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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
It's got to happen to white folk in the US before anything will change.
Moderation is inherently an after-the-fact phenomenon. People are going to do unpredictable things, sometimes bad.
I'd be interested if anyone can share anything indicating a refusal to moderate.
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.
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.