Facebook Downgrades WikiLeaks Article Page | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Downgrades WikiLeaks Article Page

explica.co

54 pointszoobab66 comments

I hate that company, I really do. It's terrifying how well they're executing their game plan. Let's not fool ourselves, HN is not a representative crowd. The overwhelming majority of population doesn't know, doesn't want to know, doesn't care.

And that's the scary bit. Most people know they are evil, very few truly understand the depth of it.

I totally hate Facebook, never had an account and will never have.

However, why the first media resource administrator of banned page reached, was Russian propagandist outlet Sputnik? Their style is disgusting Goebbels-style propaganda, coordinated attacks on social media using resources of St.Petersburg troll factory, and for sure they use Facebook for their propagandist purposes.

I can assure, in Russian jurisdiction any resource like Wikileaks would be shut down, and founders will soon have tea with Novichok.

I just want to say, siding with one evil against another could not be justified.

It bothers me as well but let's face it - western media has blacklist them anyway and wouldn't even care to write about it now. During the Bush era they were heroes and Assange a Saint.

This is just Facebook exercising their right to free speech. Or so I've been told.

Anyone who thought them censoring a sitting US president was the end of it is kidding themselves.

Might be worth mentioning that the sitting president was using the platform to create the atmosphere that led to an attempted insurrection against a democratically elected government. This is similar to what FB should have done in the Myanmar situation, where they did not act in time.

(also, private companies shutting down access to their property is not censorship, etc etc.)

Freedom goes both ways, folks. You don't have to like it, most people usually don't.

Gigantic global monopolies with billions of users are where I draw the line, ngl. There's a reason we also don't allow the government this freedom, too.

Monopoly of what though, social media? They don't have any bearing on my life, and I'm sure that's shared with many people here specifically. They aren't murdering people and they aren't stopping the water supply, food supply, or anything essential to anyone. It's Facebook, we all love to hate them, but them saying they don't want to platform a seller of something is hardly equivalent to the government imprisoning someone for speech.

Seriously? It's monopoly over the ideas and culture of our society. It's monopoly over the speech that the citizens consume. The culture and ideas that people consume on daily basis obviously affect their actions and ideology.

And yes it is a monopoly. You can tell me that I can go in a town square and spread my ideas if I don't like Facebook, but we all know that means my ideas are effectively unheard, when compared to facebook being able to instantly reach millions of people. You can tell me I can create my own Facebook if I don't like it, which is such an insincere comment, as it's prohibitively expensive to do so, and even if I did, we've decided as a society that it's also fine to then just censor, ban, shut down any system that promotes competing ideas.

But honestly I don't know how you can say with a straight face that facebook/twitter/etc have no bearing on your life. They massively define and shape the society you live in, to a point that has never even remotely existed in all of past human civilziation.

> Seriously? It's monopoly over the ideas and culture of our society. It's monopoly over the speech that the citizens consume.

People don't get information from their friends, television, Twitter, blogs, news websites, email, or radio?

> The culture and ideas that people consume on daily basis obviously affect their actions and ideology.

I agree here, but the only conclusion that can be drawn is "words matter", which is sort of generic and not super relevant.

> we all know that means my ideas are effectively unheard, when compared to facebook being able to instantly reach millions of people

Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. Also, I am someone who doesn't have a multi-million person audience on FB, and doesn't have the budget to pay for one: am I being censored? Not everyone on FB has that kind of reach - if "being heard by millions of people" is an important criteria, then I am being censored by HN, reddit, and every other comment board where I don't have high status standing / reach.

> People don't get information from their friends, television, Twitter, blogs, news websites, email, or radio?

Friendly reminder that conversations with friends & family come via big tech nowadays, because associating in person is illegal. FB and Twitter are well known for blocking links to mainstream blogs/websites they don't like, even in private conversation!

> Also, I am someone who doesn't have a multi-million person audience on FB, and doesn't have the budget to pay for one: am I being censored? Not everyone on FB has that kind of reach - if "being heard by millions of people" is an important criteria, then I am being censored by HN, reddit, and every other comment board where I don't have high status standing / reach.

Censorship is the freedom for all ideas to have a level playing field. Tilting the scales is the antithesis.

Does a level playing field include distribution to an audience? If not, then I don’t see how the definition would include big tech shutting down an account. If it does include distribution, then it’s so broad a definition as to not be useful (“the tv networks are censoring me because they won’t let me go on and spew hate speech”)

Facebook censorship is partly why division in society is so bad right now. It's pushing slightly-controversial people off to extreme websites.

It’s not in Facebook’s business interest to continue to host this kind of politically charged and controversial content. As a publicly traded company, Facebook has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.

Every decision they make should be viewed through the lens of, “Is this beneficial to the profit of the company?” If the answer is no, the content should be blocked.

> Every decision they make should be viewed through the lens of, “Is this beneficial to the profit of the company?”

Fair. However, we are not they, and should care about more than just Facebook's bottom line.

This may be true when viewed at the micro level, but it's highly debatable at a zoomed out level.

Put it this way, is it in Facebooks best business interests to be viewed as endorsing every single thing it hosts?

Note that the more they pick and choose who to deplatform, the more the ones left will get their implicit seal of approval.

I think we’re getting away from the purpose of Facebook. It’s not intended to be, nor was it ever designed to be a grand mediator of social discourse. It was designed to keep up with friends and casual entertainment. The fact we’ve gotten so far away from what it’s supposed to be is the problem.

I’m in full support of Facebook completely banning any and all content that isn’t completely neutral. That is, get rid of all political content completely.

Cat videos, yes. Political content? No.

You are correct, which is why facebook should be declared and utility and treated as such. Just like your power company cannot do whatever it wants for it's bottom line, neither should facebook

Would you support the government preventing other companies from entering the social media space? Generally utilities have a government sponsored monopoly.

Yes I would

The word "censorship" is losing its meaning for me, as more and more things are falling under that label which weren't always considered "censorship".

When I'm in a conversation with someone, am I "censoring" them when I interject?

When a teacher requires hands to be raised in a classroom, is that "censorship"?

If I have to log into a website in order to comment, is that "censorship"?

When a business doesn't allow another business to use its resources to make money, is that "censorship"?

If everything is censorship, seems to me like nothing is.

If we have a large forum and someone decides who gets to speak, that is censorship. That will allow whoever is in charge to shape peoples perception of reality.

This is literally every online forum. Every single one has moderation. You just can't have a reasonable experience without it.

I propose we reserve the word "censorship" for situations where an idea is effectively stopped from propagation as the result of the decisions of the people who would be negatively impacted by that idea.

Specific expressions getting removed shouldn't be considered "censorship", but an entire concept being purged systemically across a culture for the benefit of the group executing the purge would fall into my proposed definition.

Continuing to label specific content removal as "censorship" is unhelpful, because I want to be extremely alarmed when I hear the word, but I'm unable to behave that way currently, because things like this submission try to co-opt the term for something that clearly isn't even approaching the same degree of oppression.

> If I have to log into a website in order to comment, is that "censorship"?

There are plenty of news outlets where I'm unable to leave a comment under a news article, because the only supported option is have a FB account which I don't have.

I don't feel censored but I'm definitely silenced.

And why don't you make a FB account?

Because he does not want to send Facebook every comment he makes on the internet? Specially your political ideas and opinions.

I don't have a FB either. For me it is like the Stasi, tracking everything you do, only way more detailed.

When I talk with friends, my exact opinions are forgotten over time, while FB will record your exact opinion on September 20th, at 8:12pm for your entire life.

So does HN, but here you are.

HN doesn't require my phone number to register nor does it track my web browsing habits.

Is this question an example of the “loaded question” logical fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

No.

I don't understand how anyone can see one of the tech monopolies as just another business from which one could simply move to another platform [0]. These places are de facto public commons at this point and are a significant factor in reaching a broad audience. Removal from the platforms does amount to censorship if the reason is a mere political disagreement.

[0] c.f. the fate of Parler which was assassinated overnight by a collaboration of the tech monopolies, but was celebrated by the public because of the bad reputation it accumulated.

What monopoly, exactly, does Facebook actually have here? Are you suggesting they control an overwhelming share of... online marketplaces?

Facebook owns mobile advertising space. Their ad targeting data is part of duopoly with google, which owns search targeting data.

Facebook and google both needs to be broken up with anti-trust rules.

How is that relevant here, though? Facebook's marketplace is hardly WikiLeaks' only viable option to sell its merchandise, and in fact is probably not even the wisest choice.

Am I now unable to purchase WikiLeaks merchandise?

They are not de facto public commons, they are privately controlled advertisement channels. It is _very dangerous_ to consider them as anything other than an effective means by which to drive advertisement sales.

It is dangerous, but the people have adopted them as the commons. Especially as it's now illegal to gather in most places, this company shapes the perception of reality for most citizens online.

I do agree with you. That is the financial basis of their existence and will drive their decisions, however in practice the public does use them as a defacto public forum. These two ideas coexist and are also irreconcilable.

Personally, I think nationalizing FB, removing their profit motive, and clearly placing them under 1A protections is a good idea.

If you're worried about the government shutting down dissenters, well guess what this thread is about? The government and FB are only able to achieve this due to the private property protections FB has and rhetorical spin that provides.

... You'd give control of part of the most invasive and pervasive surveillance apparatus' in history into the hands of the American Government? Between Facebook and Google there's no effective means escaping intrusive surveillance.

I'd rather see Facebook and Google dismantled, not nationalized.

Until we can get the global surveillance apparatus dismantled, the size of the company doesn't matter. Small companies are easily bullied, large companies gain favors from cooperating and are also bullied via the threat of anti-trust.

I don't think breaking them up solves anything.

EDIT: A better but even more unlikely idea than nationalization would be internationalization, i.e. placing global companies under the control of international committees. I'm not holding my breath at this point though and the global dominance of the US means that unless Russia, Iran, and China are given prominent positions of control it's essentially meaningless.

Break them up and regulate the collection and sharing of personal information. Invalidate the freemium model by finding ways to make it more expensive to retain personal data.

Yet another idea is to force them to provide freely accessible API and possibility to extract all data in a free format.

This helps somewhat from a competition perspective, but the overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to and is a significant barrier.

While it can make switching costs somewhat lower (does uploading your posts from another platform always make sense in a new context with new people?), it doesn't do anything about the network effect.

> overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to

Users don't have to do it. See Nitter (for Twitter) and teddit.net (for Reddit).

The public is one entity- and will aggregate elsewhere, repeating the process. Humans aggregate, to expect a change in human nature is - a flawed approach.

The world has voted with there feet that this advertisement sales channel is the public plaza. Its not nice. Its horrible in my opinion, but one cannot argue with the network effect. It just is. A fact. A snapshot on reality. And parent is right. This company is censoring the public plaza. Which it owns. Which is very strange.

Supreme court has found that first amendment rights extend to privately owned shopping malls. Don't think in the current atmosphere any court will rule this way, but I understand why people are frustrated that these principles are not applied to digital companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

HN: “No one is using Facebook, and no one needs it for anything”

Also HN: “Facebook is essential and any limits they put on anything is a censorship”

It's almost as if HN were a community made from people with different perspectives and opinions.

It's about selectivity. If you're in a group conversation and you always interject when a certain person starts to speak, that seems like censorship. If a teacher requires one student to always raise his hand, but anyone else can shout out questions, that seems like censorship.

> If everything is censorship, seems to me like nothing is.

I will give a definition that counters this.

Censorship is not a binary thing. It is a spectrum.

Specially, the definition of censorship that I would use, would be "Any action at all, that chills someone else's speech. But the more power and effective the action is, the more that it is a problem".

So, government censorship is a problem not because it is the government doing it specifically, but it is a problem because the government has a lot of power.

To give another example, if a very power criminal organization was threatening to kill anyone who said bad things about it, and these threats were real and worked to chill people speech, then I would consider this to be possibly as bad as the government doing it.

To address your other example, the main question that I would ask is how powerful is the action. You refusing to listen to someone doesn't very effectively chill speech.

But actions such as very large and powerful companies censoring things is much more effective than a teacher censoring things, and thus a larger problem, although not as big of a problem as if someone threatened people, en mass, with violence.

To address the Facebook example, the question that I would ask is "How powerful is facebook, and how effectively are they able to wield that power to chill any form of speech? Are they very effective at controlling speech or not very effective at it?"

These are the people who “fortified” the election.

Expect more authoritarian behavior.

This is not censorship, it's free speech. Stop spreading misinformation or you will have to be freespeeched too.

"Censored" for running spam bots to drive traffic their way.

> They realized that the decision to unpublish the Facebook page followed what appears to be an attack by apparent bots (automated accounts). “Someone probably made it look like we were paying someone to share our posts with the bots,” the source explained.

Of course, it wasn't the Wikileaks store trying to drive traffic their way, but some spooky unknown entity trying to make it look like the Wikileaks store was doing it themselves so that the Wikileaks store would get shut down.

Why would anyone give wikileaks the benefit of the doubt? Having actively engaged in what is difficult to argue was not espionage, is spam below them?

My "benefit of the doubt" was sarcastic, if it wasn't obvious.

I think they 100% got caught spamming and are now trying to cast it as a Facebook/government conspiracy against them.

I don't know what happened in this case, but it's entirely possible that someone who wanted to bring them down organized some bot traffic to them.

It happens for much smaller mailing lists with far fewer enemies where attackers just sign up with trash email addresses in order to increase the chance of your mailing list to be flagged as a spammer account.

Facebook itself is effectively a spam bot that uses people and their invasively-assessed psychological proclivities to proliferate. To hold it up as somehow distinct from other unethical and invasive mechanisms used to "drive traffic" is hopelessly naive.

Take legal recourse on FB - they have a data center in Altoona, IA.

1) File an Iowa Civil Rights Commission Complaint for retaliation of fighting discrimination and on Julian's nationality. https://icrc.iowa.gov/file-complaint

2) File a criminal complaint with Altoona, IA police for unauthorized computer access. There is probable cause the person who blocked the account did so without legitimate authorization.

Do you seriously believe

1) in doing this, facebook was discriminating against JA because he’s australian?

2) that you or anyone but facebook has any interest in filing a criminal complaint for a facebook employee committing “unauthorized computer access” against facebook?

Don’t be absurd.

If forces them to explain. They have no legitimate explanation so it will be restored.

No it doesn't, it gets thrown out because it is absurd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com