Facebook Incubated the Insurrection
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it just because Facebook has other uses, because they're bigger or because an app store that doesn't have a Facebook app will experience a huge backlash from consumers?
Same reason tech firms are happy to "stand up" for democracy in small developing nations but won't say boo to China.
If you're looking to big business for some consistent moral principle, you're looking in the wrong place.
To be clear, what I mean is that they are demonstrably not "the law." This is a market problem and this was the market solution.
Google’s argument would be Facebook has shown good-faith efforts to respond to the problem, e.g. by freezing Trump. Parler didn’t or couldn’t. (Counterfactual: they weren’t given much time.)
In reality, a greater fraction of Parler’s users are engaging in criminal activity. By virtue of market share. (I reckon the number of problem users is higher at Facebook. Again by virtue of size.) And disconnecting hundreds of millions of voters from their kids’ photos is a good way to get slapped.
Great arguments for breaking up Facebook.
It's funny because if he did do the move earlier, he'd have hurt twitter where it counts - their stock price. But I guess the attention on Twitter was just too much to ignore.
Yes. To be fair, Parler didn’t do much including after the backlash. But I’m not going to argue this is another advantage Facebook accrues due to its size.
Parler probably pays Google and Apple more for ads than Facebook.
This is a legitimate criticism even for people on the right about Trump. He knew these Tech Giants were questionable about uneven censorship, he’s been complaining about it for years.
So why in the hell wasn’t he posting to gab, parlor, bitchute, streamable, all the “alternatives” first, then the tech giants on automatically on delay? Someone could have EASILY set that up for him.
The media for the past four years set around salivating for the next Trump tweet. They would’ve had to say Parler, Gab, whatever. They would’ve had to show the logos. They would’ve had to make it more about the words in the platform.
You could be a diehard Trump supporter, and realize that this is largely his fault for not being smart about how his message got out. I really think he thought he was above censorship, they wouldn’t DARE... I guess he was right, just until until he lost power.
Guns are mostly used to kill people. So we see them as tools only useful for that purpose. That’s why you can buy a set of knives on Amazon but not a 10 pack of Glocks.
Facebook is seen closer to knives. Parler was mostly guns.
this isn't true. guns are used far more often for hunting animals than for killing humans, by multiple orders of magnitude. even more often, guns are used to shoot targets at the range.
Guns should be seen as just a tool, they should be legal but heavily regulated, they don't need their own Constitutional amendment. The basic premise of the Second Amendment became obsolete once the US had a standing army.
At some point you've crossed from hyperbole into just waging a culture war. Remember that the goal is to evolve both sides understanding in a disagreement, not shout loudly at the other person until they walk away.
So do I (although I might disagree to some extent on the reasonable people), yet I've experienced multiple direct threats against my life. This is in England, where it's supposed to be all tea and biscuits.
No, it's because Amazon doesn't sell guns. There's also no reason to own 10 of the same firearm - it's not like you're setting your dinner table with handguns.
As for guns being "mostly used to kill people", that's just not true. My gun collection has only been used to kill paper targets and, occasionally, deer. Properly used they are no more risk to society than a kitchen knife, arguably less since there are more stabbings than shootings every year.
Banning Parler and banning guns both strike me as infantilizing and highly ineffective. Look at what all of the anti-gun rhetoric has done for gun sales in the US - the same thing will happen with alternative social media platforms.
This would make for an interesting dinner party. Does any of Agatha Christie's stories start out like this? Or one of those murder/whodunnit dinner theater type of events where the dinner guests are part of the play.
That’s an incorrect statement. Let’s look at the evidence.
More than 50 million Americans engaged in some kind of recreational shooting in 2018 [0]. Compare that to 14,000 gun-related homicides across the country in the same period [1], mostly in certain high-crime communities [2].
The CDC estimates there are between 500,000 and 3 million instances of defensive gun use in the US each year [3]. They also found that cases of self-defense where the victim used a gun resulted in less injury to the victim, on average, than in cases where other self-defense strategies where employed.
There are also obvious downsides to a society with permissive gun ownership, but overstating the case for gun control doesn’t move the discussion in a positive direction.
[0] https://www.nssf.org/research/nsga-participation-reports/
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2019/01/gun-deaths-2018-america-mas...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/...
[3] http://www.ncdsv.org/images/IOM-NRC_Priorities-for-Research-...
In the US, stabbings are the second most common cause of murders after shootings, and a higher incident of assaults. In the UK, stabbings are significantly more common than shootings, to the point they are establishing very similar regulations around knife purchase and possession.
An honest look at the data on violence would indicate two things:
1. Violent behavior and the tool used are disconnected. E.g. People with an intention to be violent will act violent regardless of which tools are available.
2. When someone is violent they'll use the most efficient tool available. E.g. Once someone has made a decision to act out violently they'll identify and use the best tool available to carry out their violence.
In effect, there are two ways to approach violence in society. You can try to reduce the number of available tools to carry out violence so people are restricted to their bare hands (note strangulations and beatings just barely trail stabbing in the US as a cause of murder). Or you can address the social issues that result in people acting violently at all, to reduce the incidence of violence and violence-adjacent behaviors in society.
Levering #2 is easier but less impactful, Levering #1 is harder, but has much wider positive impacts.
No matter what you do, violence will never be entirely eliminated.
I think assessing the data honestly and coming to the conclusion "guns are a problem" is either a result of bias or naivete, because it's not a logical conclusion following from the available data, either US-centric or globally.
> In addition to the restrictions on certain kinds of data collection,
> congressional action in 1996 effectively halted all firearm-related injury research
> at the CDC by prohibiting the use of federal funding “to advo-cate
> or promote gun control.”18 In 2011, Congress enacted similar re-strictions
> affecting the entire U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The
> net result was an overall reduction in firearm violence research
> (Kellermann and Rivara, 2013). As a result, the past 20 years have
> witnessed diminished progress in understanding the causes and ef-fects
> of firearm violence.
Additionally, "homicide" is not a sufficient tally of gun deaths. There are also suicides and unintended discharges.
Regardless, the original point is that guns are primarily designed to kill things. It would not be "effective" defense if that were not the case. 2A advocates do not defend their gun rights purely so they can enjoy target shooting.
This is an odd claim, given that the "salient point" seems to be a verbatim quotation of the linked report, which contains further citations...
> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997).
Hunting for sustenance, depending on where you live
But we were talking about Parler and Facebook. I am sure some people have used Parler for things other than far right propaganda, but can you honestly make the point that it wasn’t its primary use case?
The truth of the matter is that, unless I was actively watching those conversations, I can't make any point about its primary use case.
I'm definitely not arguing it's not; but, I have heard a call to action to get Telegram taken down from the App Store because "that's where the alt-right is going now", but there's plenty of other conversation types going on there.
Just because you and I had no interest in being a part of the communities we know are going on in Parler doesn't mean that people of those persuasions didn't primarily have friendly conversations about knitting much of the time.
I'm not sure that we can go just by volume of conversation, either. I imagine the vast majority of Twitter messages are spewing hatred, too. Maybe not the top-level comments, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people that previously responded to most every Trump tweet in a way filled with hatred for him.
As I was not a member of Parler, I can't really tell what kinds of conversations that place was designed and had in a way that's meaningfully distinct from Twitter.
You can't buy guns on Amazon for the same reason you can't buy tobacco, liquor, lottery tickets, or cars on Amazon. Because these are all things which are regulated by the government in such a way as to be incompatible with Amazon's logistics and purchasing setup and customer experience. You can buy all of those things online (except lottery tickets), but just not on Amazon. Since Amazon sells other alcoholic beverages, they're hardly taking a moral stance about the dangers of alcoholism. They sell tobacco accessories so they're hardly taking a moral stance against tobacco, they sell parts for cars so they're surely not against private vehicle ownership, and yes, they even sell tactical gear and gun accessories (although crucially not gun parts... any more).
The reason you can buy a set of knives on Amazon and not a Glock is that knives aren't regulated with more than 84000 conflicting laws between different state, county, and municipal jurisdictions across the US, including differing restrictions on transfer and shipping, and knives do not have federal regulations requiring background checks. Regardless of your personal opinion around private firearms ownership, you should surely be able to see that the analogy you've presented is patently absurd.
There's a moral-political argument which can be made, sure, but that argument isn't the basis for why Amazon doesn't offer these products, and /that/ was the assertion underlying the grandparent's analogy. It's simply false.
Look, the point isn’t to talk about gun rights. The point is that Parler was the toxic runoff from 4chan, Facebook, and the parts of Reddit it deemed too toxic to keep. Facebook is 99.9% reposting of random memes. It’s 0.1% is doing a lot of harm, but by and large it isn’t obviously designed to be a white supremacy platform, it just happens to be used that way by a decent number of people. And that’s my point: guns are designed to kill things, not to cut salad. Knives are designed to be tools that are more often than not used for peaceful cooking, and sometimes misused to cause harm. Trying to turn this into a “guns don’t kill people” debate is pointless. It’s outside the scope of the analogy of why Parler was seen as a harmful thing while Facebook wasn’t.
I'm not sure that's actually accurate. I think it's strongly debatable as to whether or not Facebook ever had any positive intents as a platform. Arguably, Facebook started as a way for predatory men on college campuses to stalk attractive women and comment on their bodies, which I'd be hard pressed to classify as a positive intent. Developing from that, Facebook has taken as many actions as possible to drive user engagement, including actively spying on their users to do so. Not only is the spying itself user-hostile, but the actions taken to drive user engagement seem to greatly emphasize and create rage, lust, fear, and other negative emotions in their user base. I'd be hard-pressed to classify any of this as positive intent.
I think you'll have a difficult time, regardless of the analogy you try to shoe-horn into place, arguing that Facebook suffers from unintended consequences when their ragebaiting mechanisms lead to political extremism and violence, and that Parler was intending that a platform designed for free speech resulted in extremism. Probably the best argument in your favor would be to focus on Parler's genesis story, which seems to strongly indicate that it too was not formed for positive intents. I think a mostly honest take is that both platforms are negative in both their intentions and their outcomes and are directly toxic for a functioning democratic society. The only real difference between Parler and Facebook is that Facebook is socially entrenched and has a massive global user base and the revenue/wealth that comes from that, and Parler doesn't.
To your other point, I am not defending Facebook here. The question that was raised: how come Parler was deplatformed as harmful but Facebook wasn’t even though it’s arguably worse in absolute terms. My point was that it’s probably because in relative terms Parler was mostly seen as being used in harmful ways while Facebook is seen as mostly non-harmful with some harmful parts.
I stand by that assessment, as in why Apple and Google haven’t removed the Facebook app from their app platforms. I do wish Facebook would get reined in because it is not a force for good. I think there was a brief period of maybe 2-3 years when it was a net positive: when you could use it to simply connect with people you used to know and lost contact with. Initially it was a weird stalker platform as you said, later it turned into a combo meme machine (and a bad one at that) and a marketing platform. About the only parts of FB that I still find useful personally are its Marketplace which is an objectively better experience than Craigslist (though FB is ruining it with how it’s running advertising there that really messes up your searches), and Messenger (but only because I at some point connected with a number of people on there; I will likely be moving those conversations elsewhere since there isn’t anything special about the Messenger itself). It’s other two major properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, are useful for other things but also have their own major problems. Instagram I think is a flash in the pan until the current generation of users ages out of being cool and the next generation wants to move to a new platform simply because they don’t want to hang out with the old geezers. WhatsApp has a privacy problem by design and better alternatives already exist (Matrix, Signal).
But yes Facebook is basically a mostly bad for society platform, it’s just bad in the sense that fast food is bad, not in the murder is bad. We tend to react to diffuse bad influences differently than to acute ones.
does it really? "tries but fails to moderate extremism at massive scale" doesn't seem better than "makes no effort to moderate at much smaller scale". I guess the first leaves some potential for improvement in the future, but I don't expect a whole lot from facebook.
edit: I am not advocating for or against facebook being so large. What I am saying is there is a clear distinction between facebook and e.g. parler in terms of moderation.
"Just make it" is no longer as convincing a non-sequitor as it used to be.
The lesson the business world should take from this is: invest in your engineers.
Twitter had 30 engineers at one point, they weren’t deplatformed before becoming a better product.
Second, they've already found a new host (https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956315632/after-booted-by-big...), yet they announced they'll still likely go offline because that host can't provide all the engineering talent Parler relied on. They just need built up their teams and do the work to develop their internal infrastructure. They don't need to become a billion dollar company to do that.
I guess in this particular case, Gab vs Parler. Access to capital isn’t enough. Companies also need good legal advice, scale strategy and testing. Etc.
A teachable moment.
I think we might be seeing the start of a total division of society along political sides.
I think the main reason these big social media and tech companies devote so many resources to moderation is their leaders are tired of being called into televised political hearings that sole purpose seem to be political grandstanding of self righteous politicians.
At $20 per hour, approximately 400,000.
As a side note: as long as they (FB, YT, ...) can not moderate properly and automatically, they have not solved scale. They might have figured out making money but scale regarding social networks? - I do not grant them that achievement.
The "terms of use violations" or whatever BS they're referencing for booting Parler doesn't even enter into it, the action is based at least 99% on cost/benefit to the platform, not some sanitary inflexible set of rules.
Dorsey showed Twitter's rules mean nothing. Trump violates rules: "oh well he's an exception because he's a head of state [and he's the best thing that ever happened to engagement!]." Trump is losing power & allies are fleeing him: "sure he's still a head of state but this is the exception to the exception, so we're booting him [plus the tides just turned against him and dumping him is more palatable]." Soon we'll have the exception to the exception to the exception.
So let's not play dumb and assert that this is about some fixed set of rules, the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along based on "who is in power at the moment, what speech is unpopular at the moment" and above all "what will this cost us in dollars."
And the minute your speech is unpopular (I'm looking at you, anarchists, communists, and libertarians), out the door you go.
I think that's exactly what makes this such a complex issue. It's unprecedented. Never in the past have social media companies been suddenly used as an outlet for national leaders.
> the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along
Again, to the above point, this is obviously the case. There's no fixed set of rules to perfectly mediate this situation and appease everybody. It's going to be a bit fluid.
Facebook moderates content only when it draws too much attention, but either way Facebook profits off said content as their algorithms promote it (because said content generates "engagement").
It's hard to say exactly what they moderate or how.
If you write in a less spoken language Facebook struggle to moderate you. Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.
Facebook is happy to let bad content stay and profit off it unless said content carries a risk of bringing bad PR; I'm assuming this is the case with the "selling animals" thing because some animal rights groups escalated the issue to the media, and it is now the case with anything Trump- or election-related (not that I'm defending said content, but pointing out that its removal is for PR reasons as opposed to Facebook actually caring about democracy or discouraging violence).
However, it's clear they aren't acting in good faith and aren't actually interested in moderating bad content. Cybercrime-related Facebook groups which don't even attempt to conceal themselves are commonplace on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... despite detecting them being trivial based on a simple keyword match.
I'm curious what kind of posts would definitely fall into this distinction. I see plenty of really distasteful, vile comments show up on Twitter. And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal. So the area between those seems to me like it would be pretty narrow.
My impression of Parler is more that they only deleted illegal speech of a particularly egregious nature, e.g. child porn.
Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law. For example, when it comes to USA laws, Trump almost definitely did not incite violence. But lots of people would disagree with the statement that he didn't incite violence.
But the statement was "inciting violence is illegal". Which involves the law. That's a different question.
And an impeachment trial is not an Article III court. Nor is it intended to be. It is inherently a political proceeding and not a criminal trial. As such, ethics and morals are certainly at issue and the rules of Article III courts are not relevant.
Nor did the founders intend[0][1] them to be criminal trials. Which is why someone who is impeached and convicted is not immune from criminal prosecution in an Article III court.
Here's a lawyer's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqAInN9HWI
"President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so."
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolutio...
Impeachment may be shaped like legal process, and the final act may be called a “trial” and supervised by the Cheif Justice, but its a political process, and the difficulty of proving things “in a court of law” is pretty much irrelevant except to the extent that comparisons to a court of law may be provide political rationalizations for actions in the impeachment or trial process.
(IIRC, one version of the bill of impeachment had a second article related to Abuse of Power with regard to the Georgia election call, but that was eliminated in favor of making the issues regarding the call part of the context for the insurrection charge, rather than a separate charge.)
Proving criminal liability is not required[0] in an impeachment trial.
According to the Ars piece, Amazon claims that Parler users were planning violent attacks openly on the site.
That may or may not be true. I guess we'll just have to wait until the archive[0] is fully released.
If it is true, that might be incitement, but it's definitely conspiracy. And since folks died, it's quite possible that at least some folks could be charged with Felony Murder (discussion here[1]).
But we obviously won't know until we can get our greasy little paws on all those messages, photos and videos.
[0] https://threatpost.com/parler-archive-amazon-suspension/1629...
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/felony-murder-and-storming-capit...
Not so for better or worse. Multiple people have been banned from Twitter for calling a human rights litigation troll (and Twitter troll) a man (he is male).
https://nationalpost.com/news/free-speech-activist-lindsay-s...
https://mobile.twitter.com/bindelj/status/118726943929891225...
Calling a male troll “he” is definitely not illegal, yet you can be banned from Twitter for it. It’s not an incitement to violence, it’s not even borderline. Meanwhile that troll can ridicule one of the women in question for having a reproductive abnormality, so go figure. There’s a lot Twitter will ban you for that’s not remotely illegal, the gap is wide.
Before we had all this mess with real identities on the internet, nobody cared about your genitals when you wanted to be addressed with "he/him" or "she/her", they just did it. I wonder how we lost that.
He also engaged in other behaviour so vile I won’t repeat it here https://www.womenarehuman.com/male-transgender-trans-activis...
Do you still think anyone who refuses to pretend-along with this predator/troll and echo his self-image back to him should be banned from Twitter? And do you think the speech is illegal?
The timing seems more likely due to a major public event than a backroom coordination.
But the platforms aren’t being honest about this – they’re claiming that it was about terms of use violations. I’m saying “stop pretending like this argument from the platform makes any sense and let’s have a real discussion about the ramifications of banning groups from a platform when they become political unpopular.”
And the real world violence significantly raised the stakes - both legal and practical.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
Later you say: "My intel may be false"
It's just curious to tell people to not spread false information and then admit you may be spreading false information.
Sounds like you answered your own question. Tech companies were lenient on hosting a questionable community, until members of that community tried to overthrow the government. For all the moderation the Parler admins allegedly did, it was an open secret that it was the hang out spot for right-wing extremists. Yet Parler was allowed to stay afloat until it became clear that doing so became an issue of national security. The riots happened. The cause and effect here are pretty clear. The Parler community did this to itself.
...
> it is not a neutral source of information
Why not?
Scenario. WhatsApp groups begin to be used as gathering places. Open secret. Bomb or explosion or storming of a government building ensures. Question: is it a question of national security to investigate and pressure to censor or eliminate the platform, and if not why not?
Scenario. The bomby extremist-y people on Parler make up .05% of user base. 99.95, while being mostly right-wing, aren't bomby or national security-threatlike. Question: is the tradeoff of punishing the platform by making it disappear, worth it as the only alternative platform to Twitter (which is relied upon by government, health authorities and journalists as the one true place)?
I have no problem with arguments in favor of censorship. I DO have acid reflux when I see the lack of nuance, the strong confidence and wording like "pretty clear."
No, censorship is never pretty clear and always warrants skepticism and conversation.
Arguing as of the two were equal two is lacking even basic attempt at nuance.
Parler was created because that content was booted from twitter, reddit and public facebook discussion. Literally. So acting like Twitter is the same is unfair despite Twitter deficiciencies.
> because anyone who cares an iota about fairness and censorship would prioritize the comparison.
Anyone who cares about fairness and censorship would first look at Parler moderation, then at Twitters one and only then made comparison. Not even looking at Parler and then claiming that "it is totally same and unbiased because that would confirm my pre-existing bias" is opposite of fair and opposite of nuanced.
According to Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit, they were warned for months about their content.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
There is a handy summary of this on Ars Technica as well. That article also says Parler was relying on volunteer moderation to clear their backlog of over 26000 posts.
Or they were completely hands off? Which is it? Goalpost one or two?
You wrote that Amazon warned Parler about their content, but that's not what your link shows. It shows that Amazon asked a question about policies regarding specific posts, and Parler answered with their policies.
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/read-amazons-letter-to-...
Also note that it wasn't removed. I'm not even going to repeat that post here, but absolutely no platform would keep this online if reported, so "very similar terms of service to other content companies" as someone up this thread claimed isn't exactly true.
That’s a filter bubble style of moderation and poor compared to Facebook/Twitter’s efforts for moderation.
The CEO also made it sound like they ignore context and instead only respond to direct threats of violence, allowing vague remarks on platform.
> In January 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Parler had increased its moderation team to 600 people, and began paying them. They also had begun hiring full-time employees to moderate the service.
It may be that Parler did too little too late, but I find it concerning that most mainstream news outlets are failing to report this.
Chance's are, they're probably not paying people to ban political content, since they can get their users to do that for free.
Source? That’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve seen, including the CEO’s own public messages.
But having based its entire marketing around its terms of service being unlike other providers, with a particular emphasis on its greater level of tolerance for certain forms of political extremism, with predictable consequences for the community, it's obviously not in a position to use the "but we're no different from Twitter" defence
Note that "free speech" in the US is far from absolute. And there is some speech that, if Parler (or anyone else) doesn't remove it, they can be subject to criminal (e.g., child porn, setting up drug deals, etc.) and/or civil (copyright violations) litigation.
As such, anyone who claims they don't moderate is probably lying, unless they want to go to jail, get sued into oblivion or both.
as per articles linked below, you are wrong:
"Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
You have not provided any evidence to back up your claims, however.
At some level, for these type of issues, intent doesn’t really matter, only results. I am sure big oil companies do t intend to cause global warming, however they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution. Same with Facebook. I am sure they don’t intend to be harmful and toxic, but at some level they put profits ahead of any concern for pollution.
Facebook has better PR too.
I really don’t think this is liberal vs conservative, left vs right. Mainstream social networks are full of conservatives. YouTube is basically Fox News mixed with Drudge Report once you start down that path. Even Reddit —- once you get past the post titles you realize that Reddit commenters are actually right leaning now. They look different than the stereotypical portrayal of gods and guns conservatives but the views are the same save a few social issues. Scott Alexander called them the “grey tribe” and I expect they’ll start being called the “new right” eventually. HN is basically entirely left-passing conservatives.
But then there’s this tiny subgroup of legit insane people who with nothing better to do than get angry at the internet all day and push conspiracy theories. They keep getting passed around and banned from social networks while more mainstream right-wing talking heads use them as the poster children for their victim complex.
YouTube seems more 'anti-woke' than 'right-leaning'. Those aren't the same, I don't think.
Please go into more detail on why you feel this way, or if you have evidence to support your view. You could be right, because both YouTube and Reddit are vast websites, and I admittedly stick mostly to tech and tech-related areas of both, so I may not be seeing it.
meanwhile what % of parler's stuff all those "bad" things are?
Many people are willing to take a stand for their beliefs, many fewer are willing to nuke their RSUs.
They could justify it to a court, because "Facebook incubated the insurrection" or "Facebook broke our rules" not because "we don't like enabling our competitors".
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18206020/apple-facebook-i...
If the violations were serious enough, I think Apple/Google would consider some kind of temporary shutdown for the Facebook app if they thought they could weather the PR storm.
On the other hand, Facebook is not really a competitor to Apple, while Google very much is, so Apple has an incentive not to carry out an action that would strengthen Google.
There is only one logical conclusion and that is that Apple and Google will eventually boot Facebook off their platforms due to increasing amounts of risk associated with mobs and things that allow them to form.
how exactly?
The phrase of 2020 was "too many". An arbitrary line.
There are "too many" unarmed black men being killed.
There are "too many" fake news stories being posted to Facebook.
There are "too many", "too many", "too many". We have to do "something" -- and this is something.
What asinine thing to say. First, does that mean there's an acceptable number of unarmed black men to be killed every year? But what this is trying to do is play yourself off as a moderate. "You know, I don't think we should be doing censorship... but there are just TOO MANY"
No. You're an authoritarian playing to scared people who want the problem to stop, and don't care what it costs.
Because there's good (or at least neutral) stuff mixed in with the bad stuff. The problem with every free-speech alternative to a heavily moderated forum is that it always ends up being 100% anger: there's never anything lighthearted to point to to defend it.
This is how it always turns out: Orwellian
'At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs start to walk on their hind legs. This is significant because the animals have gone from saying "Four legs good, two legs bad" to the chant "Four legs good, two legs BETTER." Napoleon begins carrying a whip, and soon all the supervisor pigs are carrying whips. Napoleon also is seen with a pipe in his mouth. The pigs literally wear the clothes straight from Mr. Jones's closet'
Intent matters. Did FB purposefully tailored their site's pitch for such characters? Did they have enough mods to delete stuff or algos in place? I suppose in groups barely anyone would report posts as not appropriate.
Many of my friends signed up. There was never hateful or violent rhetoric in their feeds, nor mine.
You can be removed from these platforms at any time, with almost no appeal. That's a significant flaw, not a design feature. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are the public square for the Internet now. I don't personally like it; I hate it... but that's the way it is. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe its time for everyone to build their own website, host their own video and audio, etc.
I agree with you on censorship and honestly there's no right way of doing this. What if someone in a certain position used Twitter to call for another gathering to "save our country" fight and show "our strength" and then we have dead senators and army boots in the ground? You can say we want no violence right after saying "fight like hell for the country" but... Maybe a timeout was the lesser of evils?
If there's a problem here, it's that Google has grown to be so powerful. Nobody was ever concerned about Lifeway Christian Bookstores being extremely selective in whose products they would carry, for reasons that many would consider quite discriminator. Why? Because Lifeway has lots of competitors, and no effective way to compel people to only buy books from them.
Facebook could have 100 times more violent content than parler, but it would be a much smaller percentage of content because Facebook is 1000000 times bigger. It's that simple really. Banning Parler is more efficient.
Also, Parler went out and sold itself as somewhere this was allowed, protected and encouraged. Facebook didn't, quite the opposite in fact.
Parler caused 1 night of rioting.
How is that for percentages of content being objectionable?
That's one of my frustrations with this: these issues should be dealt with by police and governments and society as a whole. The total failure of those leaves us looking to Big Tech firms to do things they were never designed to do (change human nature, police speech AND make a profit). Things they really can't do without collaboration and intrusive behaviour. But enough of my hair splitting...
Re the percentages, Any platform over a certain size will have racists (and pedophiles and other illegal or undesirable users). The question isn't whether someone on Facebook is being racist. The question is whether Facebook encourage it and whether they effectively moderate it when it is reported/discovered.
Facebook is huge and has much less racism etc than Parler did exactly because they ban it and mod it. They're not perfect, but they're making an effort. That is all you can expect from a platform that allows user content.
Parler encouraged and refused to moderate the same content. That's how it grew from zero users up. That's how it marketed itself. It could have moderated, it removed all sorts of legal content that didn't fit its brand. But it's taken little to no action on violent right wing groups. Quite the opposite, it's encouraged and courted them.
Percentage measures are a measure of the effectiveness of the mods and the actions of the people running the platform and that's what we can reasonably expect. Absolute measures are at least partly just down to size of platform.
The also percentage matters because parler is small right now. If we ignore it because it's "only a night of rioting" what happens when parler has 330mil users like twitter? Or 2.7bn users like FB? You'll get a lot more than 1 genocide out of a mega-parlar...
Density also matters. If I browse reddit, Facebook, twitter and parler randomly, how long before I see crazy conspiracy theories or calls to violence? That's what's concerning here as well: echo Chambers. All the others are much broader, but on parler you just got a very right wing, fact free and urgent set of inputs. That's much more likely to lead to someone being radicalised than the same amount of BS spread over a much bigger collection of cake recipes, kitten pics and funny gifs. That's the other reason percentages (a density measure) matter.
At least that's how I understand it.
Back to my soap box for a moment: I think we have a real problem with people who are not used to social media not having any BS filter. Thats the root cause of both the riots and the Burmese genocide (I assume that what you refer to, correct me otherwise).
We don't have a solution to that. Facebook et al tried to solve it by dilution and moderation. Parler saw it as an opportunity to profit off of and lean into. Those are 2 different business models morally even if its a difference of degree rather than ultimate outcome.
I get your larger point, but the actual numbers you picked to illustrate it are just completely divorced from reality.
The argument for Parler from at least some platforms seems to have been that they were unable or unwilling to police content after they had actual notice. Whether it is as sufficient or not may be debatable, but Facebook has at least visibly made steps to address the problem as attention has been focussed on it.
No, I mean actual knowledge of the content, by whatever mechanism.
Probably something like S/N ratio. Even though there was insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist activity on Facebook and Twitter, it was a far smaller percentage of the total, and they are more effective at moderating it (once it reaches their awareness). Parler's whole raison d'être was to capture people who got kicked off Twitter for posting that kind of stuff, so it stands to reason its proportion must have been far higher there.
Seems a far worse offender to me. At least Parler chats were public.
Parler was created because Facebook and Twitter wouldn't allow certain types of speech. Fundamentally that same speech that was banned from Facebook is what got Parler kicked from pretty much everywhere.
Parler knowingly allowed threats of violence, murder, and rape on their platform. Facebook and Twitter grudgingly booted the groups and individuals who made that same sort of speech off.
I do agree that Facebook is given too much latitude, but there are pretty significant gaps. Facebook is mostly used for speech of a more mundane sort.
Facebook on the other hand is doing the bare minimum :p
Pointing to the large size of ToS violations on Facebook and concluding that Facebook is a dangerous platform is akin to pointing out how many Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas get into collisions and concluding they are dangerous models of cars. They're perfectly safe cars there's just a lot of them on the road.
If you scroll through Parler, you barely had to go 1 meter before there's something aggressively violent.
Call it the Alex Jones method. Promote a conspiracy theory and monetise the traffic via advertising views, affiliate links or actually selling products that mitigate the effects of conspiracy theory you pushed. All online advertising makes this profitable to anyone and that's what needs to be addressed.
Facebook was very much an actor in this, not some mere communication infrastructure. Facebook wasn't "warped" by malicious actors, it fanned the flames and by doing so nurtured their hatred and multiplied their reach, all to get the users as addicted as possible to this endless loop. (The same goes for Twitter and Google/Youtube too, of course)
The hypothesis of real name policies was that people would be civil online if their real-world identities grounded them. In reality, the tail wagged the dog.
I've watched this process turn friends who had pretty mild political leanings to "burn it all down" radicals or transform into right wing talk radio hosts. It's not good.
I mean, it was a theory that was popular in the 00s, mostly because a ton of people at that time didn't have experience with Usenet.
But a lot of vile language was used in the clear, signed with the real names of many individuals. Anonymity doesn't seem to change much. Humans will be humans, whether or not they're anonymous.
They don't realize their comment is terrible or radical. To them it seems perfectly rational to be this angry or to respond to "attacks" with violence of their own.
They think they are voices of reason in a world that's losing its mind.
If you're a brave hero in an unjust world, why not use your real name?
hmm?
Poe's Law is in effect, and with the death of irony can be a (intended or not) recruitment tactic.
Though that of course has down sides. There used to be periodic news stories about people frivolously calling the cops on facebook posts. (Somehow I don't see a lot of that lately, but I haven't been looking either.)
At least most historical revolutionaries had the self awareness to understand that trying to overthrow the state is super illegal, and maybe a bit of clandestine-ness is in their own best interest.
Has anyone dug into this? What were the actual stories that caused that suspension of critical thinking? (Serious answers, please.)
It’s never possible to point to one or two stories that radicalize people like that; it’s not possible to do it that quickly. It takes a certain prior mental state (having a weak social net seems to make it worse), and continual exposure to increasingly radical stories. Like any cult, the rejection of non-members is heavily pushed, which leaves the victim more dependent on the cult and with fewer anchors to reality.
I think any good book about how cults work would be relevant for these people, given that I believe they’re in a cult. But if you’re looking for something more specific, Bellingcat has a great article[0] on the Ashli Babbitt, the Q supporter shot and killed by Capitol police as she breached the final barrier to where congress members were hiding.
0 - Content Warning: lethal violence is discussed and shown in this article. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/01/08/the-journey-of-as...
You only want one side to have to “own“ their crazies. That isn’t how it works. Neither side should be thought of or represented by their “crazies”, that isn’t anywhere near good faith.
When the crazies on the left do something crazy, we can talk about them. But in this context bringing up such a “both sides” argument smacks of whataboutism.
Thats only because you are choosing to talk about that exclusively. You aren’t taking into account the violence and destruction about BLM.
I mean, a known BLM voice/advocate went and murdered 5 cops, and not one bit of that blew back at BLM the Org, because no one forced them to own their crazies. None of the destruction, murder and lawlessness over the summer blew back on BLM, Dems, Antifa.
It’s not whataboutism when it’s similar events. A whataboutism would be if someone said “the left doesn’t need to own their crazies because Obama faced criticism for Benghazi”.
The difference is that on the right the inmates are currently running the asylum, and a significant portion of the right wing media / messaging apparatus has been pushing this stuff.
I've met a few Left-wing nut jobs here over the years. I once attended a Communist rally by accident (I had a crush on the math teacher's daughter, no one told me the overnight field trip was to a Commie rally until we were already on the freeway.) Even as a kid I could tell that they were just a pathetic "religion"-without-God, I would say the lot of them (American Communists) are card-carrying loonies.
But (and you can see it coming can't you?)
But they never stormed the capitol.
Two questions for you:
1) What were they trying to do? (If they are not weird cultists?)
2) Can you think of a group on the Left like Qanon on the Right?
I'm sincere, I'm not trying to troll you or talk shit. What do you think?
- - - -
From the article you posted there's a line that seems particularly telling to me as an older person who does not use a smart phone:
> As Babbitt lay dying on the floor, her fellow members of the crowd pulled out their phones and began to film
Even in this media-saturated era, that seems particularly cold-blooded or rather disassociated. They didn't help, nor leave, they started taking video.
The QAnon crowd unquestionably has a lot of members who genuinely believe this stuff. Generally LARPers don’t play act their way into hundreds of federal felonies, nor do LARPers vote along LARP lines.
Also, those guns and bombs are sure real.
That's all I meant by "escaped into reality". These folks (and it seems like most of them were pretty young) seem more like Pokemon GO players who think Pokemon are real than a out right cult.
It's one of the reasons why successful criminals always have a good community outreach program. Once you have the people on your side, it's very hard for the police to do much.
When gangs selling drugs in Colombia originally started, while they were quite violent, they did take care and look after the local community they were based in. And in return, they local community took care of them by alerting them when the military was closing in as an example.
If you're a young kid growing up in that environment, it's easy to see how you'd consider the military as the bad guys since all you see them do is come in and create chaos / hurt people etc. while the local drug dealer on your street is ensuring that you have food to eat.
If you’re in this bubble and the President tells you to do something, you figure how can it be wrong. The leader of our country is telling me to do this.
It can make it impossible to prosecute, because the President is the Chief Executive and ultimately the authority to which all federal law enforcement answers.
(1) Honest, even if mistaken, belief that action is taken in cooperation with the government defeats the mental state requirement for most crimes.
(2) The doctrine of “entrapment by estoppel” bars criminal conviction where a defendant reasonably relied on misrepresentation of law by an official in undertaking action that is prohibited.
(3) The more common doctrine of entrapment bars criminal conviction where a defendant was induced by a government agent to commit a crime and was not otherwise inclined to commit the crime.
Him pardoning the rioters is a nightmare scenario, both politically and for the long term survival of the republic. But the only real solution for this is impeachment and conviction, as generally the pardon power is not subject to judicial review.
0 - While I would argue that installing trump for a second term would constitute a revolution, it’s an interesting question whether or not the rioters saw themselves as revolutionary. Calling 1/6 the new 1776 certainly implies yes, but a lot of them seem to think that they were actually a pro-constitution group there to undo a coup done by “the deep state”. Long story short, it’s complicated.
The unexpected Trump era served to speed this up, which is probably one of the few silver linings it has. Remember the debates about whether future politicians could be blackmailed on account of what they posted online in their youth? A Boomer of all people just dove right in and bypassed that.
Although you are correct that a lot of people with a shaddy past succeeded to have it forgotten, thanks to a lot of pardons after the war.
The reductio ad nazium isn't a full stop to the discussion
What I find troubling is that, a system to find/flag radical/violent content likely exists within the auspices of the NSA. Despite the massive infringement of privacy that these systems create, it seems that they still can't prevent people from being 'radicalized' by content from the platforms that is designed to do exactly that. Furthermore, they couldn't (or didn't) do anything to actually prevent people from storming the Capital. This begs the question, does this massive surveillance state need to exist if it does not do the thing it is purported to do (find and suppress violence, prevent terrorist attacks, etc).
If the owners of the platforms have any conscience, unfortunately, it seems that the responsibility will be up to them. It's murky territory for sure, and you have to strike a balance between far reaching censorship (i.e. infringing of 1A) and allowing disinformation, hate speech, and calls to violence to spread like wild-fire (i.e. how we got into this mess in the first place). I hate to say it, but the older I get, the more something like 'the great firewall' of China seems to make more sense.
Maybe they aren't doing anything novel with this data, whatever, this is beside the point. The point is, we can't really count on the State to regulate this stuff, even though, you know, creating and enforcing laws is literally the reason the state exists...
IDK, I hesitantly have to side with big-tech on this, but this is a problem that the State either can't fix, or will not fix.
The internet is a wonderful thing, but it is also very dangerous. Having unfettered access to information, be it true or false, can wield some horrible side effects when such a large swath of the population lacks basic BS detection, critical-thinking and like, base level understanding of civics. Do we need a Vanguard? I wouldn't trust one coming from either side of the aisle in the current climate. Seems like 'censorship' from the platforms is the only viable solution I can see, but that can take a pretty dark turn. At least if it's a private company, you can always leave, create your own thing or find something else...for now.
When Facebook started it was a different world: Almost no data privacy laws, internet security in its infancy (e.g. in 2008 HTTPS was a rare new thing, not cross-origin security etc.) and people were spamming Farmville notifications to each other. It just turned out that this structure is an excellent ground for lots of bad things.
That said, all the mainstream social media apps - Facebook and Twitter had a hand and if Parler was de-platformed with that reason, then they should be as well.
I mean, if a 700B and a 50B company can't solve this issue, than how can we expect a much much smaller company like Parler to tackle it?
But it's obvious that these companies don't give a damn about the insurrection - This was entirely to pacify the dems by giving them a "Win" considering they have the House, Senate and Presidency.
It's funny because the company I'm currently consulting for a company that has a ~1B/yr account with Amazon and we've decided to slow our cloud migration projects. We run a major media site and if AWS decides to capitulate to the pressure from essentially people on social media or the wrath of the US Govt, what's stopping them from doing the exact same from Govts of other countries?
That said, I think the structure of Facebook intentionally makes it difficult to moderate. Reddit, for example, has public groups, group mods, etc. Far from perfect, but Facebook could definitely do more validation before promoting groups.
Uploaded government id, correct information, phone number but I'm no longer allowed to create an account.
Should a law firm be able to quit you? Should a bank be able to cancel on you? We even have major banks cancelling on the US President. At what point ought those who despise you be free to ditch you? These are all parties exercising their freedom of association.
Parler was a red hot potato for anyone who didn’t leave fast enough.
Banks? Now we're starting to have fun. If all banks cancel you, you cannot reasonably do business in this country. That's a very real concern and something that needs to be looked at.
There may be some real value in investigating all of the oligopolies in the United States, and their behaviors in cancelling.
Why does the responsibility never lie with the people who say these things, only where they say it? It reminds of of the Columbine shootings, where many articles where written about the violent video games that must of inspired the shooters to do it. Those arguments sucked then and they still suck now.
In 2016, when Facebook was charged with hosting "fake news", their response should have been "It's your fault for believing everything you read on the internet."
When Facebook replied, "We accept responsibility, and we will do better", they spelled their own doom.
I disagree, it's our fault as a society for not allocating proper resources towards education. You can't expect people to understand critical thinking, media/source analysis, etc. if no-one ever taught it to them.
Now, Facebook capitalized on that societal failure point and developed an algorithm that exploited individuals who lack that critical thinking skill by shoving progressively angrier and more unhinged content in front of their eyeballs, and recommending them groups of extreme individuals, therefore normalizing their way of thinking. They did this because they realized content that causes anger, outrage, and fear is extremely effective at keeping people clicking, scrolling, reading, and overall "engaged" which means more data, more ads shown, more money. They basically took the Fox News model and injected pure racing fuel into it.
This, like most issues, cannot be explained by one specific cause, but Facebook absolutely shares the blame.
It sounds good and is an intuitive concept but it's not enough to rely on critical thinking.
IT’S HARD TO DETERMINE the extent to which Facebook caused this hyperpartisanship or simply stumbled into it. Did Facebook cultivate more extreme beliefs or simply take what was already simmering and thrust it into the open?
Mr. McGee argued that he always thought this way. Before Facebook, he said, he watched conspiracy-laden videos on YouTube. Facebook merely helped him find his people.
“People are engaging me, encouraging me to share what I think, but these are the inner workings of my mind,” he said. “I’ve been feeling this way for years. That’s why it’s so easy for me to make posts, because I’ve been suppressing this stuff forever.”
And yet when he talks about Facebook, he focuses on algorithms and optimization, not community or ideology. It’s worth considering: Would he be attempting to influence others so forcefully without Facebook’s incentives?
Anything that "triggers" you (to interact w/ the platform), be it pottery or anarchy, FB will find "your people".
If you are prone to fits of passion, FB will find your passion-mates... mated to you by fear, anxiety, rage ... or joy.
Exactly -- and that's the real danger of algorithmic engagement-driven content.
For you, it's picking harmless content because that's what you engage with. But once you start engaging with, say, some crazy cult, Facebook's algo will pick up on that, and start prioritizing content from the crazy cultists. In time, you'll get to the point where you're only seeing content from the cultists, and come to believe that's what everyone thinks, because that's all you'll ever see. YouTube suffers from this too.
My suspicion is that journalists use Twitter more, and enjoy their audience and aura of authority they get through the Verified system, so they have an incentive to protect the platform against regulatory action.
My crazy uncles rants on Facebook are tame compared to the ones he makes on FreeRepublic.com—the web1.0 version of parlar. He’s not preaching the choir and he’s knows normal people will see it.
They are a supranational entity without any local governance. So their policies are left up to them. That’s not good for democracies. They should not force their world view across the world.
That said, this is sour grapes from the NYT. They want to pile on because this is their direct competitor to setting agenda in the anglosphere.
I think many economists and many people from all political parties would argue the exact opposite, that companies having enough freedom to set their own policies (as long as they’re legal) is very much one feature of the United States that has been supporting democracy in the last century.
Why should a private company not be allowed to establish their own rules on their own platform? Does your opinion apply to all private companies?
Does Facebook have a history of limiting legal speech? There are many types of speech that are not legal and not protected as free speech by the constitution. Surely Facebook should be free to limit such speech on their own platform, so they don’t become liable for it? False statements of fact, incitement, commercial speech, fighting words, threats, obscenity, among many other types of speech, are not protected free speech in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
We may both hold that Turkey has issues with authoritarianism and freedom of speech, but that’s up to them and the international community, not Facebook to set and settle.
They are not accountable to the local population they are serving.
That’s not true, Facebook is accountable to the laws of local populations. And populations aren’t forced to use Facebook, China chose not to.
What are you advocating for here? An international cloud platform with different standards in every country? How is that supposed to work online? What exactly would Facebook do differently ... while obeying the laws of the countries it operates in?
Doesn’t it make some sense, liability-wise, for Facebook to apply the union of all (or most... many are similar globally) free speech exceptions globally across the entire platform, and therefore subject Europeans to US limitations and vice-versa?
You didn’t answer the core question: why should Facebook not be able to apply their own rules? That goes against the grain of the idea of private companies. Are you suggesting that Facebook is too large to be private? Or are you suggesting that no private companies should censor any speech, regardless of company standards? Or that there shouldn’t be private companies? I don’t understand.
They don’t attempt to solve authoritarianism in Turkey, but they do not allow authoritarian comments which lead to harm.
There are obvious issues with Facebook, but this seems pretty cut and clear. Turkey is free to ban Facebook but what kind of values do you want to spread to the world?
They should federate the service and have moderators for every market who know local laws and mores.
One issue is everyone is in the global user bucket, rather than having jurisdictional buckets (the way Wikipedia does).
They don't. You can still speak and publish outside of Facebook.
Unless you want to be angry without reason it's a waste of time. Back in 2019 I went social media/ online dating free. Had more fun and better partners than I could ever imagine. Also boosted my income significantly
Social Media should be treated like anything else in life that is addictive and potentially self-destructive: alcohol, drugs, junk food, video games, porn, gambling, online shopping, whatever. Actively moderate and track your usage, and if you ever feel like it's negatively impacting your life, take a step back and think carefully about if you're really still in control.
Example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25768269
And things that contradict The Great Stallman teachings like TiVoization (even in self-driving cars) or saying that something can be done more efficiently with Windows (or just not Linux/OSS in general) or that plenty of ML is outright useless BS that does more harm that good.
Edit: Thanks to whoever unflagged the HN post! Let's see how long it'll stay unflagged this time!
are people here this naive?
What do you think?
Well, I think very often commands have very not intuitive names of parameters, very often some seemingly random letters
When it comes to me,
I use Linux for server related stuff, hosting my things and stuff, also I like raw terminal Linux because there's nothing happening, so no distractions
but day-to-day I use Windows.
Can one be too logical? Too empirical? Too scientific?
For example, if you've been hanging around here for the last few months, you might pick up on a sizable percentage of the population believes that paying people who live in SF more than people who live in Minneapolis is literally the worst thing ever.
Radicalizing is the wrong word, but this is a pretty strange bubble and it's easy to lose sight of that.
To be fair, I don't think of these people as radicals so much as they are suffering from Stockholm syndrome. The bubble that protects them is strong here.
Social animals conform to the social norms of their pack.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/amazon-hq...
As an american software engineer I've dreamed of working for the government, but unfortunately the opportunities with contractors far outnumber (not to speak of how the compensation and benefits compare) direct government employment, let alone private industry overall. I would gladly take a 5-figure pay cut for the chance to do the equivalent of my current work but for the government.
The call of journalists wanting to shut down, regulate and censor is deeply disturbing. One argument is that these are mainstream media outlets (NYT, WP, Fox, MSNBC, etc.) up against and wanting to use various "unassailable" arguments to shut down alternative new media.
When we call for banning things, we should not just look at how bad and awful the stuff we're asking to be banned is (even if it is absolutely terrible), but what are the long-term consequences for stuff-that-isn't-harmful but simply alternative once the precedent has been set.
The body shows some people got a bunch of likes for saying crazy things on Facebook. I assume that's true of twitter or all social media, and true for all conspiracy theories. I'd be curious what exactly the proposal is from this post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Google's search personalisation and targeted ads fall under this even if they're not as effective at radicalisation IMO.
That statement is a bit annoying, given that a fair few people have been switching to Signal/Telegram et al in the same time period for another reason - namely WhatsApp's changes to its terms to allow more data-sharing with FaceBook.
Edited to add this:
Regardless of what I might think of the people highlighted in the NYT article, I found this affecting:
He’s paid a price. He said he lost a few customers of the credit repair business he runs, which he also promotes on Facebook. And members of his family started distancing themselves. After his cat died in December, Mr. McGee said, no one in his family offered condolences.
A bereavement is horrible, and I'd offer condolences to anyone who had lost a friend, relative or pet, regardless of what I thought of their behaviour or views. The feeling of loss is, I think, something common in humanity. It should make us reach out - even in this case if, as I am, you are a dog person rather than a cat person (and definitely not a Trump person). I would definitely have commiserated. Shame on his family.
This should be obvious and media and propaganda tools have always been like this. If there were no Facebook, it would be another news paper brooding the insurrection.
What, in particular, has Facebook done to encourage this kind of behaviour? Are we really going to blame them for making it easier for people to be heard and to find other like-minded people to communicate with?
What we are witnessing is a societal problem. It's possibly a new problem, or maybe just one that has never been seen at such large scale. But all that's being done about is the oldest trick in the book: scapegoating.
I get it. It's a huge and complex problem and it's easier to focus one entity and call it the enemy. But we can do better than this. All we'll achieve by blaming Facebook is less free speech. Is that really the best solution here? Again? This has been tried so many times before.
Would removing FB from the internet help, or is it too late at this point?
But that won't happen, obviously, so we need to figure something else out.
Hackernews?
Say a group can have only 50 members
Anything a person shares can only be seen by X people and no re-sharing allowed.
Basically a return to old style forums, niche audience etc.
The only way out is some kind of a healthier platform that people move willingly to or maybe social media will just lose its interest at some point. It's hard to see that second option though since it gives people such strong emotional rewards.
Advice: If a party doesn't want to incite insurrections -- it should never claim that other parties incited insurrections...
Shakespeare Quote: "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be..."
I couldn't be further from the kind of person who would involve themselves with such grimy associations (and it's one of the reasons I deleted Instagram). I'm fairly left wing; in fact my entire unit was pretty centrist. And it was aggravating having right wing propaganda pushed down my throat, solely because Facebook's crude advertising algorithms could not distinguish between a soldier who needed some webbing for a deployment, and a far-right militiaman who had delusions of protecting their constitutional rights.
If any of this is news to you, you should probably think twice before blaming it on Facebook, alone.
Things like Qanon and BLM are a result of that declining living standard. No one would care if the country hadn’t been sold out. It absolutely is the slow death of the middle class and working class has led to all of this civil unrest and jumping at shadows. In a heathy, growing society, you just wouldn’t see things like this.
The above is by Sacha Baron Cohen, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
More excerpts:
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
If this is true - which I very much doubt as a millenial, isn't that a giant failing of the US school system first and foremost?
Probably better to qualify the statistic when you are using it as a prelude to declaring "Facts do exist"
Maybe making the quote more exact slightly dampens the hyperbole you were aiming for:
first result for the line:
> 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz
gives https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/04...
which includes the excerpt of: > Two-thirds of American millennials
> how are they supposed to know what's true
Please do explain the equivalence of not knowing what is true with not knowing what Auschwitz is?
I just got off the phone with my friend who lives in China. He was in tears. He didn't understand how someone could have such disregard for the value of human life and democracy to walk inside the capitol building in DC. It's completely against the law.
For those in the dark, the event caused serious international ripples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the...
While the deaths were sad, I don't think that's the main reason people are concerned.
This is surely hyperbole or else recent times doesn’t include much of the 21st century.
Just to be clear, sarcasm and unduly extreme language do not work as well on an engineer :)
We don’t know if it is going to happen again, if the mobs are going to be larger, etc
We don’t even know what kind of backlash Republicans that voted for impeachment will receive
People are afraid
The shooter was caught and that was it (though it could happen again, but with anyone really)
Maybe he hasn't heard about Tiananmen Square[1], since in China it never happened[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
This is classic orientalism, especially the idea that people can't figure their way out of a plastic bag without Western input. In reality, the Chinese population holds a range of opinions just as diverse as in any other country. And why wouldn't it? It just takes time and effort to cross the language barrier and come into contact with it from the West.
Regardless of your political stance (whether you think Dalai Lama is good or evil, Tiananmen Square is good or bad), the public at large in China receives different information and opinions from outside.
This is not orientalism. Concepts that could be discussed freely in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or India, could not be discussed with ease in China. This is hinted at above, that many in China are unaware of the Tiananmen Square incident.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/07/wechat-...
My point isn't to defend the CCP apparatus or to engage in whataboutism, but simply to point out that China isn't a blob of unthinking people as they are often portrayed to be. Nor are they basically primed to instantly adopt Western values should some Westerner bravely bust through the censorship wall and "educate" them. That's where the orientalism springs from: an inability to conceive of other cultures as anything other than relative actors to one's own.[0]
In my view, it is a widespread and serious flaw in thinking that only helps to weaken the West when dealing with China.
[0] For an amusing illustrative example see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/how-weste...
- the Chinese culture will never be the same as the US, and
- Chinese opinion is not a single blob,
but I think “oriental” countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan show that they could be persuaded (let’s not use “educated” here) to be:
- less aggressive to neighbors, and
- not trying to dominate, to overthrow world order by exporting authoritarianism and censorship.
And regarding swaying opinions, I agree that it happens elsewhere as well (just as Trump was swaying opinions with Twitter and Facebook before he was banned), but I would take a public discourse anytime.
I don't want to speculate too much and go into armchair territory. That said, I wonder if it isn't more productive to look at China and each country in the region based on its own characteristics instead of a regional idea. Looking at all those you cited, they all have pretty specific ways of doing things and very different histories. I think they have less in common than say France and Germany have together, but that's my personal impression.
Ultimately China has much to gain from changing the world order, just like it was natural for the US to export its values and overthrow governments back in its own heyday. It's frustrating to see Western countries reason along the lines of "1. Be democratic 2. ??? 3. profit" instead of remembering why it has historically been a successful model and working from those first principles. This veering into cargo cult and magical thinking territory is of paramount danger if China is currently developing a competing model.
* each country has their own history and trajectory, including China, its neighbors (Japan, Taiwan, etc.), or others.
* China has much to gain from changing the world order.
But, I speculate that:
* a transition of power from a US dominated world order to a bipolar (or China dominated) world order would be chaotic and likely non-peacful, given the history of the bipolar world order of the Cold War with lots of proxy wars.
* hence the world has much to lose from such a transition of power: this is essentially the one-party stability argument of CCP applied to the world, because the world institution inherently lacks the peaceful transition of power that democratic countries have—the result will be more chaotic, and likely violent, than what US is having now.
I agree with your objections to cargo cult and magical thinking, and thus I support public discourse sans government censorship or unreasonable moderation, to find out why things are the way they are.
I love the discussion we are having now.
But like you said it's fun to speculate about these things. Online discussion may lead to a lot of... issues but it also allows us to discuss intense topics where we might not otherwise be able to.
Three and a half years ago, someone radicalised by Facebook shot a group of members of Congress after asking them about their party affiliation. One of them, Steve Scalise, was hospitalized for a couple of months fighting for his life, and my understanding is that if some of the bullets had been just a couple of inches across he'd be dead right now for sure. The response of the New York Times and the mainstream press was to lie - to falsely claim that actually, it had nothing to do with political polarization and his party was the one that had incited the shooting of a member of Congress, Gabby Giffords, as he lay in hospital with potentially fatal injuries. (This was literally the exact diametric opposite of the truth - Giffords was shot by someone who had a weird grudge against her personally which had nothing to do with national politics.) There certainly wasn't any kind of concern about the radicalization behind it.
In the eyes of the New York Times and the mainstream elite whose views it represents, it's like someone on the wrong side going to a protest and turning around when the property destruction starts is more violent, more dangerous, more in need of suppression by Facebook than someone on the correct side actually filling one of the other side's Congressman full of lead.