Our Response to the Violence in Washington

> Of course, Facebook as a private company is under no obligation to follow Constitutional limits on permissible vs non-permissible speech. But should they be?

Absolutely not, the first amendment only applies to the government for a reason.

Perhaps there should be a government-run equivalent that is subject to the first amendment.

Though honestly, I think that would work out horribly. The number of people you can reach by shouting in a town square isn't very high, that's why the government can allow any kind of crank to do it. If you can reach millions...bad things would happen.

> the US didn't have a law against praising and supporting neo-Nazis

Maybe that's the problem?

> We must be able to discuss and even support things that are currently illegal, including discussion of acts of violence (but not carrying them out, just talking about them), to explore whether or not existing laws might need changes. So this cannot be the boundary between allowed and disallowed speech.

I strongly agree with this. I just don’t agree that you’re entitled to use other people’s publishing resources to do it.

You can argue that an illegal thing should be legal without inciting people to do it while it's illegal. Under your reasoning, any act of inciting violence could be dismissed as "discussion".

There's probably not a clear line in every instance. Whether you think "praise and support" crosses the line, it would be pretty hard to claim it made things better, and pretty easy to see how those words, from the most powerful person in the country, might make a person more likely to continue doing whatever it is they're doing.

Can you elaborate?

Except if no one is using the protocols, they don't actually solve the problem.

People don't want everyone to have a complete platform to them to say anything they want. So somewhere someone has to be doing some deciding of who gets a platform. Protocols can't magically solve that problem.

I think there is something to giving people options on what moderation they want distinct from having to limit who they can communicate to, but all of the current attempts at that don't do a good enough job, they all offer technical solutions, but no real solutions.

What you really need is for one of these protocols to get a particular instance that does an amazing job of "no nazis, no one telling you to die or that you shouldn't have human rights", while giving you the room to move and remain on the protocol if the instance you are on starts to limit you or you start to disagree with the moderation.

Of course, this begs the question of who is going to be doing that moderation and why. That's the hard part, not the decentralised platform.

This however does not make both sides the same.

Yes, liars will accuse their opponents of doing what they are doing.

We can observe reality to determine who is telling the truth, rather than blindly repeating lies alongside truths.

The right in the US have created an alternative reality to live in, but it clashes with actual reality if you spend even a little time comparing what they say to what has actually happened in the world.

The fairness doctrine doesn't exist anymore. It went away when it was decided it wasn't a good thing and went against free speech.

Compelled speech or forced speech is not free speech.

The Fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast licenses, to public frequencies because they're a limited resource.

It's really hard to argue that websites are a limited public resource.

It may be technically solved, but if people aren't using it instead of centralized, biased social networking, it's not really a solution in it's current form.

Until we can find a way to make a Mastodon better than Facebook, it'll be impossible to gain a critical mass for people to take it seriously.

This might come from marketing the benefits of decentralization, maybe finding a way to have a universal "login" page that can direct users to particular nodes, etc.

Who is incentivised to run the instances?

So, in the perfect world, you have all these nodes with different levels and types of moderation and people can communicate across them, but pick the level and type of moderation they want by what instance they use, right?

The reality is, no one has a good idea how to moderate something at that scale, even with the resources that come from have a walled garden. You don't even get that, and you want better moderation to draw people away? No one is doing it.

Then, on the other end, you want someone to believe in free speech enough to host the completely unfiltered one, and not baulk at some point when abhorrent shit is on their server? You just end up with a nazi server run by nazis, because those are the only people who actually want that.

It's "solved" only in theory, in practice, there is no practical draw for real-world users.

In your analogy this is more like Facebook deleting posts that call for sexual harassment, or praise/support Harvey Weinstein. I think people would be ok with that.

No, I would stop using facebook

Censorship is not black and white. It is a gradient.

I'd say it was naked self interest for Facebook to remove posts like that, but I wouldn't consider it illegal.

There is also a difference between disliking a company covering up its own bad acts and a company preventing a 3rd party from using its resources for a thing that walks up to the edge (and in many people's opinion crosses over) into inciting other illegal acts.

I would take the same stance yes and I think others would more likely stop using Facebook because they didn't agree with Facebook’s stance.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Since it should be obvious not to use Facebook if you dont agree with their service’s tendencies.

No. We’d be mad because that would be an abuse of their right as a content hoster. Some content can be good to remove and some content can be bad to remove and it is not hypocritical to get upset when some content is removed and not when other content is removed.

> My question to this, is would you take the same line if the censorship was something nakedly egregious?

Do you object to Facebook censoring child pornography?

How nakedly egregious does the crime have to be before you're ok with Facebook censoring or removing it?

It doesn't sound like you consider solicitation to commit a crime of violence to be a serious enough offense. So I guess promoting, instigating or encouraging treason, sedition or subversive activities is acceptable to you.

And there are vast stretches of the internet where private or not the platform is infinitely permissive or a close approximation. So if people are feeling unheard, it’s pretty likely they have their work cut out in terms of building the audience for their voice.

The left has been in this position forever. But somehow we’re supposed to sympathize when a bunch of yokels storm into a parliamentary procedure and start shooting it up?

Those people were heard at the election, this is the temper tantrum because other people got to be heard as well.

> The internet is nearly entirely private and controls the vast majority of communication.

Yes it's private, that doesn't mean they can't own it, they can setup their own private servers and be free of restriction.

So you're against sites censoring content that's considered unpopular but you'd like the HN mods to censor a certain point you call "trolling"?

I also find common argument tropes pretty tiring, and I feel like I've typed out the same responses again and again, but pointing out the inconsistency is probably the best way... and in a year maybe you see someone else pointing it out instead of you, and it catches on... till the pendulum swings the other way.

At least as a reader of comments that's what I'd rather read: a well thought out rebuttal, than to never see the exchange due to moderation. Eternal September and all, it's fresh for someone.

It's not in bad faith. Many people legitimately confuse morality and legality.

All posts on FB are non-public.

What are their concerns? Income, opportunity?

Honestly, the employee bees don't see out of their boxes, they execute on specs and are directly concerned with the technology they are building. I wouldn't really hold them responsible. Higher ups should be made responsible but I don't see it happening anytime soon. The law has a lot of catching up to do and seeing honesty and responsibility come directly from these people is not going to happen anytime soon. As long as their incentives are short term profits this is what we're going to come out of it

OK, I think I'd put that mostly under the second point -- it's a platform for content that's big, lightly moderated, and easy to use.

To look into that a bit more, I guess the "big" condition could go one of two ways:

- Bigger platforms have a proportionately greater impact than smaller platforms, and a proportionately greater responsibility to moderate content. Ideally actual factual content should be prohibited from all platforms -- Facebook, wikipedia, blogger, the internet generally. Propaganda should not be allowed to "fester" anywhere.

- Bigger platforms have a responsibility that smaller platforms simply do not. There can be places on the internet for them, but not too many under the same domain name.

I know that my characterization of neither possibility is charitable. I'd appreciate another perspective. Maybe the important point is that Facebook stores and serves the content. But DNS helps serve content, and ISPs help serve content, and software providers help serve content. Maybe storage is where your moral line is crossed? Maybe you think AWS and GCP and Azure etc have the same resposibility as Facebook (per unit of horrible content)? And the banking system probably has a moral incentive to cut off people doing questionable things? And if someone were to self-host, we'd probably need to think about who sold them their computers, electricity, bandwidth and hardware and food.

It's more than just a nuisance though. It comes off as arrogance to their users and a big brother feel to it. Not sure crowd sourcing would be any better, because it would involve people "ganging up" on each other and would be inflammatory. Fact-checking involves somebody's own search for truth. There's an independence to searching things out, feeling along for sources you trust. Trust isn't gained by a simple textbox warning.

if your criticism of facebook is based on an assumption that it's not possible to use any alternative to facebook, i'm calling that criticism invalid.

Organizing insurrection isn't socializing.

Non sequitur.

The correct response is that people of all stripes are capable of both promoting and destroying civil society. And I would personally add all animals, machines, and so on, too are capable depending on how society is defined.

I think we can all agree that both of those things are bad.

The BLM protests were so large that large numbers of non-protestors used the protests as cover to vandalize and loot, but the protests themselves were never organized around vandalism or violence. And indeed, investigations revealed that a number of the worst instances of vandalism were in fact instigated or committed by undercover police officers or members of the right wing, including the head of the Proud Boys (and he has admitted as much in public interviews). (The BLM bears some blame for organizing events knowing that non-protestors would use their protests as cover for committing unrelated crimes. The LA organizer admits that they deliberately disregarded this risk.)

Today, the protestors themselves were engaged in the acts of violence with the stated intention of intimidating legislators into disregarding their statutory duties. Several of the people breaking into the Capitol building organized the protest, and at least two of them are far-right-wing legislators and members of right-wing terrorist groups like the Proud Boys. The female protestor shot and killed today was shot in the act of attempting to break into the legislative chambers and her social media reveals extremist views supporting violence against legislators, which strongly suggests her plan, had she succeeded, would have involved threats of violence to intimidate the legislators trapped in the building.

The violence today was so different from the BLM protests that 3 White House staffers resigned, almost all of the Republican senators walked back their electoral objections and spent their time during the debate excoriating the President, and Republican leadership and cabinet members have openly begun planning to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president before his term expires in 14 days because of the danger they think he will attempt to inflict in the next 2 weeks.

The police is the problem in USA, they were right to protest against it.

Private properties burned down can be rebuilt, a democracy overturned overnight with weapons against the people will is a completely different thing entirely.

It's bad to watch cars burning in the streets after a riot (assuming it was the rioters to burn down things, it's easy to infiltrate and take advantage of the situation in those cases, it happens all the times here in Italy), but when you think about it Antifa were rioting for the right of the people to be treated equally regardless of their ethnicity, they were protesting against the fascism of the police, you can see videos of police officers in the Congress taking selfies with the attackers, it is now undeniable that something is wrong and should change, even if you are not Antifa or dislike their methods, I think we can all agree that the police should not welcome hijackers of our democracies as they were close friends.

The attack on Capitol Hill is one of the worst episodes that the west remembers in modern and contemporary history (I think that to find something similar we have to go back to Franco in Spain...)

That's domestic terrorism, there is no turning back if they win, there are no small business to rebuild, that would be a complete disaster, for the entire planet.

> So it's degrees of comfortable

No, it’s a moral judgment of the underlying cause and the actions taken.

> Do I need to guess who gets to decide what's considered kosher in this regard?

We’re all deciding it, every day.

> This is why we have hard rules about 1A. Being able to define what's acceptable free speech just means the majority bullies the minority. Imagine a world where that's the case.

I can also imagine a world where the minority bullies the majority. It’s the only one I’ve ever known.

> Do you think MLK or any other civil rights leaders would've had a chance in hell of not being muzzle by the mainstream opinion of the day?

> 1A protected them, and when they were incorrectly arrested or muzzled, there were legions of lawyers ready to remind the government in court what the law says.

This is one of those times I wish HN allowed emojis. This is so laughably historically ignorant I don’t even know what to say. I’ll try: do you know how dead MLK and a bunch of other civil rights leaders got for their “protection”? Do you know that federal government agents and various state governments actively conspired with the people who’d make them dead?

I mean, I take your point. The 1A is so expansive as to be nearly unlimited. That’s true. And it’s an important protection.

Anyway all of that said, it has nothing to do with FB’s policy.

Is it more often than when it leads on the right path? Is there a study around this?

The next demagogue will be happy to tell his critics the same when he takes power.

Either that, or you've already decided to use it to keep yourself in power.

And God help you if you fail, nothing is going to arm these people like the dignity of being officially persecuted.

I can remember chatting on irc having some of the most interesting conversations. Downside is that there is a lot of crap you have to filter through.

The intense censoring of its users creates an atmosphere of mistrust. Users are treated like children so they behave like children.

Psychology research would say that building a shed together or surviving a bear attack together would lead to people getting along even better afterwards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory

You have a point, but...

...but the structure of modern society, and the ideology since 1945 of having the UN around, is to lower the nationalistic propensity everywhere. And there was a good reason for that. But it has produced side-effects. Nationalism is a big no-no today.

So people don’t feel like they belong to a group. There are just, many groups living next to each other, London is a symbol of that but Paris is well in line, and all of France is made of groups who live next to each other, and don’t like each other.

Military service was praised by the elderly as instigating a sense of belonging and cohesion (among all the evil it also did on the weaker half of the population, I’m not having rosy glasses here).

So, basically, it has been more than 70 years that your idea of a nation going bowling together is a big no-no, and we work hard on mixing people, which... let’s say it doesn’t work yet, to be nice... I mean we all have a daughter who’s been raped by the « other » group so I don’t personally think it will work, but if it will, you’ll have to invent something that solders our co-country with us.

Of course bowling together is a good idea, but it works with small groups, and we’ve killed the glue that holds larger societies together (for good reasons at the base).

Also, my best friend and I cut ties after we’ve seen each other’s life choices is about exploiting the other, so I have at least one counter-example that going bowling together doesn’t tie people closer, when one is causing harm to the other with his life choices.

My opinions is, we do need less ideology, because we’ve reached peak brainwashing in 2020, and social networks need to accompany research and science and discovery of stats formulated in an digestible manner, instead of hammering onto people that one’s opinion is right and the others are evil.