Facebook content policies tweaked over time to accommodate POTUS
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Twitter’s attempts, although idealistic, are a complete failure. Some tweets that are sanctioned are far less harmful than others that aren’t. Some tweets that are allowed are outright lies. Inserting Jack and his buddies as the arbiters of truth is not going to work. And frankly, I don’t want the Twitter exec team to tell me what I should believe or see.
I understand that there is more pressure on Zuck to follow. And he may very well have to bend to the outrage of people even though it makes no sense.
I get that there’s a core question of “what even is harmful?” that many will debate but “I know it when I see it” was the answer for the debate over obscenity and it broadly worked for most people. Sometimes a best effort is better than an endless debate over an final answer.
ASIDE: It occurs to me that the kinds of discussions being had in the modern era, have their counterparts from earlier times. The arguments for and against the freedom to publish holocaust denialism has strong parallels to today's disagreements around freedom of speech, though they clearly predate social media networks. Interestingly, though global approaches to holocaust denialism (in the west) range from strong disapproval to outright bans, the strain of thought has continued to survive, albeit in far lower numbers. Would those numbers be vastly different in a world where those ideas were more freely permitted to flourish?
I personally believe that inoffensive* content does not deserve policing. However, content that strays outside the bounds of common decency, probably needs to be censored. If a political campaign started advocating for the legalisation of child marriage, for example, despite it being a political ad, it is also far beyond the realms of common decency and should be censored. Similarly, for political ads that insight hate or xenophobia.
-- *Defining "inoffensive" is difficult, but that's part of your job if you're running the largest social media platform in the world. Once you filter out the bots, your own "like/hate" buttons should allow you to highlight the more controversial items.
"Common decency" is not a some fixed, widely-agreed upon thing. There are many books that are controversial because they discuss racism, for example; should they be censored?
Point is, if you choose to run a platform such as Facebook, you need to find a fair, balanced definition of what is undoubtedly a very subjective concept. If you don't get it right, people will boycott you, as many corporates have done with Facebook. Facebook have clearly not got this right, and it may well hurt their bottom line.
Don't be naive. Their boycott has nothing to do with some moral altruism. It's the bottom line that's affected.
It's straightforward to create a list of restrictions based on types of information to prevent doxxing, at least from my understanding. Avoiding postings of addresses, employers, etc without the consent of the original person can be made an unambiguous rule. I don't believe such a restriction could be used as a weapon to silence legitimate speech.
My ultimate concern however, is the poor application of harder to define restrictions like "glorifying violence" being used maliciously. I could see pressure from various people that recent protest organizing would fall under the same category (not that I agree with such assertion). As Twitter has decided to filter some speech, bad actors are going to try to use that filtering to get opposing speech filtered.
Additionally, that's all assuming Twitter, Facebook, etc are acting in good faith. There are numerous ways the good intentions here result in dystopian outcomes.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-dc-protests-unidenti...
I think this highlights my original concern even more. While an ideal world would have some board at Twitter able to make these decisions in an ideal way, the implementation you desire requires subjective judgments. Based on the recent stories on HN about difficulties with app store filtering that should have an objective standard, I am still highly concerned about giving the power to make subjective speech filtering decisions to SV social media companies.
Would you essentially let users choose to filter it out, but show them a garbage homepage before they do, but then also let companies pay to bypass the filter (advertisements), but block politicians from paying to bypass the filter for their advertisements?
Certainly I'd agree that use of child pornography within a political campaign should be banned, or use of any material that was created by illegally harming other humans or animals, but that is different entirely from campaigning in favor of something highly controversial.
And if in power, should they then be allowed to reintroduce the ridiculing and eventual persecution of homosexuals, on the initial grounds of free speech?
And if in power, should they then be allowed to reintroduce high corporate tax rates, on the initial grounds of free speech?
These topics are important to the protection of free speech.
Censorship of ideas you don't like will create tension and unrest from the groups that are not allowed to express the ideas that they truly believe in.
The latter is prohibited by law. The former is also prohibited by law unless Facebook disallows minors from using the platform. Furthermore, there's a distinct social expectation that pornographic content is cordoned off from the public square.
Appealing to common decency in policing political content doesn't work because there's conflicting views on what is and isn't common decency. Plenty of people think it goes against common decency to advocate for defunding police, or expanding abortion. Remember that what you think goes against common decency, there's plenty of people who think it very much does belong in public discourse. And there are plenty of things that you feel belongs in public discourse that others think goes against common decency.
On second thought: Facebook already does what you're advocating. Content that goes against what is genuine common decency - "common decency" meaning that the overwhelming majority of the public supports its exclusion - is removed. It just so happens that what really does go against common decency is much narrower than many people believe and mostly encompasses sexual content.
(I independently track such content daily and can confirm that assertion has mostly held true throughout 2020)
I appreciate that ceteris paribus the leaders of a social media company might be inclined to cut the president some slack, but when the world is tipsy-turvy enough to generate corporate boycotts at insane scale, maybe enforcing the same rules you and I play by on these platforms for the president is still a fairly measured response to contemplate?
Disclaimer: Worked at FB on both ads and content policy, spent time @jack a couple times and found him to be a good guy.
Policing political content worked pretty well at killing the various communist movements in the United States in the 20th century.
I'm not sure why anyone still thinks it doesn't work. You can, in fact, deplatform ideas into the fringe.
You know what doesn't work at killing bad ideas? Actively enabling their spread.
When Donald Trump chooses to communicate on private platforms he ought to be treated like any other user. If the president were to walk into a bar and start smashing tables, unless you're in a banana republic, he'd be thrown out.
If he wants to communicate in a public manner and not follow private rules the president has official channels precisely for that reason. The personification of the American presidential office is bizarre and also sadly not new.
We live in a day and age where ActivityPub exists and the White House could be running its own Mastodon server (well, I would not recommend that exactly, but it could be running something that speaks the same language).
I don't want to have to log in to Nextdoor to see what my local politicians are up to either.
In any event rather than the official account for the office, they’ll communicate from their personal non gov account —which given first amendment, they have a right to.
- if you use a standard website you get limited feedback. Politicians love twitter and FB because they basically have unlimited retweet/reposts and feedback from their supporters. So using their own system, they would lose that.
- A stand-alone governmental system that allows interaction would need people to register specifically to that system. Beyond becoming a massive potential for data collection (potentially in the same vein apps for political parties are doing it) there is no way it could reach a significant portion of the population (beyond its own supporters maybe).
- The use of private companies blurs the line between official commentary and a personal one. That's probably also a reason why these people would not want a dedicated governmental infrastructure, it may rob them of this ambivalence.
So, the government should have its own system and any public official should only be allowed to interact through that system and not use any other social media platform other than for sharing recipes and pictures of their dogs.
Maybe they would then think a bit more before retweeting nonsense and hate[1] and they could be made slightly more accountable.
I hate how discussions look online about politics, but I worry that instead of pushing for accountability of public figures, through democratic tools and institutions, articles like that focus on trying to get a private police up and going.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc censoring more and more content from public figures won’t change the fact that USA have a racist president and that tons of people support him.
And while I think it’s a valid question how much of their racist and discriminatory content they should be allowed to say before they’re thrown out of office, it shouldn’t be decided by Silicon Valley.
Yes, and it's a worry. Twitter and Facebook are entitled to label or comment on inflammatory posts, but if you're willing to post non-anonymously, what you put up should stay up. High volume trolling by anons, though, needs to be detected and stopped. That's bulk spam, not discourse.
As a kid, I used to walk past the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, a house in a residential neighborhood in Arlington, VA. They had a big sign: "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". They were a local joke. We survived that.
But at the same time, adding context and flagging demonstrably false statements is no brainier that companies are falling behind on
Just because we survived something doesn't mean we weren't affected by it. I'm not saying this is what you're doing here, but this argument -- I survived this, so you can too -- is often deployed by abusers to justify perpetuating a cycle of abuse. I think in general it's better to ask whether or not something is actually good rather than whether or not we are able to survive it.
If the press writes something objectively false about someone, they are starting at a defamation lawsuit. If they write something that gets someone killed, they will be staring at possible criminal liability. If they print, I dunno, a picture of a child having sex, there'll be hellfire and brimstone (both legal and social).
And no, saying "ha ha, it was just an opinion column" doesn't save them.
"Press" has perks but also has responsibilities. The free press is "ok" with these rules because they've had to follow them for decades. What they want is a level playing field.
The same press will report on those racist tweets, run stories whole week where they dissect that, opinions, angry letters, etc. Should press stop running stories about racist behavior of the president? How is running story about what president said, different in terms of impact on spreading those views? Would Trump be where he’s right now if press wouldn’t pay attention to his crazy tweets before and fuel his popularity?
policy isn’t the problem, it’s the platform itself
I also see death threats on Twitter all the time to: white people, republicans, white people, Jewish people, and police officers. These are allowed to persist to this day.
Ice cube, for instance, had a cartoon ripped straight out of anti-semitic propaganda from the Nazi era and it was taken down after many weeks because of a 'copyright violation'.
Yet, if I even hint that I don't agree with BLM or underage trans surgery, I will get booted off of Twitter for hate speech and if I'm not anonymous, mobs of people will attempt to get me fired from my job and kicked out of society.
The system does need to be changed.
We need to start with the uber-progressive tech companies that take it upon themselves to stifle the speech of people they deem unworthy.
Nobody should be able to have this much control over the population and it's definitely going to start affecting our elections. It's so much more powerful than the handful of fake Russian ads that were purchased in an attempt to sway voters (which wouldn't have caused stadiums of people to come out to see Trump when he was running in 2016).
The reason we have Trump today is a direct result of this meddling. Trump and his team realized that all he needed to do was create the perfect sound byte and they would run with it and it would give him free advertising. He cast a net out and social networks and the media ran right into them every, single, time.
His team was also the most tech savvy. They used data mining companies to find out the best ways to get votes and played the social media game better than anyone.
Obama did almost the exact same thing in 2008. His team exploited a Facebook app that allowed them to get information on you and your friends when you installed it.
I still remember all of the tech magazines lauding his campaign as revolutionary, genius, and the the new way of political campaigns. It clearly violated Facebook's TOS and user privacy. Yet, we saw no investigations.
It's proof once again that it has more to do with politics than anything else. Progressive and liberal candidates and supporters of progressive and liberal causes can get away with murder.
I just wish we had true equality instead of special treatment for select groups of people.
I'd suggest you look at the data around who and what is popular on Facebook. It supports none of what you've written. Sometimes it's not the kids who are wrong...
It turns out that group represents less than 20% of the population (~63 million out of ~328 million is less than 20%).
If alienating them is an unintended byproduct of simply labeling a verbal invective that incites violence and provably presents lies to the detriment of public health might be a worthy venture in content moderation. The mere act of labeling outright lies and calls to violence as such really shouldn't be so controversial.
What if some content is deemed illegal in some jurisdictions and not illegal in others? If a community decides to ban a piece of art (such as a book, or a photograph, or a movie) should the platform then be liable for moderating that content specific to that location? Doesn't that imply that in order to accomplish that task they MUST track user location? What a win that would be, legislation that requires location tracking in order for compliance to occur.
Should "Legal" be the ultimate arbiter of what is right, or what is just? How has that worked out for us in the past?