Hacker News Reader

Comment by carterklein13 | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand about all of this because I'm simply not in the know, so hopefully somebody can explain it in more detail, is this: Facebook regularly monitors posts for inappropriate content such as this. This seems more of an active "we want to leave this up" than a "we want to take this down" type of post, correct?

I have trouble forming an opinion on whether or not I agree with Facebook or with Twitter on the whole matter because I'm not well-versed with their previous T&C, and what would typically happen for a tweet like this from someone who isn't POTUS. If someone could provide some resources, that would be great and useful to myself and hopefully others who want to get a fuller understanding of this issue.

View on HN

From Zuckerberg: "I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open." - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/facebook-staff-angry--zucker...

It's a perfectly reasonable to keep up things that are a matter of public record like this. I find people walking out over their employer not censoring enough childish and indicative of a generation that hasn't learned the dangers of censorship, caring more about moral grandstanding than freedom of the press or information otherwise being accessible. It comes off as especially pretentious doing it in the middle of all the protests over the very serious and real issues with the police, contrasted with Facebook employees with cushy jobs being mad their boss didn't do enough to curate the platform to their liking.

> "I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open."

That’s pretty fair. But, will that set a precedence of violent posts?

I can say that I see violent posts on facebook every day, and often ones inciting violence. I still see absoloutely no reason to take this stuff down. There is a comment section that people can use to share their thoughts and views, and to me this is the place where posts should be getting called out for any issues a viewer has with them. Putting a sensitive content warning on something is acceptable, but in a way that provides no moral opinion on what is behind the content warning.

To remove these types of posts due to a moral opinon is a slippery slope to so much more censorship. If facebook starts actively taking posts down and writing their own reality they should not be protected under section 230.

From the president? Maybe, but I'd still think the value of the public record is more important here. From regular users it would still be disallowed.

Instead of this murky de-facto system of different rules for public officials and regular users, maybe we need to have it codified. Accounts owned by public officials have their activity publicly recorded (with edit/deletion attempt history, etc) and with something in the UI indicating it's such a type of account, and a link to a disclaimer visible near all the posts explaining that the post might have TOS violations and doesn't necessarily serve as an example of acceptable behavior for other users. Such protection would go away when their term is over and they'd be able to be banned for past posts (but everything remaining visible), maybe reopened if they're in a position again later on.

I think this is a sensible and easily-enforceable solution. Facebook and Twitter are necessities today and oftentimes (for better or for much, much worse) are where history is being written. I think using these platforms as a highly important person geopolitically should dictate different rules than me, who has like 400 friends from the decade or so I've been on the platform, 90% of whom I haven't spoken to in years.

I wish twitter hadn't opened this whole can of worms. I thought their previous policy of basically saying 'yes, different rules do apply to the president, so we're just not going to delete his posts' was pretty good.

But where does the contrary position go, if you follow it through to the end? Say you delete the presidents post, so he goes and says the same thing at a press conference, do you now delete all the posts from news networks carrying his remarks? Deplatforming the president of the united states is just not a thing that is physically possible.

There's a middle option, and it's the one Twitter has taken: Allow the post to remain, but put a disclaimer on it.

You could even take the extra step to allow the original posts on the determined-to-be-bad topic to exist, but not allow sharing, commenting on, or otherwise interacting with and spreading the post.

I'm not even sure the T&C even matters _that_ much. Facebook is a private platform, they can likely take anything down they like.

This is a "moral" judgement call really, about the content of the post. Twitter/Jack decided one way, FB/Mark the other (was cross posted on both platforms).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com