Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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It doesn't matter if it's accidental or not. It's a ticking time bomb having that capability aimed at the population when so many people rely on FB Messenger or WhatsApp for basic communication.

It's illegal for your wireless carrier to cancel your service for having legal conversations on your phone that they don't like, despite it running over their own private towers. It's totally legal for Facebook to shut off your account for posting things Facebook doesn't like, which is the only contact info most people have for most people they talk to.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

Facebook is already engaging in censorship, both on the timeline and in private DMs. Why do people permit this to continue?

What will it take, FB banning posting or linking to any page critical of FB, even in DM?

It blows my mind people continue to donate time and content and attention to platforms that tell them what they can and can't say in a private conversation with their friends.

Most people don't mind because it's not their politics being censored.

And that's the crux of the issue. You can debate all you want what is considered protected speech and what isn't (Just to get it out of the way, inciting an insurrection should not be considered protected speech) but in the end, if you want rules for the "other side" and not your own then you're not being intellectually honest, and those conflicts of interest exist everywhere.

>It blows my mind people continue to donate time and content and attention to platforms that tell them what they can and can't say in a private conversation with their friends.

Because that's where the other people happen to be. Sure, you can use the Fediverse exclusively, but you'll then solely be able to interact with the sort of person likely to use the Fediverse if you catch my drift.

But these aren't private conversations via means covered under wiretap laws, while your analogy is exactly that.

Federal law on phone communications differs from public online forums owned by private companies.

Which is not to say other laws may not better apply meant for public forums physical or virtual.

DMs are indeed private conversations. Facebook even markets them as such.

Good luck with that, since everyone is pushing for censorship these days.

I remember this idea gained traction when there was the refugee crisis in Europe (I think 2014 or so) and European politicians (led by Merkel) were pushing for more Facebook censorship. The idea of more censorship was also popular among the citizens. However, it was mostly a European thing, although Facebook did comply to an extent. Then Donald fucking Trump happened. Now Americans were the ones who started pushing for censorship, even more strongly.

This is way beyond Facebook banning someone in bad faith, if Facebook has to censor a wide range of things, this can only be through automated systems due to the massive scale, and these systems will inevitably fuck up more and more as we add more things which they are supposed to censor. It is literally an unavoidable outcome even without bad faith. The kind of censorship people expect today just cannot work on a Facebook scale unless we accept that people will get banned unfairly all the time.

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