Facebook’s community standards censorship has far-reaching consequences | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s community standards censorship has far-reaching consequences

watilo.com

73 pointscorywatilo28 comments

To me, this just shows why it's important to build communication channels that you own (e.g. podcast, mailing list, etc) if you want to have unimpeded access to your audience. Today it's a censorship thing, tomorrow it'll be somebody deciding to erect a toll booth between you and your followers. Social platforms should just be the cherry on top of your foundational communications strategy.

Totally. The issue is that my customers use Facebook and Instagram to share their portfolios. While my business isn't built on Facebook, my customers use it, and when they can't, it comes back on me even if it isn't my fault.

I guess you could say I could police my content better, but with the moving target about what's not allowed, that's an expensive proposition.

How can you own any online communication channel? Your domain registrar could decide your domain is abusive and terminate it. Your hosting platform could decide it doesn’t like the politics of your site / business / whatever and refuse to host it. Your advertising provider could decide it doesn’t like your ad content and refuse to serve it. Your billboard vendor could decide to cave to local government if there are complaints about your billboard. The local police could push you out of a public space where you try to hand out flyers. Your landlord could not allow you to renew your lease because they privately don’t like your politics and just invent any outwardly permissible fake reason for it.

We live in a world where you’re not allowed to exist unless you (publicly profess to) believe what one of two prevailing political parties dictates is allowable, yet at the same time we pretend like you do have free speech but just have to live with social consequences of it.

An unfortunate consequence of the private-only internet. If you want to send out newsletters about how right-handed people are scum and the cause of all earth's problems the postal service isn't allowed to stop you. If you want to have conference calls about how much you and your friends hate right-handed people the phone company has to let you. It's part of the social and legal contract that neutral carriers are not responsible for user-generated content. The internet doesn't have that. Because YouTube has the legal ability to censor your "Righties are Wrongies" videos the public demands that they do so, and as non-neutral private companies they will do whatever makes them the most profit.

You don't need full vertical integration of the communication channel. You just need enough diversification between the domain registrars, hosting platforms, ad providers etc. so that you are not at the mercy of a single entity to reach your audience. It's always been a terrible idea to rely on a single company for all your needs.

How does not one of their well paid engineers flag that this will obviously happen when implementing these features?

They don't care.

Judge systems for their results, not their motives.

"Judge systems for their results, not their motives."

There's a third important concept: the process.

In this case, the process is pretty horrible -- the article's author has no idea what was wrong, and therefore can't remedy it. Similarly, since he doesn't know what's wrong, we can't criticize the process in any specific way, so the process can't be improved.

We don't disagree :)

engineers implement what they are told to do, and decisions are made in upper management level. very likely this direction came from very high levels and then this implementation is trickled down to relevant departments / developers.

I can see this happening. This is one of the biggest reasons I think product development needs to be close to the engineers. They understand it and understand the implications more than someone abstracted away from it. In an ideal world the engineers would also _care_ for the product too.

They are overpaid do perform tasks as directed.

The engineer you're relying upon is not the engineer the tech industry optimizes for. The tech industry wants engineers who are not overly concerned with how the business will utilize the fruits of their labor. Ask difficult questions or push back against management too hard, and you're on your way out the door before you finish saying "With all due respect..."

It's hard to imagine if you haven't experienced it yourself. You think it should work that way. You push for it, but unless you fall into the right, group you may as well be a fart in the wind.

All of this content control will be an interesting social experiment. I would like to see a clear hypothesis though, and ways we can judge whether this is a success or failure.

(I'm using the term "content control" to mean something that kind of feels like censorship but not done with laws.)

Even if the made a nice clear hypothesis, they won't have a control group. So the hypothesis would be meaningless.

Real life rarely gives you as much control as you'd like. You can't simply opt out of making decisions; even choosing not to do anything is a decision. You take your best guess based on your best interpretation of what knowledge you've managed to accumulate, but many of the most important decisions you make will always be based on insufficient information. That's true at a personal level as well as the social level.

I agree that it couldn't be a rigorous double-blind.

But the point is to make some kind of prediction about the results a policy will have, so that you can later reflect on what actually does happen.

Hopefully this is deep enough in a thread not to be in the way, but I noticed in some other threads that you were getting pushback on your username. Could you possibly clarify, and perhaps add something to your profile, whether that is "My name is really Jeff Davis" or "I'm a proud Southerner" or whatever the reason might actually be?

Bets on what the content was that got foliohd banned?

I would recheck logs and content hosted on the website and its subdomains

Maybe one of the other users has something really out there being shared in another subdomain

(Or it might not be a customer - but someone who found a vulnerability and is hosting questionable content unbeknownst to him)

His portfolio website arguably competes with Facebook, where artists sometimes have pages for their work. I doubt this case is a deliberate attempt to strangle a competitor in the crib (although I'm sure this does happen), but if Facebook were actually scared of anti-trust enforcement I think their whole blocking process would be a little less draconian.

If Hillary had won none of this would have been a problem. No claims of “election interference”, no one would have accused Facebook of being “used to manipulate the voters”. Life would have been happy for Facebook, Twitter and other entities.

It seems to me that this guy is unaware of the hundreds of other people who get blocked on Facebook platforms daily for years now. Otherwise he'd have already drawn the conclusion to leave all those platforms instead of begging Facebook to care. Because they obviously don't.

Literally anything Facebook does will have far reaching consequences. Edit: What I mean to say is that maybe we could choose a better title.

That's why it should do as little as possible.

That also has far reaching consequences.

the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you, doing as little as possible would make cease to be Facebook

> the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you

Disagree; it's to hoover up your personal information to use for advertising.

> make cease to be

Sounds like a great idea!

If someone can suggest a more narrowly scoped title, preferably using representative language from the article, we can change it.

I thought of something like "Facebook blocks site with user-generated content" but I'm not sure it isn't misleading.

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