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Comment by 0zymandias | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of Facebook and have deleted my account. But Zuck is right in trying to avoid policing political content. It just won’t work.

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.

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Serious question: why do you limit your argument to policing political content only? Do you think they should also not police sexual content/paedophilic content?

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.

> However, content that strays outside the bounds of common decency, probably needs to be censored.

"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?

Yes, "common decency" is subjective, much like "inoffensive content", as I mention in my original comment. I'm well aware of the subjectivity at play here.

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.

> If you don't get it right, people will boycott you, as many corporates have done with Facebook.

Don't be naive. Their boycott has nothing to do with some moral altruism. It's the bottom line that's affected.

I agree with your point, but am personally skeptical of anything more than what is literally illegal speech, with controls for individuals to personally filter more if they so choose. There are too many ways for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc to fail. The policies that shape speech restrictions on the primary means of communication for many people should come through the appropriate political processes, as problematic as those can often be, not SV boardrooms.

By that standard, doxxing is fair game. It's not technically illegal in most cases, and the victim, their loved ones, and employers are free try their best to personally filter out the abuse.

It's hard to filter out things like being swatted, or having stalkers move to your neighborhood, or having your name known to all of your psychiatric patients.

Thanks for pointing it out. That was not a abuse case I considered.

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.

I'm not sure it's so straightforward. Under the anti-doxxing restrictions you laid out, journalists could have been muzzled for identifying the unmarked law enforcement officers in DC a few weeks ago [1].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-dc-protests-unidenti...

Maybe different categories for government employees in their public roles?

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.

All those sites would be nothing but commercial spam if they couldn't block it and charge companies to post it within a limited allotment.

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?

I do not like this example. Advocating to change the laws in favor pedophilia or child marriage is absolutely within the realm of what should be protected by free speech. We've made progress on topics like homosexuality because ideas that are sometimes highly offensive are allowed to be debated in public.

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.

Should politicians campaigning on the basis "homosexuality is wrong" be allowed to do so, especially when using that line to enflame religious groups, with the sole purpose of securing votes?

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?

Should politicians campaigning on the basis "oil extraction is wrong" be allowed to do so, especially when using that line to enflame energy groups, with the sole purpose of securing votes?

And if in power, should they then be allowed to reintroduce high corporate tax rates, on the initial grounds of free speech?

How about a more realistic example: a politician campaigning to abolish the electoral college? Thoughts?

As a campaign topic, yes I believe people should be able to advocate the persecution of homosexuals or the re-criminalization of marijuana.

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.

> Do you think they should also not police sexual content/paedophilic content?

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.

The vast majority of high-performing content on Facebook is political, mostly in favor of Trump: https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1275852495215042562

(I independently track such content daily and can confirm that assertion has mostly held true throughout 2020)

How can you decide if something is harmful or not ?

By establishing initial guidelines and a regular process of evaluating the guidelines, changing them over time.

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.

History? i.e. track record of prior harm by type of speech? If similar content has demonstrably caused harm before, then chances are high decent it's likely to cause harm again.

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 am not a fan of Facebook and have deleted my account. But Zuck is right in trying to avoid policing political content. It just won’t work.

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.

Trump’s tweets and FB posts trivially violate the content policies of both platforms. Witness the dozens of times folks have written bots that verbatim repost his updates and get banned.

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.

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