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Comment by Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 | Hacker News Reader

What is their end goal here? I certainly don’t want Mark Zuckerberg or any of his employees making decisions on what is considered newsworthy, especially on really important stuff like this. Even if you don’t personally like what is being said, the fact that it _is_ being said - and who is saying it - is an important point for people to know.

The next time, it may be your own opinions that they’ll censor: Facebook has far more reach, and has much less journalistic pretensions than any of Murdoch’s properties... you really really don’t want them to start getting involved in politics.

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Just to drive the point home, what would have happened if a facebook moderator had decided to remove the initial video of Floyd's murder because, hey, the official reports said he was doing something wrong and the video had the potential to incite violence? I'm fairly sure we would not be having the discussion we're having today, and we would have lost the opportunity to improve our democracy.

Exactly. FB is just a platform and should not be a publisher/curator. Otherwise, it must be made responsibly for every post on it's platform.

Isn't the context also important for people to know?

Like, if the President of the United States is saying something that's factually incorrect and might cause people e.g. not to register to vote (because they expect every Californian will be getting a ballot), is that context not also significant?

Or, hypothetically -- but really if you think at this point that this is a stretch, come on -- if Trump claims without evidence on November 3 that he was the victim of massive voter fraud and the election was stolen, and calls for his supporters to take up arms against their state and local governments, should that be broadcast without context or commentary?

It all comes down to who you trust to get the "correct" information from. Elected officials or corporations?

This isn't about Trump. We have a robust mechanism to remove elected officials - not corporations.

Facebook should provide the platform and stop there. When they act as publishers and start editorialising or adding "platform opinions" to the user generated content, they can rightly be asked why they endorse everything else on their site that isn't "edited" or "added to".

We need to think real hard about what we want in 5 years and beyond from now... not just what we want now. Breaching the divide of platform and publisher for anything beyond light moderation to keep the platform usable, no matter how well intentioned, is bound to have a devastating result on future political expression.

Nice idealism. But human beings have trouble managing that kind of platform. Every idiot's lies look just as legitimate as expert opinion. Other idiots can search for confirmation of their biases and find any number of hits that way.

Call it what you like; we're not coping very well with unrestricted dissemination of disinformation. Folks have gamed it at the highest levels.

Aren't zuck and his company made of humans? What magic powers do they have to suddenly curate things accurately and deem the destiny of mankind? I have trouble following what you are trying to say. Maybe you are asking for all social media to be shutdown altogether.

You made all that up. I asked for nothing. Ridicule is unnecessary and misplaced.

Funny how folks get defensive when criticism of their addiction is put forward. You can always tell.

And you still haven't told us what your solution is. It's easy to criticize. "it sucks" . ok, so?

Not smart enough to fix all mankinds ills. Just noticing, we're addicted and its not going well.

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