Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy
reuters.com
reuters.com
(Sorry for the annoying repetition:) Large threads are paginated. To see all the comments, you'll need to click More at the bottom of each page, or do this sort of thing:
That's some bullshit right there. Spin the wheel, come up with a random charge, and ban the entire community with zero recourse and no way to appeal.
People generally seem love to make excuses for Power when it's stepping on people they don't like, and are then somehow surprised when Power turns around and crushes them.
E.g. Asgardia can be considered a surprisingly successful proto-nation. AFAIK UN actually contacted them and asked to launch a satellite into space (which they can) but that ended up a diplomatic failure.
> or won't let you into the UN
Getting into the UN hardly really means much. There are many nations in the UN nobody cares about. There also are nations not in the UN yet very relevant (e.g. Taiwan which was among the UN founders).
For instance:
Just build your own host bro
Just build your own financial banking system bro
just build your own social media platform bro
just build your own payment processing platform bro
just build your own internet infrastructure bro
Common Folk: We want a chance at financial stability."
Rich Folk: "Invest your money."
Common Folk: "OK, GME it is."
Rich Folk: "Wait. Not like that. Stop. This clearly must be outlawed."
Sometimes the answer is given, that it's the same impulse as playing a computer game and money is the score.
But the last few days, something else occurred to me, watching the kind of disarray of various billionaire hedge fund types. A big attraction of wealth on that level must be the sense that you're smarter than nearly anyone else.
This situation punctures that and it seems like a lot of quotes in the news are about scrambling to save face and protect peoples' self images. I don't think they are actually outraged over monetary losses as such.
It's interesting that people are comparing it to Occupy Wall Street.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/large-gamestop-shareholder...
My comment above makes no statement about who is going to eventually profit from this.
My comment is about how as soon as the "common folk" start to take their destiny into their own hands, the "rich folk" cry foul, to the point where Congressmen are issuing press releases, and there is talk of completely re-designing the entire system.
There is an awful lot of whining coming from one end of the wealth spectrum right now.
People did this. For decades.
Seriously. The lack of imagination here is embarrassing. Cargo cult engineering.
I suggest you read up on what a real persecuted site does. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ingenious-way-the-pirate...
As for the penalty of breaking the law, if it is enforced it will likely still have been the cheaper option for those who made the call.
orb otpyrc nwo ruoy dliub tsuj
it's a good place to start because it's easy and can give confidence for tackling the harder ones
New achievement unlocked 'segregation'.
Nobody says this; attempting to build your own financial banking system is one of the most illegal things you could do.
I think the real solution here is we need to break up the social media companies. Have each community be its own self hosted website again where the moderators of the community take responsibility for it and apply their own rules. The government can then step in and take action if the communities are illegal.
Facebook is definitely stuck between a rock and a hard place here though. This is why I think Mark Zuckerberg is actually being authentic when he says that "Facebook needs more regulation". He's already seen this problem and knows that having that subjective burden offloaded onto the government is the only true solution, i.e. "just tell me what the rules are and I shall play by them". Conveniently, these additional rules would also make it much harder for a new entrant to come unseat Facebook. So more regulation from the government is, in reality, win-win for Facebook.
What makes you think so?
There's violence and abuse everywhere on Facebook I guess
Actually, they can try to appeal to the new Facebook Oversight Board.[1] They released their first set of decisions today, overturning some Facebook removals.[2]
[1] https://oversightboard.com/appeals-process/
[2] https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/
More info: https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961391277/facebook-supreme-co...
Fuck I only wish....can you imagine how much healthier society would be without farcebook.
Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a forum.
WSB’s culture is a reaction which embraces how stupid the exercise is, and then races to the bottom on rhetoric, which makes it all about meme irony. So they (excuse the language) call themselves “retards,” “degenerates,” and “autists” (again, their words). It sometimes gets more offensive from there, but they try to keep the insults self-targeted.
Generally speaking they’re pretty clever and witty in their behavior, but you know how this gets when it goes mainstream. Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part.
My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes, or they’re reacting to the aesthetic without understanding the underlying wit. Another side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception. Frankly though, I think most people would enjoy WSB culture right now, given the underdog narrative and the embrace of the irreverent.
If I were Facebook or Discord, I’d trust WSB mods to get things back under control and help them protect the community, not ban it. That said, I’d bet good money their reasons for banning are not evidence-free.
So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallst...
The era of the walled garden will end. #RemindMe
Reddit has not been helpful at all. The mods made a post after they shut down the sub saying that the Reddit API can't handle the amount of traffic they need to moderate, and they've asked for special permissions.
They banned all bad words and image memes (due to lack of ability to check the content with a bot) and told the mods to rigorously enforce compliance with Discords standards or the group gets removed again. Maybe they helped configuring the mod-bot ...
This is possible, they are a victim of their own success in a way... or
The banks are looking for a way—any way—to shut them down. This is costing millions of dollars. Paying a few shills to jump into the group ramp up the BS and a few others to jump into the group and take offense at every little thing might just be what it takes to overwhelm the mods.
Not Facebook collusion, just a little discourse sabotage.
I think its far more likely that the poison would be released by funds themselves, but do not think for a second that banks will not intervene to safeguard their revolvers...
if you against banking, you have bigger fish to fry
The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content.
Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.
So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.
The RobinHood $GME situation is the natural next step in societal evolution once extreme censorship is given a pass. If you support the "go build it yourself" argument, you no longer have the right to complain about anything that's theoretically reproducible.
If you pay for hosting then you have a contract and then you and the company you're buying from are beholden to those terms.
Facebook earns money thanks to its users, providing them some service so definitely there should be a contract here.
Now, when you look on those T&C, they are very vague, especially possible reasons for account suspension are very, very vague. They refer user to some "community standards" and it is not clear, if those "standards" are part of the contract or not.
In my opinion, the first thing that should be changed is to force Facebook and other services to provide a clear, formal contract that would state what are duties of both contract parts, what rights they have, etc. Stuff that each normal contract has. No mumbling about "community", etc.
Contract should be something that is enforceable and has clear appeal path and so on. If I don't agree with Facebook I should be able to court and refer to something that is specific and well defined, not some Mark Zuckerberg views on what is good or bad.
They got "terms & conditions". This is the contract. Formalising another contract would require legal fees. Is every user willing to pay a lawyer $200 to use FB? (and another $200 for Pinterest, $200 for Twitter, etc.) Is every user willing to pay AGAIN another $200 on the next "T&C Update"? If you think $200 is too much, come up with anothe number, and then multiply it by every free service you/someone uses (Twitter, free-Dropbox, free-Gmail, free-GoogleDocs, free-HN, free-Reddit, free-Viber, free-....).
FB, Twitter, Pinterest usage comes "as-is". We/you are the products. Since when does a super market have a contract with a potato? (I don't mean to insult, but really..).
Unless they (FB, or any service provider - paid or free) clearly discriminates against someone (e.g. "you are man/woman/black/asian/etc. and we don't like people like you here") and then they kick out FB every man/woman/black/asian/etc. person, feel free to sue them (more legal fees.. I see a pattern here) :)
But if it's not a discrimination issue, then please tell me ONE person that hasn't dropped an f-bomb "f... you/this/him/her/them/.." or some other profanity on a FB post, a FB comment, on FB-messenger message. In that spirit everyone is eligible to receive a red card, and it's down to FB to kick someone out anytime they want or anytime they get provoked. E.g. HenryBemis is trashing us on HN.. HenryBemis wrote "f... this <name_of_politician>", thus HenryBemis violated the policy about swearing, threatening violence, sexual content, yada-yada-yada.
A couple of days ago we saw a post on someone sending a "accidentally, partial nude photo" over messenger to a friend of his, and this got him expelled from FB. I clearly understand the capabilities of FB vs mine. I think more people should see these facts coldly.
You have no consideration relationship with Facebook. You haven't entered into a contract. You are just filling out forms on a website.
Theoretically, yes.
In reality, I’m too small an account to warrant anything besides boilerplate. The big boys may be able to negotiate. I cannot.
Now it's possible you are so extremely deplorable that nobody is willing to take your money but I think that is society functioning as it should. People are still willing to put up with a lot when money is involved.
Phone and Internet requires literal physical infrastructure that crosses public and private property, you pay for it, and they are natural monopolies because of that. Facebook is nothing by comparison.
Perhaps you may not like the suggestion that I offered, but you’re minimizing what Facebook has become and what it takes to run at that scale.
As for the businesses that rely on it -- they choose to use that platform, for free, knowing exactly what they're getting into. There are thousands of times more businesses that do not rely on Facebook than those that do. Facebook is not some key infrastructure; if it all went away tomorrow it's a minor inconvenience at worst.
Facebook also owns at least some of its own interconnects.
It is fine with me if you disagree on principle, but to act like anybody can just create the network effect of Facebook and compete is frankly ridiculous.
You talk like Facebook was the first ever social network and didn't start out of dorm room. You talk like there aren't any other social networks right now. Or that there aren't other media companies.
What's the end game here? What exactly do you want? The inability to moderate? Nationalized? Broken up? I guarantee you can't come up with a single remedy that isn't ridiculous.
Facebook’s scale and power are bad for capitalism and democracy. You may find it ridiculous to break them up, but plenty of serious people in this world don’t.
So break it up, how? In what way? And if you've broken Facebook up, how have you ensured that you've actually solved the problem you intend to solve.
Here's the problem as i see it.
Facebook's and other companies with data exchange driven revenue models have monopolization on some of our generations most intelligent minds and are using cutting edge psychology and algorithms to get the general populace to click that, scroll for longer and be deeper entrenched in the depths of political extremism.
What if you walk in and are somebody named wvenable so they kick you out? As you've said, you believe they have that right.
What if you walk in and are ginger so they kick you out?
Have poor eyesight?
Are dressed in the costume of a religion they don't like?
Are dressed in the costume of a political ideology they don't like?
I'm trying to work out a set of fundamental principals are would distinguish good discrimination from bad. I often see people, such as yourself, adamantly insisting that some kinds are good or some are bad but the distinction seems arbitrary.
I could reverse this and ask your the same type of questions. As a business owner, am I not allowed to have any control over who and what business that I do? If I allow posts on my website, I must allow Nazi hate posts? If I allow images, I must allow all images except those that are illegal? If you're being rude to my workers, I can't turn you away, I just have to take it? If you say yes, I'd like how that is fair to me. If you say no, then that is also arbitrary, right?
But what's so different between 2 and 3 or between 4 and 5? I could understand it if you see them as grey areas but it sounds like you're adamant they have no moral requirement to serve ginger people but that it's immoral to refuse short-sighted people. And why are religious and political ideologies distinct?
I don't have much of an answer myself, but I don't think religion should be protected. People are free to change their religion or lie about it to avoid discrimination if they want. Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right? How can you even tell the difference?
I wondered if you opinion was based on some philosophy. It seems it's just a copy of what you've absorbed from your culture and suffers from all the same problems.
I'm not sure how you get adamant from my comment. I went out of my way to claim that this description was not perfect. One could argue that ginger falls under "race". I personally don't believe you should deny someone service because of there genetic appearance. I'd go all in on appearance but then you might might have to serve naked people! Everything is grey.
Religion is a grey area too; in some cases it's more equivalent to political believes and in other cases it's more like race. People also mistake appearance and religion all the time.
> Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right?
No I don't. People like to claim their persecuted because of who they are rather than what they do and how that impacts others.
Lets be clear, we are talking about Facebook blocking content (actively posted material) that they deem unacceptable. You made this about the who rather than the what and I don't think that applies in this case at all. So we've really gone down this rabbit hole for nothing.
> I totally believe that Facebook doesn't have any legal or moral requirement to host anything they don't want to. They could literally just punt me tomorrow because they don't like my name and that's their right.
In the case of Facebook, they're just offering people a free space to post stuff. They're not obligated to continue to that forever. They don't need a good reason to punt you. But their are situations where they could have a bad reason.
The question is, is this topic a bad reason to punt people? Given the low obligation that Facebook has to host anything -- I don't think so.
Your idea of Facebook's obligation seems to be pretty much just based on what the law prohibits. That's not really an interesting thing to talk about because everyone agrees on such a simple fact.
I weakly think Facebook is so powerful that when it bans people or breaks up groups, it's capable of doing more harm than most other internet services and therefore it could be more morally wrong. If your Facebook group is turned off, what other platform can you move every member to? How can you even contact them to organize the migration? If you're personally kicked off, how can you persuade all other members of your groups to migrate to another platform just so you can join them again? I attend a real-life class and it comes with a Facebook group for students to keep in touch and share materials. If I was banned from Facebook, I'd miss out on part of this unrelated class. Since everyone assumes you can use Facebook, if you can't, then you're disadvantaged. In contrast, nobody assumes you can post to HN, so being banned from here is qualitatively different, in my opinion.
My idea of Facebook's obligation is not based on what the law prohibits but the law, hopefully, follows basic human moral tenets. If they overlap, it's not by accident.
If your Facebook group turns off, there are hundreds of other platforms you can move to. If you failed to backup your contacts, how is that the fault of Facebook? If you can't convince people to migrate, why is that their problem? If your school relies on Facebook, they shouldn't do that -- complain to them, not Facebook. And not everyone assumes you can (or want) to use Facebook.
It sounds like you want Facebook to take responsibility for things that are your own personal responsibility simply because, today, they're popular. It's not because they're the only choice but because, in some circles, they're the favored choice. Pretty significant difference.
What if your group meets at McDonald's and you got banned? You forgot to get their contact info. They don't want to meet at Starbucks instead. And your school hosts a study session at McDonalds. What is McDonald's responsibility for your misfortune?
Facebook is not the whole Internet. I have a Facebook account but generally I go months without even logging in. It's not essential. You're not forced to use it. If something you want to do requires it, it's your choice to do that or not. I've literally put my money where my mouth and decided not to upgrade to an Oculus Quest 2 because of the Facebook integration.
Personal safety requirements, such as compulsory seat belt wearing in cars.
Scammers are breaking the law by tricking people to give up their money even though the victims could just refuse to give money to whoever asks for it if they didn't want to get scammed.
Tenancy and employment law, at least in my country, doesn't allow people to contract out of certain rights. That's because some poor sucker would end up shooting himself in the foot by accepting a raw deal out of desperation.
Some companies like utilities are required to not arbitrarily ban customers, even though they're not the only choice - you can still install solar panels if you don't like the power company but it's nowhere near as convenient.
Consumer protection laws.
Restrictions on gambling.
Anti-spam laws. Email is not the only option but it has market dominance and network effects meaning normal life is harder without it.
McDonald's isn't like this because it has nowhere near the market dominance or network effects that Facebook does. It would still be a problem but a smaller one which I think doesn't outweigh the rights of the owner to ban whoever he wants or responsibility of customers to organize their groups better.
My question for you, is what do you believe should the be the rules here? I'm not against consumer protections -- if you want to compose a user bill of rights that applies to all companies online and off I might be for that depending on what you really want.
I'm not sure what regulation would be, but something that protects people against surprise and troublesome problems. Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks. Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.
Not for all companies online. Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists. That's similar to how existing regulations don't apply to everyone. Eg. Home owner-occupiers can do DIY work on their own house that normal requires a licensed tradesman, kids can sell lemonade without such strict hygiene rules as a cafe, individuals can sell 2nd hand goods without providing the same consumer protections as a 2nd hand dealer, etc.
The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist. I used to be like that but then realized the real world is too complicated for simple one-size-fits-all solutions to be the best. It turns out the free market doesn't actually lead to good outcomes for people unless its natural bad tendencies (eg. monopolies, predatory sales, negative externalities, etc.) are kept under control but at the same time, too much control stifles small business and innovation so it requires ongoing active management to function well.
That's not necessary fair because everyone else is calling for change here.
> Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks.
Except that you're just spreading your private information even further. At least if I post my private information to Facebook, it's on Facebook. I'm not worried that, as a feature, my friends are porting my information to other platforms.
> Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.
I agree that competition would be better. In fact, I'd say that Facebook should have been prevented from buying Instragam, Whatapp, etc. But competitive pressure alone does not necessary require companies to treat users better. Facebook would still be the same with competition from these other companies.
> Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists.
That's hard to judge. Just look at Whatapps -- they grew to millions of users with a team of less than dozen people. Are they a small player or a big player? You might end up with a lot of social networks right on the line of being big to avoid additional regulation.
Facebook, for it's part, has been very pro-regulation as they're big enough and profitable enough. This will further make it harder for smaller players to compete even if you limit the restrictions to large players.
> The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist.
No. But I think you can't have rules for "Facebook" because in 10 years the problem is going to be some other company in some other situation. And you have to be very careful of regulatory capture.
Re: Robinhood, it is a completely different story. What Robinhood did in this case is market manipulation. They only allowed people to sell the stock and not to buy it. That is (I think) illegal.
0 - https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/nasdaq-ceo-suggest...
https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/28/janet-yellen-gamestop-cit...
I don't care how people get there. New platform. Use the correct technologies to be more impervious to top down arbitrary decisions, build a real appeals process, build representatives.
There's a definite middle ground between facebook should be able to do whatever it wants with impunity and facebook should never be able to moderate anything ever.
It should give people pause what full privatization and deregulation may mean.
They haven't been a private company since 2012.
Not every opinion is informed only by partisan position. I just believe in private ownership and personal rights. I believe in free speech but not in compelled speech.
Oh please. If that was true, they wouldn't have banned TheDonald, especially so close to the election. That sub drove a huge amount of traffic.
And let's not euphemize this, it's not a "maneuver", it's market manipulation. Coordinating a collective buy to effect a short squeeze is clear market manipulation. Enticing a horde of gullible forum users to buy the same ballooned stock based on ideas like "stick it to the man" and "turn their tricks back on them" is an even clearer pump and dump scheme.
This doesn't end well for anyone (except Gamestop's pre-existing shareholders I guess). The hedge fund got fleeced, the gullible WSB users are going to lose a ton, Robinhood flushed their brand down the toilet trying to avoid being an accomplice to all of this, and the only folks who made money on the deal are more likely than not in the SEC crosshairs now.
In my view, hedge funds have implicitly colluded for years on short positions because it's in their best interests not to screw each other over the long haul. Imagine going against Citadel as a fund. Your career is over. The fact the short interest rose to 140% is proof of that.
This trade should have been shaken out sooner, but no one would dare given the powers that be who were backing it. Also, consider the bond holders as true original victims here. Is it right that they had people artificially putting downward pressure on the security of a company that is indebted to them? If you believe in reflexivity, this is depriving lenders of a fair security valuation, which is an asset of sorts, and further driving them towards a delisting or bankruptcy.
But now that it has been done once, more people will be interested in these opportunities in the future. Quoting from Iron Man 2: If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come.
Reality says otherwise. Hedge funds get into trouble at the expense of hedge funds taking the other side of the bet all the time. Their entire business model is based around claiming the ability to beat the market by winning zero-sum bets, and in the long run the more funds they screw over the better their reputation and the more fund management fees they collect. Not going against downward pressure on a security if you think the other fund is undervaluing it and the risk is tolerable is literally leaving money on the table.
As for Citadel, they'll be delighted that a fund got into so much trouble it begged them for a bailout on whatever terms Citadel was willing to offer (and used the funds to unwind its exposure to that market).
See, this is why someone is going to jail. This explanation is wrong. Someone lied to you, and they probably lied to you to make this look like a sure bet so that you'd buy (and thus pump) a stock that is otherwise going to crash, so that they can unload their position before it does. You got scammed, and the person who did it is guilty of a crime.
FWIW: Short leverage higher than 100% is not naked selling. It just means (as an example) that you borrowed a share, sold it, then later on that buyer loaned the same share back to you, and you sold it again. This is not a good idea, but it's not naked selling (which is itself securities fraud).
Step 2: convince a lot of people to buy GME "for entertainment value"
Step 3: sell GME after it rises well above what it is worth
Perhaps you don't care that you got fleeced, but that doesn't change the fact that you did.
Because when you're short a few billion on a position, and your counterparty is a toxic stream of garbage, its a profitable strategy to paying someone to report all the toxic b.s. and disrupt their organization. In 2021, we figured out how to get hedge funds to pay content moderator salaries!
No. They pay the trolls to make content moderation a misery
They don't want the content moderated, that's the excuse to shut down the thing that outsmarted them.
Are we ok with this? We talk about endemic corruption like it's the most normal thing in the world. But it isn't. Reform or perish.
It's interesting that this phenomenon is obvious in a commercial situation, but rarely considered in political situations. Are we sure that the activists most salient to social media are anything like the groups they claim to represent?
To make super-sure that the currently fashionable unspeakables are well and truly said. Stalinist trolling would have done the job in the past, fascist trolling now.
Of course if you can already point at it you might proceed straight to getting some momentum behind the outrage with some astroturfing and making sure there's more than one media story focusing on that very small amount of trolling as "the story". This is not much trouble to go to for the sums of money involved. Enron closed whole power stations, many of them, to rape California on electricity derivatives. The sums here are measured in billions, there's not much that would be too much trouble.
Genuinely baffled why so many HNers have spent the last couple of days forgetting everything they know about how the internet actually works to imagine that hedge funds whose couple of dozen employees are busy firefighting are somehow controlling the conversation.
How is this implausible to you?
Do you really think the timing of this is purely coincidental? I mean you will have trolls on both the Democrat and Republican official groups. They aren't going to be shut.
I guess it could be coincidental and incompetent but it's not the highest on my list of the likely.
I suspect a large part of it would be to protect themselves in case the recent publicity brings forth some undesired attention from regulator with regards to market manipulation.
the demonstrated power and financial success of WSB, even if fleeting and temporary, provides a lot of implicit credibility and validation to the "retard/YOLO" non-PC culture of WSB. The modern society worships success, and the people pay oversized attention to what successful people do - like what they eat, how exercise, how they stay motivated, etc. And now instead of respectable, successful, well dressed, educated, smart, cool, etc. Wall Street-ers a bunch of "retards" crawled from under the rock, teared a new one to those Wall Street-ers and got right on top of that podium of success veneration and idolation (like the "nerds" did 20 years ago with their tech startups). No surprise all the establishment (which these days naturally includes successful "nerds" of the previous generation) fights back. The established interests are always scared of changes, and especially when changes look like paradigm shift (while we wouldn't know for quite some time whether it is a true paradigm shift or just an aberration, the scare is real)
Because they all have fairly loose monitoring and mostly complaint-based policy enforcement, and people being pissed off at you for any reason makes it more likely that complaints get reported.
They might have decided in many cases to act now, but with this specific case it seems to have been 11 days ago:
>Facebook suspended his group on Jan. 7
> Facebook Inc took down a popular Wall Street discussion group, Robinhood Stock Traders, in a move that its founder on Thursday described as backlash for conversations buoying shares of GameStop Corp and other companies this week.
First, a typo, "buoying". But it also says "this week". So what they meant is probably Jan. 27.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/buoyi...
A week ago, nobody what so ever, cared about WSB.
Today, I just had a conversation with my dad about WSB... Everyone is talking about it, I'm not surprised that someone even talked about it on some facebook board-meeting or whatever...
I saw a news item that said Discord is, and was, and the server is back up with improved moderation.
If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.
That's the way 4chan presented too, and it turned out that the community wasn't entirely as ironic as its members claimed.
Cultures turn toxic really, really fast. And this kind of "ironic offensiveness" turns into a shield for genuine hate in a way that even long term participants don't notice until it's too late.
The only moves are blunder, react, counter react, avoid, fight, flee.
The chimps at FB have dug themselves into deep holes. The only way they save themselves is to pull everyone else inside and cry for Grandma to show up.
> side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception.
This is absolutely true. Before, when this was between a few reporters and Wallstreet / WSB, it was possible to handle.
Now it has crossed the tipping point into mass politics, and the size of the audience involved is massive. Nuance is dead.
This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
Obviously Discord is a private company etc etc. They're also the dominant platform upon which ~140 million people [1] from all over the world communicate, in all the messy ways humans do. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they focus on keeping the platform running, collect their revenue from their customers, and mind their own business. This is what everyone who uses the service expects them to do, after all.
1: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-millio...
Also, "benign intent" does not make offensive behavior less offensive. Intent can matter, but it certainly isn't everything.
This doesn't address the larger question of whether or not we have a right to enforce our completely subjective standards globally on other communities which we don't belong to. Personally, I wouldn't want some outsider deciding that me and my friends weren't allowed to talk to eachother anymore if we decided to start using the term towards each other privately in jest.
On the other hand quite a few of them would probably support stabbing each other in the back. I may have had a run in with a few too many people that like to abuse simple stuff for power plays.
Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there.
Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare.
Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.
All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
It's fascinating to see how many people really just want to fuck with the rich and how many care about normal people getting life-changing money. It's much more altruistic than I imagined.
I chucked in £30 on Free Trade.
I don't care if I get that money back. I just want to see the rich people suffer a bit, know that they don't have all the power.
Everyone is aware of that. The group of people that will get rich are those who bought the stock 2 weeks ago or earlier.
Heck, when someone put their entire life savings in ornamental gourd futures WSB crapped about that person saying how stupid that was. They aren't stupid. They are fully aware of what they are doing.
Then FD's (weekly OTM options, what it stands for is offensive) became super popular.
But I agree, it was always a good mix of memes and DD. I remember some activision DD which was along the lines of: "look at the name, act and vision! Two things a company needs to succeed".
Politically correct speech is bankrupt in all forms of ethics and morality if it favors the second group just because they have kinder words. Generally why lots of people are disgusted by PC rhetoric. It's bullshit to its core because it holds no real core value, it just keeps things superficially pretty for the predators of society.
I'm enjoying this ride and wish there was more I could do because it's become bigger than the money. This whole thing is pulling back the curtain and we're getting to see the frail ankles of the wizard.
Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.
It's impossible for moderators to fully control large groups, subs and such. Some bannable comments will always be present, and they are limited by whatever moderation tools they get from reddit.
Meanwhile, the idea that discord, reddit (throttled not banned) and FB all simultaneously and coincidentally took these actions during the gamestop maneuver is not even 1% believable. WTF.
The only way you can get back is if you are "friends" with the big-boys or the mainstream media.
For example: Bohemian Club was originally founded by San Francisco newspapermen in 1872, and you can see how many friends they have in very very high places. Manufacturing Consent is not a new phenomenon.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110720044742/http://library.so...
We desperately need to abandon centralized platforms. Continuing to donate content to them will never rid us of them.
Short summary: you dear reader are a federal felon, the only reason why you're not in prison is that no one has bothered to lock you up yet. The laws on the books and the way we live our lives have diverged so much that you commit at least three felonies by the time you have had lunch.
My problem is that they bully small platforms but big platforms that also have huge problems with their users must be too big too fail.
They should probably just shut themselves down also because of the capitol riots.
Do the right thing facebook, shut yourself down.
I have been on wsb subreddit and discord server for a long time. There has been zero change in the culture or the type of content or the tone of the conversations in all that while, right uptill the discord server was banned. Either these platforms knew there was bad content but did nothing, or they know there is no bad content but are using it as a flimsy excuse to help out their fellow Harvard MBA's.
Ironically the orange man would be the one laughing at all of this today.
Unfortunately in today’s hyper-PC environment, this is such an easy way to instantly deplatform your enemies that it will continue to be abused. Any large group can be shutdown at any time should the powers that be decide they don’t like it - they just have to find a single post that the PC police would find objectionable. It’s one of the dangers of allowing such thin claims to have such instant, fatal effects with with no ability to fight or appeal.
[1] https://twitter.com/wsbmod/status/1354720831218339845?s=21
Just delete the group and say: "It violated our terms of service". That's probably also a lie, but at least it's a little less obnoxious.
Possibly even ask for their phone number.
Though it's tempting, don't message them at all. Just hang onto it.
Only use it to if your community is banned and you need to start over somewhere else. Then email/text them the location of the new community.
I suspect people do this with Twitter and other social media accounts as well.
I suspect you can do the same thing with groups. For example when WSB went down there were already backups within minutes.
The airline employees let him do it, and just repeat to us: "Sorry, he's business class!" He gets served first, saving literally hours compared to joining the back of the line.
At least they were honest.
But emotions of the crowd are understandable, so airlines usually have separate line/service for buisness class
No matter how they treat users, people won't leave due to network effect.
I don't believe the problem is solvable with more tech or free market. I think the only way forward is political, with laws and regulations.
Long ago railroad networks, water pipes networks, and landline phone networks were private companies free to do whatever they please with the property they own.
It's time to add social networks to the list.
Many laws and public discussions related to monopolies in general, as opposed to natural monopolies, are focused on pricing. FB can argue by saying "that's not applicable because our product is free for users".
> It's not at all obvious why FB cannot instantly die like all social media companies before.
About 35% of global population use facebook at least once a month. Global population counts newborn babies, and 10-15% of adults who can't read or write.
None of the prior social media companies achieved that size of their network.
I agree about social networks, but I'm not sure how good of an argument this is. In the US all those things (railroads, water networks, landline) have gone to crap.
It would be solvable with the free market as long as we don't allow big companies to consistently purchase their own competition.
Facebook is trivial to leave (I haven’t been on it in years now). It was not trivial to change to a different railroad, plumbing provider, etc.
That gets brought up a lot however:
* MySpace never had the revenue of Facebook
* Far more people are on Facebook than were ever on MySpace. There are not that many of my personal friends/family were ever on MySpace. Now however, almost every one of my personal friends and family members is on Facebook.
* MySpace did not spend billions acquiring potential social network competitors. The two biggest c(non Chinese) social networks that might have challenged Facebook were acquired for billions (Instagram and WhatsApp) and the other network (SnapChat) had an offer, and when it was turned down, a competing service was created by Facebook.
* As a market matures, it becomes harder to unseat incumbents. The social media market is far more mature than it was before.
* as an example, Google dethroned AltaVista and Lycos rather easily. However, I would bet money that 10 years from now, absent regulation, Google will still have the dominant search engine. In the same way, 10 years from now, I would bet that Facebook will still have the dominant social network.
Your experience (and mine fwiw) does not generalise. It is significantly harder for many people to do so while keeping up with familial and social obligations. Not to mention some business obligations for many. Facebrick is trying ever harder to make being a citizen impossible without a Facebook account. Government departments have Facebook accounts and use it for communication. WhatsApp is used for payments on much of the world. Don't kid yourself it's as easy for everyone as it is for you and I.
That said. Delete your Facebook account. Plan it. Do it. It feels so, so very good pushing the button and your quality of life improves significantly. Facebrick is as vile as any serious addiction tends to be once it has hold of you.
- Ban businesses engaged in online advertising from compiling real world data / mixing physical world data with the online profiles of users
- Ban businesses engaged in online advertising from building profiles of people who have not opted into their platform; require permanent removal of all data within 30 days of any user leaving their platform
- Require businesses provide human based appeal process to any user or business that spends or earns $1,000 in a year before suspending or terminating an account
These could even be done at the state proposition level, absent state authority
I don’t think Facebook should have shut down WSB but that doesn’t make them a monopoly.
As for monopoly in general, there’s Tiktok, Snapchat. Clubhouse just raised a big round.
The blue facebook app is actually anything but a monopoly, as Instagram (a facebook property) gets much more enthusiasm. There’s no “natural” monopoly for Facebook blue there.
It’s easy to pick a concept and try to apply it everywhere, but Facebook can act objectionally without being “a natural monopoly”.
Why not?
It fits the definition from the article. “An industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry give the largest supplier in an industry an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors”
In case of FB the infrastructural cost is less of an issue, at least not anymore. I think Amazon and Microsoft are capable of hosting at least a dozen Facebooks each on their clouds should they want to. The main barrier to entry which causes that overwhelming advantage is network effect.
What a joke. They're not even pretending to do it under the guise of hate speech anymore.
These groups quickly degrade into memes about how buying and holding these stocks forever will make people rich. They chastise anyone who even considers mentioning an exit strategy.
When the stock begins to decline, early investors in these groups will quietly exit while using the group to convince others to "buy the dip" and have "diamond hands".
Don't believe the narrative that this is a simple transfer of wealth from wealthy banks to Redditors. It's also a massive transfer of wealth from Redditors arriving late to the game who aren't in on the joke to those who are.
Do you really think Redditors are YOLOing thousands of dollars into a stock with the understanding that they’re going to lose most of it? Are they really spending thousands of dollars on some laughs?
No, they’ve been convinced that this trade is free money. They’ve also been convinced this money is coming from evil bad guys, ignoring the influx of cash from fellow Redditors.
I think they absolutely know they can lose it all. But the risk/reward ratio was so amazing it made sense to throw money at it and see what happens.
Haven't they been pretty candid about saying "when the short interest decreases it's every man for himself?"
Members of /r/TheDonald would likely disagree with this sentiment.
Giant echo chambers will form. But only the new ones will be uncensorable and free.
I dont understand what you think technology is.
Three, if you include regulators.
Biggest question seems to be how does the community deal with spam (and spam taking a large amount of space). But other than that I could see a lot of people willing to host nodes for free.
Independent forums might be due for a comeback as well, with modern technological amenities
KDX is the "modern" open source implementation of the Hotline/Caracho concept.
I still think usenet is the way to go. It's a robust federated system. Sure most people will use a few servers but there's always the easy open to switch to a new one. I even posted on misc.invest.stocks today using eternal-september.org text only access.
I also tried aether once, and it seemed sort of interesting.
This trope has been repeated about nearly everything Donald Trump has said as well regarding policy.
Was supporting CHAZ just politics or people’s lives? Several people were murdered there.
Decentralized and already familiar to everyone from the HN crowd to grandma.
If you don’t think this isn’t already happening, you are completely wrong.
My AMC info from Matt Levine, under the "AMC ATM" section of the article. [1]:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-28/knowin...
On the other hand, pissing off a whole bunch of your customers and investors does not seem like a wise idea. Hell, they’ve more money to buy things now.
I should also mention that the GME balance sheet wasn’t even bad back in July, and they’re doing everything to improve it, even without the short squeeze (think closing stores etc).
It shows where power is, in case we didn't notice yet. And it shows that we should collectively act to regain some of this power, we gave them for free...
I along with a few other friends have messaged the moderators and a few other notable figures on Reddit about this. Nobody has responded for obvious reasons.
Would like to see them continue doing what they’re doing outside the grasp of the money strings controlling politics and the economy.
This is not a dig at you at all - in fact you're probably right, but it is certainly striking that after all these years, people are seriously suggesting Russia as a "freer" alternative to American/Anglo systems.
This is more of an alignment issue. If your particular community is US-centric, going to Russia (or China) for hosting will serve you well, as they have little interest in what you're doing and will not easily give in to pressure (if you're scared of the US cracking down on you, you should probably avoid the EU as well).
Still, I agree: Having to take these steps as anything other than a far fetched precaution is horrible.
Here the comments seem full of old chestnuts like 'it's a private company, they do what they want' and 'WSB is manupulating the market'
The reddit is actually discussing the core of the matter and their next steps.
There are likely people on this forum who would reject that culture because of their ideals. Those words fit right into a category called "ableism" whether you use them for humor or not. You're not fighting some hedge companies paid troll machines or whatever else you can dream up. What's happening to WSBs is more tantamount to what happened to the internet and many small forums back in the late 2000s when Facebook and Twitter signed on millions of people who had never used the internet before. What you're fighting is people who want the internet to reflect reality.
Somebody posted a joke that was, taken literally, a threat or incitement of rape. "I hope you get fucked and don't enjoy it". An admin of the group "liked" or commented on the post.
Later, a human labeler determined that the post was "adult sexual exploitation". It was removed. Because the admin had "liked" or commented on it, the group was automatically banned. That's FB's public policy on "adult sexual exploitation".
Just a guess, but that is the most likely explanation to me.
Do we forget that GameStop is a mall retailer that sells physical copies of video games? This is not the next Amazon or Saudi Aramco. Anyone who is convinced to put their money in GameStop was likely tricked by someone with a financial interest (and that was probably a rich person). This entire narrative about retail investors taking billions from evil hedge funds is just that, a narrative. It's not even true; Melvin got rid of their short position.
Do we know Melvin got rid of their short position? They might be in a position to get an article published saying they did, while being able to say later it was fake news, and covering it as the stock plummeted today.
The article I saw I think had weaselly language about not being able to confirm the losses.
You're literally suggesting a revolution based on this logic.
If someone showed me an article that made definite claims based on verifiable evidence about what Melvin did, then I would revise my opinion.
But I kind of think that it's hard to be sure because any standard disclosure has a significant lag.
The nihilism is increasing more and more. This is just one instance of it, where institutions are so brazen that they don't even bother to come up with an excuse and just pull the plug after some cost benefit calculations. Eventually there will be the straw that will break the camel's back, which is what I mean by an impetus for change. If more and more people come to understand that working hard and saving is a sucker's game and that any escape from that game is rigged at the institutional level, they will stop wanting to participate in the current social contract.
The narrative about a cabal of rich people "nakedly trying to stop" Robinhood traders from trading is also manipulative garbage. Every reasonable and level-headed explanation of why Robinhood halted trading was about credit limitations, that is in agreement with what Robinhood stated publicly, and now that the credit has been remedied Robinhood trading has resumed. No conspiracy theory necessary. The hype is wrong and, worse, intentionally misleading.
The article says Facebook did several things, including banning the group, giving a notification "that the group violated policies on 'adult sexual exploitation'", reinstating the group, saying the ban has nothing to do with the "ongoing stock frenzy", and calling the group a "dangerous organization". When did each of these things happen and in what order?
The way it mentions the Discord group is also confusing.
So much for "amid".
Not that this was your intent but wanted to comment on what I've seen a few places around the internet -
I've seen various comments online comparing this to Robinhood shutting down people's ability to buy certain stocks, or their clearinghouse forcing it, etc. I don't think they are comparable.
Facebook here has the power to regulate their own version(s) of the markets due to personal fear that their stock will be affected by the every man's voice and opinion. They fear being oppressed by the people, so they oppress the people's ability to have any control over them. For a publicly traded company this is insane, and it shows how fake everything really is behind the scenes. Only a few out there are truly allowed to trade on good information and swing markets their way.
Break up big tech.
I see real opportunity for big platform here who doesn't do such PC kind of thing. I hope someone build truly neutral platform that supports both right wing and left wing politics , retail traders and wallstreet big players ... plus and minus.
There's a reason Trump's populism gained so much momentum. The economic system in which we operate is broken. It needs to change.
> First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
> Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I know, I know. Nobody is killing anyone, so let them close any group they don’t like. It’s not a problem amirite?
Bottom line is corporations are self serving, and the poem doesn’t really hold up to what is happening.
Trump was "only a test."
On the other hand, these WSB bans seem to be related to external pressure from some very wealthy people. Not really the same situation. And not something that's new to the Internet. Digg's blocking of the HD-DVD key comes to mind. Or sites that removed content under threat of a lawsuit.
What!?
*Edit, in any case, the US Presidency is not a "position of ultimate power".
Oh, there's no question that he was naive, but you're betraying your own naivete here. Who do you think rigged the system in the first place, if not Donald Trump and his ilk? Was he merely naive when he signed off an a trillion-dollar tax break for the wealthy and an ongoing tax increase for everyone but the wealthy? What else could anyone have expected from hiring the fox to guard the henhouse?
• The double-digit percentage decreases in average tax liability started with a 12.5% drop for people making $15,000 to $20,000 a year. Double-digit percentage reductions in liability continued for people making $25,000 to $30,000 (down 11.2%) through $100,000 to $200,000 (down 10.96%).
• Taxpayers making between $40,000 and $50,000 a year had the largest fall in average tax liability, a 14.5% drop, while high-end households making between $250,000 and $500,000 had the second largest decrease, with a 14.4% liability reduction.
• Taxpayers making at least $1 million had a 4.3% decrease in average tax liability.
Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-american-...
"The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019."
"The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed."
"By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not."
"At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/opinion/republicans-biden...
That being said, I disagree with the assessment of my comment. Those of us (and there were many) who warned about this escalating when Trump was censored and deplatformed were downvoted and flagged at the time, amidst lots of crowing and victory clapping from people who fully believed the censorship only applied to one individual and was acceptable.
We've seen in the past 2 weeks a huge escalation - the British Socialist pages on FB, other left-leaning sites, and now of course watering holes related to WallStreetBets. We're fortunate to see this history happen in real time, so hopefully we can course-correct, as our forebears did, but without the longer timeline and through much more horrible circumstances.
Facebook used its power unilaterally to shut down yet another group of people. Whether we agree with the opinions of that group or not is not the point - the fact that this can happen, is happening, and is being supported by large swathes of people who should be more aware of where this path leads us, is very worrying.
Reminding people that just a few weeks ago, when concern about the Trump censorship was resoundingly dismissed, that that was the same as the censorship of other groups today, is important.
I'll continue to do that, because we need to deviate from this path we as a collective seem to be walking down.
Respectfully,
It's fascinating to me how common it is that people's second comment (e.g. after a moderation reply) will give a detailed substantive expression of what they actually meant. I think we all assume that what's in our mind will come across in our comments, but actually it doesn't come across by itself—it needs to be formulated explicitly, as you did in your later reply.
If you don't share it explicitly, but only give a quick pointer to it, people will fill that in with what's in their mind, which is a huge range of possible interpretations, many of which are inflammatory or even attacks, whether you meant it that way or not. Commenters will respond to what they perceive you as saying (and feeling, and thinking, and doing), and it's your responsibility to minimize the gap between that and what you actually mean. (I don't mean just you, of course. We all need to do this.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The precedent of accepted censorship was set and accepted. Deal with it.
Insofar as people are committing crimes on Parler, I hope that they will be investigated.
But some folks meme'ing about stocks? Come on.
Edit: If you're spewing hatred on me for some kind of retribution, shame on you. This isn't a place for that.
You reap what you sow.
It's not "you reap what you sow" and you're not handing GP some funny "gotcha". It's just plain obvious decency.
Some people don't get that, and then they're surprised that most normal humans think it's suspicious, as if they don't get it on purpose. Then they get upset because they start to look like nazi sympathizers.
That is what "you reap what you sow" looks like.
People aren’t really upset about deplatforming extremists/neo-nazis. They’re upset about the deplatforming of mainstream groups and falsely labeling them “neonazi extremists”
If a lot of people move to e.g. the fediverse facebook equivalent, that shifts power away from facebook and makes it harder to deplatform people. So your two listed goals are in competition. That's why I'm saying you reap what you sow: you wanted a world where people can be deplatformed, and you got it.
I don't "want a world where people can be deplatformed". I am 100% in favour of better censorship resistance, open messaging, etc and I 100% think whatever "bad" comes out of a system like that would be far outweighed by the good it brings.
But that doesn't mean I'm against Facebook deplatforming assholes. Hell I'm against Facebook as a whole, but as far as their current role in society plays? They have a stupid amount of influence over large swathes of the population and that's a problem.
The problem is no matter how I phrase this, you'll think I'm in favour of Facebook "censoring people"; whereas my position is that Facebook has actively given new tools for assholes to spread hateful messages, including not just the groups systems but active recommendations, advertising, sorting algorithms which prioritize engagement (read: flamewars), etc.
In short: I'm in favour of Signal and against Facebook. How's that contradictory?
If I built an uncensorable distributed/federated FLOSS Facebook equivalent (fedbook?) with distributed moderation (personalized so it censors out the things that would offend you/spam from your feed, or whatever you set it to) and it became popular, would you be for that?
Do you think it that Hateful Ideas wouldn't be compelling on such a market?
Would you deny facebook to everyone if you could, because the shape of facebook-like sites is corrosive to the mind in and of itself, in a way that private chatrooms aren't? I could respect wanting to deplatform absolutely everyone, in a unabomber way. But somehow I doubt that's your position.
I just don't see how whatever advantages you claim facebook has given to 'assholes', it hasn't given to e.g. BLM twice over- with feeds tuned to engagement and rage etc. and also the Official Blessing.
I'm in favour of you building it. Then let's see what happens. Does that answer your question?
> I just don't see how whatever advantages you claim facebook has given to 'assholes', it hasn't given to e.g. BLM twice over- with feeds tuned to engagement and rage etc. and also the Official Blessing.
What of it? I've already said Facebook has too much influence. You can be against having a king, and in favour of the king doing something about, idk, taxes.
> Would you deny facebook to everyone if you could, because the shape of facebook-like sites is corrosive to the mind in and of itself, in a way that private chatrooms aren't?
This is such a weird question. Are you asking if I'm in favour of Facebook existing? I already said I'm not. Or is your question "if you were King of the World & Master of the Universe, would you make Facebook disappear?", which, again, this isn't the Matrix.
These aren't useful questions, you're just trying to figure out what my stances are. My positions don't matter. I'm just trying to try to help you understand a concept which is incredibly easy to grok to a lot of people.
I'm suspicious about how much witch-hunters actually want the king gone, or whether they wouldn't want to replace him with a cheka later. They have a vested interest in power staying centralized. This all makes it a lot funnier when it's their sister being burnt at the stake. Someone might even break out a saying.
With how evasive you're being, I can only assume your stances would cast you in an unfavourable light, similar to the guy who's "Just asking questions about race".
I've been on HN for six years, if you truly want to know them, you can look at any of my older posts.
Since you can "only assume", maybe seeing that you're wrong will finally get you to stop "assuming"?
& personal attacks are not tolerated here, FYI. Going to stop replying now.
That's rich, given the condescension you've shown in this thread.
Where I come from, trawling through people's post histories is creepy.
> your favorite pair of steel galoshes
Get your assumptions out of here if you want this to be a discussion, please.
I am all for removing violence and terrorism groups from social media. At the same time, I am against censorship from these companies in other matters.
The responses here are disgusting, contemptful and vile for what I thought was a reasonable stance.
Are you for Anarchy? otherwise, people in position will decide a lot of things for you including truth.
If facebook moderators wore fancy clothes and hit things with gavels on camera when making judgements, the situation would rapidly improve.
This is demonstrably mistaken. Look, here's an entire Wikipedia article on limits to free speech in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
And if you're talking about the ill-defined philosopical concept of "free speech", that's also mistaken. Free speech is a subservient value in pursuit of free society; if an instance of speech would do damage to the freedoms of others (e.g. slander) then it is morally just for that speech to be forbidden.
Black-and-white thinking isn't the recourse here. Free speech is a nuanced topic, and not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe.
It is, actually. Your edge cases are disingenuous (or maybe you've just misunderstood them). It's like saying killing someone is a nuanced topic. Sure, there's moral complexities with things like abortion, war, or euthanasia, but, generally speaking, killing someone is pretty black-and-white wrong.
Free speech is the same way. Let's not mince words.
Ironically, this has left me speechless. Surely you realize the inherent contradiction of arguing that something is emphatically all-or-nothing, and then turning around and moderating your position with a strategically-placed "generally speaking"? Which is it? Is it nuanced or isn't it?
The bottom line is that there are exceptions to freedom of speech, including morally-justifiable ones. We don't need to treat adherence to freedom of speech as some sort of religion that admits no heresy. It is a generally good idea to distrust anyone who tells you how (not) to exercise your speech, but that doesn't mean you can't independently derive from first principles a reasonable set of self-consistent morals around when it is proper to value other rights above it.
I doubt it. Cases in point:
> I should not be free to
> I should not be free to go around telling all your friends
Free speech is absolute by definition, otherwise it is not free. If you don't believe in free speech, you don't believe in free speech. Own up, don't try to weasel around with words. Say it: I do not support free speech.
This is the main issue, people not speaking their mind. Just speak what you feel. Don't worry, we still have some free speech left. You can voice your disregard for the principles of freedom and liberty.
And when the principles of freedom and liberty come into conflict with each other, how will you resolve it? If you must excommunicate me from the church of freedom of speech for the heresy of believing in the existence of more important personal liberties, then I accept my ostracision.
In the meantime, /u/DeepFuckingValue was doxxed today. Do you believe that Reuters' right to free speech outweighs his right to privacy?
That is for thr courts to decide. He can sue. But Twitter should not ban Reuters from their platform.
He wasn't "doxxed." Why do people use that word so willy-nilly these days? Reuters did some investigative journalism and found out his identity through public sources. He's not a confidential informant, he wasn't trying to keep his identity a secret, and he was voluntarily interviewed by WSJ anyway.
And even if he was doxxed, it's up to the courts to decide of free speech outweighs the right to privacy. This is one of those edge cases that will sometimes be answered in the negative, and sometimes in the positive.
I'm not suggesting the average poster/average discussion has necessarily broken the law, but there's likely more than a few who have.
And if Facebook went "What's happening in here may be illegal and is too much of a business/legal risk to us to continue to condone, so we've shut it down. We've also updated the rules for all groups in the future to reflect this." - That'd seem to be kind of reasonable.
-----------
Banning it with an arbitrary, inaccurate reason and seemingly no clear guidance as to what the lines of acceptable/not are going forward? That's what I take more issue with.
I think platforms have to be able to moderate content to function, but that the rules surrounding it should be as transparent and consistent as possible.
Taking it to the wallstreet chads? CENSOR THE FUCK OUT OF IT!
Fuck facebook. End it.
Now this is censorship.
Note that the term hate speech is relative, poorly defined and can mean anything, based on the perspective of the individual. What is hate speech to you is not hate speech to another, and vice versa.
I urge you to think more deeply on the topic.
> It has gotten to the point that these giant corporations are able to influence elections in whatever direction they think is "right", they are able to shut down speech, on what is now a de facto town square, and they are able to deplatform their own competition based on accusations of harbouring "hate speech activists".
I agree 100%. Twitter/FB/Google are too big, they are monopolies. They must be held to a higher standard or be broken up. Either become "public squares" where my freedom is protected or get broken up into 100 different networks.
It will be a glorious day when the EU decides to intervene and make them play by the rules. No corporation should hold more sway than the government!