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Comment by noetokyo | Hacker News Reader

Here is Facebook trying to desperately clean up in the hopes of appeasing the antitrust regulators.

This will do the opposite though I think - most of the "antitrust" arguments targeting Facebook seem to be upset that this type of content is being removed / Facebook (and YouTube, Twitter) have too much power in what we see/read.

    > have too much power in what we see/read.

You choose to type h t t p facebook dot com into your browser. They have absolutely not power in what you see or read, you go there voluntarily. Just stop going there.

True, but that's for people who are awake; in this case, we're not actually dealing with (sane, rational, critically thinking) individuals, but with statistics. Nobody cares about individuals denying the holocaust or whatever, but when it becomes a movement, or a feeling, or a suspicion in enough people, it becomes a statistically significant trend that can influence politics, elections, votes, etc.

I mean there's tons of anti-intellectualism going on now wrt anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, corona-deniers, obama-is-a-kenyan-lizard-man, trump-is-immune-to-the-rona, etc. These are rational individuals, they may not be on Facebook or they may, it doesn't really matter because in the end it's a numbers game.

I have stopped going there, I was just explaining what I think the argument is.

Facebook has made a habit of pandering to conservatives. This is more likely a result of increased public scrutiny combined with internal employee revolt.

It’s also the least they could do, quite literally. Holocaust denialism is both extremely fringe ideologically, and extremely visible to rich westerners. It’s the easiest and lowest hanging fruit to show that they’re doing something. But I genuinely doubt that it signals a willingness to tackle either more difficult content like misinformation, nor tamp down on the coordinated behavior in less visible (to Americans) places where FB has been central to enabling genocide and other similarly bad things.

In short: it’s a good move, but I suspect it’s more PR than anything else.

Yes. “The Nazis were bad” is, generally, a pretty easy PR statement.

Here, let’s spin up a really hard one. “Given the historical discrimination against Catholics, Facebook should delete all posts that discriminate against Amy Coney Barrett on account of her religion.” Not such an easy PR win there, eh?

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