Still in the app stores I see.
I've read absolutely nothing about this in the news. She even shared a screenshot one of her friends shared with her. It said:
"Your account is restricted right now.
You're temporarily restricted from doing things like posting or commenting on groups, Pages or events until January 23 at 3:19 AM.
Dismiss"
I take this to mean they are afraid of a 2nd around of problems.
Can someone post a link to something we could like that’s an objectively harmless right-wing meme?
Facebook gets a free pass because Facebook is an influential organization. Parler had no network of elites protecting it, because as you say, it had no other purpose beyond being 'volunteer' moderated.
If at a minimum, the attack gets us to think about the type of questions posed by The Social Dilemma, we're trending towards a better place.
No, Facebook devotes significant resources to moderation and makes good faith attempts to uphold their policies. Parler did not. That is the difference.
"If the negative externalities are the same in both cases, then this isn't an excuse."
No one is trying to rid the world of all negative externalities, only to make reasonable efforts to mitigate them. There may never be a perfectly moderated social media platform, just as there may never be a perfectly safe highway, and that is fine.
What's always missing here is that the outcome is still terrible and everyone is arguing from the premise that Facebook deserves to exist regardless.
If I maintain my rollercoaster in good faith but I just can't hire enough maintenance crew to do it well and people keep dying on it... maybe the rollercoaster doesn't deserve to be open and should be shut down.
All sorts of industries have negative externalities (e.g., fossil fuels). But are Facebook's worth it if they destabilize the democracy in which allowed Facebook to grow and exist?
If it's about intent, rather than results, then it's sure a big coincidence that Parler was deplatformed by Apple, Google, and AWS all within a few days.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
original sources can be found within the article.
I do not know how many users they have per reviewer, do you?
Parler reportedly had a community "jury pool" system in which Parler users could volunteer to review reports for bad content and could decide whether to leave the messages up or not.
The Internet of the 1990's is still alive by the way. Anyone can put up their message on a website provided by a host of their choice.
They clearly have a dominant position now. Their disruption won't come from phones, just like their rise didn't come from phones either.
Is Facebook failing to moderate, or failing at moderation? If the standard is perfect moderation, there is no social media. If the standard is a good faith efforts at moderation, Facebook should be tolerated (if not compelled to do better) and Parler should be punished (unless they make good faith efforts to do better).
Consider that divisive, offensive and false content is guaranteed to generate engagement and thus contribute to their bottom-line, while content that doesn't have these traits is less likely to do so. So they're already starting off the wrong way here, when their profits directly correlate with their negative impact on society.
Consider that there is plenty of bad content that violates their community standards on Facebook and such content doesn't even try to hide itself and is thus trivially detectable with automation: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-...
Consider that Instagram doesn't remove accounts with openly racist & anti-Semitic usernames even when reported: https://old.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/kz10nw/i_mean_if_...
Is Facebook truly moderating in good faith, or are they only moderating when the potential PR backlash from the bad content getting media attention greater than the revenue from the engagement around said content? I strongly suspect the latter.
Keep in mind that moderating a public forum is mostly a solved problem, people have done so (often benevolently) for decades. The social media companies' pleas about moderation being impossible at scale is bullshit - it's only impossible because they're trying to eat the cake and have it too. When the incentives are aligned, moderation is a solved problem.
Moderation is inherently an after-the-fact phenomenon. People are going to do unpredictable things, sometimes bad.
It's got to happen to white folk in the US before anything will change.
I'd be interested if anyone can share anything indicating a refusal to moderate.
I don't particularly like it when Facebook (for example) buries content from my actual friends and family beneath posts that it thinks might be more engaging. They're usually wrong, BTW; the moment I recognize it as an algorithmic promotion I scroll right past as quick as I can. They certainly shouldn't be showing me stuff from pages and groups I never expressed an interest in. If I want to find new sources I'll ask. If they do those things, they are acting as editors and publishers, and should be treated as such. There are still problems to be solved around groups people have already joined and ads and privacy, but if they'd at least stop pulling every user toward more extreme content - effectively recruiting for the worst of the worst - that would be positive.
>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
I'm hung up on the words "provided by". Facebook's algorithm controls what is presented to each user. They are providing a view of some posts, and not others. Facebook is creating the wall for each user, right?
Or would all this still considered moderation, allowing them to do what they want? Section (c)(2)(B) mentions not being liable for allowing users to control what content is accessed, but doesn't mention when the provider makes decisions like this.
At an extreme, could facebook use their secret algorithm to promote all posts saying "stolen election" to all republicans, demote contrary posts, and still claim claim section 230 protection because they didn't create the posts even though they could choose whatever they want to go viral amongst millions of various posts?
They're pretty damn good at quickly taking down child porn and copyrighted movies/music, because those are areas where big money & potential criminal liability are on the line.
In contrast, nobody's forcing them to censor political extremism, and the usual "engagement" metrics that they and their advertisers track would likely reward that content.
In the last few days, they've shut down thousands of groups and hundreds of thousands of accounts for sharing QAnon conspiracies, which strongly suggests to me that they've had the technical ability to do that for quite a while.
They're not "bad at" moderation, they just choose to moderate certain things and not others.
So I don't think there's any good reason to disagree with you.
At best, Facebook has prioritised "engagement" - i.e. ad revenue - over unacceptable extremism. At worst Facebook is knowingly complicit in the politics and in the polarisation that is being generated.
It would be impossible to know which of those is true without access to internal records. But there should at least be an investigation asking these questions.
And not just of Facebook, but of all the social tech and media giants.
The questions don't really mean much. People could honestly answer that they will apply the law, but how can they if their understanding of it is flawed, especially since that question takes place before the judge educates the jury on the law?
Prosecutors would really rather you not because it has the chance to completely screw their case and they already put a lot of effort in maintaining conviction records. Also it's one of those things where it's not officially an option there's just no punishment available to prevent it.
It does mean something you can say yes or no to 'will you rule based on the law and the evidence presented in the case' you don't have to know the law to agree to do that. It's not phrased exactly like that either it's a series. [0] #15 for example is basically a question directly about nullification. 13 and 14 are also around the subject as well.
[0] https://www.njcourts.gov/attorneys/assets/attyresources/juro...
Also, for number 15, I can but may choose not to. So basically a worthless question.
That's because this stuff was a tiny fraction of the activity on Facebook (it's HUGE, and still mostly for baby pictures), but a substantial fraction of the content on Parler and Gab (they're tiny, and mostly for the stuff that Facebook and Twitter ban).
A lot of people who object to Parler's treatment want this conceived as a simple binary, but it's more of a matter of degree an proportion.
In the Facebook case, there is some moderation (although it obviously failed), and the fraction of users who aren't doing anything wrong is absolutely staggering. The alternative to FB if banned, for people in that category is hard to find.
On Parler, the moderation was basically non-existent, the amount of well behaved users is small (although still a majority even on Parler obviously) and the available alternatives to those users are readily available, such as Twitter, making the damage to those users smaller.
I used to use Parler before the ban and I don't remembering seeing any calls for violence. I'm not saying it doesn't exist because to be fair I wouldn't of been in those circles anyway, but it seemed quite tame in contrast to what I see from the average person I follow on Twitter where I regularly see people posting violent Tweets about Trump, his supporters, and even tweets supportive of the violent protests we saw earlier in the year. It's only been in recent weeks that those calling for violence throughout 2020 are finally denouncing violence.
Everyone who is acting like Parler was this really radical place just didn't use it IMO. I think people are clearly right when they say this about platforms Bitchute and some of the Reddit alternatives, but as far as I could tell the content on Parler was just like every other social network, just a little more conservative leaning.
If Apple is that concerned they should ban the Saidit app where there is Jewish conspiracies and far-right content everywhere. I strongly suspect they're lying to you when they say it was because of a lack of moderation. Just like how Twitter allows Richard Spencer to remain on their platform while claiming Trump has gone too far. Evidence would suggest they don't target extremism, they target popular conservative commenters and platforms.
I would love to see a source for this claim.
There's no source, but it stands to reason: Facebook has something like 2 billion daily active users and it its roots are in nonpolitical social networking (meaning baby pictures, etc.). Parler had something like 2-3 million daily active users at its peak [1], and most of them joined after the Twitter started putting warning labels on false claims of election fraud. Parler also billed itself as a "free speech" social network, which in practice means allowing things other social networks prohibit, which means its mainly gets users who want to post and read such stuff [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/tech/parler-downloads/index.h...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/right-wing-users-flock-t...
It's not really, it just takes the concept of collateral damage into account. Should a billion Grandmas be denied their baby picture fix on account of a moderation team missing a few thousand users' insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist posts? Obviously not, since that action is high on collateral damage.
That said, Facebook obviously needs to do a better job here, and this is one more example of their foot-dragging causing problems.
Eh, not really. You're forgetting the other half of the equation: Parler's niche was the stuff Facebook and Twitter had either banned or discouraged (like false claims of election fraud).
The real moral of the story is: don't try build your social network from Facebook and Twitter's concentrated dross.
There was a very real chance that Parler could have attracted a lot of mainstream people. Maybe the 70M people who voted for Trump would have gone there, and started posting baby pictures, which would improve their ratio a lot.
It's entirely possible and reasonable to argue that the current limits on freedom of speech are insufficiently broad, and that the "competitive marketplace" of ideas has very little going for it empirically.
And this policy works just fine with freedom of speech, seeing as hate speech, threats of violence and insurrection are not covered by the 1st amendment, which doesn't even govern these companies anyway.
That's actually a great policy, because FB/Twitter aren't super-eager to ban people for their speech, so the ones they systematically de-platform are usually doing something pretty bad. Note: I'm not saying they always make the right call 100% of the time.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Society is not obligated to give bad ideas an audience. In fact, it's doing its job if it filters those ideas out.
Facebook has a huge moderation team. Just because some things get through that cause damage doesn't put it in the same category as a platform specifically built to enable terrorism.
It has definitely attracted an alt-right crowd, but “specifically built to enable terrorism” is some ridiculous cable-news-level propaganda.
I’d much rather this conversation be about free speech and where lines can be drawn — and it bothers me that platforms can be taken down everywhere because of an unrelated group that happened to use them for something horrible. What about Signal? It’s been getting lots of popularity recently — what if it comes out that the terrorists are on Signal now, and there’s nothing they can do to be moderated because of the encryption. Will Signal be taken down for refusing to add a backdoor?
There are very few people who earnestly want an unmoderated place of discourse, because those serve very little functional purpoae. Eventually most people will find something either irrelevant to their interests or personally repugnant presented to them and will go back to a place where there is some degree of moderation in place so that they can consistently find thing that interest and engage them. Why are you on HN and not one of these wholly unmoderated forums? Even curation of topics is a form of moderation, not to mention HN's strict approach to actually thoughtful commentary. The people who earnestly want a wholly unmoderated space are increasingly likely, depending on their desire for it, to be one of those people engaging in something so boorish that it got them removed from moderated spaces.
Furthermore, there is no small amount of irony in you saying you'd rather talk about free speech right after telling someone what they can or cannot claim.
You can't make those claims and expect people to take you seriously without backing them up.
> There are very few people who earnestly want an unmoderated place of discourse, because those serve very little functional purpoae.
Do you mean unmoderated or simply moderated to your specific standards? Parler was never unmoderated. You are defending deplatforming, while simultaneously telling people to go to different platforms if they want different standards of moderation. Do you see how this doesn't work?
You're right, it's not Reddit, and "because you're upset" would take it in that direction. Let's not.
> it bothers me that platforms can be taken down everywhere because of an unrelated group that happened to use them for something horrible
Does it bother you that many people are calling for exactly that wrt Facebook right now? I just checked comment history and saw no evidence of that, but I figured I'd ask instead of pretending to be psychic.
> Will Signal be taken down for refusing to add a backdoor?
I don't think anyone, including Apple or Google, considers Signal to be in the same category that requires moderation. Why not? Because there's this commonly applied but never defined distinction between public and private communication. Facebook is considered public, even though some communications there can be private. Signal is considered private, even though you can form pretty large groups of people who are nearly (but not completely) strangers. I wish someone would codify the difference, and its implications wrt moderation/takedown requirements. The lack of clarity around such issues is why both posters and platforms can claim immunity while toxic content spreads.
I create a new social network startup. Early on, most of the people it attracts are those banned from Twitter and Facebook - since they don't have a lot of other options. In addition to normal social network things, they post some questionable and inciting content. Since I'm a startup, I have a small moderation team and no fancy AI moderation so most of it slips through the cracks. Is my social network "built to enable terrorism"?
The political situation we find ourselves in, even though it was allowed to fester for years on established social media platforms, seems ideal for securing a monopoly for those same platforms. How could a competitor get a foot in the door without being accused of catering to extremists?
Let me paint a hypothetical.
[...]
Since I'm a startup, I have a small moderation team
and no fancy AI moderation so most of it slips through
the cracks. Is my social network "built to enable
terrorism"?
I once ran an for-profit online community. It was a startup, with strictly volunteer moderators. It was an early "social networking" thing; honestly more like "a BBS with some primordial social features". But hey, sounds like your hypothetical to an extent.
This doesn't mean I know anything.
Just means I'm sympathetic to the plight of folks trying to make that sort of thing a reality. For the record, I'd sure like to give it another try at some point myself.
Anyway, intent matters here, to an extent. Parler advertised itself as a more or less moderation-free space.
That's quite different thing from Twitter and FB, with their codes of conduct and actual moderation teams. I mean, the line may be fuzzy, but it's there. I'll be the first person to say that Twitter and FB suck, and moderation efforts for advertising-driven user content mills are probably eternally doomed because their very business model dictates that their user-to-moderator ratio is always going to be laughably huge; far too large to enable effective moderation barring some kind of generational leap in AI moderation tools.
But there is at least the semblance of a good-faith effort there from those two, as much as I dislike them.
The notion that you'd need moderation should not come as a surprise to you. It's not 1997, so it's not like you don't know that this kind of thing happens. If you want to build a social network, handling the moderation load is part of your job, not an afterthought.
We absolutely allowed large social media platforms to get away with it for far too long. It's not the only thing making them a monopoly -- the network effect of having all of your friends in one place is also a significant barrier to entry for any new social media site.
Fixing that after the fact isn't easy. But it doesn't mean that you can act as though you're not very, very, very late to the party in trying to establish a new social media site. In 2021 it's part of any new site to make sure you're not being used for crime -- or at least making enough of an attempt that authorities don't see you as being implicated.
Seems like a bit of a catch-22, doesn't it? If we set moderation standards too low, then big social-media companies are evil because they're not doing anything about harmful content. If we set those standards too high, then big social-media companies are evil because monopoly. And there never seems to be any space in between. We need something better than just an excuse to hate on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc.
They were trying to growth hack using an extremist leaning, marginalized audience and got burned for it. Roll the dice, accept the outcome.
Content still slips through the cracks on Facebook too. Parler had a moderation system in place, although it was jury-driven and not centralized.
Moderation seems to be an activity that can scale linearly with users (content). So if you have 1/1000 the user base then you have roughly 1/1000 the moderation effort.
Of all the barriers to entry in the social media market, moderation seems like the smallest one because it doesn't scale as well as other activities such as operation costs, development staff , and so on.
Of course, if you start a social media company with the intent to be a haven for content that "takes a lot of moderation effort" then obviously you are setting yourself up for a situation where it's difficult to compete. If you need 10x the number of moderation actions as facebook or twitter, then you have 10x the cost too.
At what point do we stop pretending that a company with access to tens of millions of dollars of funding (or more) is a "fledgling" company that isn't responsible for its own failures?
They may have the capacity to do so and just failed to do so. Or the public failed to inform Facebook of the violent messages.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
This would undoubtedly bring a lot of attention and legitimacy to that platform that could create a rift in the tech sector and a new era of actual competition.
Is this documented anywhere? From what I've seen that's simply not true.
"the lack of moderation on Parler is not the issue. they actually have very robust moderation tools and all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"[0]
[0] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
It sounds to me like the actual issue was about how quickly and thoroughly Parler could moderate a platform that blew up overnight and whether Parler's moderation standards matched the expectations of AWS, Apple, and Google.
The stronghold it has over world politics has more power than an atomic arsenal.
2. By far smaller user base, with that base overwhelmingly participating in fear mongering fake news. There are people I know convinced of entirely fabricated stories that contributed to the violence at the capitol.
3. It's clear the admins of parler explicitly allowed content that encouraged the riots and violence therein.
Facebook does admin all of these things. They're also significantly larger. Don't be dishonest.