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Comment by deminature | Hacker News Reader

You would hope that the custodian of the world's most popular communication platform would have a greater sense of obligation to the social responsibility that comes with it. Unfortunately we don't live in that world, and Zuckerberg continues choose dollars over lasting damage to the standards of discourse. He is the Murdoch of the 21st century, tearing at the social fabric in pursuit of profits and facilitating the spread of foreign disinformation if it increases engagement metrics.

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>would have a greater sense of obligation to the social responsibility that comes with it

Maybe that's why he is largely hands-off when it comes to policing or shaping content? Not everyone agrees that the best way to manage an important communications platform is to shape the speech allowed on it.

Allowing anti-vaccination sentiment to proliferate on the platform is fairly unambiguously harmful to society, especially during a pandemic that may rely on a vaccine to escape. It appears to be choosing engagement, which drives clicks, page views and ad impressions over being a force for good and then dressing it up as free speech, when moderators selectively remove millions of other posts per day.

Social networks have proven themselves so powerful, it seems unlikely their ability to wreak havoc on society will remain unlegislated forever. One day social networks will be legally responsible for the content published, and we'll see an end to the laissez-faire attitude of allowing disinfo to spread unhindered.

I mean, by that logic, the US government allowing anti-vaccination sentiment to proliferate without legal/policy action (read: the First Amendment), is also "unambiguously harmful to society".

Except, the issue is way more nuanced than that. The reason this expression is enshrined as a protection in US jurisdiction is because we decide that free expression trumps every other social need — with the narrow exceptions as laid out in Brandenburg v Ohio (imminent lawless action).

To the extent that this is undesirable, if the political will to amend the Constitution is absent, then you'd also have a hard time convincing people that Facebook should not exercise the same principle.

My point is that true freedom of speech of already only partially possible on the platform owing to moderators selectively taking down millions of posts daily that violate the 'community guidelines'. Extending this to anti-vaccination rhetoric seems like a small expansion of existing policy, and addresses a problem causing real harm in society.

Cities are paying millions to stop outbreaks of previously defeated diseases like measles and counteract disinformation primarily being spread on social networks [1]. Should social networks not be somewhat culpable for their quantifiable externalities on society?

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl...

Right, and that's just as easily an argument in favor of loosening the existing restrictions, not tightening them even further.

Epistemologically, where you come out on this all depends on which axiom you start from.

Also, there's a subtle difference between the existing guidelines and what you're proposing: the existing guidelines exist to maintain a positive experience directly for those consuming the platform (eg I don't want to see ISIS beheadings on FB). The new guidelines you're proposing exist solely to indirectly prevent others from seeing things you think they should not be seeing (eg I don't want my aunt to see this post). It's a very important distinction.

This thread is about Mark Zuckerberg specifically saying how they will police certain content. How is that hands off?

The trouble is that Facebook’s algorithm by definition does shape the speech that people see on Facebook.

Is he the sole person responsible for policy on Facebook or is it by commission / shareholders? I often feel like Zucc is getting scapegoated and bears the responsibility for all of Facebook, but I'm not in the loop whether he still holds the majority of shares and policy of FB, etc.

Zuck controls 60% of the voting rights.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/shareholders-wont-force-zuck...

Is there even a point of voting rights if one person hold the majority?

Only in the sense that one day he might not.

I suppose there might be scenarios in which he'd recuse himself, or not care either way on an issue.

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