Facebook’s experimental hate-speech policy seems to be working
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I really wish that when Zuck was at the hearing about this, he had just said something along the lines of, "We want people to be able to post things that are true and not post things that are false. The problem is even you people in the Senate can't agree on what's true, so instead you're trying to make us, a private company, the arbiter of what's acceptable to say as it relates to US elections. Doesn't that seem insane to you? Let's do this - you guys form a bipartisan committee of Facebook truth deciders. When there's controversy over whether a post is true or not, we'll kick it over to you guys, and you let us know whether to keep it up or remove it. If a bipartisan Senate committee can't agree on what the truth is, then you all agree to stop complaining about the decisions we make on that front. Isn't that better than having a private company control election-related speech?"
At least in highly-televised public hearings, you have the opportunity to impress upon the public the insanity of their elected officials' positions.
They absolutely can agree on what’s true. What they can’t do is admit what’s true when it’s politically inconvenient.
Look at all the republicans who called out Trump for being a horrible human being before he was elected who now bow before him. Do you really think the last four years made Lindsey Graham decide he misjudged Trump’s character?
They say what’s politically convenient.
Certain industries are natural monopolies. The winners win more. When a certain corporation gains too much power in a very important industry, the society at large becomes uncomfortable with the amount of power unelected employees at that company begins to have. The result is that companies within certain sectors becomes subject to certain laws, or are made public sector.
For example, most countries have made the road-keeping-and-making industry almost completely public sector. This means a private company can't just ban certain pedestrians or drivers from accessing the road.
Because road-keeping-and-making is a natural monopoly, and is very important to society.
Now, social media is very important to society, and it is also a natural monopoly. Youtube will not be outdone by a competitor, neither will Facebook, neither will Google. (Notice Alphabet Inc. owns two of those) It only follows that these companies should become subject to new laws that prohibit them from exercising their power over society, after all, they are not elected officials.
But something doesn't work. What country will decide the policy of Facebook? The US? Then why should the US decide the social media sector policy of Myanmar. .Which naturally follows if they control the policy of Facebook. Social media, the internet and it's mega-corporations are either in a very good spot right now, or in a very bad spot, depending on how you view it.
And I see no good solution. Certainly, if things keep going the way they are in the west, this trajectory of political censorship will probably lead to real conflict, like in Myanmar.
What happened to MySpace?
Disclaimer: I dislike both Facebook and Tik Tok so I'm neither applauding nor decrying this.
I think that social networks are not public utilities, but they need to respond to the laws of the countries they operate.
For example: IMO it's not up to YouTube to decide automatically if something is a copyright infringement but rather the copyright holder should file a legal complain and the jurisdictional system should have the final word.
Social networks on the other hand should be liable if the only way to contact them is some private ticket system that do not engage a public investigation.
For example: a comment has been deleted because it's been signaled. The author should have a way to appeal through an independent state run office that will take the final decision.
Maybe it would not make things faster or better, but since public offices duty is to serve the public, it's their natural role to respond and resolve disputes, if we let private companies decide on what's right and what's not, we lose control of the public speech, what we achieved building up democracies.
There are a lot of ways in which this setup could be abused by tyrants and dictatorships, but it's already happening and letting SN do all the work it's not gonna fix it.
How exactly is the Main Stream Media media weaponizing big Tech? The Myanmar genocide is not "fake news."
The term "genocide" has been so watered down by the UN that it now includes hurt feelings.
Destruction of habitat or forced expulsion is close to genocide itself. We as humans destroy the habitat of animals causing extinction, how is this not the same case? Because the inhabitants have legs and can move elsewhere? What if they choose not to migrate?
By the way, the reason they're expelled & fleeing is because the only other choice is death. There's no option to stay other than death and if you think that's not genocide then sure. I know where you stand.
Regardless of whether it was expulsion or genocide, atrocities were committed and Facebook was a key factor into the lead up to what occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook's_r...
Genocide literally means killing the gene pool. The Rohingyan "genocide" is only a genocide by the UN standard which is so incredibly weak that it includes hurt feelings.
Sorry, but the talking heads on the msm are lying to you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opinion/myanmar-election....
I won't argue whether they can or can't, but they shouldn't. Let the political process handle political things.
Or will it use tools designed to prevent hate speech to censor?
I think there is historical precedent in the East India Company for companies actually putting boots on the ground when they want a country stabilised for their economic interests. There are a lot of ways things can go wrong when companies are encouraged to decide who should and shouldn't be in charge.
It isn't like supermarkets have a role in only feeding the righteous, or educators to only educate the children of good people or bridge builders to only build bridges that moral people can cross. Corporations are a tool of doing things, not deciding political direction.
If Facebook has a moral imperative to intervene in Myanmar, then they have a moral imperative to try and topple a number of governments that are corrupt or leading their people in bad directions. And they have all the usual human failings in that they won't correctly identify which ones. It will end either badly or with Facebook engaging in deep hypocrisy and becoming a corrupt but politically active entity.
So who gets to decide what gets “contained” on the internet now? The government has a really, really bad track record of using these sorts of “options” for suppressing dissent. Historically it’s been absolutely abusive.
Outside of applicable laws, you have no "rights" on this private platform you're provisionally allowed access to, and any attempt to sugar-coat that fact is just corporate PR-speak to avoid needless user attrition.
Our generation has seen entire sectors of the economy subsumed within monopolies. The consolidation is unprecedented in the modern era. These monopolies have a degree of political influence that makes them hard to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense. We have seen what the financial sector has chosen to do with its political influence. Why would we expect anything different from new media companies like Facebook?
People need to stop and ask themselves if the core enlightenment principles of toleration, free expression, and free association are worth protecting. Once abandoned, they will not be easy to resurrect.
Blogs still exist. Newspapers exist (even very extremists ones). Telegram exists, forums exist, etc.
What Facebook and co. may have a monopoly on is channels of mass outreach. However, I don't think that there is or should be a right for your opinion to be widely disseminated by a third party.
Recall that the Green Dragon tavern was the unofficial headquarters of the American revolution.
Maybe not, but when it comes to politics, unequal access to wide dissemination can be harmful to the democratic process. For any given country, either all parties or no parties should be able to post to Facebook—but certainly not some parties but not others.
Unequal access to wide dissemination is already a given btw. It depends in part on how much money you have.
Note: I'm not talking about censorship of individual posts they make for the views expressed in those posts. That's what Facebook was doing here, and I fully support that. (I'm from Canada; the concept is enshrined in law here!)
I'm just talking about the idea that you probably don't want third parties like Facebook to be responsible for deciding whether to censor people, rather the much "safer" question of whether to censor individual posts. Especially when those people are current political candidates, and the people calling for their de-platforming are people opposed to their election, who are perfectly willing to libel them if it silences them at a time crucial for swinging an election.
Facebook, unlike a government, does not have a concept of due process, and so is not equipped to deal with complaints from people who have motivations (like swinging an election) strong enough to be willing to "take it in the chin" for libelling someone, as long as their libel causes the desired de-platforming effect at just the right time.
This is why we tend to want censorship to be a legal matter: courts have well-built, well-thought-out mechanisms to allow the recipient of a complaint against them to fight back. Meanwhile, what kind of arbitration system does Facebook have? Or, more abstractly, what kind of arbitration system are they required to have? Are there any requirements at all, for how Facebook and other networks should work with people, when others are asking for them to be de-platformed?
In the case of a whole party/movement, I would say it's a really fine line to walk. I wouldn't advocate for Facebook to ban parties like the AfD in Germany or FN in France, while they're often extremist, there is still some legitimate opposition within the bounds of the constitutions left in those parties. But I wouldn't be opposed to FB banning e.g. the KKK or some party that explicitly made reference to Mein Kampf or to killing all the Jews or similar.
Also beware of the slippery slope fallacy. Just because one believes that deplatforming some parties or movements is legitimate, it doesn't mean nor necessarily lead to deplatforming all opposition.
Because if Google began deciding which blogs, newspapers, etc align with their version of truth, those entities and their audiences would disappear almost overnight.
I think it's easy to hold this opinion when the views silenced are not your own.
It's also really easy to be a "free speech" absolutist[1] when you're not personally being persecuted.
As others have already mentioned ITT, there is a legal argument to be made that most opinions can be expressed in some form, but there is neither a legal argument to be made that they can be expressed through a particular medium, nor is there a moral argument to be made that every opinion is equally worthy of defense.
It's not about the question whether Google censoring LGBT content would be technically illegal, or violate "freedom of speech" - I think neither of these are necessarily true - but it would be morally wrong[2] and thus worthy of outrage.
[1] By that I mean people who think that "freedom of speech" means that you should have a right to speak your mind in every context without any repercussions. Freedom of speech is important, but so is protection from persecution, or the trustworthiness of reputable sources etc.
[2] The only way in which it wouldn't be morally wrong is if they decided e.g. to ban all political content altogether or something similar.
Don't attack Cloudflare and Cloudflare won't terminate you. That's not censorship, it's self-defense.
Facebook doesn't merely allow sharing information, it facilitates it -- worse, it selectively facilitates information whose availability is useful to Facebook, not to you. Facebook spends billions of dollars developing algorithms to control what you see on Facebook. Where in the "free expression" handbook does it mention that newsfeed posts which support the bottom line shall be seen more often than those that don't?
This idea, that anything that happens on Facebook has anything to do with "free expression" or open, unmediated communication between acquaintances, is the first thing that we need to get rid of. When people stop believing that, they might use Facebook much less -- which would be a good thing!
Here are a couple of good explanations.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
If facebook tomorrow banned all LGBT content I have a feeling "it's a private company" would not be an acceptable defense for anyone currently using it.
In short you're using the most in vogue fallacy of 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
"Facebook is allowed to host or refuse to host any subset of legal speech so long as refusals doesn't target any protected classes or otherwise violate US laws."
I still think you can argue your position from here but there is a perfectly defensible argument for why banning LGBT content would be stopped while banning puppy videos would be allowed.
The thing is, "its not right" and "its not within Facebook's right to free speech and is instead a violation of someone else's free speech" are two different things.
The people arguing "its a private company" are generally not responding to arguments that Facebooks moderation decisions are merely wrong, but to arguments that they are violation of others' free speech rights rather than exercises of Facebook's free speech rights.
Which is why I linked to the moat and bailey argument. The first amendment is a non-issue. Freedom of speech is something completely different which has nothing to do with one law from 3 centuries ago that limited the power of the federal government to limit peoples rights to free speech in certain areas.
We know the opinions of the people who wrote the first amendment and they would have not been amused by the arguments we see today. These would have let the East India Company silence anyone who complained about their tea in the areas they owned a charter.
There are different understandings of the right to free speech, but a very common one (both now and at the time of the Founding and the First Amendment) is that it is the right of private parties to decide what ideas to expression, including deciding what ideas to use their resources to express and relay, free from government intervention, and that there is nothing outside of that freedom from government intervention included in the right. A private entity can, in that view, violate the right only when it acts as an, de facto or de jure, agent of the state.
It is not a bait-and-switch to hold a different view of “free speech” than your idiosyncratic one.
To put it in the melodramatic language of the 18th century: A corporation has no soul to save and no body to punish. It has no natural interests and no natural rights. It is a legal fiction whose only use is to protect its owners from ruin and whose only justification is the public good. To pretend otherwise is an affront to both common sense and god.
No, the above is the fallacy of equivocation. “Private” in “private party” unambiguously refers to the “non-government” sense of “private”, where the “party” may be a corporate entity or natural person. It does not refer to the “private(ly held)” vs. “public(ly traded)” distinction regarding how corporate stocks are traded.
But if I don't feel there's a similar prohibition against corporations or individuals censoring things on their platform/property/whatever, then I have to think about whether or not I agree with the proposed censorship for other reasons. That's not a retreat to the motte - that's just an acknowledgement of the fact that anti-government-censorship arguments don't necessarily apply to private entities.
Once we're dealing with an entity for which I don't have a blanket objection to censorship, it makes perfect sense that I would accept some content bans but not others, based on my opinion of that content.
Not really. I've frequently seen the argument made that particular censorship is within the legitimate purview of a private actor, while still being disapproved by the speaker.
> If facebook tomorrow banned all LGBT content I have a feeling "it's a private company" would not be an acceptable defense for anyone currently using it.
Facebook absolutely has the right to censor all LGBT content, and them doing so is not a cause for government intervention.
Facebook also absolutely should not censor all LGBT content, and I would condemn them and cease use of the platform if they did.
It's impossible to refute your hypthetical because FB would never do such a thing because of the reputational and financial cost.
HN loves this argument until it comes to bakeries that don't want to bake gay wedding cakes.
Please debate the actual argument instead of a tired straw man.
In what fucking world does political speech not deserve at least as much legal protection as being homosexual?
In any case, you're illustrating my point perfectly - it's all about "businesses have the right to exclude customers" until the customer happens to be someone HN likes, at which point the goalposts move wildly.
Marriage equality was about equal treatment under the law. It was debated and decided and passed. You can’t generalize that to your imagined right to troll Twitter.
The question is: do businesses have the right to reject customers?
If the context is political speech (which is critically important and deserves the most extreme legal protection), HN says “you’re fucked, Jack, business rules!”
If the context is gay marriage (which, saying this as a gay man, is not nearly as fundamentally important as free speech) HN says “fuck those businesses, they can’t kick you out!”
You're the one that changed the subject to bakeries and marriage rights.
But to correct that, my preferred solution would be to eliminate corporations entirely. Eliminate the power structures that allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power and the legal protections that let people think they are not personally responsible. The legal framework would need to adjust, but I think society would find itself massively improved when personal responsibility and rights were restored.
> AT&T [insert any other carrier] is a corporation, it owns the platform, it decides what traffic is allowed on its property (subject to applicable laws, of course, but not confined to only those laws)
See the problem?
In the first case, I am in full agreement - of course GoDaddy decides, and ought to decide, what domains are allowed to be registered on its property.
In the second case, the correct solution is to change the applicable laws - enshrine net neutrality into law in a constitutionally valid manner, and Bob's your uncle.
Whomever owns a platform gets to decide what gets published or not published on that platform. They get to make the rules, enforce them and change them as they will, where the law of the land permits. That has always been the case.
There is also, crucially, no liability for not publishing hate speech in the US.
Facebook is allowed to do what they're doing and the question of whether that makes them a "publisher" or "platform" isn't relevant.
... I'm just assuming that's where you were going with this. Here's an exhausting HN thread on an Ars Technica article explaining further:
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803998
[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-...
It won’t have the same reach, and it won’t be as visible, but it will be just as free as freedom of speech ever was. If someone started posting their un-cited drivel, racist rants, and society harming misinformation on my hard drive, I’d want it purged. It’s my responsible as a citizen to maintain the health of my system and maintain reasonable discourse with those I disagree with.
Is it “oppression” or an “infringement of our rights” or the “nanny state” when a HackerNews mod deleted a racist post or personal attack on another community member? I think not...
You either have free speech, and host stuff you personally disagree with, or just call it 'moderation with political bias' (or some other kind of bias), if you only leave stuff you personally agree with.
You never know, when you'll be the one facebook disagrees with, and then it's too late.
I really don't understand how we can start equating LGBT rights with outright hate speech.
Yeah, I know, you're right. Everybody else is sure that their moral framework is right, too. So why does yours get to rule? What is your basis for saying that yours is right and theirs is wrong?
You may in fact be able to give a defense of your moral framework. That defense seems right to you, and to those who agree with you. But defenders of other moral frameworks can do that, too. Which self-consistent and defensible (per the adherents) moral framework should be the one to rule Facebook, and why?
(also we're talking about outrage here, not about lawsuits.)
Why do we believe you instead of the other guy? Why does Facebook believe you instead of the other guy? Because Facebook is in the US instead of Iran?
Here's my position: I am a moral absolutist. Still, I don't want a moral absolutist deciding what Facebook thinks is appropriate content. There's too many systems of absolute morality, and too many of them differ from my own in important ways - ways that I'd like to be able to talk about.
However, I get to be morally outraged at their actions whenever it pleases me, and I get to get others to be outraged too and if we're enough people we may convince them to change course.
In that sense, I don't care one bit about the guy in Teheran who thinks being LGBT is wrong and I don't have to.
I'm still worried about the guy who does get to dictate what Facebook will carry (namely, somebody at Facebook). I don't want that person to be very morally absolutist, and I worry that they are becoming increasingly so as time goes by.
There are opinions that I don't agree with that I think are still completely legitimate and perfectly moral.
There are opinions that I take serious issue with and may even find immoral but for which I'd still claim that it's worse to try to suppress them than to allow them.
And then there's stuff like incitement to violence or the president of the USA spreading dangerous lies about an election ... tolerance can only go so far.
Of course, it's a difficult call to make. Of course, no matter what you decide, someone is going to be angry. But you can't just not decide, you do have to take a stand and by refusing to do so, you have effectively already decided something (that's the whole point of Sartre's philosophy btw, which was inspired by WW2).
So what exactly makes your morality absolute? Can you provide any evidence for it? Most people give hand wavy answers to this question, mumbling something along lines of intuition etc, which is not evidence, but as arbitrary and relative as some random choice of initial values for some random moral framework.
It's a fact that different people have different perceptions of morality, but that alone is not a sufficient argument to shut down any debate about ethics.
It is our duty as moral individuals to fight for what we think is morally right. And sometimes we will have to compromise.
But I'm tired of having to argue for why LGBT rights are important (something that I really would have hoped would be understood by now), since that is not the point. The point is that OP gave an example of a decision that "would spark an outrage" and I contended that that would be the case because it would be seen by the outraged as an immoral decision.
You can't take people's rights to be morally outraged away from them. You can, at the most, try to argue with those people why the supposedly immoral thing is not actually immoral, but I haven't seen anyone here doing that: only people defending the truism that "everyone has different moral standards". Which... yeah.
You just make a lot of claims, but you fail to back them up, so they are and remain nothing but that, baseless claims. It's basically just your opinion, which you are trying to wrap in the garment of 'morality'. So if you are moral realist and your morality is easily discarded, why should they care? If you are a moral anti-realist and still make moral value judgments, which are also easily discarded without consequences, why should they care?
Everyone individually, and each can then express their opinion on Facebook’s moral status, and decide otherwise whether and how to engage with Facebook, based on whether and to what extent Facebook aligns with each individual’s moral standards.
Even evolutionary, everything that doesnt create more kids is useless.
But we, as a western society usually stand by the rights to let adults do whatever they want (consentually), and don't care about it, if it doesnt affect us directly.
And what does 'morally' even mean?
We, as a western society, support kids seeing and sucking on boobs, until they're 1yo or 2 (or whatever), then for the next 10-12 years we hide (images of, and real) boobs from them, as if they were radioactive, and they don't know why, then they (approximately half of them) want to look at (real and images of) boobs, but we find that "wrong", a few years later we legally let them pay to see boobs (or find them online for free), and somewhere in the meantime, start bothering then, when are they going to find someone with boobs. Meanwhile mens boobs are ok.
In some other cultures, women of all ages don't even cover their boobs in public.
So basically something, that is a normal everyday thing in some cultures, for people of all ages, becomes morally wrong in our culture, and we censor it online, we also lock up people if those boobs are owned by a person younger than some arbitrary age, and even have wikipedia pages about that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... ).
So basically, for some other culture, what we do is morally wrong, but we, as a majority, get to ignore their morality and impose our own (even if it's stupid).
TLDR: we (as a group) support social networks deleting photos of female nipples, because showing and seeing those is morally wrong in our culture, even though it's an issue that affects a lot more people than LGBT stuff.
So? They are as free to express and act on their opinion of private actors expressing pro-LGBT messages as people who believe otherwise are to express the opposite.
> Even evolutionary, everything that doesnt create more kids is useless.
Obviously false or such traits would be quickly weeded of it wherever they arise, and they are not.
The last time someone didn't want to bake a cake, they had to fight their way to supreme court... so yeah, expressing your beliefs is not an easy task to do.
The problem with beliefs is, that they're arbitrary, and a tiny variable can make a good thing a bad thing. Rape in a movie? Bad thing. Crime, thriller, etc. Rape jokes, bad. But wait, if you just change the gender of the rape victim to a male, you've got a hollywood "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ).
So, rape jokes are bad, and deleted ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15641998 -here facebook even stood with free speech, but bent down soon after), but if the victim is a man, you can shoot a comedy and make $95M. And it's far from being the only movie with such cntent ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nheskbsU5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc6QxD2_yQw ).
Why is one (morally) ok, and the other isn't? Who decides that? If we censor one, shouldnt we also censor the other? Or if we let one online, why not let the other? Is it just a personal choice of a trigger happy moderator? Or is there a written, official moderation rule, where content with rape is ok, if the victim is a man?
But as a matter of fact, it wasn't about bakers not baking a cake for gay people, or whether you should be allowed to make rape jokes - all topics that maybe have a bit more nuance to them, and can be discussed elsewhere.
The question was "would it be wrong for Facebook to ban LGBT content"? I contend that it would be wrong, i.e. immoral. If you disagree with that, we can try to have an argument about that. If you agree or don't care, I don't see the point in this mental exercise.
It is of zero interest in any discussion ever that there are hypothetical people who disagree with opinion X, because I'm not arguing with hypothetical people. I'm having an argument with specific individuals with specific beliefs.
Read again what you have formulated above. You just asserted that it's 'immoral' without giving any argument or evidence for it. Surely, you should formulate an argument yourself first, before asking for one.
However, I would have thought that this line of reasoning is self-evident on a forum such as this one...
What is self evident to you might be self evidently wrong to others, let your arguments speak instead of appealing to your local culture. this is an international forum and one shouldn't just assume that everybody thinks and values the exact same things. maybe start off by explaining why your moral framework is supposedly 'absolute' and not just some arbitrary choice you made that is convenient to you and how it's supposedly better or more valid than the moral framework of the people you lazily vilified as 'crazy' just because they oppose you on certain issues.
And now I'm done talking to homophobes.
See that makes your 'moral assessment' as worthless as your infantile name-calling. If you had any valid arguments, you would have given them. Thanks for the exchange anyway.
LGBT is just an example, because in many cultures it is immoral. As is the nipple.
I just don't think it's a good idea for a private company, to be able to decide arbitrarily what is moral and what is not. Especially facebook.... there are many bakeries, but not many social networks with billions of users.
You seem to be under the illusion that if Facebook banned nothing (or at least nothing that goes beyond what is illegal), they would not make a moral decision.
But that is wrong. Deciding to allow absolutely everything is a decision (e.g. by placing higher moral value on freedom of expression than on other things) just as much as deciding to disallow some other content is a decision.
In the end, there is no escaping morality. As a human being, it is your responsibility to make decisions according to your own moral standards (and the limits of the law) and if you're someone with power, these decisions will affect more people and will be scrutinised more.
> Who decides what is moral and what is not?
Everyone decides for themselves. And then we come together as a society and we figure out what to do about the messy differences between our positions and find some sort of compromise - that's really the only way it goes.
also, I support less repression on sexual expression (btw something that often correlates with support for LGBT issues) and (as a European), I find American prudishness to be often quite puzzling, but this
> TLDR: we (as a group) support social networks deleting photos of female nipples, because showing and seeing those is morally wrong in our culture, even though it's an issue that affects a lot more people than LGBT stuff.
is ridiculous. Some people's inability to be able to view boobs on FB is not on the same level as LGBT rights.
Why?
Isn't seeing boobs a lot more natural than anything lgbt? I mean, pretty much a 100% of people have boobs, 50% of those have the ones we're not allowed to see, and if you count all the lgbt people, you get what.. 10% of the population? 20%? Definitely less than the number of people with boobs.
Yes, i know it's a stupid example, and there are historic reasons for promoting lgbt rights... but we're currently in a state, where one person (or a relatively small group of people) with their own set of beliefs, can decide that an 8-9yo drag queen is ok (Lactatia), a 6 year old can be a star of really creepy beauty pageants (honey boo boo), but one visible, female nipple is bad (sometimes even very bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... )
Who decides what is ok and what is not? Laws surely don't. Yes, facebook is a private company, but it should be treated as having a monopoly position, especially after buying instagram and whatsapp. Having a company with so much power (having so many eyes watching them, that they can manipulate) is not a good thing, especially if they can arbitrary censor stuff they arbitrarily don't like.
Seriously? LGBT people are being bullied and beaten not only in Russia but also in Poland, which from here is about an hour away. In Iran and other countries they are hanged. In Chechnya, they're being deported and murdered.
But even in the West, suicide rates for LGBT people are much higher, AIDS continues to be an issue (even though significant progress has been made), there are still crazy people who think that teaching LGBT issues in school - which would be enormously helpful for teenagers in accepting themselves - is some sort of propaganda, and to this day, some families still don't accept if their kid is gay (or trans). Oh and also, just a short while ago, in a city not that far from where I live, there was a murder attempt on a homosexual couple and one of the guys actually died. These are real issues with real impact for the people that are affected. It's easy to think that homophobia is gone in the West, because of the public opinion, but secretly and deep down some people (even if they are fewer) are either latently or sometimes deeply homophobic.
Again, as in the other thread... who decides what is moral and what is not?
In iran, it is moral and expected for women to cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And on facebook it is moral and expected for women to cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover.
But you care about LGBT issues, and don't care about special covering rules for women, so you're arguing me, that one group of people should be protected because of unequal treatment, but other group of people shouldn't be protected for their unequal treatment.
Yes, it's wrong that women are forced to wear head scarves, but that has nothing to do with nipples not being allowed on Facebook.
You're letting facebook decide that groups of people should be equal regarding issue #1, and disregard facebook treating them differently regarding issue #2.
To quote you from another post:
> Well, it depends a bit on what is meant by "banning LGBT content", but suppose that a gay couple wouldn't be allowed to post their wedding pictures. Since, presumably, all straight couples can do so, Facebook would effectively imply that gay couples are somehow "wrong" and should not be shown to people. I would find that deeply immoral because gay people are not worth less than straight people.
I'll just change a few things:
Well, it depends a bit on what is meant by "banning womens nipples", but suppose that a woman wouldn't be allowed to post their nipple pictures. Since, presumably, all men can do so, Facebook would effectively imply that womens nipples are somehow "wrong" and should not be shown to people. I would find that deeply immoral because womens nipples are not worth less than mens nipples.
You're basically saying iran is right to jail women not wearing headscarfs, because their culture and morals say that it's somehow wrong for women to go outside uncovered, while man can do that.... oh wait... replace "iran" with "facebook", "jail" with "delete photos", and "headscarfs" with "nipples".
So basically, by your logic, discrimination is ok, as long as it's nipples, and not anything lgbt related. I mean, showing womens nipples is immoral in america, showing womens faces is immoral in iran, and women kissing women is immoral probably in iran too... as a not-american, it's interesting to me, that you're against respecting what's im/moral in iran, even if it's clear discrimination, but don't care about discrimination if it involves american morals.
However I do hope that at some point you will do some thinking or research about the myriad issues LGBT people (or, for that matter, women in Iran) have to go through, and then maybe see why it comes across as slightly offensive for someone to equate these struggles with nipples not being shown on Facebook.
Have a good day.
And you don't have to wait a 100 years, in my country, if we overly applied the same rules, at the start of the first covid wave, facebook would censor all the science-deniers, and crazy preppers for using masks (because "masks don't help" - our doctors, depending on where you live, probably yours too). Then one random saturday, our government decided you need a mask and gloves to enter any indoor public place (stores,...), and facebook would censor the anti-mask people.
We also live in a culture, where we have a few "protected groups", where we censor anything (even jokes) about that (eg. rape jokes), but even those rules, we apply very arbitrarily.... in movies, rape bad, rape jokes bad, unless the person raped is a man, then it's not a crime/thriller, but a "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ). Again, rape jokes are censorship worthy, unless you change one tiny variable, and that makes it all ok. Today atleast.
The paranoid prepper advocating for mask use, while all the doctors say masks are useless?
Or antimask denier, who says masks are useless, and doesn't want to wear them, when the doctors say you need to wear a mask?
In my country, you could ban both in a single weekend, when we went from "masks are useless" to "masks are mandatory in public indoor places from monday on".
If you mix politics into this, it makes it even worse... we were listening for four years how the ameican election was stolen, how the russians hacked everything, etc., and now we listen how it's impossible to hack the election, steal the votes, etc. Who do you ban? The conspiracy theorists then or now?
More stupid example? You have religious people in eg. Iran saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And you have instagram saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. On one side, if you advocate that women should cover up parts of their body, that men don't have to, you're a misogynistic hate group, and get banned, unless we're talking about nipples, then it's instagram itself doing the deleting and banning.
Alleged bias.
Outrage is also free speech. You're saying if you agree with moderating some things, you should never be allowed to complain about other types of moderation? That's even more antithetical to free speech.
It's like supporting (eg.) warrantless surveilance (because pedos and terrorists), and then complaining when it's used against you. You supported the system, now shut up and deal with it.
I support criticism of moderation decisions on the basis of freedom of speech for individuals.
You're allowed to say whatever you want, but if you insist on using my property and resources to say it, that's an infringement on my freedom.
These positions aren't inconsistent.
> If you support a system with moderation (censorship) based on peoples beliefs, then you should not complain when the system you supported is used
Again, now you're arguing against free speech. I'd never tell someone they shouldn't complain about something because they said something I didn't like. They're free to complain all they like.
Until the same activists who wore down Facebook start going after the domain-name registrar of that same self-hosted blog, anyway.
> racist rants
They can then post racist rants until CloudFlare terminates their account on their platform. Like you know, that thing that actually happened to a specific racist ranting platform? (remrotSyliaD)
But I suppose those guys should have just made their own CloudFlare alternative...
Either way, I don't think corporations should do anything to censor speech, other than that which they are specifically ordered to "censor" by the government. For example child pornography, etc.
Perhaps corporations that handle water and electricity in Myanmar should shut down the water and electricity supply to those who advocate hate?
(And arguably, water and electricity is easy to get hold of on your own. Easier than your own publishing platform for sure, due to the natural monopoly of that business)
So yea, the power and ability to suppress content based on illegal activity has downsides - it's a necessity. We can't strictly avoid the topic entirely and allow everything everywhere for very obvious reasons.
So if we're not allowing everything everywhere then we agree that there are lines, and those lines have to be drawn. So we're already on the "slippery slope", we're just debating where exactly to draw the lines.
To me this stance from Facebook is one of the very few things i agree with from them. Much of the uninformed viral and outage based discourse is doing nothing but harming humanity in my eyes and tools to spread it are helping no one. We're in an information war time and while i support controversial information about race, gender identity and any other "hot topics"; i definitely do not support toxic discourse on these subjects that don't even attempt to inform or constructively discuss.