun clubs, which they used for training members in street fighting and tactics.
They ran a database of basically every politician and public figure who ever espoused left-wing views, and thousands of ostensibly left-wing citizens as well, labeling them as "traitors" to be "dealt with".
At least one of their members was from the armed forces in some security-related capacity, and they had reasonably good opsec procedures in place.
I have no doubt that even after being exposed and having its members publicly named, the group or a new equivalent still exists, with new secret sites and a heightened level of paranoia towards possible infiltrators.
By deplatforming these people and driving them further underground and paranoid, we limit their ability to attract people through social media, for fear of exposure.
Do you have any evidence to support that statement? Would you expand on why you think so? I would estimate that by driving them more underground, you make them seem more cool in the eyes of angry teenagers. You also make them more radical because underground their opinions are not exposed to contradicting views. In my opinion, we should do exactly the opposite - we should give them platform to speak and oppose them. Isn't that what open society is about?
There are a few studies in this thread that conclude similar.
The whole sunlight is the best disinfectant trope is only a trope, not a truth.
See also any conspiracy theory and the amtivax movement. When groups appeal to fear, not logic, as a recruiting tool, you can't logic people away.
And somewhat related, does this mean you have as dismal a view of humanity as it seems, that you don't want people exposed to dangerous ideas? This all seems necessarily paternalistic. EDIT I can't imagine, for instance, trusting in democracy with such a view.
I lean towards anarcho-communism myself, generally close to the original communist definition of libertarianism. So my answer to which authority should run things is "none". Facebook runs their own ship and are free to choose which content they will platform. While I would prefer a complete absence of hierarchy in all aspects of life, I think we can agree that this is probably not going to happen at FB.
I also strongly support anarchistic deplatforming and generally hindering fascists, nazis, racists and other bigots from spreading their noxious views. We have to realize at some point that some views simply aren't worth spreading.
In fact, we humans already form a decent system for weeding out bad ideas/opinions, we just don't listen to our own past experiences on the matter. We found out that fascism is putrid and yet now we try to come up with a new system that will weed it out instead of just chucking it into the garbage bin and moving on.
It's not paternalistic or a dismal view of humanity or that "humanity cannot be trusted with such a dangerous idea", it's because the people advocating for it constantly lie about it and intentionally trick/indoctrinate others into following. Under the right circumstances of me growing up, I fully believe someone could have deceived me into believing it, so I don't think I'm better than anybody who got sucked in. We can trust in democracy as long as we take proper precaution against things that prey on the freedom of expression and association in order to remove those rights from others.
Put another way, what real benefit is there to "freedom of speech, except for advocating fascism" as opposed to "freedom of speech, no exceptions"? The US already doesn't have pure unrestricted free speech because there are exceptions made for outlier situations where free speech is not protected in efforts to secure the safety of others. That hasn't led to total collapse or censorship.
Personally, I feel there should be legal protections for all speech, but not protections from social ramifications. By this logic, I am totally fine with the idea of punching fascists. Which itself could be hit with assault charges, but then, how many juries would disagree with the reasoning for the violence? Let the masses decide for themselves, basically. It's what bothered me about the firing of James Gunn and Roseanne both despite their polar opposite politics. The companies that employed them cared so much about what the public thinks or feels that they couldn't be bothered to let the public decide for themselves to support either celeb or not. (And I know Gunn has since been rehired, but this happens so often, my point stands.)
With regards to ISIS, if their recruitment videos are publicly available, then people can contest them publicly too. They can explain why this viewpoint or whatever might be appealing to certain demographics, but look at this evidence for what happens to those people once they join.
The self-harm / suicide question is harder for me. I still think it's a good idea to have this happen in the public sphere so people can expose those who encourage such things in other people. However, if an individual is being targeted specifically then maybe there should be a line there. I don't know.
As for white supremacy, yes, I said "dialogue" when what I really meant was "speech". I don't know who Richard Spencer is, but if he's blocking comments then people can still post rebuttals in other videos.
I guess my main point is that it's better to confront such things openly then to try to hide them under the rug.
There also seems to be this idea that ISIS and white supremacists and whoever can magically infect others with their dogma as a form of mind control or something. The danger, in my opinion, lies in trying to bury it. Then when people stumble upon them, or are recruited and given a login somewhere, they have access to only one side of the argument and are effectively in a bubble. In the public sphere where this plays out openly, they have ready access to conflicting information on the same platform.
I don't want a society where people aren't allowed to dislike me. I don't quite get where you're coming from. I want a society where people can say what they think and not get censored for it for the most part. It requires that we all come to terms with the fact that some people hold different opinions that we really hate.
I wasn't alive 100 to 150 years ago. However, growing up 40-ish years ago, I remember hearing such things as "I don't agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Not something you hear much, any more.
At scale, this is exactly the case. If the probability of the average person becoming radicalized is greater than the probability of the average radical de-radicalizing, then open discourse will, on average, increase the number of radicals until those probabilities equalize.
So now I ask you: how successful have you seen discourse at deradicalizing Jihadis, white nationalists, westboro baptist church members, anti-vax parents, or flat-earthers? Is it more, or less, successful than those groups at radicalizing new people?
>I want a society where people can say what they think and not get censored for it for the most part. It requires that we all come to terms with the fact that some people hold different opinions that we really hate.
Someone says "I want to diddle your kid". You tell them to never speak to you again. They say it to someone else. That person blocks them too. The same person keeps telling everyone that they're interested in child molestation. Free association says that we should all be able to shun that person because yikes.
But you say something different. That we shouldn't shun the potential kid-diddler. We should continue embracing them and their views, because shunning them censors them. And all views should be cherished and protected.
Or maybe you aren't saying that, but then its very tricky, because if everyone blocks them on facebook, they've been deplatformed. So why is that okay if facebook banning the person isn't? Or maybe it's that proclaim support for child molestation isn't okay, but proclaiming support for genocide is. In which case we're right back where we are now, just that your definition of "for the most part" is "expression of child molestation is bad, but white supremacy is fine". This brings me to my final point:
>I don't agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
This only works when what you're saying isn't a threat to me. See how willing people 30-40 years ago were to defend to the death the right of black power groups to call for black empowerment. (hint: people got so scared the republicans banned guns)
If I start saying "we should kill all free-speech absolutists", how long are you going to defend my ability to say that? Only as long as I don't have power. Once I have the ability to actually carry out my threats, say, if I'm the president, do you really want me saying I'm going to kill some subset of society? Are you going to defend my right to say that? What if you think I might actually carry out what I'm claiming?
As long as the speech isn't a threat, people are okay with defending it. This is why no one really cares about flat-earthers, they aren't killing anyone, they're just the easy butt of jokes. Same with, until very recently, anti-vaxxers. Jenny McCarthy is kooky and their stuff is nonsense, but what's the worry? Well, measles, the loss of herd immunity, etc -> hmm, maybe we should stop this kind of thing.
Sometimes its possible to make the fix reactively. Kicking unvaccinated children out of school stops much of the harm that unvaccinated children cause, and in many cases forces parents to vaccinate their kids despite their views.
Unfortunately for explicitly violent groups, there isn't an easy reactive solution. You can't un-shoot someone.
As soon as people are threatened, they stop. "Expression of white supremacy is acceptable, but child molestation isn't" is just an expression of what you find threatening. What you're seeing is actually a shift toward more people speaking. Those who were voiceless before are speaking out and saying hey, this was really shitty before, let's not go back, and all the people saying otherwise are actually, truly threatening to me, so perhaps lets have them not say these things.
And on the other side you're seeing people threatened by this change in how people are considering speech, and feeling threatened, and saying "hey actually let's legislate these platforms so that I can keep spewing my garbage". White supremacists feel threatened by censorship, black people don't. That should tell you all you need.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It's not clear how to preserve a forum for free expression while spammers or trolls seek to suck up all the available bandwidth for their messages. You can end up with a sort of spectrum allocation problem, where if everyone is allowed to crowd the same frequency then communication on it becomes impossible. But once you start moderating content, it's really hard to find a satisfying balance. And on the margins, some trolls are indistinguishable from some people with really unbelievable opinions.
I don't know what the answer is, it seems like a really complicated problem.
Ends vs. means, buddy. Ends vs means. Every single political topic on HN seems to be arguments between people who can't separate the two, and those who do.
This is the end of freedom and, along with Europe decisions recently, the beginning of all the worst dystopias we have already listened/read/watched about.
> Our own review of hate figures and organizations – as defined by our Dangerous Individuals & Organizations policy – further revealed the overlap between white nationalism and separatism and white supremacy.
It doesn't appear that this content is being banned because Facebook surrogates find the politics in question abhorrent (though they likely do so find). It is being banned because it is acting as part of a recruitment funnel for an ideology that openly advocates violence. They collected evidence of this before acting.
The line is somewhat blurry, but it does exist. On one side, we have a sensible use of editorial discretion; on the other, we have censorship. Is Facebook going to cross the line at some point? Almost certainly. Basically every individual or entity to have editorial discretion has both made mistakes and abused that power.
It remains to be seen to what extent that will happen here. If anything, they've erred on the side of permissiveness so far (e.g. how long it took to ban ISIS). If that changes, we should call them out at that time.
That would be believable, if it was applied as such across the board - e.g. also removing Christian Dominionists, Stalinists, Salafi Muslims, NoI etc.
As for the others--when's the last time a Stalinist drove a car into a crowd or committed a mass shooting?
I doubt that have enough data to show the links for the other groups.
Often is isn't meant as a threat, but instead is a political statement calling for the end to the hegemony of the West. However, sometimes it is meant as hate speech (often when associated with calls for the destruction of Israel).
I mean, we're discussing this topic on a site that highly polices content, albeit in one that does in different ways, but such different ways that it attracts the very commenters in this thread to read and respond to content rather than visiting other sites -- or any at all.
No one is confused about the difference between "I want to kill all Jews" and "I think the British economy would be better off with fewer Polish plumbers".
> And remaining banned even for people who support it on economic grounds because they think that having to follow EU policies on GDPR, copyright, and so on will be a net negative for the UK?
This is a non-issue and just scaremongering, not all that different from "they allow sex with children next!" from the anti-gay idiots (no one is confused between gay rights and "pedo rights").
You clearly haven't been paying attention to modern day discourse over issues like illegal immigration and such. If you listened to some people (unironically the same people pushing for stuff like this) having an issue with illegal immigration is basically treated like a confession to guilt. And that's even ignoring some of the newer types of arguments they are making.. That merely holding an opinion that could be seen (solely determined by them) as problematic or a "whistle" (in effect anything to the right of left-of-center or non-PC) and thus a "gateway to extremism". So "hate speech" needing to be banned next.
Furthermore, as soon as the literal neo-Nazis get criticized the anti-immigration crowd either outright jumps to their defence or shrugs any concerns of. Trump's "very fine people" remark is a good example of that, or a recent article which "proved" anti-conservative bias on Twitter by pointing out that people like David Duke (former KKK grand wizard) or Richard Spencer (literal neo-Nazi who wants to forcibly eject all Jews and Blacks from US) got banned from Twitter.[1]
So, if you don't want to be treated like a duck, then don't walk and quack like one. How else am I supposed to interpret an article defending literal neo-Nazis as "Conservatives treated harshly on Twitter"? Look at the data that is presented[2], it literally includes the the American Nazi Party. Now, if you want to make the argument that we should allow these people because "muh free peach" then okay, but read that article again, it just talks about "Conservatives" and "Trump supporters" (aside: there are other problems with this "study" as well, such as not including various Liberal accounts that were banned for unstated reasons).
I also agree that sometimes anti-immigration views are brushed aside as "racist" far too quickly, and it annoys me as well. But this kind of confusion is a bed of your own making.
I am not as pro-immigration as you'd might think based on the above, I think there are some real problems caused by both legal and illegal immigration, and that they should be addressed. But it's plenty evident that the anti-immigration right has long since been infested by some very nasty people, which is doing a great disservice to anyone else, especially those with anti-immigration views.
I suggest you first take so effort to purge the toxicity before complaining about "PC".
[1]: https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw... [2]: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/88a74d_d231bdbfb13c4b9ab77422...
Idiots like David Duke and Richard Spencer make weak strawmen here. And i'm not even going to play into that game.
The problem is that paying better attention to whom you... defend(?), works both ways. Certain groups and people are literally believed and "protected" by the mainstream media by default, when they are clearly coming from a pretty strong POV.
>your own making
No it's a silencing tactic, no more and no less.
When one side stops calling everybody else nazis, then maybe we can all come together and have an adult talk about "toxicity" but that's not going to happen as long as some keep acting like little children on the playground calling others names to shut down debate.
And "one side calling everybody Nazis"? Really? Did you forget that Dinesh D'Souza wrote an entire book calling the left "Nazis"? That there were ACA protesters with Obama defaced as Hitler? Never mind shining examples of "adult talk" such as "Assume the Left Lies, and You Will Discover the Truth"[1].
[1]: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/left-lies-trump-russi...
I am opposed in principle.
White nationalism (or black nationalism, or yellow nationalism) should be able to speak on a social platform like Facebook.
I used to think that pushing such content off a site or forum was futile and calling it for what it is on a site had value, I'm not sure that is the case anymore.
If you look on platforms like reddit and such where you have groups in subreddits calling for race wars, general hatred, and violence and of course the lesser efforts to just normalize hate takes place... there's no discussion anyway. In their own subs any hint of anything less than absolute commitment to their talking points of the day, ever changing theories, and general hatred is an instant ban from their subreddit(s). Then they venture out spam their fake news articles / take over other subs and push their message with endless streams of new accounts. There is no discussion, just constant spam, memes and etc.
We've seen topics like Gamergate, incels and such (while not that tasteful to begin with) quickly pulled to the extreme and go from something about "gaming journalism" or general angst to an identity movement steeped in fear / hate, harassment, and for some actual violence.
I suspect there may be some value in ushering these people away, if only to prevent recruitment of some others who otherwise might avoid their message that fear or dissatisfaction with life and other problems can be explained with hate.
1. [The Pewdiepipeline](https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw] 2. [Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34858587-kill-all-normies)
The terrifying thought is that this might be a product of scale more than anything else.
Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle, it's easier to produce propaganda than debunk it and "call it what it is," so any sufficiently large and scaled platform will almost certainly eventually be flooded with propaganda bullshit.
Minimum wage human shit-sponges with limited mental health benefits are the current industry standard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6TrKkkVEhs
According to ^this video, gamergate actually started out as the latter and only later claimed to be the former.
Sucks, but that’s what it takes - especially when they wrap themselves up in the flag and hide behind the first amendment to spew their hate.
> hide behind the first amendment
I think people need to hide behind first amendment, you misunderstand what it is.
I think this is the greatest misconception about the push for de-platforming. The goal is to remove the platform from becoming an echo chamber for racism/hate/violence not to stop people from being offended by content they dislike. By removing mainstream sites as options to promote hatered/racism/violence it's likely that it will make a measurable reduction in people joining these groups as there will be less traffic.
As evidenced by what?
From everything I see, deplatforming creates filter bubbles, which lead to radicalization, which lead to hate.
After the rise of deplatforming tactics in the last 5 years, American society is more radicalized than before.
As for your dilution analogy, deplatforming does have that effect because it breaks up the filter bubbles of the hate groups. It makes the media feedback loop of hate more difficult for those caught in that. From the perspective of those considering the hate, their input has been diluted.
http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/
You’re engaging in behavior with truly horrifying antecedents.
The fact that they're readily going down the slippery slope of propaganda by identifying people with Wrong(TM) beliefs and directing them at the Right(TM) beliefs does not sit well with me. Censorship aside, this is a different issue and a very dangerous precedent for a "platform" to be setting IMO.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to tell me why they disagree?
Genocidal racism was never allowed on facebook. After this move they will censor a lot of legitimate things.
You jump from "censoring white nationalism will censor legitimate opinions" (such as there "there is a white race" - a question on which there are good arguments for both sides, and which it's reasonable to debate), to I hold such opinions. Then you jump from a few of those opinions to hatred. And then you jump from there to being part of hate groups.
Calm down and think.
And this idea of "preserving itself"... what exactly does that mean? Does that mean getting to kick other people out of their homes? Threaten their livelihood? Threaten their social safety nets? What exactly happens in this supposedly benign process of "preserving culture"?
not allowing people of European decent to have their own state, country, etc IS genocidal. Is it "supremacy" and "racism" to simply advocate for the preservation of a culture and people?
Whether you agree, they should at least be able to talk about it without being labeled "genocidal racists".
(Not talking about actual white supremacists. Don't believe I've ever met one.)
Fixed.
>One of the best parts about having the freedom of speech is that I’m free to label those people genocidal racists
And now you can do so on facebook in peace with all the other genocidal racists.
Ugh... I knew this day would the come. The slashdot crowd has found out about HN.
Finding a book in the library about frogs, doesn't make you a frog.
You could be searching for those terms for a good reason, maybe I'm writing an essay about the spread of white nationalism and want to see how many groups exist online, or whatever.
It's very dangerous to label people and infer their intention automatically.
Some people who research white nationalism don't make specific accounts for research purposes [1]. In general, and based on my own usage patterns, I think it's probably dangerous and definitely scary to assume that googling for "X" on your primary account implies that you support "X"
[1] Source: Currently sitting next to someone who is literally a full time white supremacy researcher.
We went to war on the subject.
The massive danger is going to be the countless false positives this thinking generates. Just like the craziness of arresting the guy whose dog made a nazi salute in the video.
He would be denied access to social media because of stupid interpretations of a joke.
This isn't about defending or persecuting Nazis, it's about protecting the public from systems of abuse.
Not to mention the ineffectiveness of online censorship. The only worse thing are Nazis organizing on public platforms is forcing them to congregate only with other Nazis on radical websites where no one will challenge their worldview. But that's a totally different discussion.
Sorry, don't agree. Forcing them to congregate on unpopular websites is great because those websites have a terrible reputation and that massively hinders recruitment. Sure, they're echo chambers, but extremists already use private fora for more underground organizing activity and likewise there are people who specialize in monitoring and infiltrating those websites.
If your argument is that they just need to be talked around with reason and logic, you can always go to one of their websites and give it a try. Sure, deradicalization can work and it's great when it does, but generally the odds are poor and it's extremely labor intensive.
If they promote violence or brigade, harass, or attack other members directly on FB then. Then yes, they should have their pages shut down. That is more than sufficient rather than saying any language that can be categorized in a very broad and vague category will be banned.
The simple fact alone if you asked various people in America to define a "literal Nazi" you'll get a hundred different answers of who should fit into that category.
And for definitions: I think it’s very clear to indentify fascist thought - favorable views on ethnic cleansing and stories about mighty groups of people that can’t be proven should never be tolerated.
And we went to war because of Japan, whom we put into concentration camps.
I was talking about the National Socialist German nation. Not modern "Nazis". Take the good, reject the bad. Since when is it shameful to be a history buff?
I mean, there's literally no responses to that. I'll pray for you.
There are plenty of nations, both before and since, that have so much higher of a focus on conservation and environmentalism that they don't compromise those in the interest of conquest and genocide; the Nazi campaigns directed at those aims, leaving aside the moral dimension of their more direct effects on humans, were fairly disastrous from an environmental and conservationist perspective.
This seems historically inaccurate, unless from the perspective of German resistance.
Britain waited on the war to come to them, and the U.S. didn't join until Pearl Harbor.
Something like the notion of a DMCA shield; where a platform can expose third-party content without consequences so long as they response to take-down requests means that they do not get to do filtering. If they get to do filtering and curation, then they are also directly responsible for copyright violations or libelous use of their platform -- the shield shouldn't apply unless it cuts both ways.
That is, by accepting some immunity from the consequences of free speech, they are then subject to free speech restrictions on their enforcement of their own opinions. A newspaper, for example, is not subject to the same restriction -- they are responsible for all content they publish, so can choose to publish or not publish whatever they want.
This isn't a precise framing, but I'm trying to capture some of my general thoughts on why I find it unappealing that YouTube and Facebook can filter out content that they deem offensive.
Facebook has a natural filtering mechanism through the ability for a user to restrict what they see. If you find content offensive, unfriend or block the person and you're done. Youtube can exercise some discretion in auto-play and recommendations, but they shouldn't be able to ban content unless they are required to do so by inheriting legal requirements.
I think the explosion of hate speech on the Internet is entirely because someone else is basically paying for people to post whatever they want. They don't need to create their own newspaper and get advertisers. They don't need to print signs. It's all free for them. You can consume as much services as you possibly can given your free time and those with more free time, therefore, get more free (as in beer) speech.
If they are going to get the benefit of _not paying_ for speech that they would ordinarily be penalized for (libel, copyright infringement) then that's the cost, yes.
I think they should be able to impose arbitrary limits on the cost of serving content, either the size of the content or the bandwidth consumed by serving it, but by invoking any sort of copyright/libel safe harbor, they should lose their ability to curate based on content rather than metadata.
Sort of like being able to opt in to being a common carrier -- it carries both benefits (immunity from most criminal and civil prosecution for content served) and obligations (complying with takedowns and not discriminating based on content).
Why? That's an interesting statement, but I don't see how one follows from the other.
If you create a community online, should you not have some control over that community? Hacker News frequently censors and bans people in order to maintain a certain community. What if you created EverybodyBeNice.com that wants only "nice" posts? Is it not that fair that these companies can enforce their own standards while also getting protection from libel and copyright infringement made by their users? I don't think there is a good argument why one should be tied to the other.
I think arguing that every single website should be a common carrier takes that concept way too far.
You're right, of course, I don't think there's a direct implication between the two. There's a difference of degree, not kind, to some extent. My intuition is that the value that YouTube derives from being a place where people can post videos (and, somewhat importantly, monetize them) is much higher than the value that HN derives from people posting content.
EverybodyBeNice.com is an interesting thought experiment. It wouldn't be very convincing, though, as a shield, if there was no effort put into active moderation not only for "niceness" but also for copyrighted or libelous content. The idea lives in that grey area between "completely curated content" and "just a place where people can post content". I guess my feeling, roughly, is that at some point during EverybodyBeNice.com's rise to serving billions of videos, they can no longer credibly claim that they are preserving the "niceness" unless there is some sort of review process that by its nature must also police for other kinds of illegitimate content.
I don't see how "value" contributes to the argument. YouTube makes money showing videos to people that other people have posted. Hacker News makes no money linking to articles that other people have written and showing comments other people have written. But in neither case is there a moral or legal imperative to allow any video or post on either platform based on any concept of value. Value doesn't (and shouldn't) matter.
> It wouldn't be very convincing, though, as a shield, if there was no effort put into active moderation not only for "niceness" but also for copyrighted or libelous content.
If such a site did or did not moderate for niceness, copyright, and libelous content I don't think it matters. You can't assume perfect moderation and some mean comment, copyrighted content, or libel might get through. As long the site makes an effort when discovered to remove copyrighted and libelous content then they should be shielded by the law. Furthermore, I think that's morally acceptable. It's incredibly difficult to filter for niceness or copyright.
> The idea lives in that grey area between "completely curated content" and "just a place where people can post content".
There is no such thing as "just a place where people can post content" in the sense that you are going for. Every place is owned and controlled by someone. They have no moral obligation to allow any content. It's also perfectly reasonable for them to also be shielded from copyright and libel if they make a good faith attempt to remove it.
It's a bit contrived, but the internet itself is such a place. I think it's widely accepted that the internet itself, and to some extent DNS, is a common carrier in the sense that it shouldn't be doing discrimination based on content, just on bandwidth. I mean, I don't want to start a whole net neutrality thing here, but a router or the operator of a router does not face any consequences for routing traffic, no matter how offensive or illegal that traffic is.
Web sites that are principally public repositories, where people can upload their content, seem to be a borderline case of that -- if they want to offload the risk of hosting the content, then they can do so, but it seems to me that they have to provide a service to society in return, namely, some sort of neutrality about the content posted.
I think it's equally reasonable to say that they should have no shielding at all -- society has no vested interest, necessarily, in allowing such a site to exist that has absolutely no say over what is posted on it. Allowing users to contribute to a site is fine so long as the site, in the end, bears the responsibilities for societal negatives associated with posting content (primarily libel and copyright, the two unambiguous restrictions on free speech).
The Internet isn't a place and that's what makes it a carrier. Just like the telephone system, the Internet connects you to other services.
Websites are not principally public repositories; they are privately owned services. If they allow you to post, that doesn't make it public in an ownership sense or carrier.
> If they want to offload the risk of hosting the content.
But they aren't. The law doesn't allow companies or individuals to get away with hosting copyright infringement. It simply makes it possible for companies that accept user uploaded content to function in any way as the alternative would make this impossible. That's all. Implying this requires a moral imperative to allow any content is a stretch at best.
Facebook isn't an "anyone" - it's a thing.
We can decide to do whatever we want to these things - they exist only because we permit them to. They have no natural rights.
But the ones that are - where their private rules have an extremely broad stifling effect that in practice makes it comparable to government censorship - should have very little leeway. I'd rather not allow such dominant positions in the first place (i.e. cap the size directly), but if we are doing that, it should come with strings attached - e.g. smaller companies get a choice between common carrier and curated platform with responsibility for everything, but something as big as Facebook is forced to be a common carrier.
But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.
If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.
* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.
(Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)
For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:
- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it
- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say
- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources
- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government
- who will be using the service
- is the service a government-allowed monopoly
- etc.
Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.
edit: formatting
Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.
Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.
There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.
If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).
I've written about this before:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.
A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)
All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...
"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."
But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.
If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.
As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.
Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.
So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.
Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.
This!
A thousand times THIS!
People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them.
(I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)
If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.
???
It never was.
I couldn't watch porn movies on Facebook.
Point is, even if you find the content questionable, it's still allowed to be shared, as long as it's within the laws obviously.
I mean this was the approach they were taking to White supremacist material until now, which was why people were giving them a hard time.
With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.
It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.
Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.
Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...
Look at Germany and its Streitbare Demokratie policies. Then look at how AfD polls.
Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?
If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.
>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?
Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.
Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.
It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.
Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?
It's no longer _your_ free speech.
You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.
Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.
Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.
Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?
A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.
My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.
Please point out a single society that has upheld absolute Free Speech as a principle for any significant period of time.
The United States has even killed its own citizens when their free speech collided with national security: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...
That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.
There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.
Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.
So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.
What about network neutrality?
Etc etc...
It's not so easy to answer this question.
Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.
This is unrelated. If it is your home, you are free to protect it by any means.
And there's no paradox of tolerance with speech - you can tolerate intolerant speech just fine, so long as you police the actions.
A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.
I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.
The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.
No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.
The fact that all your photos, content and friends are on one platform and not the others, obviously.
However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.
Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.
A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.
Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.
People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.
Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.
Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?
This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds.
There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.
If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.
Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.
In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.
It's the former. There is no law, at least in the US, that forbids banning people from private property for group membership in general.
So, I'm certain you will find legally hung signs with racist and discriminatory content in certain places.
> If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms
That's outside the scope of the First Amendment. It may not even be possible to pass such a law without infringing on those platforms First Amendment rights... I would expect the SCOTUS to strike any such law down.
You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?
If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.
Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?
Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).
To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s
If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.
"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.
Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.
I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.
No one has to pay attention though.
As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.
And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.
It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”.
It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead?
On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...
Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice.
Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because:
1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point?
2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases
3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong
In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it.
How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?
I think another outcome for Facebook is more likely because they seem to be forgetting that they are not the ones creating Facebook, rather they are capitalizing on part of the activity in the relationships amongst their users as long as they can express something relevant to them on Facebook.
They are effectively attempting logical rationing with a lack of emotional meaning to their relationships, and overvaluing what one can learn from subjectivity without truth seeking.
As they said I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
FB has become too large and ubiquitous, they shouldn't be all of those.
A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish.
Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise.
Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms.
Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.
With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact.
Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary.
Who's to decide the labeling?
This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics.
Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company.
I just think it's bad policy.
There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB.
I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.
“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.
That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?
In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.
I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.
Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous?
Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech?
Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?
If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?
> how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide
I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?
And those who deliberately inspire violent behavior with their speech are very, very careful to make sure it's not an explicit call to action. This is not new. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" has been around for a long time.
How is that working out in the People's Republic of China? They have a very concrete definition of what dangerous speech and have legions of people to decide whether individual instances are dangerous and to remove them.
Clearly, their system illustrates the hazard of your viewpoint.
And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech, and sincerely so (not saying yes out of fear). Meanwhile, things are much freer than they were. I'm currently reading a Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, set partly in the Cultural Revolution, and it pulls no punches about how awful it was.
Of course you would, polls like all speech are tightly controlled.
Sometimes we'll get it wrong, and need to correct it. That's fine. We're capable of that.
What's not fine is throwing up our hands at even the concept of performing that judgment, because it's subjective or whatever. That cedes the public square to extremists, which results in a shittier society.
When we started this game, we had slaves, who were defined as three fifths of a human being for purposes of political representation of slave owners. Voting was restricted to white land-owning men. It's getting better.
You're WAY too hung up on this "who decides?" question, ignoring the reality that either someone has to decide, or that no one should decide and society should simply not regulate speech in any way, ever.
Good luck with the latter if you ever have kids.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Consider this a warning, as we eventually ban accounts of repeat offenders.
Would you say that the political and judicial system of our societies is fair, or is it biased against minorities? If it's biased, why do you expect it to enforce any such "safety of society" laws in a way that is not similarly biased towards the groups that already are the beneficiaries of that society?
It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed?
Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.
In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content?
You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned.
Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either.
What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception?
If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules.
There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites.
It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers.
And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1]
It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2]
You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost.
Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...
If Facebook is becoming a defacto ISP in countries it should be subject to the same regulations and really should be required to follow net neutrality rules. Though I don't think those exist in a lot of developing countries(or I guess America also...).
In the end though, it's those country's governments allowing facebook to do this.
These are my realistic thoughts on the matter.
My own personal thoughts...
That shit's downright evil. Government's should absolutely not be allowing facebook to do this. But I feel the same way about ISP's in general owning content providers and favouring their own services.
This practice would be the same as Ford or gm owning a bunch of gas stations and giving preferential prices to drivers of Ford or gm vehicles. I honestly don't understand why it's looked at differently when it comes to internet companies or technology in general.
If a social media company wants to be an ISP or a an ISP wants to be a content provider or host, they really should not be able to give preferential treatment to their own content and companies that do this should be scrutinized heavily for bullshit.
I think that's why Facebook has been getting more criticism and attention in the media than Reddit or Twitter, despite wielding comparable social influence. On the flipside, I also think that's why people are more outraged about the "censorship" issue. If you ban a Reddit user you're just banning some username. If you ban someone on Facebook, you're banishing a person and stifling their voice.
The slippery slope arguments are sensationalist. Facebook had many motivations for implementing this policy, some of them undoubtedly motivated by money, but ultimately I would argue they implemented it because American and western society pushed them to. To the extent that western society has unequivocally decided that racism is very bad and not good, this policy change will also not push us over the edge into total censorship because that's not what we want (and I think it would be difficult to take the stance that that's the direction we're heading in.)
If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.
Because FB is not targeted at specific communities of people like HN, and less so reddit, it's welcome to everyone. Everyone is in fact actively encouraged to join. That's their mission. Private spaces that are open to the public often have first amendment protections:
Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to.
That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper
or printing press was required to print
everything sent their way. Today it's the
centralized websites that also don't have
this obligation.
...
You are not entitled to widespread
distribution. Never have been.
All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses.
Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information.
Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then?
Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this.
Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant?
Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours?
Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?
If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.
Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.
If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies.
The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.
Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it.
The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis.
In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons:
1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.
2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis"
3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money.
Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.
That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than:
"Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?
Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.
Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].
[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .
Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.
If FB wanted to redirect funding from "bad" things they don't like to a decent group, Life After Hate is about as bad as SPLC. There have to be better groups focused on helping people of various types.
The shooting in Christchurch referenced a video from the Mosque in question that spelled the same thing out. Unfortunately I can't share the video due to laws which would put me in jail. [0]
Is your objection to them saying it out loud, or saying it in English?
[0] Isn't censorship grand? Now instead of seeing the video yourself you have to trust someone else to tell you what's in it.
My criticism applies to them as well, and as far as I can tell, they are also banned from Facebook.
> Is your objection to them saying it out loud, or saying it in English?
English very clearly has nothing to do with my objection.
Again, I can't link to either of the documents because censorship but the facebook group of the mosque that was shotup in Christchurch absolutely did have a video explaining why the Christian west was doomed due to having a birthrate of 1.x children per woman and why Muslims were going to inherit the countries because their birthrate was 5 children per woman.
That was left up long enough for the terrorist to find it, put it in his manifesto and me look at it an hour after the shooting had happened.
Good luck banning the FB page of that mosque after the terrorist attack against them though.
So I'm going to call baloney on your claim unless you can provide evidence for it.
But let's say you have some group who happen to opposes certain policies/bills in regard of immigration at the moment. Some people will label them automatically as racists, which is a broad statement that cannot be proven/unproven, what do you do with that?
Where do you draw the line and who does?
It's incredibly naive to think that "hav[ing] a racist point of view" wouldn't result in "real discrimination" out in the world.
Here's something relevant from William Cliffor'd "Ethics of Belief":
> I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbours ready to deceive. No belief held by one man, however seemingly trivial the belief, and however obscure the believer, is ever actually insignificant or without its effect on the fate of mankind, we have no choice but to extend our judgment to all cases of belief whatever. Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity.
I never said that such point of view don't have consequences. But there is a law and means to enforce it when discrimination is realised. And you can indeed define some reasonable limitations on a limit on speech. But as soon as you go after personal opinions, you do more harm than good.
By doing so, we steal from people a chance to make their own minds and actions. It's an important part of human experience for many. And when that freedom is threatened, they often resist as it were almost an existential threat to them.
We know for a fact now, that humans are evolutionary wired in favour of tribalism and prejudices and overcoming our own nature is a hard and delicate process. And slow, conflicts can last for hundreds and thousand of years. History says that even if you manage to keep them dormant using state force, it's not forever. State will eventually fail and people will continue on killing each other with same amount of enthusiasm if not more. Just have look at pogroms that took place the moment USSR collapsed in brand-new national states, an excellent illustration.
There must be a solution to those problems that relies on force as little as possible, otherwise it's not very sustainable. But instead I see justification of mob justice, thought policing and global censorship. The last one is especially infuriating. Tools that are required to implement such censorship should not exists and will certainly be exploited.
After all, people we disagree with are just regular people, not monsters. Likely, troubled, needing a group they can identify with, lost in rapidly changing world, unneeded, susceptible to human flaws we all have to a certain degree. And yet it's not uncommon to believe that it's a good idea to just dismiss and alienate them and at the same time somehow pretend to hold a higher moral ground. I like those opinions no more than you do. But I see hate, arrogance and cruelty just shapeshifting and nothing good coming out of it.
I would say that, where there is debate over the level of danger and need to take action to restrain hate speech, whether or not that particular kind of hate speech is motivating violent acts and on what scale is a quite legitimate factor to consider.
Indeed. And it was motivated by white nationalism, not the Hebrew Israelite movement, so it's kind of a weird thing to bring up if you are trying to make the case that deplatforming the latter has as strong a case as the former.
We aim to prevent potential real-world harm that may be related to content on Facebook. [...] We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.
In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence, from having a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following:
- Terrorist activity
- Organized hate
- Mass or serial murder
- Human trafficking
- Organized violence or criminal activity
We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities.
That seems like a pretty clear statement that people who are engaged in / advocating for / recruiting for groups that engage in mass killing will be censored.
It would surprise me if Facebook were the first internet platform with rules like this.
Note German, Dutch and French Heritage celebration isn't banned. Neither is Palestinian or Syrian.
But Hezbollah is banned [1], not sure why White Nationalists shouldn't be.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/facebook-twitter-pages-of-hezb...
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
The more I think about these kinds of questions, the more inevitable the total Balkanization of the Internet feels. Countries are finally waking up to the fact that “individual privacy == national security” but they all have their own notions of how much privacy the individual is afforded and from whom.
Irish, German, Roma, Italian, Russian, are all ethnicities. All of them have particularly Irish, German, Roma, etc cultures. But there is no shared "White" culture.
White nationalism defines itself not by a shared ethnicity or culture, but by making it crystal-clear who it excludes. A white nationalist can't tell you what being white actually means - but he can tell you exactly who isn't.
But if Hispanic can be an ethnicity, so can European, AKA "white".
You have Asian covering disparate people from india, east asia, and southeast asia with completely different cultures and economic states.
Relatedly, there's African-american which covers both black americans and black africans, but not people don't really consider white South Africans to be African-American.
And then we get to the white americans which in modern times covers most europeans, but at various points of history didn't cover Italians, Germans, and Irish.
If some measure of "white culture" does not exist, then what is it that people are code switching to in the workplace? What is it that comedians often make fun of, and why do audiences (including white members) laugh in recognition?
If you don't agree, how would you describe white culture?
Yes, at least sometimes?
I think they did ban the collection of accounts in Myanmar which advocated for genocide of the Rohingya, but only a few years after the genocide was underway, so yes https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... .
I have the same question. What about all the other nationalist movements?
They aren't. They went after ISIS years ago, and they've recently been trying to go after accounts contributing to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, as a sibling comment noted and provided a link for.
If Hebrew Israelites start driving cars into crowds or shooting up churches and synagogues, I'd hope Facebook goes after them, too.
(Also, those are odd examples...AFAIK each time it was single person operating alone.)
It is your understanding that no one else in the world contributed to the Tree of Life shooter's belief that murdering Jewish people was necessary and important? He, operating alone, picked a synagogue purely by chance?
> by happenstance
It was deliberate choice.
> picked a synagogue purely by chance
Also deliberate.
But though the deliberate choice of targets is clear, I'm not advocating banning Congregate Charlottesville or closing synagogues. Right to assembly is a basic human right.
And I wasn't suggesting you thought he rolled a dice when choosing his target. I'm asking what you mean by "operating alone": do you think it's happenstance that his deliberate choice of target, and his ideology, coincided with white nationalists'? That the lone Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter's ideology coincided with ISIS'?
These people have been shooting up places of worship and running people over with their cars, all the while their supporters cheer them on.
They can get right the fuck out. Black Israelites start doing the same then by all means do the same to them.
Any platform that offers freedom is going to have problems on the head and tail of their platform. I feel facebook is trying to adjust where they make that slice and are justified in doing so, from a moral basis and according to the wishes of their shareholders.
Isn't it obvious that they are not just ANY business like a mom and pop store, they are THE place where public discourse is happening with a massive influence on culture, society and politics.
Yet people feel the need to jump in and defend their right to do whatever they want, because laws we came up with when people were selling bread did not mention anything about global corporations who control elections.
When people communicate on a public platform unself consciously, they reveal themselves openly and freely. There is no greater protection to vulnerable populations than transparency. Freedom of speech is a gift and a valuable tool.This move is dumb beyond words.
This is somewhat true, but your argument has a pretty big flaw.
> When people communicate on a public platform unself consciously, they reveal themselves openly and freely
This simply isn't true. You aren't revealing that you read this content. THe authors aren't always revealing themselves. Those who don't really do themselves any harm because they tend to be well established as white supremacists already.
Richard Spencer doesn't care if someone calls him racist and evil.
This is why people take photos and plaster them online when white supremacists march. People get recognized, that's the point where they can be called out.
> Freedom of speech is a gift and a valuable tool.
These people are radicalizing young men into committing violent acts. They should be banned the same way terrorist content has been removed from other platforms.
This is really a failure of state to install controls and protections from out of control elements. This is a breakdown of state measures to deter/punish unlawful acts and failure to protect WHEN actions occur rather than breakdown of society.
One cannot make an entire society conform. To me, that’s terrorism too.
You could say that Facebook has effectively privatized prior restraint, given the "town square" arguments made elsewhere in the thread. Great when we happen to agree with the views being restrained, I suppose.
and I need to kill the <undesirable group> isn't sincerely held?
I think you have to believe pretty sincerely to be radicalized to the point of committing murder.
> Regardless of how we feel about it, everyone has the right to feel love or hate or superiority.
Why? I was perfectly happy living in a society where that was not the case. Where freedom of expression is guaranteed, rather than absolute freedom of speech. It's not flawless, but it's better than nazis murdering people all the damn time.
If anything..driving free speech..however hateful..to dark recesses with only a willing or curious audience ...and without the judge mental and opposite view in the public..will only make the situation worse. Nasties multiply faster when they are not witnessed.
On a simple level, think of an ocd monologue about whether your malaise is flu...vs checking with a doctor and he declares you ill(or well). Being witnessed is a huge deal. It affects people’s opinion of themselves.
It is well known that we behave better when we know we are being watched.
And Salafi Jihadism isn't? I have some Saudis and Pakistanis I should introduce you to...
I've found it interesting that the supposed "bad guys" are willing to openly espouse their views while the opposing side frequently utilizes masks to hide their identity.
Friend, if you aren't willing to condemn the white supremacists as the bad guys I seriously question your decision making.
There is zero value in maintaining this veneer of both sides being in any way the same.
I've also seen the violence from the masked, hard-left types while never any initiated from the other side. At least in some parts of the US. I can't speak for what occurs in Europe.
In Europe and the US the main sources of terrorism are i) the far right, ii) Islamic extremists, and then a long way behind iii) animal rights and environmental extremists.
If you haven't seen far-right violence it's because you're not looking. It's pervasive.
The entire motivation for this change at Facebook is because someone just finished killing 50 people in the name of white supremacists and streamed it. You would have to bury your head pretty deep to not have heard anything about this.
Given multiple, recent mass killings (as well as additional disrupted plots) with explicit far-right motivation that have gotten widespread, in some cases global, news coverage, it is more than just something that vaguely exists.
> But most of the videos I have seen online show antifa initiating violence.
That really says a lot more about your selection of information sources than ground truth.
> Are we just more willing to accept their behavior because they are fighting for the "correct" side?
I think we're more willing to accept their behavior because there aren't bodies being piled up in job lots due to antifa-initiated or -motivated violence.
We have been hating on others not like ourselves since the caveman days. I honestly can’t think of any time in history when we haven’t been doing horrible things to each other. It’s like cancer. We are able to diagnose it and hear more about it now.
It’s like saying ...we are going to install a ban on sharing that you have cancer. “If we don’t know about it, we don’t have to acknowledge that there is a terminal illness amongst some of us. And all will be fine and dandy.”
Rather than gagging certain people, anti-racism and CVE focuses on raising the cost of certain kinds of speech acts, specifically ones that are less about intellectual inquiry than about intimidation and coercion, which behavior may endorse or actually escalate into violent physical acts.
Despite the aphorism 'sticks and stones may break by bones but words can never hurt me', hate speech imposes a significant burden on the unwilling recipient from general anxiety up to full-on fight or flight reactions, and the infliction of this burden is deliberate and strategic. It seems entirely reasonable to me that the people who want to engage in such speech should experience for themselves how their speech acts feel for the recipients.
I can walk away!! That is an enormous relief and I am in control. I got a cue..information and I am free to act upon it.
If I don’t have cues, I will walk INTO unknown circumstances and be clueless with those who don’t want me in their midst.
True story: the most vicious racism I have experienced is the covert passive aggressive kind in the heart of liberal Berkeley. And I have lived in the south. Yes. The South. Some were absolutely lovely and others..they don’t want you eating corn and grits with them at their Waffle House. And that’s fine. Because I knew to stay out of certain waffle houses.
But Berkeley tho’...I needed therapy. It was serious mindfuck.
And yet quite a lot of people get beaten up or murdered by racists, why didn't they just walk away? Because, in many cases, they didn't have the option. Some racists just sit there and say hateful things, others are more active. I'm guessing you do not have much experience dealing with the latter variety.
That is not going to stop people from acting in reprehensible and violent ways.
It's going to make it harder for them to get the audience they desire, and harder to recruit, radicalize, and organize. Contrary to the 'lone wolf' trope, violent actors almost always have identifiable and often leaky support networks.
Transparency is helpful. And non transparency hinders detection and pursuit.
There is a lot more damage prevention and damage control you can do if everything is above board.
Here's a decent and current introductory article on the topic: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-link-terrorism-mental...
I'm not part of the group who says the tail wags the dog here. I don't think mental illness leads to violence, but that violent people may be more likely to have certain kinds of mental illness.
I mean, a pacifist could argue that choosing to join the military or obey orders that might result int eh deaths of civilians is pathological, or that states themselves suffer a sort of institutional pathology. But if one accepts a casus belli as a valid premise for military action, such questions are immediately collapsible into a cost-benefit analysis - which is, to some extent, how military forces actually operate.
This part, especially, from the article... We also need to get better and faster at finding and removing hate from our platforms. Over the past few years we have improved our ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find material from terrorist groups. Last fall, we started using similar tools to extend our efforts to a range of hate groups globally, including white supremacists. We’re making progress, but we know we have a lot more work to do.
My question is, how are you going to know when you're done? What would Facebook look like if they didn't have any more work to do on hate? I'm honestly asking this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
This is my favorite bit, from right at the top: "Hate speech in the United States is not regulated, in contrast to that of most other liberal democracies.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment."
What happens long-term when the people whose memories of the horrors of the early 20th century die off? That is still an open question.
Surely you could think of race/religious/class based horrors that have occurred since WWII. There have been genocides in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Yemen this century. There is an ongoing one in Darfur, Sudan [1]. Rwanda [2] and Bosnia and Herzegovina [3] had genocides in the 90s.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/witnessing-genocide-in-sudan-08...
Likewise, I don't know about Bosnia, but it would be pretty understandable to sympathize with the Serbian attitude towards Croatia declaring independence from Yugoslavia because the last time Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, it was to literally collaborate with the Nazis. So Croatian nationalism would have seemed vaguely fascistic and threatening, but Serbian nationalism, not so much.
The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.
Do you have a source for this claim?
It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
It's my own opinion.
> It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
My argument is that you cannot trust anyone to apply a fair standard for which propaganda could lead to people doing horrible things to each other and which propaganda could not. The far greater risk is for such a mechanism to be hijacked by the very demagogues it is intended to disarm.
It's easy. First, you pick out the most extreme and unpalatable examples of your opposition. Then you scapegoat them as a public menace worthy of censorship. Then you exploit the powers of censorship you've received and apply them more broadly. The rise of Hitler[1], for example, followed this literal pattern--he convinced the people that the Communist Party was enough of a public threat that they should be banned, received the executive powers necessary to do so, and then banned the Social Democrats too, for good measure.
It's understandable that post-WWII Europe has the particular set of scar tissue necessary to prevent the rise of another Hitler. The only problem is that Hitler himself rose to power on the back of the scar tissue that post-WWI Europe developed to prevent the rise of another Lenin.
This seems absurd to us today, but it was justified the same way people justify banning hate speech today. Even the cliche about "crying fire in a crowded theater" was coined in one of the Supreme Court cases that upheld the laws against sedition, as well as the more general arguments about whether the enemies of open, tolerant societies should be able to weaponize that openness and tolerance against them. If you squint, a lot of the rationale against banning hate speech looks a lot like they're just trying to make the world safe for democracy.
(Was the German Empire really an existential threat to the safety of democratic, open societies around the world? Is white nationalism?)
This is, of course, entirely a matter of opinion.
If your speech inspires someone to shoot someone an hour from now, it's legal. It wasn't imminent. If you speech will inspires someone to commit a non-violent but illegal action immediately, such as buying some drugs, it's potentially illegal (outside of 1st amendment protection).
Unless (a) directly incited (b) (via the boundary test you cited), (a) isn't legally guilty of anything.
But if the law discovers (b) heard (a) and acted because they believed (a)'s rhetoric, (b)'s crime rises past just violent crime to hate crime (because their reason to commit violence was a hate-crime motivation).
It is arbitrary. This is a closed for-profit platform, run by decree. In the interest of shareholders, it can (and ought to) make whatever rules it wants, as long as they don't violate any laws.
as these networks have grown to global scale we need to assess them for what they are, not for abstractions that may be less relevant now that these systems represent unprecedented "public squares"
So what? Those people use Facebook because they like to do so. If you feel like Facebook treats you unfairly then stop using it. It is permissible to communicate with people that use Facebook even if you don't use it. If you fundamentally disagree with the way Facebook operates then stop using it. Just stop using it.
That supposed blurring is illusory. There are no impactful consequences for not using Facebook; it is wholly unimportant and an entirely superficial distraction, in fact, less use of Facebook correlates positively with mental health. You most certainly do not need Facebook to operate in society.
> When you enter a new peer group of 20+ people you can't just tell them to completely mix up their habits because you happen to not like what they're doing.
You're constructing an image of reality that isn't correct in order to support your position. If you encounter a gathering of your peers and someone says, "hey, you on Facebook?" and you say "no, I don't really use Facebook" in reality, the conversation just moves forward with a discussion of a different communication medium like SMS or snapchat or twitter or e-mail or whatever. The suggestion that lacking a Facebook is social suicide is obviously wrong.
Perhaps in your particular friend group people only communicate through Facebook, but that is definitely not typical and it still doesn't mean you need Facebook, it means that you find the Facebook network convenient for communicating with a particular group of people. Participating in a group-chat is not a necessity. What if your entire friend group communicates on Discord, does that mean you need discord? Obviously you don't need it, you just find it convenient. If you refuse to use Facebook and none of your friends care to adjust their habits to communicate with you that really has nothing to do with Facebook and certainly doesn't imply that Facebook is now a social need.
> The thesis you're defending is wrong.
My thesis is just common sense. The idea that Facebook is a necessity is laughably absurd.
Even if those two platforms die off before they reach the tipping point where most would agree membership on the platforms are necessary to operate in society, we should still realize this is a potential eventuality. If you disagree with the core point of this potential outcome, then I'd be interested in the argument, but it certainly seems possible (and I'd argue, likely) that Facebook or a site like Facebook could quickly evolve into something that you need to be connected on to conduct business, interface with the government, get a job, get into school, or in general be connected to society in a way that is not making you "sub human" in a future where the whole world is continually connected via the Internet at all times.
If you make something addictive, people still hold personal responsibility and can decide to quit, HOWEVER the majority of people will still find it hard to do so and therein lies the issue.
In a lot of ways, Facebook is as much of a country as the Vatican is.
When other things have such powerful network effects we force them, through the state, to treat people fairly. For instance, utilities like water and electricity are natural monopolies because of the limited physical space for the infrastructure. Social networks aren't quite the same but there are powerful similarities.
If you talk about a Free Tibet in China, you risk having your legs broken and your family put in camps.
If you violate Facebook's ToS, you might get banned from their website. Then you can just type literally any other website into your address bar and be on your way.
The key difference is the penalty: is it going to jail or some people roll their eyes and stop being your friend?
I don't think it's ever going to be "people enthusiastically try to understand your positions and respect them". That has been the ideal in the US, but historically I can't find the pages in a history book where it's been largely true.
>can not accept cash donations via any payment processor
>has had their domains revoked from multiple providers
>is only barely able to be able to protected from (numerous, expected) DDoS attacks due to being kicked off Cloudflare, etc.
There comes a point when a person is not free to express their content on any platform on the web despite a lack of government censorship.
In hunter-gatherer days if you had extremely antisocial ideology your tribe probably just left you in the desert and you died.
But... I'm not at all sad that Daily Stormer has trouble staying online.
Free speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want. It doesn't mean that anyone has to give you a platform to say your piece. It doesn't mean that people can't react negatively to what you say. It doesn't mean that there are no consequences to what you say.
Assuming there is reasonable diversity in your options for platforms[0], and yet you still can't find a place for your speech, maybe you're just an irredeemable asshole and should change your views[1].
[0] The current availability of this is certainly debatable.
[1] Maybe you're not and you actually are being unjustly oppressed and censored. But I don't believe that's the case with the Daily Stormer.
Should the government compell private internet service firms to service anyone?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/4/12092740/un-resolution-con...
I agree. But one problem with bad-faith actors is they can bring productive discussion to a near standstill, due to the time / attention / emotional-energy costs.
In my view all these arguments people are making about "open environments", or "bad faith actors", or extremism or what have you are completely irrelevant. A privately owned, NON-governmental, environment is allowed to be as "open" or as "closed" as they please. If a "bad faith actor" wants to act in "bad faith", (whatever that is?), then that's their prerogative. That's their Constitutional liberty. (You ever consider this? Who, exactly, is defining what "bad faith" is anyway?) And extremism in content is fine, you don't like it, don't look at it. (Or in Facebook's case, don't have it on your system. That's fine. That's FB's Constitutional liberty.)
The Constitution really does provide room for obvious solutions to all of the arguments people are making. There's really no need to get bent out of shape about a lot of these things.
At some point, platforms need to realize there is a moral value in allowing different view points so that they can discuss and be seen. Otherwise, people leave for more "open" platforms that breed exclusive extremism. It then further divides the split.
The other issue is that these platforms are so big that they literally dictate narrative in many cases, or at least to their audiences.
If the banned go to Gab and 4chan, then there is no "monopoly" on distribution. The Constitution is what allows for the alternative options to even exist. It's GOOD that we have the alternative options. That's not a "bad" thing.
And what is wrong with people going to "open" platforms that "breed exclusive extremism"? I don't see anything Constitutionally wrong with that. (Keep in mind, you or I not liking something does not mean it should be Constitutionally restricted.)
Mein Kampf is still available for purchase in NZ. I've personally looked through his manifesto and think it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements. If you understand people like that, maybe you can identify them early on, or encourage attitudes in general that would prevent those xenophobic ideas from developing.
it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements
How about the explicit calls for assassination of specific individuals, among other direct incitements to terrorism?
The fact that NZ has a censor is abhorrent.
Where were the free speech advocates back then? And why are they so vocal now that the extremists are a different skin color?
Secondly regarding the most recent NZ manifesto, it isn't a well argued thesis as much as a dump of memes and shitposting.
How did you reach that conclusion?
History repeats itself and people on the left want to pretend you solve this problem with the debate club.
People respond with their best arguments when they are confronted with bad ideas.
People respond with censorship attempts and violence when they are scared that their own positions are weak.
Better not let him iterate the overreach in the first place.
And of all the ways FB is making the world worse, "letting Nazis have a soapbox" is least of their problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Corp._v._Tanner
I'd put Facebook more in the "mall" example than the "company town" one.
EDIT: Given their uniformity of viewpoint and their power, I would expect a moral, intellectually honest, and highly self-aware of such powerful people to act with forbearance and not attempt to use their power to coerce the public. They should be seeking the consent of the weaker. They should be concerned about the consent of the governed.
Instead, they are revealing just what they think of the rest of us.
Manipulation is not a substitute for consent!
This describes basically every big company CEO in existence, and hardly proves the idea of collusion.
> They behave in concert, often taking similar actions on the same target, all on the same day.
That's hardly surprising. Media attention has a habit of snowballing, even absent active collusion. It's pretty easy to mistake the two.
I highly doubt that excuse would hold up under discovery.
Social media in the late 20-teens were a bizarre (and, arguably, pathological) special case in world history.
Nothing about FB is equivalent to living in a town owned by your employer, complete with public services, law enforcement, and grocery stores. YouTube is dominant, because poeple make a totally free choice to use it, not because competition can’t exist. Nothing about being dominant in a market or network effects directly implies a monopoly. It’s not as though we’re dealing with Standard Oil, and if you want heat or a running vehicle you do business with them, or get bent!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/247597/global-traffic-to...
Heinz Ketchup is the utterly dominant brand of ketchup in America by an order of magnitude. They sell more ketchup than every other brand combined in the U.S. and it is not a monopoly. Every attempt to make some new upstart ketchup has failed, and generations are totally sold on just Heinz with a degree of brand loyalty FB would kill to get... and yet they are not a monopoly nor has it been seriously alleged that they are.
"it would really depend on what you want to use it for" It was my understanding that social media platforms were for connecting with people and sharing content/ideas with them.
If you're trying to rebut my claim, you're going to have to actually do it, not point to something else and claim that it does.
A 15 second google shows the top social media sites based off monthly active users. Tell me an equivalent, viable platform to rival Facebook/Instagram that doesn't share the same political values.
I’m not seeing a claim there, and what you did bring up (marketshare) I’ve responded to. If you want an alternative to mainstream social media, they exist and aren’t as popular, but since we’ve agreed that popularity isn’t monopolistic... who cares?
They may get stopped from having their message show up in the "recommended videos" column on YouTube, and that's fine. Nobody has a right to be in that column.
(When the man said "The revolution will not be televised?" This is what he was talking about. ;) )
In 2019, you might as well restrict those guilty of wrongthink to standing on soapboxes and distributing pamphlets. Everyone you don't like will be restricted to the technology of 20 years ago.
(When the man said "The revolution will not be televised?" This is what he was talking about. ;) )
Basically, in 2019, if you don't have virality+monetization, you don't have the franchise.
Putting aside the hysterical Orwellian reference, the world would be a better place if everyone from ISIS to Nazis had to go back to shouting on street corners. This implicit argument you keep making about parity of amplification being equival not to free speech is ludicrous. Given how often people in this thread alone have confronted you on the issues with it, and the cagey nature of your responses it’s increasingly difficult to assume you make this argument in good faith.
You can believe that people are owed a Youtube channel and a Facebook page, but at least recognize that no law or principle in law supports that belief.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
To further Pharmakon's point - being a popular product on the market doesn't mean monopoly or lack of competition. A monopoly is a company with dominant marketshare, but not all companies with dominant marketshare are monopolies. Facebook has competition.
The power of viral trending and discovery, combined with the synergistic economic advantage of monetization amount to an insurmountable advantage in 2019. A small group of Silicon Valley oligarchs reserving this power for only the opinions they like is absolutely dangerous. Calling the situation "fair" would be like calling "fair" a race between someone in a Tesla and someone on horseback.
Opinions guided by such power have nothing to do with debate or seeking truth. That's all just power controlling discourse, and through that, controlling society's thought. That's like declaring a vigilante group to have "won" the public mandate, because they have all the guns, and no one speaks up against them. If SV's CEOs really want the right ideas to win in the marketplace of ideas, they need to create fair stages and level playing fields. They need to fully acknowledge the human right of Free Speech. They need to stop coercing.
It's the bias and use of power (essentially corruption) which fuels the horrible voices.
Monopoly isn't important. It's the control of discourse within an entire community which is key. Hell, it's not one entire community these companies control. It's hordes of communities across entire forms of online discourse for huge fractions and even the majority of populations online.
YouTube is dominant, because people make a totally free choice to use it, not because competition can’t exist.
Due to network effects, effective competition can't exist. This gives YouTube the potential to nearly absolutely control the very broad category of video discourse online.
Nothing about being dominant in a market or network effects directly implies a monopoly.
In 2019, this just seems ridiculous. This has got to change.
It’s not as though we’re dealing with Standard Oil, and if you want heat or a running vehicle you do business with them, or get bent!
It's as though we're dealing with Standard Oil, and if you want to be a full time political vlogger, you hew to YouTube's rules and politics, or get bent.
In 2019, the potent combination is virality/discovery+monetization. Google along with the rest of the SV CEOs and other people of equivalent status can indeed withhold that, despite the wishes of large numbers of people. Just "putting things online" is so 1990's. In 2019, the real power comes from that dynamite combination of virality/discovery+monetization. A 2019 formulation of Free Speech needs to account for that.
We saw this before in the 1980's with Manufacturing Consent. The western papers technically weren't censoring like Pravda. But in effect it amounted to the same thing.
The litmus test should be: Are there people who want to hear, yet a few are using infrastructure control to stop them? Then Free Speech is being blocked. Are there people who want to pay, yet a few using infrastructure control to stop them? Then Free Speech is being blocked.
In 2019, indexing gives you the capability to define reality. People riding on the coattails of giant SV corporations have been using this capability to basically put words into the mouths of people and ascribe positions to them that have no real bearing on the truth.
In 2019, indexing is part and parcel of Free Speech. In 2019, you don't have Freedom of Speech if you aren't indexed, and you can't trend. In 2019, trying to exercise Freedom of Speech like that is like giving a 19th century speech with a tracheotomy. It's not the same by literal orders of magnitude. It's as disingenuous as giving one man a club and your political crony a rifle, then declaring trial by combat and saying it's a fair fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
The salient truth, is that corporate oligarchs are trying to game the system so that their own side has several orders of magnitude more voice, and everyone they don't like has several orders of magnitude less voice -- then try and claim it's "Free Speech" and "fair." No. The system is rigged, and the disingenuous arguments are made simply because the law and cultural norms haven't caught up with technical reality yet.
Due to network effects, effective competition can't exist.
And
>Nothing about being dominant in a market or network effects directly implies a monopoly.
In 2019, this just seems ridiculous. This has got to change.
And then
It's as though we're dealing with Standard Oil, and if you want to be a full time political vlogger, you hew to YouTube's rules and politics, or get bent.
Now first of all your last point is conflating the right to express yourself with the right to make a career on someone’s platform expressing yourself. The latter is not protected, but as you live in a free country you are welcome to try to change the law I guess. You can after all still be a full-time political vlogger without YouTuber, Alex Jones seems to manage it (unfortunately). It will be harder to find a mass audience and make money, but that isn’t protected and neither does it imply monopolistic practices.
As far as the need for network effects to be classified as monopolistic, I disagree, but again if you feel otherwise then by all means, try to get that passed into law. What isn’t acceptable is pretending or arguing as though it already is. I suspect that your attempt to pass such a law would be met with scorn and incredulity, because after all you’d be arguing for the inaliabel right to make a living spouting views online. As it stands no one is stopping you from attempting to do so, and no one owes it to you either.
The 20th century concept of "monopoly" is entirely insufficient. This is the underlying cause of the pseudo-paradox.
Now first of all your last point is conflating the right to express yourself with the right to make a career on someone’s platform expressing yourself.
Controlling monetization+virality/discovery is too potent a combination to let a single entity control for censorship purposes.
As far as the need for network effects to be classified as monopolistic, I disagree
It's hard to convince someone of a fact, if their bread and butter depend on their not acknowledging it.
As it stands no one is stopping you from attempting to do so, and no one owes it to you either.
If a bunch of people want to hear, and others are blocking, then the right to Free Speech is being abrogated. If people want to pay, and others are artificially blocking, then the right to Free Speech is also being abrogated.
3 newspapers dominate the news industry. Their circulation reaches the majority of people in a country. They refuse to publish editorials / letters from a certain point of view.
That fits all of the tests that you have outlined above, yet I think most would agree the newspapers have the right to editorialize and selectively publish what they choose.
In that case, these newspapers have a tremendous capability to manipulate the public. Don't have to take that from me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Competing digital empires are always a click away.
Not even size will save you.
Facebook really is nothing else than a company town of the digital space, or to put it even more strongly, facebook is almost the equivalent of a digital nation state, with its own market, its own rule of conduct, its own laws and contracts and so on.
To circumvent the speech issue by acting as if Facebook is your neighbours mom and pop business completely distorts the nature and influence it has over everyone's life, and the amount of hardship you encounter if you're forbidden from speaking on its platform.
The ruling was about the the monopoly over the receivers, not over the sender.
In other words, my friends/receivers aren't a click away to becoming migrated from a digital monopoly to another 'competing digital empire'.
> The Court initially noted that it would be an easy case if the town were a more traditional, publicly administered, municipality. Then, there would be a clear violation of the right to free speech for the government to bar the sidewalk distribution of such material. The question became, therefore, whether or not constitutional freedom of speech protections could be denied simply because a single company held title to the town.
It's also not a good idea to bring up this case without bringing up Cyber Promotions v. America Online, in which America Online put up spam filters and Cyber Promotions tried to use the above precedent to say America Online was blocking their right to free speech. You can probably guess by the fact that we still use spam filters how that case came out.
As a final note, even that original case has had limitations based off of the type of property-
> In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it.
Telecoms are regulated, which is why they can't do things like that. If we want to have the same thing apply to social media then we need to regulate social media to do so. Depending on a court precedent that has already been deemed by other cases not to apply to tech companies isn't going to work- legislation needs to happen.
Malls aren't and have never been the primary space used for public social discourse and commentary. Today, such discourse increasingly happens online, and it's increasingly true that sites like Facebook and Twitter actually are the primary space for public discourse.
It's really never before happened in history where a private company has become the mediator and facilitator of discourse involving millions of people simultaneously. Previous forms of media had extremely restricted participation roles in comparison. Newspapers, TV, and radio can all only publish a relatively tiny amount of content, so the idea that millions of people could simultaneously publish content to those platforms was never viable; they were only capable of pushing out content from a few folks to many, but they were never many-to-many. This almost infinitely scalable many-to-many communication property of modern social media makes it feel much more like a public space than newspapers, TV, and radio ever did.
This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media.
>It's really never before happened in history where a private company has become the mediator and facilitator of discourse involving millions of people simultaneously.
This depends on what you mean. On the one hand, up until ~30 years ago, discourse involving millions of people was impossible. So in one way you're correct. On the other hand, media companies of all kinds have historically had a huge level of control over what people see. When the only form of communication was the town crier, he controlled what you heard. When we added printed paper, the people with the press had outsized control over the media. And the barriers to entry were much higher then: I can spin up my own website in an hour. Your average person couldn't afford a printing press.
>This almost infinitely scalable many-to-many communication property of modern social media makes it feel much more like a public space than newspapers, TV, and radio ever did.
What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid.
You're still extremely limited on Facebook and Twitter by natural space and time constraints. Just because these take a slightly different form and aren't based on physical distance between communicating parties doesn't mean that communication on the platform is just completely unfettered.
So "infinitely scalable" does not mean that each person can actually consume all content produced by all other people. That's not possible in all current iterations of social media and presumably is fundamentally unachievable. Rather, it means the system can scale to an arbitrary number of producers and consumers, each of whom is still subjected to natural physical constraints, whether those be determined by physical location, screen space, the loudness of your voice, the speed at which you read, the speed at which you type, etc.
If you create a FaceBook competitor, identical in every way except dozens of other users instead of hundreds of millions, it would not be a realistic alternative. Likewise for Twitter, or real estate listing services, and a growing number of other things where it's not the tech so much as the other users.
When network effects dominate, as is so common online, and users gradually lose the realistic ability to just switch to a different service with terms they like more, service providers must also lose the ability to impose any terms THEY like and to refuse service to users. What they can charge, who they can ban, etc., should become matters governed by regulators.
Imagine it from this perspective; whom can a telephone company decide to deny service?
If they have stepped beyond merely disagreeable speech (and I agree, it's often very disagreeable) where was that line crossed so that our court system might process their transgressions?
If you want complete freedom to refuse to do business with users for whatever reason you want, charge anyone whatever you want and change as you like, and so on, you can have it as long as your users can reasonably exercise similar freedoms by doing business with alternatives. If network effects remove those options from your users, they should remove them from you, too.
Were the town residents in Marsh v Alabama, required to inhabit the company town? I think the fact that they did is what made is a public space, regardless of whether they were required to.
Facebook is not the same thing- people aren't moving there and people don't live there. I know we want to pretend that digital and physical are similar, but this particular case that everyone is citing was very specifically about the company towns and precedent afterwords has been pretty clear.
if (users.count.toString.length > 7) {
return response.send(noMoreSignupsAtThisTime) } if (users.count > 9999999) { if ((ln(users.count) / ln(10)) > 7) { ... } if (users.count > 1e7){ ... } ... >= 1e7 ...
I don't think there was ever an outcome other than the one we've seen - Nazis getting banned. The company town precedent doesn't make a good comparison in my head - this is Facebook content stored on their servers and printed on their timelines. I believe they should be allowed to control what appears in their timelines.
I don’t think this is a real problem unless Facebook follows its current path where they are acting like they do endorse content on their network (because they don’t ban it).
A nazi can take a picture holding a coke bottle and spam it everywhere. That’s not coke endorsing them. But if coke decided to only sell to “cool people who weren’t nazis” and then NAMBLA sends out coke pictures people might get confused.
You can get a screenshot of anything in a web browser. Screenshots of a browser have no evidentiary value at all.
That's probably true, but in my opinion the overall problem is the centralization of the web (and the internet at large), not the policies of these websites.
You won't convince me to play devil's advocate for white nationalist content on Facebook, I would however gladly embrace any effort to help make the web more decentralized.
And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem, bandwidth and hardware have never been cheaper and yet hardly anybody hosts their own content anymore. That's what needs fixing IMO.
No, it is not. But it is not a solved problem either. Self-publishing content has been tried. For years. And the reason we are where we are is not because hosting your own content is hard or expensive, it is because it has unsolved problems that social networks solve. How to consume content you want to consume? How to share your content with people you want to share with? How to build and manage an online community? You might say that aggregators solve the first problem and blogs solve the second one and forums solve the third, but all of these things existed before Facebook and other social networks. Having a unified platform for sharing content with people you choose and consuming content from creators you choose won the market against multiple single purpose services like blogs, forums, news aggregators etc. And Facebook wasn't the first, the "original" social network LiveJournal started out as a sort of a blog hosting service, yet simply by adding an ability to have "friends" and read a selective news feed from people you "friended" it became more popular than any other blog service of its time. Facebook and other social networks are doing exactly the same and they are successful because they provide functionality that does not exist otherwise.
Could this problem be solved? Could we have a decentralized content hosting, yet keep all the benefits of a centralized service like Facebook? Most likely. But it is not a problem that already has a solution.
So if a site has a monopoly on video commentary, that would seem to be "sufficiently dedicated to public use" to me.
The fact is that Facebook already has rules that restrict it far more than "public use" would. Facebook blocks people for bullying, nudity, discussions about drugs and violence, age, and probably many other types of things. You can't even access many of the site unless you register. It's very much different from a town that allows everyone access to its streets (which is the original case we're all talking about here).
Having a monopoly on a form of speech does.
Being able to dole out the potent combination of virality/discovery+monetization to only one particular ideological group basically is a monopoly on Internet speech in 2019. Facebook doesn't control all of it, but a rather small group of people in the circles adjacent to SV CEOs basically does control all of it for the entire English speaking world. That is way too much unaccountable power in too few hands, particularly because it effectively drowns out the 1990's and prior conception of Freedom of Speech.
Myspace collapsed after user dissatisfaction. So did Digg. If someone in Wichita is unhappy with the current situation they can always do something on their own. Which is why Voat or Stormfront exist.
Do you realize how arrogant and dismissive this can sound to people who happen to live in Wichita?
What is happening in 2019, is there is an active program to label all dissent even quite reasonable dissent like that of Steven Pinker, as something unsavory. Basically, what we are seeing in 2019, is that everyone who isn't a diehard adherent of the party line is to be relegated to Voat or Stormfront.
Korean American journalist from the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago? Call him "Alt Right" and get Antifa goons to go and beat him up. (Literally happened. You can find the videos online.) Left leaning Professors who are widely respected and cited in their fields are called "Alt Right" and "White Supremacists." Professors no longer feel free to say exactly what they think! There is no due process for people falsely accused this way. It's a form of power which can instantly exile people to a de-powered, effectively pre-Internet society. It's stacking the deck for a particular group of people (who happen to have been demonstrably wildly enmeshed in groupthink, and dramatically wrong about matters of public import -- again and again) to the tune of orders of magnitude greater effectiveness at media.
What if a cabal of corporate oligarchs decided only the people they liked got to have virality and discoverability over the Internet. That would be a competitive skewing of the odds far worse than a 1990's style monopoly. But instead of startups and business, instead apply that to the most potent forms of discourse and Free Speech.
That's a recipe for mass groupthink and oppression through the control of speech and thought. It's one which is being enacted right now.
Facebook users are not restricted to only using Facebook. If they want to go to your blog they can.
With the pervasiveness of regulation in modern United States, pretty much everything worth mentioning now is "a blending of public and private". Any business has restrictions of how it can hire and choose their clientele. A person with minarchist political bent could consider this wrong but it is undeniably the reality today.
> You can probably guess by the fact that we still use spam filters how that case came out.
I don't think this decision means what you think it means. Of course, AOL was found to be right to block spam. But was it because spam is repugnant, not because AOL rights are absolute. Consider what would happen if AOL blocked communications by a competitor, or say political speech by a popular group? I can not guarantee it, but I ascribe very high probability to the outcome being very different. If so, the conclusion is not that the provider can do whatever they want, but they can do whatever they want as long as they serve public interest. Which means, the current politics defines what they can do and what they can't.
AOL would have still won. That case didn't turn on the content of the spam. It absolutely was predicated on AOL's rights to control its own software/community.
Companies block competitor ads all the time. Companies frequently refuse to air or display political ads.
The First Amendment puts limits on congress. It's a check against government oppression, full stop. The Fourteenth Amendment extends that all the way down to local governments.
I feel like many people are then trying to bend its scope past the breaking point to fit their worldview.
Yes, but the idea is that the government shouldn't be able to suppress the spread of information and ideas, or persecute on the basis of ideas. It would only be meaningless words on paper if the courts didn't uphold the rule of law, and the First Amendment specifically, and the executive didn't enforce it..
In the decision[0], they cite three distinct tests used in previous cases to determine if the company acted as the state by asking if its activities are "state action" (i.e. meaning that removal of speech constitutes a violation of first amendment rights)
1. Is Facebook exercising the exclusive prerogative of the state in its activities?
2. Is Facebook acting with the help of or in concert with a state official?
3. Did the government insinuate itself into a position of interdependence with Facebook to assert itself as a joint participant?
All of these hold for the Marsh v. Alabama ruling, but the argument that these tests pass for Facebook's daily business activities is less convincing.
[0] https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
There's good legal arguments for why online publishing is excluded
The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a thought police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.
This doesn't mean your point is wrong (I don't think it is), but it's more effective to make your argument on its own merits rather than making a false equivalency.
Jeez man, Arizona isn't that bad, I wouldn't call it third world [1]
Jokes aside, you are correct that Facebook does have lots of third-party contractors that do moderation located in underdeveloped countries and Facebook seems to exploit a lot of their contractor labor, regardless of where that labor is located.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
Only banning white nationalism is giving fuel to the white nationalist belief that whites are being unfairly targeted. That's not something we should encourage IMO.
There's a "punching up" vs. "punching down" model that pretty much explains most "hypocrisy" on this issue. For instance, even subtle hints of anti-Semitism expressed by white Westerners (e.g. being anti-George Soros in particular) are condemned far more vehemently than anti-Semitism expressed by black people or Muslims, because of the perception that Jews, being perceived as predominantly white and Westernized themselves, are more privileged than blacks and Muslims but less privileged than white Gentiles.
I don't agree with this mentality myself because the tides can turn a lot faster than your ideological model of privilege and oppression can change to reflect it, but it's similar to the ideas that are commonly expressed on the left and serves as a decent predictive model of their attitudes.
Radiolab covered this recently:
Post No Evil | Radiolab | Duration: 1:11:45 | Published: Fri, 17 Aug 2018 07:20:00 -0400 | Episode: http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil/
Media: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/152249110
Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and...
Let's talk about the word "cracker". In the US, it's a derogatory term for white people that was coined by black people. The etymology is that a "cracker" was a white man who was hired by the plantation owner to crack the whip at the black slaves. Even in white society, these "crackers" were pretty much what we'd call "white trash"--they had effectively zero social status, received no largesse, and lived in poverty themselves. Literally the only thing they had going for them was that they were white, which meant they were the ones cracking the whips and not having the whips cracked at them. Which only made them all the more eager to crack the whips and do the dirty work of oppressing black people. Being white was literally the only thing these people had to be "proud" of. And so, the most evil people weren't necessarily the plantation owners (who were evil in a detached, hypocritical way), but rather the crackers (who were evil in a directly hateful, sadistic sense). A plantation owner could come around to the idea that slavery was wrong, as Washington and Jefferson did, and merely live in a state of complicated hypocrisy. A cracker is a pure mass of utter racial animus.
The same dynamic remained after the abolition of slavery, and it's the same dynamic that you describe.
Privilege is basically the logical inverse of discrimination. If driving while black means getting pulled over more (discrimination), then driving while white means not getting pulled over more (privilege).
Hope this clarifies how even poor whites are "privileged".
One could equally well point the the anti-colonial resistance in the Balkans and the Caucuses against Ottoman imperialism. The result of which were massacres and genocides up until 1925. You could still buy white sex slaves in Istanbul in 1915: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#...
‘We don’t like it when individual ethnic groups in our multi-ethnic empire presume to have privileged rights over all the others’
Vs.
‘We don’t like it when just white people do it.’
1. a Chinese nationalist can post about China while living in the USA.
2. You don't need institutional power in order to do harm to other people.
3. How do you handle cases where power is evenly split? 60/40? 70/30? Who gets to be racist?
The USA is a unique case in the world and should be exception, not the rule.
I'm personally a fan of them taking a more fine-comb approach to banning certain forms of expression on the platform, rather than just saying blanket "The idea of nationalism is banned".
Well its easy to believe in something that is simply true.
Not to mention, it just means extremists go to platforms that welcome them (Voat, Gab and others). That means platforms that use to have a big mix of views, like Reddit, are now horribly one sided and those other platforms are all extremist.
Keep in mind, we're not seeing the "right" or "moral" view. We're seeing Twitter/Facebook/Reddit's CEOs/Mods/deciders views.
Banning such discussion very soon precludes any disagreement with increasingly narrow set of orthodox doctrines. Of course, Twitter has fully legal right to do exactly that - but what's the use of such platform? And if all major platforms do that - what happens to the society where important questions can not be publicly discussed?
In your example no one is going to get banned for that, but they will get banned if after getting blocked they create a harassment campaign of hundreds of people to repeatedly tell the person their religion is bunk. There is no "discussion" there, it is purely for harassment reasons.
And even there it is debatable - does saying "people with pale skin are better at producing vitamin D in low-light conditions than people with dark skin" make me a white supremacist?
(Or perhaps people need to become more accepting of a distinction between better at x and better. Michael Phelps is certainly better at swimming than I am, but that is mostly orthogonal to whether he is a better person than I am)
Stop making bad imaginary corner cases and stick to the actual problem.
That is precisely the actual problem--the term is loosely defined and thus lends itself to partisan equivocation. For example, lots of people assert that the MAGA hat is a symbol of white supremacy (and indeed it is, albeit only for those people who sincerely believe it to be).
No we haven't. We've seen white supremacy being legitimized at the highest levels, and as a result white supremacists claiming to be "victims" openly because they feel emboldened by the election of white supremacist politicians.
Nah disagree there. We'll see if Facebook starts arbitrarily banning libertarian content or whatever, but I don't think this spells the doom that conservatives think it will for the bits of their ideology that aren't racist.
This is the world Muslims deal with every day - radical Islamic terrorism gets shouted about, and suddenly Muslims have to say "so er, we're worried about being labeled as terrorists just arbitrarily." Way I see it this will help, because another class of people will now be aware of that distinction issue and perhaps be more sensitive to the differences between, say, a Muslim and a radical Muslim terrorist.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dallas-police-shooting-...
IMHO I would supports Facebook's right to do this if: 1. They gave up the safe harbor protections and were subject to the same liabilities as news organizations. 2. Or they were broken up.
Otherwise, this is akin to kicking someone out of the town square without the ability to move to another one....and that is not free speech...
You believe that private companies have the moral right to censor and filter user-generated content. That's your opinion/morality. But it's not "free speech absolutism" in the common English language.
I beg to disagree, and in fact I believe you are the one that is redefining free speech. "Free speech" as I have known it has always referred just to government restrictions, because the government is the only entity that has the very unique punative powers that they do. Indeed, a strong corrolary to free speech, freedom of the press, by definition means that a (private) journalism organization is free to publish (or not publish) whatever they want.
I do agree that the relatively new, immense power of large technology companies with respect to how we communicate may require a sense of updating what we mean by "free speech", but this would be an update - it is not inherent to the original meaning of free speech.
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations.
From Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship), where there is no mention of 'censorship' being a government-specific concept:
> the institution, system, or practice of censoring
From Oxford (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/censorship), where again there is no mention of 'censorship' being a government-specific concept:
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
As I understand it, it means freedom only from prosecution, but not persecution or censorship. I agree with GP in that this is their platform and their rules.
Facebook is a US based company. When talking about Freedom of Speech in America, it's almost exclusively used to refer to the Constitutional protections around Freedom of Speech, as that is the only codified Free Speech parameters for the country at large. So in context, OP would be saying that they are near absolutist on Freedom of Speech as it relates to the Constitution.
I don't know many people that would interpret Freedom of Speech as a more generalized concept unless it was defined before hand.
The parent comment is referring to absolutist FoS. This form of FoS implies that you do not have the right to walk away from a discussion: the speaker has "the right to be heard" and you do not have the "right to ignore." If someone were to post involuntary pornography of you online, that would be their FoS and you wouldn't be able to issue a take-down. This type of FoS is ludicrous because it sacrifices so many other freedoms to achieve purity in a single freedom.
The common definition of FoS deals mainly with government censorship and fighting words. The government must step in to protect the speech of someone if they are not violating the rights of others; conversely the government must stop speech that might result in the rights of others being violated (e.g. promoting violence towards a group). This approximates the UDHR definition, which is basically the "dictionary definition" of FoS (even this definition has been amended).
False. As the Marsh case demonstrates, Free Speech takes priority over property rights. No inconsistency there.
As the "subsequent history" section of the Marsh v. Alabama Wikipedia entry indicates, not always.
That's like telling the part of the population you don't like they don't need cars and mass transit, they can still just walk. They want to rig the media landscape, such that their side has 1000 times the online voice as the other, then declare they've "won" because they can't hear the others. All the while, huge numbers of people find their comments and reviews are erased, while the content creators they want to hear from are de-platformed, kicked off sites, and demonetized.
No, that's not winning in the marketplace of ideas. That's just forcing people with economic power. It's as disingenuous as anything ever propagandized in history.
As is Facebook a subset of social networks on the Internet.
> That's like telling the part of the population you don't like they don't need cars and mass transit, they can still just walk.
We do that. License suspensions are a thing.
> No, that's not winning in the marketplace of ideas.
Sure it is. The idea that "Nazis are harmful" has won a bit of a battle here. May it continue to.
It could be argued that requiring companies to reproduce speech against their will is more a violation of "free speech absolutism" than defending their right not to do so.
I think people should take note though, that this is the exact point in time when the machinery for censoring and filtering the internet is being implemented. Although hateful speech is a great use case for this technology I can't help but wonder what it will get pointed at next. This isn't the kind of development that can sit back idly after performing its primary function.
It also sounds like the events that you mention were dealt with quickly and severely, maybe they would have been more severe threats given the space and time to form more completely.
My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening. Or that people will have to go to extreme lengths or break the law simply to escape their filter bubble.
/tinfoil hat
In the case of draft resistance in the world wars, perhaps. We did win those wars within 2 and 4 years of the US entering them, respectively.
In the case of the Hollywood blacklist, the Communist screenwriters became a cause celebre and, once the anti-Communists went overboard, were rehabilitated within Hollywood. This is despite the fact that they were members of an organization under the control of the USSR under Stalin. To some extent there was even an informal counter-purge of Hollywood conservatives who supported the blacklists and investigations.
> My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening.
Ah, back to the last hundred thousand years of human history!
To me, this sounds like you _don't_ fully support this development. And rightly so. It'll soon be technology in search of additional applications.
1) In particular, what about black nationalists, Chinese nationalists, etc, etc?
2) One of their main justifications is "conversations with members of civil society and academics". It seems unlikely that these conversations are with politically neutral groups, particularly since academics focused on race relations tend to self select for slightly off-beat views of the world.
Also, to poke touchy subject, white nationalism includes some much milder ideas than white supremacy does like 'white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries'. A reasonable and rational person could hold that view after reviewing what happens to minorities in any country. Look at the Jews in Germany or the white farmers in Zimbabwe. Whites don't have a magical pass to be free from racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing.
Whites should be allowed to organise around race like everyone else, as long as they keep it civil and nonviolent.
Which is the problem.
It seems like less blame for the world's problems could be put on FB if it was just treated as a dumb bulletin board. Why not go back to Facebook being a "dumb pipe?"
This change of designation, of course, would be a significant financial blow, once they started losing lawsuits. But you can bet that if one considers their gov't influence and status as a money-spigot for leftist politicians, they have no fear of this actually happening.
It's only the little people who have to worry about running afoul of the law---not HRC and not FB. Welcome to the late Roman Empire.
On the other hand, chauvinism is a negative attitude, this is misunderstood nationalism. The good example is the following.
Let's say I have kids and my neighbour too. Obviously I want the best for my kids, so I take care of them, send them to a good school, so they have the best possible education and perspectives - this is "nationalism". It does not mean that I wish anything bad for my neighbour and his kids.
Now, chauvinism means that I am going to hurt my neighbour's kids, since they are competition for mine, and this is obviously bad.
So, coming back to the FB declaration, "white nationalist" does not make much sense. The colour of the skin is hardly a predictor of common interests. I assume FB means chauvinism, otherwise they will have to ban all international sport competitions news (funs are naturally nationalistic since they support national team), they will have to also ban all national holidays, including 4th July, as they are nationalistic by very nature.
That's because you are trying to reason out what it might mean as if it were a simple combination of two words whose meaning should be transparent from the constituentsz rather than a name for adherents to the ideology named “white nationalism” which isn't “white” modifying “nationalism” but rather a construct with (very loosely; it was originally a bit of a PR term for those selling it) the same relationship to the idea of a (putative) “white nation” with specific traits that “nationalism” has to “nation”.
But, you know, you don't have to guess about things like that, there are search engines and decent general references at hand any time you have access to the internet, so even if you didn't know the meaning, you could easily look it up and find out. [0]
----
We thought it was going to be helpful. We never realized it was going to be the linchpin to generating investment in social media. We envisioned that the law would be both a sword and a shield. A shield so that you could have this opportunity, for particularly small and enterprising operations to secure capital, and then a sword [by allowing them to moderate without facing liability over the practice], which said you’ve got to police your platforms. And what was clear during the 2016 election and the succeeding events surrounding Facebook, is that technology companies used one part of what we envisioned, the shield, but really sat on their hands with respect to the sword, and wouldn’t police their platforms."
- Ron Wyden on Section 230
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/17606974/oregon-senator-r...
I see a lot of people in this thread expressing the view that by moderating their content Facebook is becoming responsible for it. To the extent that's true under the law, it's not necessarily a great idea. Certainly the intent from a lawmaking perspective when some of the underlying framework was written is that this wouldn't be the case. You could moderate and remove bad actors from your platform without fearing legal persecution for it.
How are people ok with this? Whatever your opinions are on the subject matter that was banned today are, are you honestly ok with the idea that people are now deciding what billions are allowed to see in broad strokes? History is filled with examples of controversial viewpoints being viewed as societal cancer only to be later accepted in some form as sane. Are we really going to now decide that we’ve reached final evolution and can now start judging wrongthink?
I view this as part of an alarming trend of people simply getting tired of seeing people they disagree with continue to exist and wishing they and their speech were just gone. It terrifies me that this is starting to get political will and we’re shifting to censorship as a solution.
There have been doing this since they launched. You could not post semi-nudity even for educational purposes. Remember the breast-cancer debacle? You couldn't post anything that incites violence. The list is fairly long and is often referred to as their "Community Guidelines".
Twitter has rules. Reddit has rules. Most online communities do in fact have rules of some sort and in the end it's up to humans to patrol it.
I guess a Finnish person living in Finland can now no longer use Facebook to express a wish that the demographics of his home country stay unchanged?
Your guess is probably correct.
It's perhaps an unintentional example of the difference between advocacy (banned) and education or discussion (not banned).
Very interested in how Facebook will distinguish between them when both use identical words.
| Searches for terms associated with white supremacy will surface a link to Life After Hate’s Page, where people can find support in the form of education, interventions, academic research and outreach.
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I've been plenty critical of Facebook in the past, but this post is refreshingly honest. I hope it's followed up by some discernible results.
Honestly though, posting about any serious separatist movement has a good chance of violating their "terrorism" community standard: "Any non-governmental organization that engages in premeditated acts of violence against persons or property ... in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim"
You can't tell me with a straight face that if Facebook existed 50 years ago, Sinn Fein would be allowed to post on Facebook, because they were not the IRA.
I find it so strange how people on the left and right swap argument styles on the issue of free speech, though. As pointed out by Freddie DeBoer, people on the left want to strictly define free speech as government intervention and criticism, contradicting their usual tendency to interpret law more broadly. Then the right, contradicting their own approach to law interpretation, want a more expansive interpretation of free speech to include things like corporate censorship on platforms that aren't necessarily "public" as we'd traditionally understand it, but have public-y qualities nonetheless.
Anyway, good riddance to white supremacy, but this is a transparent bid by Facebook for PR repair. Their public image was trashed by the 2016 election on several fronts, and this hardly rectifies it. It seems like cynical bullshit to me.
EDIT: It also makes me think of Freddie DeBoer's essay "Planet of Cops": https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/planet-of-cops-50889004904d
The web is pleasant over here in the blogosphere. People write what they want, and readers read what they want. There’s no clamor about ads, algorithms, and censorship. Try it sometime!
While this might be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the views held by conservatives and liberals as a whole are comparable.
I cannot for the life of me imagine someone being called a pro-racist liberal, it just doesn't compute. But someone who looks the other way and claims to be conservative? Sure, plenty of those folks to go around.
> The conservative side definitely does not include "arguing with people on voat" as a platform.
While true, I think the author recognizes that sadly conservatism doesn't often include anti-racism in its platform which is what my comment was trying to highlight.
So you can praise and support your ethnic nationality, as long as you're not white.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nationalism
It's in the first sentence of their description:
> White nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white national identity.
For example, if someone praised their white race, a lot of people would consider that white nationalism. Especially in the context of, say, a national news story.
I'm not sure what the best social media model for such a platform would be -- preferably something mostly non-anonymous like Facebook, but self-moderated (within the bounds of the law) like Reddit used to be.
Anti-semitic speech has traditionally relied on soap boxes to spread their message, for decades before the internet even existed. That's why most academics won't engage them, because these groups are not interested in genuine discussion but in broadcasting their prejudice.
If you want the data, check out these studies from the quoted researchers:
1: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf 2: https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/
Neither of those sources demonstrate that banning “alt-right” content “works” unless you mean that banning results in bans.
> r/CoonTown was a racist subreddit dedicated to violent hate speech against African Americans. It contained “a buffet of crude jokes and racial slurs, complaints about the liberal media, links to news stories that highlight black-on-white crime or Confederate pride, and discussions of black people appropriating white culture” [28]. Their banner featured a cartoon of a black man hanging, with a Klansman in the background [20]. It had over 20,000 subscribers at the time of banning.3 The following is a representative, highly-upvoted comment from the subreddit:
> “It would be so much easier if this [n-word] was taken outside and shot. Then rasslle up his eight or nine [kids] and shoot them so we can terminate that line of genes.”
And from the abstract:
> We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%.
Would you like to try again?
And yes, it borders on the tautology I pointed out before - banning content results in banned content. This fails to address the question: is banning content a good idea?
> 1.2 Research Questions & Findings > We analyze the effects of the ban at two levels: the user level and the community level.
> RQ1: What effect did Reddit’s ban have on the contributors to banned subreddits?
> RQ1a: How were their activity levels affected?
> RQ1b: How did their hate speech usage change, if at all?
> RQ2: What effect did the ban have on subreddits that saw an influx of banned subreddit users?
> RQ2a: To which subreddits did the contributors to banned subreddits migrate after the ban?
> RQ2b: How did hate speech usage by migrants change in these subreddits, if at all?
> RQ2c: How did hate speech usage by preexisting users change in these subreddits, if at all?
>And yes, it borders on the tautology
It's the study of the before-and-after effects of banning two subreddits, particularly on users of those subreddits as they migrated to others. Where is the tautology?
> that does not generalize to reasonable public policy.
The second paper, from the person you Ad Hominem described as "some woman’s opinion on how people should write about Internet-related news," directly talks about how you can generalize these ideas into combatting attacks on the Internet to prevent their amplification.
EDIT: That "some woman": Whitney Phillips; PhD 2012, English with an emphasis on folklore, University of Oregon
Would you like to try again?
If VICE is trash, then it should be easy to point out where the article is wrong, right? Which studies did you disagree with?
What about Tech Crunch [1]? Mashable [2]?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594kq5/alex-jones...
Yes, although there is no need to defend my opinion every time after having bothered to read this kind of junk often enough. And the well is already poisoned by past articles.
The trashy VICE article has a broad claim in its headline that suggests (and is used to claim by the post here) that deplatforming works as a general tool against alt-right hate speech. The study itself only found that within a few weeks of shutting down certain subreddits, hate speech in a few other subreddits did not compensate. They did not investigate whether the hate speech went to other platforms, decreased in general or even increased due to radicalization from this. Nor did it examine long-term effects. And to be honest, it's not particularly convincing since it's heavy on ideology (example: "These constitute our invaded subreddits. Using this method, we identify 1201 subreddits invaded by r/fatpeoplehate migrants and 275 subreddits invaded by r/CoonTown migrants.").
Without deplatforming, the situation would be far worse. With a better economy, the situation would be far better.
You're in a sinking ship, and there's a few people desperately using bailing buckets to get water out. You point at the bucket brigade, and say: "You are the reason the ship is sinking."
No, they are the reason the ship hasn't sunk, yet.
(I'm not saying it's not. Read Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People for a superb analysis of how we're talking about the wrong things, economically.)
The alt-right or alt-left is a tiny group. An entire party is 35-50% of the population. Rep or Dem.
No one ever starved because they couldn't call me a f-----. Not too long ago the fact that I am a f----- would have prevented me from working in my chosen or almost any field and gotten me harassed or assaulted on a regular basis.
However, banning all separatists?
Well. Not all separatists are created equally. Sometimes it is a question of getting out of a union for the sake of reducing the state, and this is in no way vile. Quite the opposite.
Can anyone elaborate on this? Speaking as one of them, I'd hazard to say that the majority of 'white people' in the United States are so far distant from their 'ethnic heritage' that we'd just define it as 'American'.
Mexican-Americans celebrate their Mexican heritage, Japanese-Americans celebrate their Japanese heritage, etc. What does your average 'white person' celebrate? We don't know a heck of a lot about my mom's side other than that her father is French Canadian and her mother is Polish American. Dad's side has been here since the 17th century (according to my grandmother anyways).
Holidays they imported from their European past. Saint Patrick's Day isn't originally a drinking holiday, it's a Christian religious holiday. My friend with Serbian ancestry celebrates 'Serbian Christmas' or Julian Orthodox Christmas.
Lots and lots of Christianity.
This is the same as a newspaper refusing to publish an op-ed they don't agree with.
I should also remind you that similar (equally sane IMHO) bylaws apply in the current forum - at least from what I've seen as long as I'm here.
Turning benign stuff racist is how modern racists thrive and spread their ideas, and pretending they don't exist doesn't help.
If they leave content up after big incidents they are enabling. If they take it all down, they are promoting certain points of view over others. Both will have folks screaming.
Probably they were smart enough to do the math and determined which action likely results in less blowback. That's all.
Then again, Facebook like many public areas always was a cesspool in my opinion. Not a fan of drinking from cesspools. So they can do whatever brings in the most money and I'm sure they will.
Good on them for finally cracking down on bad ideas.
IMO, this is a good thing, and implies there is at least some decency in the world
I much prefer "Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
(In case it's unclean, I don't think Voat or the .chans are good platforms either.)
White nationalists are not a protected group, therefore it is not discrimination. If FB wanted to purge all pro Republican or all Democrat articles from the platform, that would also be in their right (though not best interest).
Another concern of mine though is that just banning this stuff atrophies our ability to effectively debate it.
You start limiting free speech, that's going to cut both ways, eventually.
I've had comments on Facebook get auto-censored simply by discussing racism while trying to combat it.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
If they really wanted to combat the hatred they cause, then they should change their algorithm and stop putting stories on top that cause the most emotional reactions (and clicks in consequence).
John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" is essential reading for those who wish to silence speech they find offensive, especially corporations which may or may not have the right to regulate content on their all-but-universal, essential-to-modern-life platforms.
In the meantime we should all ask ourselves how we can move forward to a world where no single Facebook-like entity has so much say over the ability of Americans to freely assemble, speak, and publish in the modern world.
In regard to comments concerning why it only addresses white-nationalism, understand that these statements are made in the context of North America’s on-going flirtations with white nationalism going back 300 years. It’s not an easy pill to swallow and speaks little about individuals regardless of colour.
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
> White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
I'm fairly certain a state that tried to ban female drivers or (openly via legislation; this next one definitely happens in practice) punish black children disproportionately would find themselves in hot water with the Feds.
If Facebook wasn't a platform so many use then I might support there censorship as creating a space for a unique kind of dialogue. Just like hacker news has certain rules that help shape this unique community.
But since there as big as they are, and since there not the only ones censoring this kind of content. There not just creating a unique space, there making it extremely difficult if not impossible in some cases, for this perspective to be voiced at all.
And that is damaging to free speech.
Do you have evidence backing that up? Because from what I've seen[1], Facebook has been serving the opposite purpose: showing people things that reinforce their beliefs and trigger outrage reactions for clicks.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
A lot of commenters seem to be giving them negative credit for this outcome, and a number of people who claim to want racist content gone are also giving them negative or zero credit. As someone that wants racist content gone, this seems like a perverse state of affairs. No wonder they allowed it for so long given this.
facebook is not a monolith, it is a collection of people making evil decisions every single day. When it takes them 15 years to overturn just one of their evil decisions, there still should be some penalty for it.
There are many violent chauvinisms in the world that are not white, and they should be treated equally.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/soros-bankrolls-unverified-hat...
What do they mean by "American pride"? Googling it brings a lot of marketing, I do not know how to filter all of that to find out an idea.
They will put zero real effort into this because they put zero effort into everything.
If Facebook decided to ban all Chinese, Islamic, or African-American content, then the conversation would be completely different. People wouldn't say, "so be it -- go set up your own servers".
Obviously they have to make a value judgement, and they have done so here and said as much (which I appreciate). In other words, they made a considered and conscious decision that's beyond my expertise. But it's still a value judgement about particular content. The decision really can't be made on an abstract "free speech" basis.
That same law has not been (and probably should not be) extended to protect white supremacy or white separatism, which are political ideologies.
which specific federal law would that be? I can't think of any law protecting content about specific groups
... though it's unclear whether it's more of a private club.
Bad take.
... unless that philosophy explicitly states "... and we'll build that nation on the shores of Antarctica," there's a genocide implied.
This argument is profoundly weird. There are more people living on Manhattan than in Montana.
That'd be inconvenient for the Montanans that own that land.
... and the US has some historical precedent regarding how it responds to separatists in general that isn't very promising. ;)
By far the most common existing model I've heard reference for a theoretical white ethno-state is Israel. Non-white people would not be banned from participating in it, but it would exist with a mandate to serve the interests of a particular culture and people. In the same way that Jewish people can apply for automatic citizenship in Israel, people with European heritage would be given incentives to migrate and participate in the state. Of course, Israel did not come into being without war, and most white nationalists that I've seen anticipate future wars, but nearly all of them see an ethno-state as a response to war and destabilization rather than a cause of it. Most also advocate a peaceful migration of populations rather than forced or violent ones.
The most common historical model for white nationalism is the United States itself. The country was not founded to serve the needs of every race and people equally, but the particular interests of white British colonists. Eglitarian movements participated in the creation, and the abolition movement pre-dates the founding of the country, but the overall effect of the specific policies and laws enacted prioritized the interests of white people, and policies implemented into the 20th century and even some today reflect this clearly. If we deny that countries like the USA were originally patriarchal white ethno-states that eventually allowed equal particpation for women and minorities after centuries of advocacy, we lose touch with history. Most people still recognize this, but it's often ignored, most often by people with center-right politics who would prefer that history more closely resembled the present. But those old traditions still have a strong pull on people, and the only way to argue against them is to admit that, for all of human history, most people have preferred to live around people who look like them and share a common culture. Moving toward a different type of social organization is extremely difficult and can't be done without discussing openly why people have tended to prefer it. Look at centuries of failed attempts at communes to see how difficult it is to get people to act against their natural inclinations.
There are plenty of people with violent tendencies that would welcome ethnic wars. This is not restricted to white nationalists, but includes all sorts of people, and their motivations often intersect with other movements. The New Zealand shooter, for example, considered himself an "extreme Green" and killed people both because he interpreted them as a foreign invasion and because he wanted to oppose migrations that would lead to rises in population. This in itself does not mean environmentalism or advocating population declines is a dangerous movement. The particular aspects of his ideology advocating violence are dangerous, which is why there are rules specifically addressing calls to violence.
This ban which states that expressions of racial pride is allowed but bans advocacy for a nation-state which prioritizes the needs of an ethnicity, and only if that ethnicity has light skin, raises some interesting questions. If the model for white nationalism is Israel, a nation that serves as the homeland for a particular, majority white people, does support for Israel qualify as white nationalism in this context? I'm sure Facebook won't interpret it that way, but there are stong anti-Israel movements that consider support for Israel over Palestine to be an expression of racism. How we handle these kinds of things moving forward is not at all clear.
No, he was taking money from Far Right organisations in Europe.
Jihadis don't do it implicitly they do it explicitly.
The SPLC considers some black nationalist groups (including offshoots/successors of the Black Panthers, which is relevant because there is no actual modern day "Black Panther Party") to be hate groups all the same.
Yes, Facebook should be allowed to ban people posting from before Facebook existed.
OTOH, that's unlikely to be practical issue of any concern.
In other words, they abrogated the Free Speech rights of others by imposing their own values.
Free Speech also includes the right to hear. If there are those who would want to hear/read the speech which is being de-platformed, then by definition, Free Speech has been interrupted.
Facebook isn’t banning content from white people, it’s banning content that is racist by design.
But now they are banning "white nationalism and separatism" in addition. I guess I don't know enough about white nationalism to say if it's racist or not. Like I said, it's a value judgement (and an issue of categorization) that's beyond my expertise.
I don't think separatism is by definition racist. There was the separatist movement in Spain a year ago. The movement is obviously based on race or ethnic background, but it's not obviously racist. There were probably some racists in the movement, but the entire movement may not be racist.
I think they probably made the right decision -- it looks like they considered it carefully. But my point was that the grandparent's framing of the post as a free speech issue is misleading. Facebook ITSELF framed it as a value judgement.
Also, the separatist movement in Spain was not racist because any number of races can live in the region that called for separation. An ethnostate is racist.
The primary principles of Israeli citizenship is jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) for Jews and jus soli (citizenship by place of birth) for others.[2]
Citizenship by descent? Lots of Jewish people are white, or at least all the Jews I've ever met looked just like me. Israel is without a doubt intended for ethnically Jewish people, and is thus an 'ethno-state' by any reasonable definition.
So does that make the Israeli people collectively racist? They elected the government that wrote those citizenship laws after all. Is it a white nationalist movement?
Or if someone's going to argue that Jews aren't white, OK, why isn't it a racist non-white nationalist movement then? If advocating for a country to be reserved for specific kinds of people is no longer allowed on Facebook, what happens to Israeli election-related material?
Sure, advocate against white nationalism, they sure have a powerful platform to do it. Banning all discussion of it seems like it puts Facebook in a position of terrible hypocrisy to me.
If I'm fine with or at least neutral towards Israel, and I am, and if Facebook shares this view, and it clearly does, and if Israel is an "ethnostate", which it is, then by simmannian's definition, I and Facebook would have to be OK with racist states. That sounds totally wrong but I can only see three possible resolutions:
1. Being an ethnostate isn't racist or problematic. But in that case, being white nationalist would also not be racist or problematic, which means Facebook's policy is in contradiction.
2. Advocating for an ethnostate is wrong if it's "white", but Israel isn't a problem because Jews aren't "white". Maybe there's some convoluted path by which this is true, but I use a simple definition of whiteness - do they look like me? They do, so, this one can't work either.
3. It's only problematic if westerners do it, for no defined reason.
Of those I can only see (3) being a plausible explanation for Facebook's behaviour here. Which unfortunately seems to back up the feeling some of these people have that white people are being 'persecuted' for views that are considered fine when other races have them.
This whole thing rapidly seems to hit unresolvable contradictions. It seems like Facebook should just stay out of it as a result: any path forward puts them in a position of hypocrisy, which I find to be one of the worst sins.
Note that none of the above means I'm myself white nationalist or approve of it. Just that I think it's really important that moral positions are coherent, internally consistent and people who claim to follow them follow them even when inconvenient. That's more important than almost anything else, in my worldview.
This is because we have laws about discrimination based on race. White supremacy is not a race. You're free to discriminate against someone due to the views they hold.
However, Facebook even now is ok with white people advocating for seperation. They claim there is a connection of white seperatism to white supremacy that made them ban it, while not banning other groups like the Basque from wanting independence.
>We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
>But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.
Basque is a political state in Spain defined by geographical boundaries, not an ethnic identity. Basques can be white, black, or brown.
Facebook is okay with voters wanting self-governance. This is not even remotely the same thing as white nationalism. If you can't see that, you're clearly a troll and there's no point in further discussing this with you.
And, OFC, they are considered as Basque as anyone else.
Custom traditions and the language had far more weight than how did you look. Specially here, where, in Iberia itself, had multiple-way Religion conversos since several millenia.
Maybe the Americans are used to Race = Ethnics = culture. Here it doesn't work like that. It's the surrounding culture what defines you in the end.
If your parents came from Africa you are African-descendant, but if were born and lived in the Basque Country you are Basque and not African, period.
Here is Richard Spencer mocking white nationalism:
http://doesnoonehavevision.blogspot.com/2018/10/wanna-be-sit...
> He says he rejects nationalism, independence, and sovereignty for Other Races. He thinks the Aryan Race, being a conquering and wandering global people, must destroy and dominate all the world.
"I'm not a white nationalist because I want the entire world to be white-only" is a nonsense quibble on the terminology.
Or at least corporations and the government are not allowed to.
I'm pretty sure discriminating against people for their views on religion is illegal. Ditto for their political views.
It's the definition of bigotry.
Like yes I'd be much more annoyed if you cut off my foot than if you served a vegetarian dinner.
That's about as apt a comparison as I can make between "white supremacy" and "science".
Lest you think I'm being one sided, I absolutely support the ability of Facebook and YouTube to ban pornographic content, while I think the groups that do provide pornography are morally fine, something I don't think is true for white supremacists.
So unless you're making an absolutist free speech argument, please elaborate on why you think feminism and white supremacy deserve to be treated the same way. I can name a few reasons they shouldn't be: Haji Daoud Nabi and Clementa C. Pinckney to start.
Also, if they decided to ban all White content, it would be different.
White and White nationalist aren't the same thing; please stop insulting White people that aren't racists by implicitly equating them.
True.
> So they're engaging in illegal discrimination due to disparate impact.
Disparate impact discrimination is illegal under Title VII (employment) but not Title II (public accommodation), so even assuming FB is covered by Title II (which is dubious), and even assuming this would be found to be disparate impact discrimination (which is difficult to assess because the test for that is narrowly tailored to Title VII context), it would not be illegal on that basis.
The thread this spawned reminds me of why I don't usually chime in on these issues. But what many replies are missing is that Facebook says they already ban "white supremacist" content under existing rules. They don't need a special rule for that. Just like they don't need a special rule for terrorist content that's violent.
But they ARE adding a special rule for "white nationalism", for the reasons given in the post.
I'm not saying they are wrong. I'm just saying that you can't really use the argument "they can go set up their own servers" to justify it, as the grandparent did.
I suspect that there's simply a LOT of white nationalist content, and it has a practical damaging effect, but nationalist content of other kinds isn't that widespread or damaging, and they want to allow it for free speech reasons (and probably because they aren't qualified to make fine judgements about various nationalist movements). That seems reasonable.
Anyway, Facebook gives the "right" reason for the ban (a value judgement), while the parent comment was pushing a reason that's besides the point, IMO. It felt like a "backward rationalization". But yeah it's more of a nitpick, so I regret spawning this thread, which became very political :-/
-----
Even so, let me throw something else onto the pile. A few days ago I watched this documentary on Netflix:
Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski
https://www.netflix.com/title/80109551
It's too complex to summarize, but it's about a very talented sculptor who was also a Polish nationalist (for a significant period). It came out in December and was produced by Leo DiCaprio, because his father was a friend of the artist in LA.
I googled for reviews afterward, and this was one of the best summaries that I found:
https://www.counter-currents.com/2019/01/a-patriot-without-a...
Only after reading the whole article did I realize that it's from a white nationalist site (if you read "about this site", it's very clear).
The long and short of it is that it's a subtle issue, but most people seem to view it in black and white. If Facebook banned this content, it would be a mistake IMO (although I don't use facebook). But their decision might be the right thing overall. They have a hard job, and people like the parent were trying to apply some strict principle to it, when in reality there's no such thing.
Of course, FB does not owe anybody to neither have consistent free speech position, nor support free speech at all, nor be an inclusive platform. They could convert their site to the fan club of Jar Jar Binks tomorrow and make every user to pledge loyalty to Supreme Lord Jar Jar or take a hike. Completely within their rights. Presenting themselves as an open platform while executing a clear political censorship is less morally clear (though of course still legally completely OK). It doesn't matter that political censorship is now directed to the group that is outgroup for most people here - it always starts that way. It never ends there.
They only become wrong by running down your slippery slope. They're not banning Christian speech, or Republican speech, or whatever.
The existence of a slippery slope does not demonstrate that everything that could reach the slippery slope is de facto immoral.
Sorry I do not agree with this sort of shit. I have left facebook long back as a platform. I do not want some Phd in Gender Studies and Race relation to dictate what I can read and what I can not.
This is a general problem with trying to ban speech. It's often very hard to figure out what someone intends to mean versus how others interpret it versus what it "really means". Especially when symbols, slogans, etc., come into play, not to mention different audiences. That ensures that this policy will be applied inconsistently and have unintended consequences, and create a flurry of argument over what was banned, by whom, and why.
It's just a mess and does not help the discourse.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/10/24/trum...
A white nationalist is not the same as a nationalist who is white; a white nationalist is one who adheres to the ideology of white nationalism.
Censorship may be a necessary evil, but if so, it must be done by duly elected or appointed government officials. FB and other tech platforms should build APIs that allow government officials to make the relevant decisions about when a piece of content is unacceptable. That is a principled and nonpartisan strategy that will allow the tech companies to focus on what they're good at - technology innovation - and avoid what they're bad at - politics and public relations.
Also the far right: why is Facebook censoring my ability to spread hate speech!
I'm oversimplifying it, but the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is astounding.
Either way, it's conceptual gerrymandering to carefully carve out a wiggly boundary that -- strictly by coincidence! -- protects their own side and restrains the other side.
What could go wrong?
Clearly nobody is going to shed any tears over Nazis... but is it wrong to support Palestinian claims to Jerusalem? Where's the line?
I don't like this move since I feel it will just push people into places where we can't determine real identification, should that be needed after a crime.
I don't like this move because I don't, fundamentally, think we should all have to agree with Zuck to have a voice online.
I don't like this move because it's reactionary, and there's no consistent philosophy behind why these groups would be banned but not others.
Just feels skeezy to censor people, no matter how skeezy those people are.
So... is this going to be a train wreck like YouTube's content ID where certain keywords will trigger the robots to censor my post with no human to appeal to?
"Sorry, you said: '80 years ago today Hitler committed suicide and axis power was extinguished.' This post contains keywords associated with dangerous groups and individuals and has been removed."
However, people en masse are different, and tech platforms have to acknowledge that. So, I believe it is a good thing to ban and police hate speech, at least when private companies do it (and not government).
If you do and it doesn't cause you to experience any negative emotions, I am surprised.
If you don't, I am also surprised. In light of what has happened in Pittsburgh and Christchurch.
You aren't calling for 230 to be enforced, you are calling for it to be abolished.
Which is already happening one step at a time (SESTA/FOSTA), each of which radically accelerates self-censorship. Actually, I suspect a lot of the self-censorship that happens that isn't connected to legal changes but is connected to popular mood is to avoid political pressure for new limits on the 230 safe harbor which would force even more drastic self censorship.
Now do anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.
> Facebook to ban homosexual hookup content
How about that, eh? Funny how a simple change of political platform will U-turn your support of so-called 'free speech'!
As a private platform, Facebook is free to curb the topic you have suggested, in the same way you are free to avoid said private platform.
To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
They've been dragged kicking and screaming into this realization but we'll take it.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this response will not be comforting to those with genuine concerns about civil liberties. Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.
Edit: Find it pretty crazy that this can't even be discussed without people accusing me of all sorts of things.
It's all well and good for you to say "white nationalism is very different from what most people think," but that doesn't stop the OP from being right.
Nationalism of all kinds root from an insecurity, and white nationalism in particular is proppogated in colonial societies to encourage the alienation of brown colonial workers via, among other acts, stochastic terrorism.
It's a lot like ISIS propaganda.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
"We don't encourage people to commit terrorist attacks, we only encourage them to do what it takes to ensure the survival and dominance of the white race."
That was facebook's policy as of yesterday.
They changed it for good reason, and it was not a small reason to overcome that much inertia.
I'm glad that after these white supremacist terror attacks and seeing how these attackers all share the same things on social media, more people are waking up and realizing these memes are like ISIS propaganda.
I don't think so. One wants a caliphate, one wants an ethnostate. The end result is the same for anyone who isn't part of the extremist in-group.
To those ends, I don't want to not draw lines. I want some kind of clear criteria and process around thw drawing of lines. Perhaps we could consider a system whereby we can make sure that the power to draw lines is not used against weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal.
No, it just implies that we don't need to have the perfect final answer now. Maybe we'll draw more lines, maybe we'll find out we don't need to, maybe we'll decide that this line was drawn too far and pull it back. We don't need to pretend that we have all the answers yet—we don't even need to pretend we have all the questions yet.
Perhaps people might consider offering such elegant points as yours, instead of making the claim that the current line is correct and that's all that matters.
This is a category of labor that formerly wasn't necessary, and yet somehow now it is. Why is that? How can we make it go away?
Perhaps the monetary incentives will provide motivation to solve it.
However, at least Facebook now admits their political bias and people can make informed choices.
And no I do not support white nationalism.
White nationalist content should be viewed no differently than content by the likes of isis. I think it's completely reasonable and responsible to ban it from the platform.
Saying that white nationalists, despite their inherently violent nature, deserve a platform is categorically support.
You're not acting as a neutral arbiter. Instead, you're saying that this group who spouts violent rhetoric, despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated, ought to be able to spread their message.
Here's your problem. Free speech isn't about "we as a society".
"We as a society" had decided that the earth was the center of the universe before Galileo decided to defy "we as a society" to state something unpopular.
I'm not suggesting that there is any value in white supremacism like there was in Galileo's speaking of heliocentricism, but his lack of access to free speech protection meant he was persecuted for speaking the unpopular - the idea that you can ban "certain kinds of speech" is going to do precisely the same.
Where exactly is the line drawn at what is considered "white supremacism?" What if somebody says something which isn't a white supremacist viewpoint, but some loon misrepresents the view as if it were? You don't seriously think it will end at white supremacism do you? This is just the first step towards incrementally dismantling your right to free speech.
The solution to "bad speech" is "good speech", not attempting to issue bans. The Streisand effect is in full force, and each time you try to ban it, you accidentally give them more leverage. The solution is to ignore. Stop advertising for them! That's all you're doing.
That doesn't mean that we should ignore actual hate crimes - but can we get back to a sane world where people are innocent until proven guilty, and where we have a legal system where judge and jury get to decide the punishment for crimes - rather than bored, virtue signalling keyboard warriors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
At one time, advocating for gay rights or saying god doesn't exist was considered offensive. Only two decades ago, major television networks wouldn't allow jokes critical of Christianity to remain advertiser friendly. A recent episode of The Simpsons had Jesus beating Homer with a sign that said "Love" (standards and practices from 20 years ago wouldn't allow 'Jesus' to even be said in a comedy, which is why "Great Zombie Jesus" was cut out in later edits of the Futurama episode Atlanta).
It is offensive speech that has lead to civil rights, gay rights and independence from autocracy. What is and isn't offensive tends to change over time.
I can both think their ideas are absurd and at the same time support their right to have those ideas.
That's the very definition of free speech in the US. There are many ideas and messages I don't think should be spread that doesn't mean I am against people being allowed to spread them.
You don't know what kind of fire you are playing with here if your think your position is the rational one and have a good outcome.
We're not talking about having an ability to have an idea, we're talking about responsibly deplatforming hate speech.
> You don't know what kind of fire you are playing with here if your think your position is the rational one and have a good outcome.
I can say the same of you and your naive belief that the fascists will be beaten by triumph, will, and logic.
No you cant say the same about my position. Why do you think we have the 1st amendment? Do you understand what lead to it?
What? There's no room to support the right of certain people to speak without "supporting" them? "Deserving a platform" is a total red herring here. There's room to worry about the largest platform in the world suppressing speech without claiming that those it suppresses "deserved" that platform.
>despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated
I can't believe you are serious at this point, because it is just so obviously untrue. Have you read what people have had to say in this thread at all? Are you aware that the position of the ACLU is that not only is "hate speech" to be tolerated, it is protected by the First Amendment in the US? https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/free-speech-can-be-mes...
I say this as someone who's pretty okay with Facebook taking down white nationalist stuff. As big as it is, Facebook simply isn't big enough to create major worries about controlling speech. My problem is that you're not making an argument here at all; you haven't really come to terms with the fact that quite a few reasonable people disagree with you.
When their speech is to advocate violence against every other group that isn't like them? No there isn't.
White nationalism is a... Politics?
"Speech that harms people" and "speech that hurt people's feelings" are so closely related and sometimes people (intentionally or unintentionally) mix them up.
If you are looking for examples, search HN comments that begin with "I'm hesitated to say this but" or "I know this sounds XXX"
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion — and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
> But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.
There is no meaningful difference between white nationalism, white separatism, white supremacy, and hate groups. They are the same thing. So... I mean... did you read the article?
I did. The snide comment is unnecessary.
That's the question I'm asking: if we accept that these beliefs are on a spectrum and that white separatism (or more generally pro-white politics) slide inevitably into violent white nationalism, who's to say the same doesn't apply to orthodox Islam? Specifically the above poster referenced Christchurch as an example outcome of the former, I argue you can't do so without considering the many examples of the latter.
There is a difference between orthodox Islam and extremist violence: just because some violent extremists are Muslim doesn't mean all orthodox Muslims are violent extremists.
Are you going to extend that same logic to devout religious followers that want a government aligned with their religion and think non-followers should be forcefully re-educated or killed?
Maybe make this argument when we aren't talking about literal Nazis. Advocating harm is their entire schtick.
But that is not where they're starting though, is it? They're going much further:
>Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism on Facebook and Instagram
Praise, support and representation not of speech encouraging harm, but the ideology itself, reprehensible and ass-backwards as it may be.
This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor.
This is wrong (opinion), antithetical to American notions of freedom of speech (opinion), but Facebook has a complete and unalienable right to do this on their platform (fact). Despite that right, things should nevertheless be accurately labeled. This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech" as most reasonable people define it.
The ideology itself is an encouragement to harm.
Again, Facebook absolutely has the right to censor political views using whatever arbitrary rationale they want. I just object to dressing it up with PR euphemisms such as "Standing Against Hate". They're not doing it to stand up against hate (Facebook is a cesspool of very thinly veiled hate against immigrants, for example). They're doing it for political expediency and PR.
Wait, are you thinking there are masses of people who are okay with Facebook deplatforming white nationalists that are going to be upset if they did the same to Leninist vanguardism?
I mean, sure. But I'm so used to FB doing the wrong thing, that them doing the right thing for self-serving reasons seems like a welcome change of pace. Maybe someday they'll even do the right things for the right reasons?
...yeah, probably not. But still.
This is deplatforming, which is entirely different.
> This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor. [...] This is wrong [...] This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech"
Are you saying that hate speech comes off of a vacuum?
These two concepts do overlap.
In general, that logic calls for deplatforming every topic that people get outraged over.
In this context, that's simply a neologism for private-sector censorship. Again I want to reiterate that I don't think the private sector should be prohibited from censorship. But using euphemisms like "deplatforming" distracts us from the fact that it is private-sector censorship, and from drawing our conclusions about these platforms, how widely representative they are, and how safe our own speech is on those platforms from future "deplatforming". Thankfully I'm not anti-immigrant, pro-theocracy, anti-abortion, communist, don't hold views like 'homosexuality and transsexuality are not genetic', etc. But if I were, I'd be worried.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/private-censorship-not...
If we're being intellectually honest, we know that they know full well that they're not getting a white ethnostate from peaceful participation in the political process.
Secondly, as I mentioned elsewhere, such rationalization can be used to ban a whole lot more speech than just "white ethnostate". Why is Marxism-Leninism still on Facebook? For that matter, since we're not limiting it to overt calls for violence, the mental gymnastics can be effortlessly applied to any calls to overthrow any government, when it's obvious that this cannot be done peacefully.
If it were 1920 I'm sure the Marxists would get banned for stirring up terrorism.
I say we decide first what kind of speech to ban (clear incitement to violence, for example, or something broader), and then proactively ban it to save lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
> Why must we wait for tragedy to strike in order to act?
Actions of the government (or other actors WRT policy changes) are given legitimacy by serving as a response to perceived existing problems. In essence, if there is no tragedy, there is no legitimacy to the action. Without legitimacy, the policy change carries less weight and is not effective. This is a basic reality of policy implementation.
The actions of banning white nationalist speech on tech platforms are given legitimacy by the recent NZ shooting, where (1) the shooter made numerous callouts to the white nationalist subcultures that these platforms foster (subscribe to pewdiepie, etc) (2) The content the shooter generated and streamed spread widely across nearly all distribution channels (FB, youtube, reddit, etc) despite censorship efforts, (3) We know that wide distribution of the extremist type of content that this guy distributed (whether its white nationalist, ISIS, or anything) in his actions inspires more people to extremism.
The exact same people "not allowing" white nationalist content, of course.
Militant "right" is always a problem. Death toll: millions. Mostly "others" (jews, east Europeans, disabled people)
Militant "Muslims" are a problem in large parts of the world and has been so for centuries. Death toll: not sure. Ironically most Muslims lately.
And of course: militant "Christians" was a problem in certain centuries. Death toll: hundreds of thousands. Ironically mostly Christians?
I write "left" and "right" here because I find it unfair to blame concervatives and ordinary socialists for something that is more about being totalitarian than about more or less tax or ownership.
Same goes for religions to a certain degree (although there's no doubt that for example old Norse (viking) religion was very focused on war compared to Christianity).
This is certainly an opinion as well, but my view is that the concept of a white ethnostate alone is hateful. Whether or not one can or can't be created without violence is immaterial.
Should people be able to talk about a hypothetical white ethnostate in academic, research, or news-reporting capacities? Sure. But simply promoting a white ethonostate as something that is wanted is, IMO, hateful.
Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance. Would it console you they're doing it as a private company, or would you demand regulators to come and stop it?
> Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance.
This is substantially different from what is being talked about here: censorship versus deplatforming. No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet, Facebook is simply saying they won't retransmit their ideas. You can still find them if you desire and they still aren't illegal to express.
What parent post was talking about is "free speech". The claim was that free speech is only about absence of governmental coercion. This is precisely wrong - absence of governmental coercion is one of the necessary conditions for the free speech to exist, but it does not equal it and does not ensure it.
> No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet,
We have already seen hosting companies to remove people from the internet for other reasons. Same with banks and credit companies cutting off certain companies from banking services, etc. I do not see how white nationalists would be an exception. I do not see how the ultimate goal is not exactly this - removing white nationalists from the Internet. Practical implementation of this goal could be hard, but getting within 99% of it - banning them from the space accessible by 99% of people without technical knowledge of darknet and such - is not.
If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech? Is "go build your own Internet" really a free speech?
I've recently read about the infamous "Green Book" - a guide for a non-white traveler in the US which specified which hotels, restaurants, gas stations, stores, etc. would serve them. There weren't many, and even when there was no governmental coercion (there were "sunset cities" but even if one avoided them) travel turned into a real hassle. Was that situation normal? I do not think so. I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You can create very bad situations even without governmental involvement. I feel that is what Facebook, Twitter and others are creating right now - even though for completely different reasons than those that gave birth to the Green Book. You could say the people being affected by it now deserve it, as they'd probably impose the same on their opponents if they could - and you probably would be right that they would. But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there. Already disagreeing with any of the positions of transgender activists is verboten. How long before criticizing Green New Deal, or Keynesian economic theory, or the mayor of the town whose policies Facebook supports, or any other subject the benevolent overlords declare sacred becomes verboten?
No, this is entirely sufficient for free speech.
> If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech?
Your definition is absurd; essentially you are demanding that "freedom of speech" include not only that you can legally say whatever you want, but that you also are guaranteed a place to say it and an audience who must listen to you. At some point, the freedom of the venue to choose what goes on there, and your audience members to select what they hear, must matter.
> I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You and I both! This is why we have laws ensuring equal access to private services -- however, those laws are based only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion). Having bad ideas does not mean you're part of a protected group.
> But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there.
This is a slippery slope argument. We already abridge the speech of people who are maliciously trying to create harm (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example). Yet despite this we still have substantial freedom of speech today. The fact that we don't allow people to incite panic seems to coexist quite happily with our current rights and privileges; claiming that somehow preventing white nationalists from speaking on Facebook, or credit card companies refusing to take their money, will somehow lead to the death of free speech is just fallacious.
Frankly we have, socially and legally, always placed limits on speech. The fact that it hasn't been done perfectly doesn't mean we just throw all restrictions out; it means we should always try to weight the good of free speech against the ills that speech can cause.
I never did that. There's a difference between "audience must listen to you" and "audience would want to listen to me but unable to because I'd have to build a new Internet to do it".
> only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion)
So we agree that denying people access to private services can be not OK even if it's not done by government coercion? But only if it's because of racism? If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
> This is a slippery slope argument.
It is. We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times. We know how it works. We are observing the narrowing of the bounds of what is acceptable on major social networks right now. Should we refuse to believe the experience and our own eyes because "it's a slippery slope argument"? Yes, it is - because the damn slope is very slippery!
> (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example)
Very bad example. That decision by Wendell Holmes was overturned decades ago. But if you knew what the actual case was about, you'd be even more wary to use that quote. The case sought to ban American Socialists from distributing pamphlets opposing draft. If there's any case for free speech to be protected, the case of political speech opposing government action forcefully sending people to die overseas is that case. So maybe when you complain about slippery slope arguments, you don't realize how far the slope actually gone. Do you actually want to be jailed for criticizing the government? If you do, keep using that example. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
We are talking about Facebook here, right? Do they have to power to remove your content from the Internet entirely?
> If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
It depends! It is entirely legal to discriminate against someone because they're stupid or ugly. Is that okay? Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
> We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times.
Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform. You have no more of a right to post there than have your articles be published by a newspaper. They aren't a government and can't police your speech, but they can (and should) decide what they post.
> Very bad example.
Except it's still actually illegal? The rest of your argument simply doesn't apply, since Facebook is not the government.
No, Facebook is just one facet of it. We've seen deplatforming from every major social network, bar none, from Paypal, from Patreon, from banks, from credit card companies, from hosting providers, DNS providers, CDN providers... Virtually every piece of internet infrastructure is subject to deplatforming. And it's not just if you do something - if you provide services to people that do something controversial, you're out too.
> It depends!
You write "it depends", I read "if the mob likes you, you're ok. If they don't - well, you're screwed". Maybe it's a comfortable existence for somebody who never had a controversial thought, but it's certainly far from something I'd call "free".
> Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
Who is "we" and why you have to rule? I don't particularly like to be ruled by "we", and be judged on its whims. OK, frankly, I can live without Facebook, I left Twitter long ago and could leave Facebook behind too. But it wouldn't stop there, would it? Intolerance to existence of contrary opinions never just stops because these opinions are now located under different URL. If it were possible, having them on Facebook wouldn't be a big deal from the start - just don't subscribe to people you don't like, ban them if they come to comment, and you'd never read their content. But the point is not that - as long as it exists anywhere, it must be suppressed. The only real end to it is elimination of the offending opinion, anything less is good, but ultimately always unsatisfactory. You may say "ok, what's bad in complete suppression of white nationalists"? Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else. Lack of freedom can be very comfortable when the rulers do the same things you wanted to be done anyway. It very soon stops being comfortable when they don't. Are you sure you'd never say anything anybody could find some problem with? Maybe decades later?
> Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform.
And the list of banned things grows constantly. Yes, I know. That's exactly what worries me. Not because I like white nationalists - quite the contrary - but because one day whoever decides what to ban may dislike one of my thoughts.
> Except it's still actually illegal?
You basing that on what? Certainly not on decision of Wendell Holmes, since he never decided that (it was a rhetorical flourish for him) - so on what exactly? http://civil-liberties.yoexpert.com/civil-liberties-general/...
This is essentially the marketplace of ideas working as intended -- if your idea sucks you get booted out of venue after venue. Maybe the problem isn't the venues having standards, maybe it's your idea being bad?
> If they don't - well, you're screwed
How is not being able to tell people your bad ideas "being screwed?" You aren't being jailed, your property isn't being seized. People are telling you they don't want to hear what you have to say, but you can continue saying it to anyone who bothers to listen to you. No one is obligated to hear or agree with anything you want to say.
> Who is "we" and why you have to rule?
Platform owners specifically, citizens in aggregate. We judge the ideas we want to hear and tell people we don't want to hear that we don't want to hear them. This isn't exactly some radical new concept either.
> Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else.
Except it literally has "white nationalists" in the rule itself. How about we ban them? And then rule, on a case-by-case basis, on whether other things should be banned? Like pro-ISIS speech? Or pornography, which Facebook also bans?
The idea that nothing at all can be banned, because Facebook might ban the wrong things, is absurd. If your ideas are bad and no one wants to listen to you, the problem is your ideas, not that Facebook can ban things. No one should be compelled to hear bad ideas. And before you ask, yes, Facebook can decide what ideas it considers are bad on behalf of its users. If you don't like that, don't use Facebook -- problem solved.
> You basing that on what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
"The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.""
Of course, this is still applicable to the government, not private corporations, again. Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
> Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
Legally, they can. Morally, they shouldn't.
But also recognize that (unregulated) private entities have a right to decide what speech they do and don't want to be a platform for. That's the big distinction here.
Last I checked we kinda had a bit of a scuffle from 1940-1945 that stated, "This ideology is not okay and responding to it with violence is acceptable."
They're getting booted off the platform most people use to talk to grandma, not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to? The accepted definitions of both "literal" and "nazi" seem to have drifted significantly in the last few years.
> not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Funny, this type of story about people advocating for literal violence against non-whites is extremely common on the internet, I've heard it recounted I don't know how many thousands of times in the last few years, yet I've literally(!) never once encountered an actual instance of it anywhere I browse. Ironically, I have encountered hundreds of examples of violence being advocated against white people, although in the vast majority of cases the proponents themselves were white.
Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
White nationalists are literal Nazis, so... yes?
> Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it? White nationalists literally marched with torches chanting "blood and soil" and "we will not be replaced." What do you think those messages mean to non-whites? What do you think they're advocating for when they say those things?
a) No they aren't.
b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
> Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it?
Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Try to not treat this like an internet argument that must be won, and try not to exaggerate the frequency of rare (as far as I know, I am seeking a reasonable, fact-based argument in order to change my mind) incidents like Charlottesville, or conflate the specifics of what happened there with unsavory words that don't literally (actually) meet the claim of advocating violence.
Make no mistake, I'm definitely playing Devil's advocate here, but if the facts are on your side this (making the case that literally advocating literal violence) should not be overly problematic.
Or, if you would like to lower your claim to something like "frequent and possibly increasing dog whistling" (without arguing about the technical boundaries of that) on Facebook, that seems like a fairly reasonable claim.
Indeed they are! Or at least there's no difference meaningful enough in their political ideologies to draw a distinction. Obviously I'm not saying they're a member of a political group originating in 1930s Germany, but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either.
> b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
> Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting? These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform. They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology? Facebook has banned child pornography, doxxing, and pro-ISIS content from their platform too. How much of that has to be posted before a ban is justified?
You can not like that Facebook can make decisions like this, but it is entirely their right to choose what to platform. If you don't like it, you can make your own platform. That it doesn't have the audience Facebook does is your problem, not Facebook's.
Is that so? The Nazis were a large, organized group with a distinct leader, a fairly specific shared ideology, and track record of action - you would have us believe the same is true (no meaningful difference) of modern day white nationalists? And that there's evidence of this?
> but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either
col·lo·qui·al·ly
adverb: colloquially in the language of ordinary or familiar conversation; informally.
This is what I mean about the common misuse of the words "literal", "Nazi", "alt-right", and in my mind this excuse is similar in quality to the "I'm not really racist, I have black friends" argument. Have you ever stopped to consider if this type of "dog whistling" is contributing to the problem in any way? Do you care?
> So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
Your words, not mine. The question was "Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to?".
Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship? And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
> Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
For every single "white nationalist" incident you cite, I can cite several similar racially/religiously motivated crimes committed by non-white people. If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
> These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage
The coverage was mainstream, but is this behavior or these beliefs mainstream/common? How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media? Have you ever considered that both the incidents themselves as well as the increase in "dog-whistling" propaganda on social media (I've yet to see examples of advocating violence) might both be effects of something else? Do you care?
> and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform.
Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told? I haven't read the whole manifesto, but this fellow seemed to have much more complex and nuanced beliefs than those held by "100%" of "white nationalists".
I assume this is a "white nationalist" propaganda site of some sort, but to me the actual words of what this madman wrote are what actually matters, not who publishes them:
https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/31759-...
Is what's written there mainstream white nationalist views? Personally, I have absolutely no idea, so I'm willing to consider any evidence you have supporting that idea.
> They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
They might be right, they might be wrong, unlike you I make no claim to know. What if they are wrong, and censorship aggravates these already mentally unbalanced people even more, driving them to organize (perhaps in the physical world) underground where it's difficult to see what they're up to or thinking? Is this worth considering when setting policy?
> What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology?
Then we should be banning a lot more speech.
> You can not like that Facebook can make decisions like this, but it is entirely their right to choose what to platform.
I believe free speech is crucially important, and any curtailment should be carefully and logically considered, including a healthy discussion before any decisions are made. In this case, I can envision a plausible scenario where it makes the problem even worse.
> If you don't like it, you can make your own platform.
Again, there is a distinct difference between the First Amendment and the general principle of free speech. That so few people consider this important seems risky to me. I suspect this type of attitude is in no small part what got Donald Trump elected.
> That it doesn't have the audience Facebook does is your problem, not Facebook's.
And if social engineers like you are miscalculating, if you underestimate the complexity of sociology and human psychology, it might be all of our problem.
For the sake of improving the quality of discourse, can you sense any legitimate concerns in what I'm saying, or do I seem to you like yet another ignorant racist, little different than those who might frequent Charlottesville rallies?
It's not misuse if it's common usage, it's simply usage you disagree with. Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else. If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
> Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship?
Not particularly: if those things happen, let's protest those instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
> And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
Deplatforming is not censorship. You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech. White nationalists can still say whatever they want, and they can even say it legally. But they can't say it on Facebook, and it's not Facebook's responsibility to let them any more than it is to let pro-ISIS people post their content.
> If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
> How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media?
I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this. Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
Of course, I also think it doesn't matter if that's true or not. No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism, and Facebook already bans a plethora of other (totally legal) content because they don't think is appropriate on their platform. If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
> Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told?
Yes, it's so. Read the manifesto.
> Is this worth considering when setting policy?
No. People can (and will) do anything in response to anything; maybe white nationalist groups will make Zuck their #1 enemy over this. You can't control the actions of other people, especially crazy people, so catering your policies to them seems absurd.
> For the sake of improving the quality of discourse, can you sense any legitimate concerns in what I'm saying, or do I seem to you like yet another ignorant racist, little different than those who might frequent Charlottesville rallies?
I don't really see many legitimate concerns arising from banning white nationalism from Facebook. As I've said multiple times, Facebook already bans other kinds of speech they disagree with. I get defending free speech is a thing, but Facebook is not the government and they can ban whatever speech they like. They don't control the entire Internet or even a majority of it, and they can't prevent you from hosting your content somewhere else, so... I just don't see what's being lost here, except white nationalist content on Facebook.
And even if they do go ahead and decide to ban other content, I mean, A) let's cross that bridge if we come to it and B) who cares? It's just Facebook, they don't control the entire Internet. Make another site if you want to discuss what they deplatform.
Your or my personal agreement on what the definitions should be are not the problem. The meaning has changed for only some users of the words, resulting in widespread misunderstanding, I would argue resulting in further (and completely unnecessary) political polarization. Words not having shared meanings seems sub-optimal to me.
> Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else
But no one knows what statement they're making because we no longer have a shared dictionary, so people resort to their imaginations.
> If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
This suggest the problem is my lack of ability to understand, when the problem is there is no longer a common definition. There are certainly multiple popular definitions, according to which political ideology you subscribe to.
> instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
It's not me who's "wringing my hands" - I'm not promoting or supporting any policy change, you are. I'm simply asking questions.
> Deplatforming is not censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations."
Well look at that, once again our definitions don't match. Care to share the URL for the authoritative source you're using?
> You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech.
As I said: there is a distinct difference between the First Amendment and the general principle of free speech. You only have a "guarantee" to free speech in the limited context of the first amendment.
> This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
I thought the principle behind your argument was the harm - maybe the principle is race after all?
> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
> Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
I certainly do, but I'm concerned about everything that could lead to radicalization. History is full of examples demonstrating the strange and complex behavior of individuals and civilizations. Are we over-simplifying this situation? Should we freely discuss such things with open minds?
> No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism
Completely agree, but is that all there is to it? Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
> If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
The tragedy is if this further inflames emotions, "righteously" or not, and someone shoots up another church. That's what I'm worried about.
> Yes, it's so. Read the manifesto.
The link I included sure didn't make this fellow sound like just another stereotypical redneck racist as you claim, at least my understanding of that stereotype. But never mind, let's once again not bother ourselves with messy details when vague stereotypes will suffice.
>>> They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
>> They might be right, they might be wrong, unlike you I make no claim to know. What if they are wrong, and censorship aggravates these already mentally unbalanced people even more, driving them to organize (perhaps in the physical world) underground where it's difficult to see what they're up to or thinking? Is this worth considering when setting policy?
> No.
Well then, this well answers my "Do you care?" questions as well.
> People can (and will) do anything in response to anything; maybe white nationalist groups will make Zuck their #1 enemy over this. You can't control the actions of other people, especially crazy people, so catering your policies to them seems absurd.
If everything is random, why even bother with policies like this, or any at all?
> I don't really see many legitimate concerns arising from banning white nationalism from Facebook.
I obviously disagree, but if you believe the reaction of extremists is not worth considering, at least you're being logically consistent.
> I just don't see what's being lost here, except white nationalist content on Facebook.
If any future negative reactions (in part due to this type of policy) of extremists are excluded from consideration, you are completely correct.
> who cares?
People attending a future church service might, if there is any validity to my belief that people aren't as simplistic as you think they are. But we'll never know for sure, because like you the media seems to prefer to not bother with messy details of why people commit atrocities when a simple stereotype works (and certainly sells more papers as an added bonus).
> Make another site if you want to discuss what they deplatform.
A perfectly fitting conclusion.
The only misunderstanding seems to be yours. We can clearly identify white nationalists as actual Nazis, no redefinition required.
> Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations.
No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
> maybe the principle is race after all?
The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
> Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
There are many examples in the news recently. Here's one I read just the other day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rh... White nationalist speech creates hate crimes; the correlation appears clear to me. Of course, it also seems logical to me without any sources, so sources are just a nice bonus.
> Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
Essentially your argument seems to boil down to: we shouldn't create good policies because crazy extremists might have bad reactions to them. But crazy extremists have bad reactions to everything. We should be trying to deplatform and deconvert extremists instead of catering to their sensitive tastes. If that offends them and causes them to lash out, that is unfortunate, but they'll do that anyway. At least if they do it to this there might be less of them in the future.
> If everything is random, why even bother with policies like this, or any at all?
While you can't control how people react to what you do, you can do what you believe is right and hope it has a good outcome in the future. Facebook apparently agrees with me.
a) With no standard definition of the phrases?
b) Some people may be able to, but can Facebook accurately and fairly (despite no standard accepted meaning of many terms) police speech (remember, we're not dealing with people wearing white hats at a rally, we're dealing with speech, which is subtle), at scale? Sure everyone can agree at the extremes, but when it's close to the middle, then it's complicated. It's like "I know pornography when I see it."
> No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/standing-against-hate/
"Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism on Facebook and Instagram, which we’ll start enforcing next week."
I'm not saying they don't have a right to do this, it is their platform after all. I'm not even saying that it is necessarily or certainly a bad idea. You and I disagreeing on this is fine and healthy. But how can you interpret "you can't say <x>" as not censorship? I asked you earlier for the definition of the word you're using, and you didn't reply. I ask again: please tell me the definition you're using for "censorship", with a link to the source.
> The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
No, that's the only thing the article is discussing. The HN discussion, and our thread in particular, are discussing broader principles of free speech and fairness, possible downsides of these types of decisions, etc.
>>> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
>> A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
> There are many examples in the news recently. Here's one I read just the other day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rh.... White nationalist speech creates hate crimes; the correlation appears clear to me.
"To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data (a different variable than our topic of conversation, but again, no need to bother ourselves with precision or details) to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred. We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally. Of course, our analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more hate crimes in the host county."
You can find a correlation in data for anything you want to support, see: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Now, stating that doesn't prove your claim is wrong, I'm just pointing out the one piece of evidence you finally provided is little more than an op-ed piece. We should be collecting more and better data on these things if they're important, so we can set evidence-based policy.
Erring on the side of caution (as Facebook is doing) is fine, but there's no need to tell lies in the process as far as I can see.
> Of course, it also seems logical to me without any sources, so sources are just a nice bonus.
This sentence explains this conversation, as well as the general state of political conversation in 2019: facts and evidence are considered completely optional.
> Essentially your argument seems to boil down to: we shouldn't create good policies because crazy extremists might have bad reactions to them.
No, that is one small point of my overall concerns (my "argument", if any, is that you won't provide any evidence for your claims, or assert that none is necessary when curtailing general free speech), and it's an important point. People are becoming incredibly politically polarized to the degree that it is causing strange behavior. Some people lose the ability to engage in logic & evidence based conversations on particular topics, others shoot up churches. Shit is pretty seriously fucked up and doesn't seem to be getting better. Being cautious and thoughtful about non-obvious risks seems like a good idea to me, not something to avoid.
> he's just going to come back with more circular bullshit.
Asking people to justify their claims, and pointing out falsehoods or logical errors in their responses, is "circular bullshit" now?
I clearly stated I am playing Devil's advocate.
I concede points where they are valid.
I make no (other than conversational) claims without backing them up, how many claims has OP made without providing evidence for?
The discussion is curtailment of free speech (the general principle, not the First Amendment - try to get someone to even admit there's a difference without changing the subject) - I am arguing that we better have very good reasons for it, supported by evidence. Fashionable popular opinion is not evidence.
If you remove "unalienable", then yes, that's correct. Future legislation and regulation could definitely change that.
You've already disproven your "that's pretty easy" note. Who defines "harm"? The goal posts seem to move damn near weekly on this. That's the problem that can't be solved as easily as you purport.
The day facebook bans advertising about abortion will be the day I believe that line.
It ends, as it always does (and must) with massive hypocrisy on the part of the arbitrary censor, since "harm" is so poorly defined that it ends up being replaced with "whatever seems fashionable today".
You are defending literal nazis. Their idea of speech is Christchurch. Deplatforming that is absolutely the correct move.
This whole conversation centers on the relationship between speech and action. Equating the two will confuse the discussion.
Kicking them off Facebook isn't anywhere close to that large of a response.
Based on numerous past incidents of corporate behavior (not specifically from Facebook) I do doubt a fair and unbiased application of such a standard. Politically we cannot even agree on what constitutes harm or even murder (abortion being an example of such disagreement). How then is it possible to fairly ban speech that encourages harm when we don't agree on what constitutes harm?
Conversely, to the extent that they are public and transparent (eg I think twitchy is pretty specific about feedback for content removal) people will game that information and either refine their content to fit within the letter of the ToS while spreading it as widely as possible, or seek to litigate the decisions depending on what's least costly.
I am a free market guy, so for me these companies ought to have the right to determine the parameters within which their users can operate on their service. However, with things such as EUCD and GDPR rules, introducing competitors to the established networks becomes harder and harder for each day, which only benefits the existing platforms. So when the platforms are biased and competition is hindered by red-tape and regulations, we cannot expect alternatives to popup that can compete with said entities.
All of this leads me to believe that things will only get worse as I don´t see a way out of this clusterfuck we´re in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
Edit: why the downvotes? :S
> We can see what definition is
"seeing the definition" just means seeing some flowery language which may or may not be the full truth when it comes to individual cases. If people don't pay attention to the fact that they don't actually know, and don't seem to care, who exactly is booted off these platforms and why, exactly and on a case by case basis, and just take the word of platforms like FB or Twitter for it, they're in for a rude awakening when they end up on the wrong end of it themselves.
The amazing achievement of not being a racist or an anti-vaxxer doesn't make up for the failure to clearly speak out against the hypocrisy of a company that on the hand hand fights democracies that want to protect citizens against tracking [0], to mention just one color in the spectrum of shit they're up to, while on the other hand bragging about how they're not evil. Facebook can do what they want, people and use their "services" all they want, and roll their eyes about "outrage over FB" all they want, but then they also need to own it.
What I have a difficulty understanding is how and who will define "violence". Inciting direct violence is one thing, but people like expanding definitions. Is expressing support for one state which wants to overthrow another state "violence"? Is supporting China (in some aspect) but which none the less persecutes some people, "violence"?
Is buying almonds violence because it deprives some people in some areas of California of municipal water violence?
What about suppressed minority groups in Sudan who oppose a regime, or likewise South Sudan? Are they proposing and promoting violence?
An uprising in Teheran, is that violence? Suppress it? Are they pro regime, are they anti-regime? Is it fluid, is it at times both? What do you do?
This gets very dicey very quickly.
Definitions are absolutely fluid, not least because the science of measuring and mapping such contagion in virtual spaces is currently in a fairly rudimentary state. We're building our technological infrastructure out much faster than we are developing an understanding of how it impacts our future.
Presumably this wouldn't be happening if not for the dozen or so mass shootings with oddly similar perpetrators in the past 5 years.
Why isn’t Facebook banning leftist propaganda when groups like Antifa regularly use it as justification for political violence?
This is a game, because it initially masquerades as using the definition of "harm" any reasonable person would use, while simultaneously working the other end to redefine and vastly expand the concept of "harm".
We're now supposed to recognize unpersoning, microaggressing, belittling, twitter-mentioning as harm, and it's naivete bordering on manipulative to try to and make the case that our understanding of harm will not continue to expand
The average person isn't exactly curious about different ideologies but when facebook and youtubes algorithms throw it in their face constantly? Probably something we want to fix.
I hope that you're right and that I'm completely wrong about this.
There are always disaffected people, but throwing this crap at them day in and day out for ad dollars is just throwing gasoline on a fire for a percentage of the insurance money.
How do you know? or are you confusing "alternative destinations" for facebook and twitter?
I think taxes should be higher.
Whoops, did I just encourage harming others?
Welp, there goes the Declaration of Independence.
I feel like maaaaaybe there's a few steps in between the two.
Awfully easy to answer questions like this by going straight to "Nazis" or "terrorists" or "child molesters," isn't it? When a complex social problem seems that obvious and straightforward to resolve, that's when you really need to challenge your own thought processes.
Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes?
So impotent that they never walked into a synagogue or mosque and shot up a bunch of people. Oh wait...
For example, if the U.S. government's tax revenues were much lower in the 1960's, would they still have invaded Vietnam? Perhaps not entering Vietnam would have saved far more lives than are lost to domestic mass-shootings.
My main point is simply that causal relationships between policies and (various definitions of) harm can be highly speculative and messy.
We went to war over it.
Should people be banned from advocating for or against such policies on Facebook? I mean, if one advocates for, it would hurt one set of people. If one advocated against, it would hurt another set of people. If you say we must raise taxes, you will be repugnant to Libertarians. If you say we must lower taxes, you will be repugnant to welfare state proponents. Should we just limit ourselves to posting cat pictures on Facebook? Nobody would disagree with cats, right? Right?
Leaving that aside, banning white nationalism does not prevent Facebook from banning other content it considers extremist in the future, regardless of what you see happening any time soon.
Weak meme, 2/10.
But they do. Not all of them in synagogues and mosques of course, some of them do it on stadiums, night clubs, buses, trains, buildings, and some use explosives, poisons, cars, etc. But adherents of all ideologies above committed acts of murder. So, by your logic, every adherent of such an ideology should be banned. Or just those that visit 8chan? It's hard to tell these days.
No doubt, explicit threats or advocacy/conspiracy to violence exist, and should not be tolerated.
However, there are countless complicated grey areas subject to interpretation and potential bias. Was Kathy Griffin advocating violence by holding up a mock Trump severed head? Is “Abortion stops a beating heart” a coded message to inspire violence against abortion doctors? What about “Eat the rich” or “The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire”?
My favorite edge case is this WKYK sketch, which is clearly satire, yet trivial to indict as an explicit call to unlawful violence: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA
How the heck are they going to deal with pro separatist or uzbekian socio-political issues?
What FB has realized and is realizing is how to play the PR game, because they have to.
----
And if that means getting rid of Nazis, more power to them.
How can it be consistent when some of the very same people that consider white nationalist speech as harmful encourage the spread of antifa's ideals?
I'd rather everyone feel free to share their ideals so I know who to avoid. It's going to happen anyway, and I'd rather it not be restricted to behind-closed-doors, so to speak.
The next would be maybe an argument of banning speech that _indirectly_ calls for physical harm, since that leaves room for interpretation. Calling for a white ethno-state indirectly calls for physical harm to all non-whites. Why? Because how the hell else are you going to move us out, other than by force? Are you planning to pay each of us $2 million to leave the country? Obviously not.
The third would be all other forms of hate speech (which arguably would cause even more debate).
There was plenty of videos of the NewZealand shooter still up on Brazilian facebook
It's affecting FB's bottom line.
White nationalism is in the news and on the rise in the US/Europe and therefore spooking advertisers who only really care what the pundits in US/Europe are talking about.
This soothes them over = money for FB.
My hope is that the algorithms and models developed for slowing the spread of White Nationalism will also work (down the road) for things like Hindu Nationalism, Chinese, etc.
Yes it undoubtedly is, but they only seem to care about it now.
I would love to see a more proactive approach, but unfortunately proactive approaches don't often generate profit.
Maybe Facebook should ban Hindutva organizing on their platform. That seems a perfectly reasonable position.
Rather, it is a business that bans speech based on whether or not such speech hurts its profit margins. Those advocates of free speech should realize that Facebook is not currently a platform for speech, but rather a mass publishing company whose sole purpose is to sell adspace to marketers.
We should not expect a private company to serve the public interest out of benevolence. Moreover, it is worrisome that Facebook feels okay to ban speech -- again not based on some internal moral compass -- but rather on the whims of advertisers. It's fine to cheer when those advertisers agree with you and speech you dislike is banned, but the market is fickle, so all the people cheering this action shouldn't be shocked when Facebook bans speech you think should be there because some business doesn't like it.
> If you think profit motive is inherently bad regardless of any outcome, then fine, but that should be the focus of the argument.
That is not at all what I claimed. All I suggested was that we shouldn't be cheering the banning of speech based off the profit incentive since there is no clear alignment in the general case between profit and ethics.
That can be true. But any other concept that influences decision-making can also be fickle, e.g. "what the company thinks is moral." In fact, I would be more concerned if I saw a company doing something that seemed bad for their bottom line but was motivated by what the company's supposed moral values, because I know that the bottom line is always by definition an existential concern of the company, whereas its supposed moral values are not.
(obvious sarcasm, apparently not)
It sounds like you have legitimate concerns about further content that should be banned and I fully support this and further efforts to draw Facebook's attention to the issue.
They're not. Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market.
I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and [...]
Well, that's something they should be addressing too and I agree it has significant negative effects. At least now you know who to address at Facebook about it. I know other people have been making that exact complaint to Facebook, such as members of the Dalit caste who have been on the receiving end of violence from Hindu extremists with very reactionary views on caste.
Facebook has 1 billion + users, which means the majority are necessarily not American. Now I don't know where those other users are from, but white nationalism is not the largest source of terrorism related killings worldwide, even if it is a problem in america. The fact is that white nationalism is -- for whatever reason -- seen as something worse than all the other forms of racism, and that perception is itself racist. There are two forms of such racism, either straight up dislike of white people or an infantilization of the racism of other cultures that absolves them of their own racism (well they didn't know better...)
Hope this helps.
You aren't likely to find much media coverage of this question from sources within Myanmar for reasons that I hope will be obvious.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/12/study-shows-t...
What they say is changing is that in the specific case of white nationalism and separatism the overlap with white supremacy is nearly total to the point that they cannot be meaningfully separated.
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I'm not saying it should be banned, but "American pride" being an important part of people's identity is really part of the problem.
So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool.
Guess the same about the two halves of Italy.
I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.
I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".
I'm reminded of the Sargon v Richard Spencer debate here. Sargon's line of attack was essentially this: You advocate for an ethnostate, people will not react well to the non-violent policies you publicly advocate to bring this about, thus there will be violence, therefore your rhetoric is violent. Even if you approve this line of reasoning, you have to admit that it can be applied to any separatist movement anywhere in the world.
Nor should they. I helped run a large, active web forum for years. We found general rules and moderator discretion were far more valuable than a list of 800 different "you can't do foo" specific rules, because the bad actors tie up all your time lawyering about the specifics.
e: But it's not an arbitrary exercise of power when I do it!
And in your rush to snark you skipped the part that calls out "American pride and Basque separatism" as important things to leave alone.
Except you can't, which is why for example "Islamophobia" is a thing. Things that should be ideologically separate are inevitably tied back to race/ethnicity, because nobody seems to know how to separate race/ethnicity from ideology in debate. Just listen to how much flak Sam Harris gets on the subject.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.
Of course FB as a private company is entitled to censor whatever they want.
In a general sense, I don't really understand the need, as usually in social networks like Facebook people only see the stuff they want to see. There are lots of tools to facilitate your own filter bubble, and people use them. So the worry that "ideology x is spreading via Facebook" is somewhat unfounded in my opinion.
The whole "you can go make your own platform, facebook/google/twitter/youtube doesn't owe you anything" excuse is bullshit. Look at what happened when people DID try to make their own platform with Gab. They were DDOSed and people uploaded child porn and then reported it to try to get the whole site shut down to prevent people who were silenced elsewhere from talking there too. They're behaving more like the nazis than the white nationalists!
Cheering on authoritarian censorship of things you don't want to hear doesn't make you virtuous it makes you a coward.
The solution to bad speech isn't censorship, it's better speech:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
-Martin Niemöller
If not, then why not?
First they came for the Nazis. And I did not speak up because I was not a Nazi.
Then they came for the pedophiles. And I did not speak up because I was not a pedophile.
Then they didn't come for me, because I'm not morally reprehensible, and life was good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatism_in_the_United_Kingd...
I was annoyed that instagram has now become just reshares of twitter and facebook posts that spread the same message without being indexed as easily as the text versions are
Hope they don't go after things I like and target my accounts next! I know how the limitations of their process and lack of appeals or justification.
Also easy enough to find my friends on group chats elsewhere
I would have very different views if these were state run systems, but fortunately that's not relevant here.
Banning speech can and typically has been harmful, especially when governments get involved with doing it. No one is ignorant about this fact. But we're collectively discovering that not doing anything about what can be published and said is just about as harmful, if not more so in concentrated circumstances. There will be irrational people who act irrational on fundamental erroneous information. It's a practical matter, not an ideological one. White supremacist ideas aren't up for debate. There isn't a point in debating them. And the people adhering to these ideals aren't looking for a debate and most definitely won't consider other ideas. You can't debate rationally with someone who hasn't arrived at their position in a rational manner.
There's also something else at play here. We're seeing new systems that replaced old ones re-implement "lost" functionality they thought wasn't needed. Turns out it was, in fact, needed. The old media empire of yesteryear was always subject to regulations around the content they spread.
If bitcoin is an exercise in why we need financial regulations, facebook and other social media networks are an exercise in why we need content and publishing regulations.
So I haven't done anything. There's no need to start an epistemological bankrupt conversation here. Or to engage in philosophical waxing about intellectual curiosity surrounding view points that serve no purpose.
Every decision is discrimination.
> As if people with different shades of skin being nationalists are nicer than white nationalists.
A “white nationalist” isn't “a nationalist with white skin” but “an adherent to the ideology of white nationalism”.
You can be a white-skinned nationalist and not be a white nationalist.
> Is it 1984 already or we still have some time?
1984 didn't feature discrimination against either white nationalists or white-skinned nationalists, so it seems unrelated to your complaint.
1984 is mentioned as a reference to the dystopian world of propaganda and Facebook / Google are quickly turning into corporate Ministry of Truth.
No, white nationalism is not “nationalism” + “white preference”. It's closer to nationalism around a concept of a white nation.
> but we have guys from ICGJC and other afrosupremacist groups, etc. Why not ban them all?
Because we don't see scores of bodies piled up motivated by the message of those groups.
If your argument is that "they don't have right to access the platform", you are acting ignorant when you know there are only handful of platforms on internet.
The next step would be blocking DNS registrations of websites whose content you don't agree with, oh wait there is entire country which does this and you disagree with that country's rules too.
Your continued participation in said platforms ensures that they will remain the "only" platforms on the internet.
There is absolutely nothing guaranteeing you a right to have a private entity host your information, especially when you're paying absolutely nothing for them to do so.
> The next step would be blocking DNS registrations of websites whose content you don't agree with
Slippery slope fallacy incoming!
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
First of all, why white nationalism, how about black or yellow nationalism, are they ok?
Second thing, they will ban "separatism". Really? Are you FB guys really going to ban Kurds who want their own land, are you going to ban Palestinians who want their own land? If FB existed 30 years ago, would it ban anty-communistic opposition in central and eastern Europe which was fighting to get separated from Soviet Union? What the about Scots, what if they want to separate from UK? Will they be banned? Same with Catalans?
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
Very specifically, it points out that they are not just "doing one", they are bringing one in line with a broader policy that is applied to many different types of hate. So I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make.
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion
I'm just saying this has always been selectively enforced at FB, the reason they are speaking to white nationalism now is because of recent current events and they are in the spotlight. I feel this is purely this is a convenient PR campaign.
Not that it's an easy topic to control or address all the platforms have issues with this, but FB is being opportunistic for press.
This is the problem with this type of censorship, who get's to decide what is defined as "hate" speech. Facebook, who is run by it's own set of individuals with their own set of beliefs. It is their platform, their servers, they can do what they want, but Facebook as a company should not be defining what constitutes "hate" because we obviously have a stratification of morals in this country and what could be considered hate to one person could be considered perfectly charitable to another.
They are all valid topics to discuss civilly, but some believe that even having a discussion is racist/homophobic/sexist. My fear is that it will move beyond what we've legally defined as hate speech and into "don't hurt people's feelings" territory.
But this has nothing to do with free speech. If I tell someone something, they have no obligation to broadcast what you said. Why should Facebook act differently?
I don't like that they're targeting such a specific group. I think we should be on the lookout for real racism, and this is certainly an example of that.
I wonder if they can re-purpose this technology to re-direct people who post content critical of Facebook and social media to pro-Facebook propaganda.
edit: I'll note here that the above should be read as tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, but I do think the question is worthwhile when considered in earnest by those who support nazi speech on private platforms.