Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook is sometimes in a difficult position. But, with respect, I don't think it's correct to say that it's the fault of their critics for putting them in a dilemma.

Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways. https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680

That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are today by having the best intentions all the time.

But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

> Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.

> Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways

A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.

> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.

> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too ignorant, too emotional, too irrational, and too hateful. If you want to find something bad on Facebook, you will succeed, because everybody is there, and this is just how we are. Turn back the clock and you'll find ethnic hatred spread through private Whatsapp messages, bullying on Myspace, ignorance in chain email, disingenuous appeals to emotion in yellow journalism, and hysteria in a mob whipping itself into a lynching frenzy in a literal public square. The platforms have changed hundreds of times, the people have not.

What amazes me is that critics of social media don't see this -- despite their vaunted liberal arts degrees, they act as if Zuckerberg invented human flaws in 2004, and pretend that he has the power to get rid of them with a technological solution. Destroy Facebook tomorrow, and the people will just move somewhere else. The exact same problems will reappear, because the people are the same.

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