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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

I don't fully understand why people think Facebook should be policing content, yet no-one thinks the phone company should delete SMS messages that are spreading misinformation, or the postal service should destroy false mail etc.

It it because Facebook makes it much easier to share something with a wide audience? Is it because "the algorithm" means Facebook has more responsibility than if it were a simple chronological feed?

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Facebook alters and manages the information flow to drive its commercial agenda. When it started doing that it lost the defence of being a neutral distribution platform like the mail service.

But people clearly want to see what's popular in their own bubble. Facebook just gives people what they want.

Like heroin dealers? Because people want it doesn't mean that it can be part of a stable society.

At this point, deciding what is or isn't part of a stable society, is just anyone's opinion. We don't have that much science describing which types of information are making society stable or not, we can't even tell those types apart and we don't have any science showing that living under censorship is better for society. So comparing the popularity of fake news with heroin is a stretch.

Why are we focusing on the platform anyway? We know who doctored the video, we know who published it to facebook... why are we not punishing the real origin?

I don't think the "data addiction" angle has much to do with the problem that is being discussed here.

The algorithm is probably the biggest element of it, they are already deciding what you are going to see and what you'll not see, so they put themself in the position of being a lot like an editor.

On top of that a phone call and an sms are 1 to few (mostly 1 to 1), facebook posts are 1 to many, this makes the damage exponentially greater...

Yeah, but a personal Wordpress website also is 1-to-many. Where will this end?

Facebook is a monopoly. There is an impossible inertia to starting a Facebook competitor because they have the network effect on their side (not to mention the money). Their monopoly is basically the same as rail monopolies, only on the social connections between people. As another user said here, they should be required to provide basic interoperability between competing social networks and to be able to transfer your account and data to a competitor. Kind of like a Federalized model. Then Facebook would have to compete on features, not simply relying on the monopoly of "this is where all of my friends are". AT&T is required to interoperate with T-Mobile, etc. The same should be true for Facebook. Trying to equate Facebook and a single WordPress site is just a slippery slope fallacy.

But you’re criminally responsible if you use your personal Wordpress site to host illegal content, or use it to facilitate a crime. Facebook would say they aren’t criminally responsible for how their users use their site, because they’re just a common carrier. However they also want to exert a huge amount of editorial control over the content, which could be described as having your cake and eating it too.

By “you are criminally responsible” you mean “Wordpress is criminally responsible”? I don’t think the analogy makes sense the other way.

If you host your own Wordpress site, and use it to publish illegal content, then you are criminally responsible. Facebook have immunity from being held liable for the content published on their platform granted by the telecommunications decency act:

>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The party who publishes the content is liable, not the service that distributes it.

Often not discussed when this law comes up, is that it has a Good Samaritan clause:

>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

The question is whether Facebook, etc... are publishers of content, or mere distributors of content that others publish. Facebook will tell you that they are distributors of content. Their opponents will tell you that the editorial control they exert over their platforms is beyond the scope of the Good Samaritan clause of the law.

I think both, there is a point where increases in the ease of doing something signifies a categorical change in the activity, and since the algorithm is meant to drive engagement without thought to harm to Facebook's benefit people may think that they have some sort of responsibility to reconsider that algorithm, and mitigate the harm.

FYI, you actually can report mail fraud (including some chain letters) to the post office [1].

[1] https://www.uspis.gov/report/

Yes, the algorithm makes all the difference. I've missed out on two friends who were expecting children now, even though they posted it on Facebook, yet I see all kinds of conspiracy crap from my closest relatives. If this was done through mass SMS this would be different.

You dobn't have to remove the content either, lower the priority of that content dramatically compared to content about family updates. If Facebook is supposed to be about connecting people, stop the radical from using it as a cheap publishing outlet. If Facebook is a news publishing platform Mark Zuckergberg is the editor in charge. He has to pick a side because it's clear this is not sustainable.

People aren't calling for FB to start policing their content, they've been doing that since forever. FB has never been a neutral platform.

if the postal service could look at people's response to mail and then intentionally mail out copies of popular mail to more people, then this comparison would make sense

tl;dr: yes, it's "the algorithm"

Facebook (and Youtube et al) have chosen not to be content-agnostic distribution platforms (unlike the postal service and SMS). They perform a variety of editorial functions to curate content and provide recommendations with the objective of maximizing engagement and hence advertising impressions that they can sell. This is popularly known as "the algorithm".

Given that these platforms have chosen to selectively display content for profit, many people believe that they should have some sort of responsibility for the editorial decisions they make.

Facebook isn't an editor, though, it's a curator. You use them interchangably but I think there's a crucial difference. An editor modifies to inject their own standards into the work. A curator just includes or disincludes as-is.

Facebook does modify content at the level of the feed; first it includes sponsored posts, second it promotes posts to people leading them to promote them to others.

Curating on a fine grained enough level, you are not only an editor but even a story teller. You can make a narrative only quoting other people and it has been done many times in books and movies.

That this story is driven only by an advanced self-adjusting Skinner box to maximize advertiser revenue, is very weird. You never expect sci-fi to be so mundane when it becomes reality, but it always is.

But "the algorithm" is impartial. Editorialized content implies there's a message being driven.

The selection of the algorithm is not impartial. Algorithms are chosen to maximize some quantity for the benefit of the corporation.

Impartial as in it's not treating certain types of content differently. It's one thing if "the algorithm" decided to push (or censor) an anti-Pelosi agenda across the board, another if it pushes anti-Pelosi content to people who already are anti-Pelosi.

The entire point of a content algorithm is that it handles different content differently.

Regardless, the selection of the algorithm is not impartial. Content is pushed up or down to maximize engagement or whatever metric Facebook has decided it wants to maximize.

"People" don't. I don't think social media companies should be policing anything. They should be agnostic platforms.

It's the establishment and the media/news companies that are demanding facebook censor according to their liking.

And what of "dirty tricks". There are "dirty tricks" in political ads/content all over TV, newspapers, radio, etc. Hell, CNN/NYTimes and much of the media outright colluded with Hillary and the Democratic party. Foxnews backed Trump.

If "dirty tricks" is this upsetting, then we might as well shut down all media.

I for one think it's outrageous that the USPS delivers so much unwanted and dangerous spam mail.

A huge waste of resources too. If the price of recycling, cost of growing and cutting down trees, carbon emissions from driving spam, etc aren’t factored into the cost then we’re all paying for it.

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