Facebook Shuts Down ‘Stop the Steal’ Group | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Shuts Down ‘Stop the Steal’ Group

onezero.medium.com

55 pointspslattery53 comments

People have lost trust in the system.

Its pretty much the worst thing that can happen to systems that are not supported by laws of nature. Fictional structures implode once trust is gone. Financial systems, ideologies, religions.. Gone..

Yes they have. But can you blame them? The media, academia, scientists, WHO, CDC, the government, all lied purposefully and continuously during the pandemic. Social media is infused top to bottom with disinformation from all sorts of nefarious actors, foreign and domestic. It's a mess.

"On Thursday afternoon, Facebook banned the group on the basis of attempting to delegitimize the election process, and its role in potentially instigating physical violence."

No shit. Democracy is hanging by a thread in the US right now, with a president trying to shut down the democratic count and vote counters fearing for their life from crazies on the right. This is the right move.

If you look closely you'll find that group is trying to draw attention to election irregularities.

Facebook is not an arbiter of truth, it's a platform for staying in contact with others. And as such shouldn't have an opinion either way.

Once it steps outside of that role it's on a hiding to nothing as all sides will find fault - as they are.

Yes and QAnon claims to #SaveTheChildren. It doesn't mean they're actually making good faith efforts. Specifically, facebook mentions calls to violence.

Um... are they looking in to voter intimidation? showing up at polling stations with guns? blue dots on houses? Republican voter fraud? Something tells me they are not.

As far as I know, you can form groups about that too. Or at least you should be able to.

And if those groups form, and they plan kidnapping governors or running around town with guns I hope they are quickly shut down.

Facebook provides a service that people use. Improving the likelihood of finding accurate information may increase people's likelihood of using it. Taking down groups decreases that likelihood. Which is more important isn't always clear

> If you look closely you'll find that group is trying to draw attention to election irregularities.

Have they actually pointed any irregularity?

I see a lot of Trump fanatics parroting blatantly false and baseless claims involving all sorts of convenient irregularities, but so far I've seen zero actual evidence supporting any of the claims.

If there is indeed a massive wave of election fraud then where's the evidence?

There needs to be a citizen group called ‘stop the disunity’ that tries to get people to talk to each other instead of yell at your friends who already agree with you in your social media filter bubbles

7 people would join it. 6 would be from the same gardening club.

There are a few good subreddits for this, one is changemyview: https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/01/23/reddits-model-...

It's sort of interesting too as a meta point how changing the incentives (away from karma to deltas) leads to different ways of engaging people. Another facet of "the medium is the message".

What is there to talk about if the two groups assume completely opposite things?

Everything, of course, starting with the assumptions. The alternative is war and ultimately subjugation of one of the parties.

Everything

> There needs to be a citizen group called ‘stop the disunity’ that tries to get people to talk to each other

There was a serious attempt at this in https://articlesofunity.org/

It was promptly banned from twitter and its founder's account was blocked on Facebook.

Why was it banned?

I wonder what the percentage of people calling for violence was. The article says there were 300k group members, and FB only said that "some" were calling for violence. You can find "some" people calling for violence in any group, so I'd like to know what the difference is here (regardless of whether or not the group has legitimate complaints).

> You can find "some" people calling for violence in any group

Uh, no, you can not.

Let be real here. Facebook wanted to shut it down and then looked for excuses. Violence, hate speech, etc. They would have found whatever they were looking for. This is pretty much the standard big tech M.O. No amount of calling for "violence" will shut down pages they like.

Also, doesn't this just incentivize political adversaries to join groups they don't like and make threats just to have pages shut down?

Sadly, this is just going to add gasoline to the fire. It's just going to antagonize and rile up these people more than anything.

> Let be real here. Facebook wanted to shut it down and then looked for excuses.

Does anyone has any problem understanding the reason why groups actively advocating for the subversion of democracy through violent means are obviously and naturally shut down in a free and democratic society?

In Trump, you have a candidate who acts, speaks and tries to govern like the most reviled dictators of the past 100 years, and millions of Americans enthusiastically gave him their vote. So I'd say nearly half of America is incapable of reasoning about liberty and democracy.

I took some time to try to understand why so many americans happened to vote for Trump and I was left with the impression that the problem lies more with disenfranchisement than with vilifying and even dehumanizing scapegoats.

Beyond the usual conservative tropes of less state and stopping attacks on personal freedoms, I've seen Trump voters mention deescalation of wars and international tension and lower taxes. I've also seen Trump supporters criticizing what they perceive as lawlessness and pending threat of state-sponsored oppression, such as the demands to erode law enforcement. Trump supporters were also quick to point out that both Obama and Biden were behind escalation of targeted assassinations on foreign soil and also increasing attacks on privacy and personal rights doemstically.

More importantly, I've seen Trump supporters state they voted for Trump in spite of his despicable personality and failings, because they see in him someone who enacts the policies they want enacted although he comes off as kind of a loudmouth moron. Yet, they also state that the public persona is also very skewed due to all the media manipulation and blatant propaganda that is targeted at him.

Those would normally be serious issues, but it's either historically ignorant or irrational to deal with them by supporting a leader like Trump.

This is precisely the part that you fail to understand: some people prioritize not dragging the US into another war over having to endure the media overblowing tweets from a moron.

Those who are able and willing to endure the propaganda barrage to get their low-taxes, not-war, pro-individual freedom policies upheld and enacted look at the bipartisan system and see that they have two choices: a candidate which is behind escalation of wars and political assassinations in foreign soil, and a candidate that brought troops home and deescalated relationships with historical enemies such as the North Korea dictatorship.

Between those choices, if you value policy over tabloid propaganda and you are already quite used to see a candidate repeatedly portrayed in bad light, isn't the choice pretty clear to you?

  the media overblowing tweets from a moron.

Trump is a man whose recent tweets likely constitute an act of sedition against the president-elect.

For four years, the media overblew some aspects of his presidency, but downplayed others. In history, it has sometimes been unwise to dismiss leaders who behave outrageously: http://depts.washington.edu/depress/nazi_seattle_times.shtml

There's still a chance all this could wrap up with a civil war. It is serious.

Best part is that they even had a gofundme, which has subsequently been taken down. :)

I feel groups like this are the most predictable thing ever, as long as being an outrage junkie is socially rewarded.

This post would be perfectly fine on HN if people were actually discussing the pros and cons of Facebook taking such actions. However, as it stands, it's turned into an abstract debate over which entities are the cause of all the problems in the world. That isn't constructive, and HN really isn't the place for these kinds of debates.

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