Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potential Political Bias
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down. He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company.
That said, HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports). FB gives employees access to much more than most companies, so the sort of things HR made secret would not be visible at most US companies.
Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that.
Of the handful of people I know who work at FB, all of them are super smart and motivated. Half of them have expressed a lot of anxiety, stress, and imposter syndrome to me over their reviews. I’ve seen this at other companies when a project is failing but I hear about it at FB from A players who are working on successful projects. It gives me the impression the managers must be brutal - like they just push harder than other companies and make people feel they aren’t good enough to get more output. These are my impressions as an outsider. Does it seem fair to you?
Leadership sets the tone and culture so it's always leadership's fault if culture is toxic.
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>HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports).
Aren't these essentially identical aside from the timeline?
Edit: Or at least your opinion on why they would do that.
I have no opinion about why content was hidden. At nearly any other company the same content would have always been secret.
If his cited sources (which presumptively were somewhat important to the point he was making) should (or would have, which may be subjective. I don't know because I'm not a Facebook employee and have no direct knowledge of the now-secret information) have been secret, then it stands to reason that it would have been more difficult for him to make his point.
If that's the case, it sounds like they've changed an entire policy organization-wide to stop more posts like this, or they've made no global policy changes and selectively hidden information that would support his point. Either way I'm curious about this culture of openness and what defines its limits.
"Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that." - that's what people do 'on' Facebook all the time and no action is taken.
Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you want without consequences.
Arguably, one purpose of HR is to help employees work well together. It is in their literal job description to be arbiter of decency.
You've gone way off topic, missed the point of the people you're responding to, and seem to have some agenda regarding Facebook that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about Facebook as an employer.
Facebook’s HR department does want to be the arbiter of acceptable speech for facebook employees communicating with each other inside the company.
These are quite different situations, IMO.
Wrong. The First Amendment means that Congress isn't allowed to silence the media. The First Amendment and "free speech" are entirely different entities, with really not much shared between them. The First Amendment is a law and what it does and doesn't mean has been quite precisely specified by the Supreme Court. "Free speech" is a more loosely-specified concept, and is much broader than the First Amendment. One could easily believe (as I and many others do) that free speech is very valuable, so valuable that it deserves even stronger protections than those granted by the First Amendment.
Free speech: the freedom to speak one's mind (this can apply in any context).
Any and all consequences for speaking one's mind are a direct assault on one's freedom of speech in the relevant context, by definition.
The first amendment protects individuals who speak their minds from government imposed consequences for doing so. This is meant to prevent the government from curtailing their freedom to express themselves.
"Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence" means (in the context of the US) that even if there aren't any governmental consequences for speaking your mind there might still be social ones.
Hypothetical situation: People debate the merits of a non-governmental entity (for example, an employer) placing various restrictions on speech in some context (say, in the work place). Someone comes along and glibly points out that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence". Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point.
Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?
> Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point
I'm I understanding this correctly, this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A? Isn't it preconditioned on everyone being on the same page about free speech? We've seen people having extreme opinions being shunned by the the rest of the cohort. How does this group then maintain cohesion, rather is it even possible to do so?
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but note that I was speaking to definitions (ie I wasn't debating the merits of any particular situation). Employing relevant terms in a mutually understood manner is a prerequisite for the productive conversation of a topic.
> this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A?
You misunderstand. In the hypothetical situation, the merits (or extent, or mechanics, etc) of free speech (ie the principle) in some specific social context (ex at work) are being discussed. Someone shows up to the party and unhelpfully points out what the current legal realities are. But the legal status isn't what's under discussion - in context, it's an off topic comment that serves only to derail the conversation.
That's the narrow redefinition of free speech that's currently in vogue with people who want to crack down on free speech. The whole time I was growing up, until quite recently in fact, free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind. The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions, which is the world the new ideologues want to create for us, would have seemed shockingly unfree.
The classic cliché of the limits of free speech is "yelling fire in a crowded theater". That's where society used to draw the limit. Those lines are being way, way, way moved, and the people moving them are pretending that they're just reiterating the old standard. It's a radical shift, and everyone who doesn't subscribe to this orthodoxy can feel it, even if they're too vulnerable to be able to stand up to the priests.
Also, firing someone stops them from receiving a paycheck, not from speaking.
For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.
The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.
I'm not sure I believe any of that but I think it is an interesting idea.
However, I have to nitpick for accuracy. Despite becoming a cliche, "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the standard in the US. Currently it's "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action)
People reiterating it to justify banning people have to live with the fact that they too might get excluded.
We have certainly dogmatic speech rules around racism and sexism while most people don't really perpetuate it, but can still be penalized if some schmuck thinks you have crossed a line of imagined decency.
Companies are really bad at policing speech, of course it would be restrictive. People demanding more of it should just be ignored because they haven't thought it through.
As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.
Also "speaking your mind" has never been (and never should be) consequence free. There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently.
> The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions [...] would have seemed shockingly unfree.
I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
> That's where society used to draw the limit.
Because society used to be a lot more lopsided in terms of diversity, power balance, etc. Now the balance has shifted and some of the people who previously had all the power do not like it one bit.
There's some truth to that, but the solution is obviously to extend the same freedom to everyone, not dive into authoritarianism.
> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently
It is not at all the majority who are "applying consequences". It is a small vanguard of extremists, most of whom conspicuously belong to the classes they criticize.
And this was a good thing. Before that the majority applied said consequences via witch trials.
> I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
Said people did not have the freedom of speech. It would be great if we changed that so that it applies to everyone.
He wasn't fired for how he said it. The post was taken down for that. He was fired because he demonstrated that leadership is dishonest. They rewrote norms on the fly to justify firing over normal access to non-user data.
Calling people by those things in a work environment might not be the best strategy to demonstrate process irregularities.
You can, and sometimes you should.
What looks embarrassing for the person they do this and then act surprised when the people they attacked retaliate, especially if those people are wealthier and / or better connect.
Can we just acknowledge for a moment what it’d be like to have a colleague who’s desperately trying to prove that your work is a “big conspiracy” when you’re honestly all just trying to do your best.
I see so many of these stories of weirdly rogue political activist type employees recently surprised when they their employer doesn’t like that they’re purposely trying to undermine them and their employees work. I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
This smells like sour grapes* from an employee who focused more on their plans to take down their employer than their actual job.
*ed: previously written as “sour apples”...it’s been a long day.
The story didn't read as "sour apples" to me but rather an employee pointing out evidence that contradicts the "two strikes" policy Zuckerberg explained at the company Q&A. It's tough to write that off as "Facebook isn't perfect".
If he actually cannot get a job due to his stated opinions, well, frankly I’m not surprised. Why would you hire someone who publically says up front he scorns many of his potential coworkers?
Right after the (somewhat-carefully-worded) memo was punished, the author showed his hand by appearing as a guest on the YouTube show of Stefan Molyneux who, even then, was well-known for his white nationalism and "men's rights" activism.
In any case your underlying argument is really bizarre.
Kind of like how he soon after sued Google for discrimination for being "white male conservative" (which has not aged well).
What does it mean to you?
By suing Google for discrimination against white conservative men, Damore fits this fairly well. That, and the alt-right podcasts he went on.
In fact extreme xenophilic restrictionism is the norm in Japan. There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy—probably the most restrictive first world country. But no sane person could call the Japanese people racist. They love other cultures—no, they adore them. They are incredibly welcoming to tourists from across the planet and delight in the sharing of culture.
I would disagree with that. You will see many sane people pointing out the racism against koreans, chinese, tourists, western residents, etc in Japan.
Can you point to some statistics on that, please?
>probably the most restrictive first world country
If you can get hired by a Japanese company (and some do accept applications from overseas), they will sponsor your work visa. There's none of this H1-B style nonsense. After you're in Japan, if you've been there continuously for five years (which, mind you, is a smaller period of time than any country I can name OTOH), you can apply for citizenship, and again as far as I know, it's not a ridiculous waiting list/lottery style process. In what way is this nearly as restrictve as you're saying?
It's also not difficult at all to get into Japan by applying to an English teaching company (eikaiwa or ALT jobs) from overseas (where they recruit from), and all you need is any Bachelor's degree. You'll have a valid work visa and you can be shipped out within months. Try doing the same as a Japanese teacher applying to teach in the US (or many other countries, for that matter). Browse tech job listings for Japanese companies on major job boards in the West. Almost all of them note that they'll be happy to sponsor your work visa.
This game of prettying up the language to make it seem nice and friendly, while maintaining the otherness that daily affects people (groups which the other reply to you here has pointed out) with language like "xenophilic restrictionist" does nobody favours.
And if there is support for such policies, and in particular bent on nihonjinron notions and race perceptions, I must be insane, but I'm going to go ahead and call "the Japanese people" racist. Being "incredibly welcoming to tourists" doesn't mean anything if you want to work and live there. It misses the whole point of the discussion, and waves away systemic issues with a gloss of "they're good to tourists". We're not talking about tourists. I don't care how much they are able to enjoy Western comedians. I care how receptive they are to people integrating and living in their society like everyone else, as the Japanese constitution guarantees should be possible.
At the risk of stirring the pot a little (and only because I couldn't think of a better analogy), you may as well say no country has race problems, because after all, members of the majority race might frequently listen to music by, and watch films featuring, the minority race. That doesn't mean anything in terms of how the minority race is treated, and it's a farcically ignorant point to make. So sorry if I see the same sort of logic in nebulous feelgood terms like "xenophilic restrictionism".
Is this a joke? Japan has well-known issues with race relations and its historical and current treatment of its minority indigenous populations.
It’s the same as when people protest building housing: “oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood”. I know what they are really talking about, and I know full well what he was talking about — he was making the same argument, in the same terms, as plenty have before him. I assume he read those arguments before, himself.
> oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood
Is there no situation where this is obviously, trivially true? If someone wants to replace a traditional cottage in the middle of an Irish village with a glass and steel modernist masterpiece, would you accept the argument then?
And anything that says * ism might be a smaller problem than thought, that * ism is getting better, or that our current efforts to reduce * ism are ineffective... Well, that's an unapproved direction.
Also, if I know there's no way to convince someone of something, I'm generally going to stop caring about what they think. (Because it's always going to be the same, and nothing I can do will change that)
I read the memo as sincerely asking whether the data showed a sexist conclusion. Either it is inherently sexist to ask the question, or it isn't. If it is, then... what? Is it inherently sexist to note that men are faster than women? (Yes, I am aware that there are 12-year-old girls who can beat me in the 100 meters. No, that doesn't invalidate my point.) Then is reality sexist? Or is it only sexist to notice? Or to admit that you noticed?
If it isn't inherently sexist to ask the question, then we start into judgment on whether he asked it in good faith. That's a different question, on which I will not pass judgment. But I suspect that what's happening is that people have decided that it is sexist to ask the question, and therefore he couldn't have asked it in good faith.
When they're not conservative opinion pieces, they're cherry picked articles, even going to far as to misrepresent the data they support.
The sort of people who argue against his memo always end up looking foolish because they never argue against anything that was actually said. No specific claims are ever brought up except lying strawmen like "he said women can't program", a claim not found in the memo.
Instead it's all just slurs, insults, attacks on his character, guilt-by-association and so on. There's never any actual depth to it, it's all "don't look at the bad man".
Damore's arguments must be good, because in years of this coming up nobody has ever once managed to make an intellectual argument against the stuff in his memo.
From what I understand it was about preferences not competencies.
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:
>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.
I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:
>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.
I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.
Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.
And that story was mostly fictional. The memo itself bares little resemblance to most of the reporting about it.
Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.
Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.
I thought at first you meant gender, but then I looked up the word and it means "the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth" and now I'm not sure.
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.
1) The company is actually doing evil things
2) The employee is aware of the purported evil things the company is doing, and agrees with that claim
Now we can debate all we want how evil Facebook is or not, but how many employees do you think check off box 2?
I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.
Here on HN we are happy to call out the NYT and Bloomberg when they are wrong, but is that only when their articles don't align with our prior biases?
Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.
Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.
Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.
> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).
- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.
- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.
If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.
I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.
A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.
Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.
There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.
Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.
Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.
Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?
Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)
At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?
(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)
It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.
He and his buddies had and endless list of grievances involving political this and that. Nothing seemed to happen that wasn't somehow 'political.' They surrounded themselves in this thicket of 'logic' where the simplest explanation was impossible and conspiracies were the most obvious answer to them. Thankfully it was long before social media as we know it.
He was fired for leaving some nasty bigoted comments in code.
But for the record I have no idea who these folks at Facebook are or their motivations.
If the guy I'm thinking of made the news, you wouldn't know either.
Eventually I just stopped talking with them as that’s all they could talk about.
> I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
Yeah, I don't think you read the article. That's what's happening: a bunch of employees are blowing the whistle on what seems to be executive abuse of the fact check program.
Large scale platforms like this are hard to manage. I can see many cases where people doing their best can be misconstrued as an evil conspiracy.
Eg.
- Users and companies with large fan bases are open to brigading. Previously companies have been taken off the platform suddenly because of militant FB groups.
- A new rule is instituted "anyone with more than X followers get Tier-1 support in reviewing and reinstating their account following a take down."
- Engineer on some team mildly close to the team who runs the takedown/reinstatement systems sees that a Right Wing commentator is getting Tier-1 support and fast turn around reinstatement.
- Said engineer tries to vilify the people who wrote the policy and those who are carrying it out, tries to go public with a conspiracy that "FB is prioritizing reinstating Right Wing users". Instead they've really just lost the trust of their peers, failed to understand the space properly, and now brought their employer into disrepute - they should be fired.
This stuff happens all the time, and is usually just chalked up to "its a hard problem to get right, and we're trying to get better every day". When people over react and make out like Zuck is pulling strings to rule the universe i have a hard time understanding when he sleeps.
Zuckerberg should never have given way on fact checking. I wonder if he understands it was a mistake. Facebook is meant to be a social network, it's inherently a graph oriented organisation in which graph nodes are all roughly equal. Fact checking is the exact opposite: a hierarchy with Facebook at the top and delegated "truth arbiters" a layer lower, that try to dominate the social graph.
The cited example of the Breitbart video is a good example. The video is a video of doctors. There are tons of scientists, government advisors and indeed whole governments saying they don't see any need for masks, children can go back to school or never even left (as in Sweden), etc. You don't need to go far to find them. That children aren't infectious is by now widely accepted in the scientific community. For Facebook to censor the President for making such a statement makes them look absurd, and totalitarian. Given the long term accusations of fraud surrounding mail voting that were never addressed, it's not a big surprise Trump is worrying about the integrity of the election process.
I'm curious also by your claim that children aren't infectious. That is not widely accepted by the scientific community. It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.
Indeed. And if the grandparent got all their "news" from paid feeds and shared content on Facebook (given the right seeding and demographics), they might genuinely believe these are mainstream positions.
Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.
The problem with that is no amount of flagging and removing is going to fix the problem and that is why I don't even see the point, the left and right are so divided that those on the extremes will fall for anything being blinded by their emotional hatred for the other.
I mean we are at the point where the extreme left believes for a fact that via a thoroughly refuted dossier, that the sitting president paid Russian hookers to pee on him.
The extreme right is just as bad, believing that their is a global cabal of elite leftist that are raping children with a presidential candidate being one of them.
No amount of blocking content is going to repair the fact that people are no longer listening and that is the problem one side wants the other side filtered so that they can be the only voice shouting in the dark, thinking if the other side cannot talk then they are by default going to listen, but the reality is almost everybody has stopped listening, no amount of censorship is going to fix that.
Fact checks might help slow crazy conspiracies a little bit. I think it is worth for this reason, although I believe in content warnings+disclaimers instead of takedowns because of Streisand effects.
Finally, again, the Steele dossier is not even a "left conspiracy". It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays, that got leaked. I think it is a bad example for the point your seem to be making.
It was a hit piece, who funding is now well known, it was political from the start. What it was not, and would not qualify as is an intelligence report and was never formulated for the purpose of intel. It is no different than the hit pieces being produced by the right to paint Biden as a pedophile. So I don't see it as a Strawman as the point was people are so far gone on their version of the truth that no amount of censoring or labeling is going to pull them back from the edge. Both sides are doing it, and at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.
OK, that's just silly. Read a newspaper? Watch a routine 1 hour news program from any of the major networks? No pee tape. No pizzagate (well, except when that nut started shooting up the restaurant over it). I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies.
There are many journalistic organizations who genuinely care about reporting the truth. And they "filter" and "censor" themselves to do it all the time, because in that world it's called "good journalism". They get stuff wrong, and when they do they tell us about it.
And the issue at hand here is that Facebook is trying to apply some of the same controls to the news it presents to its users, via most of the same processes (i.e. by trusting journalists). And stuff leaks through, and sometimes Facebook itself seems to be uneven in the application of its own rules.
So I don't get your point. Why is it OK for The Times to spike its reporting on the pee tape because it can't find good sourcing but when Facebook to do the same it's somehow an impossibility?
Sure there is bias, Fox news is plenty biased so is CNN. and there are plenty of lies, a lie by omission is still a lie. Not to mention burying retractions in blurbs and page 10 even if they do a retraction. Make no mistake about it, I blame both sides equally so I am not advocating for one sides bias over another. My point is simply that people have stopped listening so all the meandering in the world will not "get them". Most everyone has chosen a side and the few of us left in the middle are stuck in a shit storm, that we don't want and we damn sure don't want to hear either sides dogma as it has become the stuff of religious fanatics, so we are not listening either.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
Just to be clear, I am not advising anyone to avoid wearing a mask.
Please note that I did not say there was scientific evidence for masks, but that wearing masks is good is the mainstream scientific position (which changed only very recently).
I read your article. It's pretty limited in its analysis. I'm going by this popular science article from my alma mater (I have a PhD in biophysics), https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
The article you cited doesn't include a number of the articles my article mentions (http://files.fast.ai/papers/masks_lit_review.pdf, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342198360_Associati..., https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...,
More importantly- this is a situation where we don't have unambiguous data, but the mainstream position is consistent with the current data and reasonable thinking about disease prevention.
There's nothing in there that should serve to argue against the general consensus that masks are a good idea. They are, within the bounds of the evidence at hand, effective in the opinions of most experts. And that includes the authors of the paper you wrote.
You just wrote yourself that there is no consensus, even amongst scientists who have been extremely willing to recommend extreme measures from the start. The review paper showed the science isn't settled: that's literally the definition of no consensus.
The concept of scientific consensus is horribly abused. Look at the reply to my post. It's not about anything concrete, it just asserts everyone agrees with the poster. That's a lie, and obviously so. Yet simply by claiming it's true, some will believe it, as it's an unfalsifiable statement. Indeed you yourself believe it, even whilst reading a paper that says there's no consensus.
They are not "weirdly rogue political activist type employees". They are normal people reacting to the abnormality that is Facebook. I mean which tech company has ever produced the kind of polarization, fake news, Brexit and Trump type events all over the globe?
If Intel or IBM or AT&T had produced these type of outcomes you can bet your ass "weirdly rogue political activist type employees" wld suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Facebook will continue to be a highly abnormal place to work for anyone who isn't mildly conformist.
Transparently it seems the right type of activists are celebrated and the wrong vilified. That’s fine, but let’s not act like this is principled.
I get that there are good whistle blowers. I also have first hand experience (a growing list recently) of people who decide to vilify their coworkers under the guise of "justice" and "taking down the man" when really most people ("evil VPs" included) are just trying to do their best and get through the day. They on the other hand are horrible to work with, and usually very unproductive. When threatened with performance management for their lack of delivery, they then tend to become hostile and see the whole charade as a conspiracy against them, when really no one trusts them or wants to work with them as they are assholes.
I can't imagine any person at any company who wouldn't get fired after publicly speaking to the CEO that way.
It's a shame, because if this guy had an emotional intelligence he could have personally driven change. Now he's a martyr at best.
For anyone who believes they’re participating in an evil system: quit, whistleblow, or sabotage. Don’t be like this guy.
That's a bit offensive to all the others who are driving positive changes without acting crazy. We only see the bad apples.
If other people are behaving in a way that better drives change, how would the above offend them?
There are multiple sources indicating that conservative sites work in concert to amplify, at best, specious content and at worst, complete misinformation.
Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
1. Conservative information (Fox News, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, etc.) is consistently shared more than other content
2. They don't want the optics of making it seem like they're censoring conservative voices because they're afraid of the blowback, so they're hiding behind the veil of "It's not our job"
3. They don't want to lose the ad spend running up to the election season nor do they want to lose the vanity metrics of DAU/MAU/etc because they're a publicly traded company
Zuck is a feckless coward, full stop. And while I don't know his personal political leanings, this non-policy certainly has the earmarks of Thiel and Joel Kaplan all over it.
I believe that the issue of the 'right wing side' in this case is possibly as you've indicated - in that there is just more sensitivity around it.
The Valley is Left/Anarcho/Libertarian with 'traditionally minded' immigrants, and so there's more suspicion in certain camps of legit bias on 'one side'. I think this is where the sidedness of the issue might derive.
As to the materiality of it ... who knows ...
This is just for demographic reasons: Facebook has to compete hard for eyeballs among young/urban/techie/minority users. Those folks are fickle with their tastes and willing to try more platforms. And they're less sensitive to advertising in general. Facebook has lots of them, but they certainly aren't dominant in that market.
But old white folk? They're all on Facebook. Really, they're ALL on Facebook. Facebook probably has 90%+ of all social media advertising revenue in this demographic. And they skew heavily republican.
So who's interests are they going to serve? When Facebook's executives feel pressure to put their fingers on the fact check scale, in which direction are they going to tilt it?
If they didn't really believe that it was important to allow on their platform, then they would have banned it years ago, as it causes them nothing but bad press and blowback.
Seriously, I definitely saw some numbers (maybe from the FT) and it was like less than 1% political advertising revenue. That's maybe 10-15 times smaller than gaming, and maybe 30 times smaller than ecommerce.
TLDR is that if you know certain subjects will get your base talking about something else that you aren't allowed to promote (such as a conspiracy theory), you promote the hell out of real news stories about those subjects knowing your base will a) share and b) discuss the conspiracy theories in the comments.
It's a very clever way to use money to boost the conversation around untrue claims, while technically neither the ad buyer nor seller are responsible since it's the users doing the lying. And I don't know what the solution is, fact checking every user comment isn't feasible..
That is a surprise. Is there data that this has also been the case before the increased efforts to moderate content?
All criticism aside, I think Facebook does a better job at providing a platform for users. Yes, I don't like a lot of content either, but if I compare it to Twitter, I think FB did much better.
Furthermore the actual goal of a "right wing media" is to collect reliable, large, consistent easy to sell to audiences for advertisers and isn't necessarily committed to any particular agenda.
Also political opinions and grandstanding is cheap content, expensive journalism isn't required, so it keeps the costs low.
All the other consequences, just like they are for tobacco and oil companies, are swept under the rug. This is the content associated with the lowest cost, best audience, highest profit business model.
I sold bumper stickers in the early 2000s, all kinds of politics. The conservatives were easier; larger volume, longer time window (they sold over a longer time), the ramp up time was shorter, and the stickers were way easier to come up with. Much easier business.
Again, this is all from in my head, I'm not a researcher and don't have a paper trail here, but it's a fun idea and seems to match reality.
> Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
Does facebook enforce discipline on sites from the other site that spread misinformation? (e.g. snopes) If not I do not think that it is really selective.
Considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24079172 for example it does not seem that they have a right wing bias.
Woah, twitter banned all of the conservatives? How did Trump take being banned?
I'd disagree with this part pretty strongly. What clear parameters are you thinking of, besides "get rid of my enemies"? Can you formulate a "no endorsing violence" policy that keeps the current protests/riots while banning Trump's latest idiocy, or one for "no racial discrimination" that keeps White Fragility and bans "they're not sending their best... Murderers, rapists" or similar? That kicks off Infowars or Richard Spencer while leaving Malcolm X or Ta-Nehisi Coates? Sure, the political right tends to cross those lines further - but it's often a case of degree and direction, not kind.
I think it's either a really hard line to draw in a viewpoint-neutral fashion, or a huge political fight. (Whether you choose to ban Trump without the Left, or you try to ban both, people will be furious)
Yes, it’s quite simple and I’m wondering if you are intentionally or accidentally being obtuse by trying to frame the current protests as riots. There were plenty of peaceful protests all over the country - no endorsing violence simply means not highlighting peaceful protests over violent ones. It’s not rocket science except to those grasp at straws in order to equate civilians walking in the streets to Trump implying police shoot civilians.
Well, OK lol
Show me something AOC has _said_, not a meme of a dubious quote with her face on it.
And again, I'd also like you to explain the logical leap between "AOC blocked some people on Twitter" to "AOC wants the power to tell Facebook who to censor".
https://www.ncsl.org/blog/2019/07/23/potus-cant-block-critic...
I'm not prepared to argue this applies to her in the same way, but maybe the person who you're responding to thinks it is parallel, so perhaps more dialogue than just scoffing would be appropriate.
>because the government cannot censor speech AOC wants companies like Facebook to do it.
Ok, AOC shouldn't be allowed to block people on Twitter. What does that have to do with the original claim?
But now that I have read it, I'm confused even more about the responses.
Blocking people on Twitter is arguably (because the courts are saying so) a violation of the constitution. For an elected official at least.
If someone wants to regulate speech, and they have tried and been prevented from doing so on first amendment grounds, it seems likely motivation to search for a legal alternative method to achieve their goals.
Is AOC against Facebook regulating content then?
I don't think I see the motivation/goal attributed to her as illegitimate. Maybe everyone is taking for granted that it's a "loophole".
"Government" is made up of many actors and groups, and the fundraising dynamic is that a) corporation gives to incumbent to get favors or b) gives to opponent to remove regulatory pressure from an incumbent not willing to play ball.
What you are seeing is the natural result of corporate control over elections and consequently, politicians.
This is a stance I wish non lefties picked up on tbh. Even if you're rather right wing or liberal it should be obvious that larger companies being able to pay less taxes and being able to get more benefits than your local business or startup is unfair. Or that anticompetitive practices that squash smaller competitors, give unfair advantage and/or establish monopsonies is terrible for entrepreneurship, social mobility and the free market in general.
yet it's self-proclaimed 'capitalist to the bone' that I see defending it's erosion of it's dynamics and benefits.
this is so silly, and later when the article claims “misinformation”, it’s a tricky situation to claim you know the 100% truth about everything and anything that goes against what you believe is considered misinformation that will undermine an election... totally ignoring the possibility that you might actually not be correct and that things aren’t as black and white as you think they are
Why is it "silly" exactly? Are you saying that Facebook wouldn't allow itself to be used this way, that the government wouldn't try, or that it's not possible? Are you contending that the results of an election are not "black and white"?
"Undermine" is obviously a subjective judgement, not an objective one. Which in turn makes it difficult to legislate "prevent people from using social networks to undermine elections" in an objective way.
And this is now my personal opinion, but legislation that cannot be enforced with some amount of objectivity is a recipe for disaster down the road.
There is nothing Facebook can do that won't cause a riot. But if there's truly no acceptable action for Facebook and similar platforms, maybe the only option in the long-run is for them to cease to exist.
Conservatives, not just in the United States but globally, pour vast resources into using social media platforms to propagate ideas that are objectively false and to embed those ideas into the minds of vulnerable people. There is no equivalent effort by non-conservatives in any English-speaking country. Non-conservatives see ample ammunition in the actual behavior of their opponents and see no need to use falsehoods to help their cause. Compare: Trump claiming that Biden will destroy the suburbs by letting non-whites liven in them vs anti-Trump forces using actual pictures of actual children in actual cages. Also compare: the lies used to manufacture support for Brexit vs. the actual truths about what would happen.
Rampant dishonesty is seen by many, particularly non-conservatives, as social cheating and social media platforms that enable it are condemned by non-conservatives for pro-conservative bias.
On the other hand, social media networks that do not tolerate political lies will, purely because most political lying is done by conservatives, more heavily restrict pro-conservative ideas and be condemned by conservatives for anti-conservative bias.
There's no way to square the circle of responding to habitual conservative dishonesty without favoring either conservatives or non-conservatives any more than there's a way to be neutral in the face of a wildfire: you either put it out or you don't.
If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter - and then they will evolve to dodge the new filters, or cause filters to create collateral damage.
Deplatforming these voices also plays into their strategy of calling themselves victims. Since most people don’t know the ins and outs of frequency of rule breaking, and the disproportionate amount of false information in conservative circles, people assume (wrongly) that it can’t be “that bad.”
I wish someone had a cost benefit analysis on what is the most effective way to resolve this, but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
Perhaps it’s a civilization level issue - we have the technology and structures to create platforms - servers, networks, computer science theories.
We don’t have a solution or science for handling the structures that come on top of it, like what is the societal cost of keeping crazy theories on a network, vs the cost or methods required to stamp it out, and the philosophical arguments that support or prohibit such action.
It is a serious civilizational health issue that conservative political blocs in many countries have adopted electoral strategies based on spreading information that is objectively false. If social media platforms did not enable this, conservatives would simply find different avenues to lie.
Expecting for-profit social media platforms to combat the rise of rampant dishonesty as a political strategy in nominally democratic countries isn't ideal, but it's the only tool we have to mitigate the damage.
> If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter
So would the far left. People do not particularly enjoy being baselessly accused, cancelled, and have people call for violence on them.
(not to mention that in the past certain things which we consider as decent such as homosexuality would be considered indecent)
> but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
They really are not. More like they are being pushed to censor posts based on what a 3rd party deems are wrongthink or incorrect.
In contrast, fact-free argumentation from conservatives has the backing of both established figures and big money. To keep this as non-controversial as possible, consider Trump's continued promotion of an anti-malaria drug as a COVID-19 treatment. This misinformation is both false and has the potential to kill people. Consider also the GOP's long-running strategy to de-legitimize elections by overstating the extent of voter fraud, which has now resurfaced as opposition to mail-in ballots. This misinformation is both false and deeply dangerous in a democracy.
There is no left-right equivalency here and america's long-running slow motion political crisis isn't going to get any better until people are willing to admit this.
The recent discussions about applying the first amendment to companies like Facebook have some logic behind.
"Intolerable speech" makes it sound like it's the speech's fault.
US only, other nations probably have larger lists of free speech exclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Directly threathening to execute someone maybe. But "Fire in a crowded theater" has not been part of jurisprudence for... 40 years. The US has very, very limited free speech restrictions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
I think it's very illuminating that so many people accept these speech restrictions without question or fuss (although breast-feeding advocacy groups have fought the good fight on their pictures), but, as soon as FB blocks an article falsely claiming that Joe Biden will dynamite churches if he becomes president or whatever, it's suddenly Very Important That Facebook Not Practice Censorship.
Can we all imagine for a minute how conservatives would react if Facebook took a 100% compliance approach to speech and allowed anyone to post porn into their newsfeed?
Oops somebody said the thing out loud.
Note it appears a majority of Facebooks top ten posts are from right wing sources. [1] This is not me suggesting a bias on the part of FB, but it‘s a clear data point against the now common talking point that “the right” are persecuted victims, not fairly represented on the Internet.
You have to look at the long tail of content and the distribution over all content. How many smaller right wing creators are censored vs left wing?
These and other interventions appear to be in violation of Facebook’s official policy, which requires publishers wishing to dispute a fact check rating to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible.
[...]
Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook...
This is a little like when my package gets lost, and -- very rarely -- the shipper tells me to contact the post office instead of simply claiming the insurance and refunding me. These shippers often don't give me the receipt I need to show the post office that it was insured -- because telling me to contact the post office is just another way to say, not my problem. The post office is likely to say: please contact the shipper...
If the user isn't happy with what Facebook did -- regardless of whose advice Facebook took -- they have every right to contact Facebook.
- Fake news is bad
- Government taking out fake news is actually bad??
- But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Now it becomes a shouting match to get Facebook to ban posts/people they don't like.
Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match.
I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.
The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3].
Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...
You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.
Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them.
Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value.
It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.
Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.
To be explicit since for some reason people here are afraid to come out and say this: yes, I want to take that freedom away from American businesses and I would if I could. (I'd take it away from European businesses too.) That's what a law is - that's what every law is.
Both have competitors who can supply fungible services to the market, some of which are typically very close, sometimes "just a click away".
I'm sure there is already something that is illegal for companies to do or say or censor.
Why not adding one more thing which is fake news?
It's a possible idea that doesn't sound far-fetched.
In America, the default is that private businesses, even those who provide a service to the public, get to choose who they engage in business with and how, with no interference from the government. There are very narrow exceptions (Civil Rights Act, ADA, antitrust, etc.) when absolutely necessary.
There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store.
This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher.
It's an end run around the constitution.
Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store.
If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
They specifically state that they failed due to the constraints and had to back to the store.
> This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
Yeah sure, there's a few other minor stores but they are nowhere near the size of the Play Store.
Additionally we could compare to other markets, if you compare the number of companies which can host your website and the number of companies which can host your app, the numbers are going from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 for apps even by counting almost irrelevant stores.
Both are private ownership of public spaces.
Even though consumers will simply move to another ISP just like they are free to move to another website.
So I'm not sure what part of it happening before makes it seem unlikely to happen again.
And no, Facebook is a website and app(s), not a common carrier.
Also, I note that you didn't list MasterCard, which has been known to cut perfectly legal businesses loose... and that's a very small industry. You have what? Visa/MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, pretty much.
Now, you can muddy the semantics by saying, "Isn't every website an information shipper?" and even then the answer is still no, that still does not make them a common carrier.
There are what people want Facebook to be, which is some system supporting of their own political views, but the bad faith arguments to project Facebook into being an ISP are not sound.
Facebook's social function is as a distributor of broadcast information and carrier of peer-to-peer information for two billion people. Further, network effects mean that Facebook's size makes it a natural monopoly.
There is no shortage of historical evidence that unregulated natural monopolies are bad news for everyone except their owners, and, given that Facebook's function is the distribution of information, the natural path for regulation in a free society is a common carrier designation.
ISPs shouldn’t even be able to see what goes over their wires.
Facebook is not an ISP.
So are media networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc. They are private too. But they are still regulated. They can't post whatever they want and are held liable for any news that they present to their audience. Social media companies aren't regulated in the same way. They have more powers than the Government because they can literally censor anyone's speech they want. They can ban anyone they want. If they are left-leaning they can ban right-leaning content. If they are right-leaning they can ban left-leaning content. They are also not regulated like media networks because they are given immunity from liability through Section 230. They can never be held liable for what is posted on their platform. It is like having the cake and eating it too. Heck, they can even censor the US President's tweets and videos. This makes them extremely powerful. It is surprising to me that US citizens are perfectly fine with this setup.
They are. It is called "The Communications Act of 1934" in the United States. They are completely regulated by the FCC in US. They are regulated differently in different countries. In US, as an example, they have rules on political advertising. They have "equal time" rules where every political candidate "must" be given equal time and opportunity to air their viewpoints. No such regulations exist for social media companies.
They can be held liable for fake news or slander. Social media platforms cannot. Only the content posted in the editorial is considered personal opinion and not the position of the News Organization. That is the only page/section in the newspaper/news that does not expose the News Organization to liability/slander. That is why you have a separate "Editorial Section" in a newspaper where the editor can give his/her opinions without exposing the newspaper to liability. But of late, the news agencies have started using other pages for giving their opinions too (from harmless clickbait to downright slander) which is again a very risky choice to make. This exposes them to liability/slander. This is why regulation is so important. To ensure what is legally allowed and not allowed. News agencies are bound by such regulations. Social media organizations are not.
If news agencies publishes a hit piece on me that is obviously false, I can sue the news organization for slander. The news organization cannot claim that it believed the news reporter/agent who passed on wrong information about me and get away with it. The ultimate publisher is the news agency. Period. That is why the organization can be sued.
But if a user posts a hit piece on me in a social media platform I cannot sue the platform for allowing the user to post slanderous material. Because the platform shields itself from liability by taking advantage of the provisions of Section 230. This is because it calls itself a "platform" and not a "publisher". This is fine by me as long as it remains a platform. But once it starts censoring opinions (like Twitter/Facebook deleting Trump's tweet) then it no longer is a platform. It is now behaving as a publisher. Then why should it be protected by Section 230?
> because that exposes them to civil liability
Exactly. They are regulated. Even if a news agent publishes a fake story, the organization is responsible for it. They cannot carry it forward without verification because if they do, they end up becoming liable. Not the news agent. That is the whole point. The recent case that comes to mind is when Nick Sandmann was falsely accused of being racist against a Native American by all left-leaning media organizations (CNN, Washington Post etc). When the fact were completely different (if you watch the video in its entirety). He sued these media organizations and won. They had to settle the 250 million $ lawsuit. Can he sue Facebook/Twitter which carried this story more than any of the media organizations did? Nope. That is the reason why I say that social media organizations enjoys powers that neither the US Government nor the Media enjoys.
> There's no obligation to show the President's content there either. They can choose not to show right-leaning or left-leaning content
Yes that is right. But when they do show the President, then they have to let him have his say. They cannot either censor him or change what he meant. If they do that then they open themselves up to defamation/liability depending on what they actually did. Social media companies do not have any such issues as they are unregulated.
You can read more about Media Regulation in the United States here: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/americangovernment/chapter...
The whole point of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate their content without becoming liable for it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/13/610/section-230-...
> The classic example involves Yelp, explains Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet, a book about Section 230. If someone posts a defamatory restaurant review on Yelp, Section 230 ensures that the restaurant can sue the person who wrote the review, but not Yelp itself. It protects everything from Facebook and YouTube to the recently deplatformed 8chan.
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
I am not against Section 230. I am against platforms misusing Section 230. They are a platform until they behave like one. When the platform itself starts behaving like a publisher rather than a platform then why should provisions of Section 230 apply?
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it? Are you seriously telling me that the President of the United States video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus is in some violation of policy while porn/gore content that is posted on these platforms not? I have personally reported so many of these videos and they still haven't been removed. And if political issues are the reason for censorship then what about the other politicians in US and around the World who say as bad or worse things as Trump? Will same rules be applied there as well or not? If not, why not?
> In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
Then will these rules be applicable to everyone? In that case, I can give you a million tweets and comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" which haven't been removed yet. Nor has Youtube removed "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" videos from its platform.
It is clear bias at play here. If you try to tell me that it is not then you need to take a hike.
The law was designed to allow platforms to remove content without being legally liable for all of the content. If you disagree with that then you disagree with all of S230, and you need to campaign to have it removed and replaced.
> So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it
It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect. Children do get covid-19, children do spread covid-19. They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
> > In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
> Then will these rules be applicable to everyone?
I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
There is no need to campaign really. I am not an American but US laws govern these social media companies that operate in India too. I have experienced first hand how these social media companies operate here in India and know their biases clearly.
But the US Government is already exploring it: https://www.project-disco.org/innovation/072920-what-is-sect...
and here: https://gosar.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
> It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect
I don't understand "otherwise objectionable" to mean "factually incorrect". There are people who genuinely get a wrong idea of some process or procedure because not everyone is technically well versed. If I tomorrow say that stuxnet virus harmed my PC the technical minded you might say that it is factually incorrect because stuxnet is a worm and not a virus. So would you then censor my right to say it incorrectly? Do you want me to communicate to you perfectly and if not, that communication must be censored? Any reasonable person will allow that much of leeway. Not everyone can have perfect communication skills. Not everyone can be well versed in everything.
Anyways the point is that "otherwise objectionable" is too broad a term. For me, killing animals for food is objectionable. For you something else might be objectionable. That sort of power is not reasonable by any means for a platform to have. For instance, Twitter did not censor Ilhan Omar when she tweeted falsehood against Nick Sandmann and other Covington students. She later deleted that tweet when the true story came out into the open. But the damage was done. An innocent student's life was put at risk. All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"In her tweet, Omar wrote that the male students were "protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled 'it's not rape if you enjoy it' " and "taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants.""
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/426635-omar-deletes-tweet...
and this:
https://twitter.com/NRCC/status/1088163426172633095
Did Twitter act on it? Nope. Why did it not when it was not just factually incorrect but also put a child's life at risk?
But truth be told I don't want Twitter to act on any content that is not illegal (like child pornography, terrorism, scams etc). In true spirit of Section 230, I want her tweets to remain for as long as she desires so people see for themselves what she represents. I want Trump's tweets to remain for as long as he desires so people see for themselves what he represents. Now that is a free platform right there.
I don't want social media companies to baby sit me. I don't want social media companies to tell me what to see and what not to see unless that material is banned/disallowed by law. I don't want my viewpoints censored because it doesn't match with the ones running the platform. Is that too much to ask for?
> They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
"Almost immune" qualifies as "unlikely to be harmed". Unless we both are referring to different dictionaries. This is nitpicking to be honest with you. It is only because it was Trump who said it that it is being made into a huge issue. Just like everyone took objection to Trump calling it Wuhan/China Virus when every outlet (CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc) was calling it by that name way before Trump even said it. Because "orange man bad".
> I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
It means precisely that. They have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it. Because they said they are incapable of doing that, activist groups demanded them to provide tools which can be used to report such violations. But those tools are pretty much useless as I have repeatedly tried removing videos that blatantly violate their own policies but to no avail. Pornographic and Gore content is not allowed on Youtube according to Youtube's own guidelines. Yet those videos don't get removed and instead get "Age restricted". Because clearly they want that ad money more than following the rule of law.
As for Section 230 protections for civil liability: Instead of suing the platform where the content was posted for slander, you'd sue the individual that posted it. S230 protections do not extend to where the platform's own speech (ex, Twitter's blog), and they don't shield the actual speaker, where you can still recover damages. Your own example goes to this end - Twitter didn't publish anything, CNN did, and he was able to convince a court that it was slander, so he was able to recover from CNN.
In a hypothetical world, Facebook could decide that masks wouldn't work.
And there's nothing we can do about it except screaming at facebook?
That doesn't sound good.
I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better.
Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.)
And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.)
I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative.
Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.
That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.
Is their process rigorous, public, and auditable?
It seems like just another private org that can determine what is true or false.
If someone has to do the job, I'd rather my government do it.
Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0].
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether.
I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof.
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way).
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Or who spends the most on ads.
> Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.
The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders.
Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.
Is this really misinformation, or a false statement, worthy of censoring a presidents speech. For one, "almost immune", is not the same as claiming "immune". So its not even like its even a false statement, anymore than saying I "almost caught" a fish, when you didn't.
The implication is that children have low infection rate.
Regardless of the truth value, of "almost immune", removing the post, also robs people of valuable information, like for example, if Trump is leaning to have schools open in September.
If they think people are fools and won't notice it they are so wrong. It is only going to amplify voices for an alternative platform. My fear is that it will create platforms divided on political biases rather than a truly free platform where people from all sides can participate. This sort of polarization is not healthy.
We are beyond the speculation point here. Facebook has demonstrated that it has the capability to spread misinformation and sway political opinion very effectively and never for the right reasons. The pandemic is the most recent example of Facebook’s fuckery: post something that tells people that Covid is caused by 5G and that Bill Gates wants to implants microchips in you? You might get a small disclaimer on your FB post saying that “parts of it” “may be” inaccurate. You are constantly fed anything to keep you engaged with the platform and increasing Facebook’s bottom line.
Zuckerburg has just spun to Congress that Facebook is going to extreme lengths to moderate their platform - this employee’s testimony is proof that Facebook doesn’t care in the least or worse, they may be actively trying to help along candidates who will be politically lenient towards their behavior. We just discovered a “bug” caused Republican ads to show at a more frequent rate than Democratic ads - I don’t know what’s more worrying: that a bug on Facebook could swing the election or that it wasn’t a bug at all.
People need to stop with the “I know good people at Facebook” B.S. It’s beside the point. Facebook is a rogue actor that has enormous social and political power to completely mislead the general public into practically any belief. They have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be trusted with this power. This man should be praised as a whistleblower for exposing the charade that is an unregulated Facebook. We need more like him in tech to show people how serious the problem is. Give me a break with the analyses on whether he should have been fired or not and recognize the scope of the problem he is trying to warn is about. The quality of our democracy is absolutely at stake.
Aldous Huxley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasBxZsb40
That doesn't seem like an argument anyone would want to make.
> While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.
> The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.
Depending on which media outlet you turn to Facebook is trying to skew the election towards Trump or Biden. Depending on your political bias you get the story that fits your narrative. Perhaps our framing is off?
feels like the only way to enjoy working there is to either be someone who only cares about the money and prestige and/or convince yourself that the criticisms against Facebook are invalid