Yellow Vest Facebook group with 350k members frozen on European election day | Hacker News Reader

Yellow Vest Facebook group with 350k members frozen on European election day

wsws.org

78 pointsmmoez31 comments

It is worth noting that FB made an agreement with the French government last year to directly cooperate with them on filtering and controlling spread of shared content:

> Zuckerberg’s meeting with Macron on May 10 reviewed the first half of a year-long collaboration—the first of its kind with any government in the world—in which French officials have been invited directly into Facebook’s content “moderation” offices to analyze the material censored from users’ news feeds. Because what shows up in a given user’s news feed is determined by Facebook’s own algorithms, the company and the state can control the spread of material.

This is actually normal, and is done in a lot of countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence. According to this, France acts "on the Saturday before the Sunday election; polling silence included"

> This is actually normal, and is done in a lot of countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence. According to this, France acts "on the Saturday before the Sunday election; polling silence included"

The yellow vest aren't a political party, they may have individuals running but that page wasn't one of a political party, they aren't even an organisation. This is purely Facebook enforcing political censorship to please the French government, there is nothing normal about it.

People are not forced to stop talking about politics on a public forum the day of the elections, that's complete bullshit.

It would be like saying, that people gathering into a bar on election day are barred from talking about politics. There is absolutely no such law that mandates that in France.

So please explain us what is normal about it again?

> People are not forced to stop talking about politics on a public forum the day of the elections, that's complete bullshit.

They actually are in some European countries. France included.

EDIT: Link to the law in question in the official site for FRance with English translation:

"From the day before the election at midnight, it is forbidden to distribute or have distributed newsletters, circulars and other documents.

From the eve of the poll at midnight, it is also forbidden to broadcast or cause any message that has the character of electoral propaganda to be disseminated by any means of communication to the public by electronic means."

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticl...

> They actually are in some European countries. France included.

No there is none in France. Discussing politics isn't the same as campaigning.

And again, your "edit" changes nothing to what I'm saying, the law you quoted does not bar people from discussing politics, it bars candidates and their supporters from promoting their candidates or their parties, the yellow vests are not a political party.

A Facebook group exists in a meaningful grey area between "discussion" and "publication". To argue otherwise is wilfully obtuse.

It's not restricted to political parties, it's more generally defined to counteract any form of propaganda during the hours leading to the election. I agree it's still ethically dubious to apply it to discussions. They should have set the group to private.

I disagree.

French law states:

"A partir de la veille du scrutin à zéro heure, il est également interdit de diffuser ou de faire diffuser par tout moyen de communication au public par voie électronique tout message ayant le caractère de propagande électorale." [Article L49 of the Code Electoral]

I.e. it is illegal to disseminate or to have disseminated any "electoral propaganda" message through any electronic communication mean from the Saturday before polling day (which always takes place on a Sunday).

Any Facebook post, tweet, email, SMS text, etc which content is aimed at influencing the poll is thus illegal and it is not hard to understand why they blocked that group during the weekend.

"Tout message ayant le caractère de propagande électorale".

Tu vas devoir prouver que la page Facebook des gillets jaunes diffusait des messages ayant "le caractère de propagande électorale", en premier lieu, d'une. Il n'est pas interdit de discuter politique sur un forum le jour même de l’élection.

Il n'y a aucune loi en France interdisant les gens de discuter politique le jour du scrutin. Il est interdit aux candidats de faire campagne.

propagande électorale =/= propagande politique.

La différence est évidence.

What are people going to discuss on a Yellow vest Facebook group on an election weekend?

How is "political propaganda" different from "electoral propaganda" on an election weekend?

You're obviously in bad faith here.

My argument is intellectual honesty and the law in all its glaring clarity.

> You're obviously in bad faith here.

Look at you resorting to personal attacks since you have no other argument, mixing up two very different things: political discussion and campaigning. The former isn't outlawed the day of the election.

Well some candidates where affiliated with the yellow vest.

Different countries have different norms around political speech. Report at 11.

That's what Google execs said to justify building a censored Chinese search engine.

You can fit a few semi trucks in the gap between France’s political norms and China’s. Comparing the two is just silly.

Furthermore, if you’re positing that France is wrong in some absolute sense to do this, all you’re doing is just imposing your own conceptions of political norms into some other culture, which has historically worked out very poorly.

A ban on political campaigning is very different from banning speech on politics in general.

No, it’s really not with such politicized Facebook groups. In fact access to any medium where one’s opinion can get distributed to unreasonable number of consumers should be banned. Contemplate your choice on your own.

Agreed. The irony of it all makes me really wonder: is the yellow vest leadership really that stupid to not know they would be throttled before the elections? No, they are led by expert manipulators that are playing a zerosum game -- if some uneducated person cements their belief that they are being silenced by Facebook unreasonablly that's a win. And if you know the laws you can shrug off the lie.

Welcome to the era of zerosum politics.

The more I think about it, this makes sense. No last minute Meme should sway your vote or trigger action. One should know at least a day in advance what they are voting for. OTOH it is sensorship.

What I'd like to see is if there's any other social media pages on the other side of the political spectrum that have been blocked.

Does anybody know if this effected other FB groups? Were any other political groups silenced around this time in France?

There's a Yellow Vest Canada group on Facebook that is in full-on tinfoil hat conspiracy mode (wildfires in Alberta are being set by Muslims, stuff like that; see https://twitter.com/theBurlyChef/status/1133592129639313409 ). I wouldn't be surprised if the use of a European group to spread disinformation or even promote violence caused this to happen.

These rapid growing movements seldom have any requirements to join and allow the spread of all kinds of misinformation really well.

Another group will pop up in x weeks and the facebook groups will have people doubting vaccines, blaming immigrants, blaming the current government, and as an average user you can't sort who's just an angry middle aged person or a russian bot.

Actually in France, the government has been way more often caught lying about the yellow vests than the opposit.

I haven't heard much about this - care to elaborate?

One case: https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/02/french-government-claims... There were others, but I'm too lazy to search. I remember seeing one other at least. Never seen any fake news problem with yellow vest. Usually Lemonde is prompt to denounce them.

Never seen any fake news problem with yellow vest.

That's just outright laughable.

Here's a 20 page report detailing how the yellow vest groups have been flooded by fake news, presumably by foreign agents.

https://avaazimages.avaaz.org/Report%20Yellow%20Vests%20FINA...

You can be sure where ever there's angry people in the world Russia will be there to help fan the flames.

There's a lesson to be learned here and noboby lerns it every time this happens. They should have been using Discourse or something else rather than being at the mercy of facebook. France also has some draconian telecom laws. Like the requirement for obtaining a license to operate a public WiFi AP.

I'm sure there just be more to this story. World socialist web site doesn't seem like a particularly trustworthy source.

It's not a trustworthy site, but I can't find any mainstream news sites covering this.

There's a https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/technology/facebook-franc... which has some background on the French Facebook group though.

Yeah, very generic title, full of trash articles.

Seems like an outlet for disinformation itself.

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