Facebook takes down main page of Myanmar military | Hacker News Reader

Facebook takes down main page of Myanmar military

reuters.com

148 pointsPEOPLEgetoff144 comments

What about the US military's FB page? Didn't they cause thousands of innocent deaths in Iraq? I'm sure some Americans can somehow justify it, but I doubt the grieving Iraqi's will accept it.

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

Why even bring this up? Whataboutism is a very shallow argument.

Because it may be shallow, but when discussing the criteria by which they decide what is worth taking down, it is also a very valid argument.

Well, aminozuur is pointing out hypocrisy. Facebook is not applying the same rules to everyone. That is bad. That aside, my own views are similar to sep_field's... with the exception that I would silently prefer Facebook to go away, without explaining why I'd like that.

Given that “Whataboutism” really means “hypocrisy in a geopolitical context” I think the entire definition should be updated to reflect it as a very valid observation, instead of the assumption that it is a weak argument because in my experience it usually isnt, even during the height of the cold war the Soviet Union’s observations about the US were accurate.

An American company will always be a mouthpiece for American propaganda. Not saying whether it’s right or wrong, it’s just the way it is.

The difference is the Myanmar military was killing their own citizens.

A country's military firing live rounds on their own citizens with seemingly no remorse is different than a country's military committing violence in foreign countries.

I'm certainly not condoning either example of military force presented here, but the duty of the military should ultimately be to preserve their citizens. Killing its own citizens and then using social media to lie about it is something I don't think the US military has done.

Should Facebook then close Police departments pages? They're killing fellow citizens and they're doing that more than any other Police force in the west.

That's a decent point. To my argument though, the duty of the police sometimes does acceptably involve violence against citizens when necessary (although at present they are far too frequently forgetting the "when necessary" part).

Also, police departments are far more localized and I think hold much less clout than a national organization.

Well, I'm sure at least someone thought about doing that over the summer.

Aung San Suu Kyi Defends Myanmar Against Rohingya Genocide Accusations:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-k...

The US is inprisoning drug users en masse and forces them to provide labour. That does not directly kill people but prevents them from living it the way they want which is somewhat similar in effect, not to mention all the suicides or related gang violence. Not much different to be honest. Army let politicians get boatloads of cash from prison and pharma industry to keep up the war on citizens. Wake up.

I think you are misunderstand the point of Facebook's actions.

The purpose is not to harm or pressure the Burmese military authorities -

Its to virtue signal to left-leaning activists in the USA and other Western Countries.

Technology companies have dug themselves into a hole of censorship and deplatforming, and they have no choice but to keep digging.

Only "left-leaning" people oppose the Myanmar coup?

The details of the coup aren't understood or cared about that deeply by American discourse. But the idea that it's trivial and salutary to identify and ban "bad" or "dangerous" speech is decisively left-coded right now, in exactly the way similar impulses were right-coded during periods of rightwing political dominance (immediately post-9/11, parts of the Cold War, etc)

All these recent events involving censorship and left aligned tech companies eerily reminds me a passage the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto back in the 1990s.

" Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control. "

Exactly. I don't share the Unabomber's directional disdain for leftists, but most people are simply too dim to understand the concept that liberalism/illiberalism exists on an axis independent of leftism/rightism. If you're planning to burn down liberal norms for short-term partisan gains, you better understand the long view, but that's simply beyond the capacity of the majority of people.

To be clear, there are leftists and rightists that explicitly own the rejection of liberal values (Communists/tankies, racial essentialists like the "woke" and neo-Nazis, neoreactionaries). But the majority of these dynamics are driven by useful idiots who can't even grasp what's happening.

Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted—maybe some are reading your list of groups, seeing their own, and saying, "well they were right up until that part," and got offended—but you are correct that illiberalism exists on all sides of the political spectrum.

And of course when it does, the now-illiberal faction rationalizes it with some manner of, "liberalism, except when..."

The problem with liberalism is that—while it is the most sane mode of structural organization—it is extremely brittle in the face of illiberalism.

Liberalism—and its ancestors/influences—never ate itself, unlike illiberalism. But it does always fall to barbarism. It's like having an argument with an insane person: you may be right, but you'll never win that fight.

That is a seriously concerning weakness, because when liberalism is threatened, the default modes of self preservation are either: roll over and get beaten (as a matter of principal) or reject some (or all) liberalism in order to fight back. In either case, liberalism goes away.

I'm not sure that anyone has ever come up with a reasonable defense. (And maybe there is none.) Humanity seems to prefer pendula. The grass is always greener...

> Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted

I've definitely learned not to be fazed by downvotes on political topics, especially in the current political environment. Like I said (and like you say, more diplomatically), most people are just too dim to understand not only this dynamic, but the very concept of liberalism.

I am always impressed at how effectively Facebook has convinced nearly everyone on both sides of the US partisan divide that Facebook is using censorship to attempt to crush their own side.

Its removal should be actively encouraged amongst the SJWs. FB backing itself, and being backed into, corner after corner helps reveal the hypocrisy more quickly.

There is a slight difference though. Myanmar military took over the government. The US military is led by the president of the United States and only the Congress has the power to declare war.

The outrage people have about censorship wouldn't be that big if those companies simply stated "we censor opinions we don't like, and we censor for political reasons" in their terms of service. Instead they create the outrage by having vague rules about what is allowed and not allowed on the platform and then, on top of that, start enforcing those rules selectively.

Ah, managing expectations seems to be a dying art.

They won’t do that, because “we want to hide this” is a lot less persuasive than “this is false, fringe, propaganda, etc.”

They won't because the Social Media platforms prerogative for bans isn't ideological, or to be consistent. Their sole purpose to do what's best for themselves. Therefore they benefit from having vague, ill-defined rules that allow for selective enforcement.

The argument regarding private platform freedom of speech/censorship isn't relevant for Facebook, where documented examples of the state/governments working with Facebook to censor opinions and restrict speech exist. The line between state/private is blurred at best, and disappearing.

A side-effect of actions like this is it makes it much easier for governments themselves to justify censorship or internet restrictions.

See, e.g., this interview by Der Spiegel w/ the president of Uganda:

> DER SPIEGEL: Observers complain that they have been denied access to social media.

> Museveni: If you're talking about the all-powerful rulers of Facebook, I can tell you it was the other way around. Facebook blocked my party's accounts. Is that freedom of expression? If the people at Facebook think they're silencing me, they're wrong.

> DER SPIEGEL: It wasn't just about Facebook. The entire internet was blocked in Uganda for days.

> Museveni: That was done for security reasons. The internet was misused to stir up trouble. The opposition spread misinformation about the election results. The block has long since been lifted.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ug...

Governments have been justifying internet restrictions since before Facebook was an idea. If Facebook had a policy of absolute tolerance of political speech in Uganda it would have been just as easy a segue to "security reasons... misinformation".

Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.

Sure, there has always been & always will be a tug-of-war, but I think the dominant social media institutions quite blatently engaging in political censorship certainly has to be a help to those tugging for the censorship side.

It's true without FB's actions, Museveni could've immediately started with "security reasons & dsinformation", but that would've been a far weaker answer.

> Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.

The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.

A dictatorial leader who has censored the press in his country since before the internet existed, like the dictators before him, does not need "help" in justifying censorship.

> The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.

And yet there is more access to less censored media in most parts of the world than at any point in human history.

The question is, if the giant US internet companies acted more in alignment w/ the speech values the US professes to believe in (at least when convenient), would that contribute to those values being more widely adopted?

You're taking the position that no, it wouldn't make any difference, other entities will just do what they were going to do anyway.

But I don't think the US example is entirely without influence. Eventually policies reflect beliefs which reflect narratives; the narrative of the internet as a non-partisan enhancer of freedom becomes much harder to sustain when its major sites are clearly picking sides.

> And yet there is more access to less censored media in most parts of the world than at any point in human history.

Because of the internet, of course.

Now, in reaction, we are seeing rising censorship (since the internet suddenly made speech much more available and powerful). Whether we'll end up having more or less uncensored access to information ultimately is still unknown, I think.

> The question is, if the giant US internet companies acted more in alignment w/ the speech values the US professes to believe in (at least when convenient), would that contribute to those values being more widely adopted?

No. Why would people and parties who have journalists arrested and tortured become true believers in freedom of political speech because a foreign website allows it? Big Tech's social media actually has skewed quite close to US censorship norms (i.e. you can censor anything you like but be very careful if it claims to be political) for most of its existence and the results are not something most liberal democracies see as admirable, never mind paternalistic ultraconservative countries or outright dictatorships.

> Now, in reaction, we are seeing rising censorship (since the internet suddenly made speech much more available and powerful)

It's not "rising censorship" because a couple of companies decided EULA policies they'd enforced with varying degrees of consistency against everyone else since the beginning also applied to mouthpieces of the POTUS or the Burmese military. Censorship has been around everywhere forever, and claims a website which has long censored people for not using their real name or showing a nipple has stepped into unacceptable censorship when reasons for bans were political violence is a very narrow, US-centric concept of "rising censorship" that apart from anything else is highly unlikely to convince most cultures that "rising censorship" would be a bad thing.

Absent the ability to the split the universe and do a proper experiment, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about likely wider impacts of places like FB engaging in political censorship.

If you read carefully, you'll notice I'm not making claims one way or the other about the goodness of the censorship. I think a rising demand for censorship is a predictable reaction to technology enhancing the power of speech.

I would not say trend of speech restriction is limited to social media giants. E.g., the US is attempting to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, which, if successful, will, in the words of the NY Times, "open the door to criminalizing activities that are crucial to American investigative journalists who write about national security matters".

I remain convinced that Facebook is incrementally scrubbing news and politics from their platform.

Ah yes, the travesty of murderous thugs shooting their own citizens having their Facebook page taken down. What ever has the world come to.

I love this comment. It captures the current political moment like lightning in a bottle, dominated by simpletons who think every action exists in its own sandboxed parallel universe and can be judged without reference to weakening norms or downstream effects in a dynamic system. Truly a work of art.

You appear to be reading a sentiment into my comment thats not there. Facebook can do whatever they want (within the law) because it's their platform and thus their rules.

I'm merely commenting that I'm reasonably convinced they're (in general) removing news and politics from the platform because its _in their interests_ to do so.

Considering the wider issue faced in Australia at the moment, its fair commentary and sarcastic responses don't contribute to the discourse.

More like selectively scrubbing news and politics, this case in point being one more example to add to this troubling trend.

I don't think it's troubling at all. On the contrary - the more politics removed from FB, the higher the net benefit to society of not having citizens continually "enraged at the other side".

For all the people oblivious to why Facebook did this:

Because Myanmar people lobbied for it, and because the Myanmar military is terrorizing its own people, then lying about it.

The military is shooting its own people, kidnapping them in the middle of the night, and torturing them.

Over 10 protestors dead and 50+ injured, as they are using live rounds on protestors. Over 500+ disappeared or kidnapped. Protestors killed include two teenagers shot in the head, one of them a medic. They also shot at ambulance. They’ve threatened to kill doctors, and kidnapped many of them. Stole the covid vaccination after beating doctors trying to stop them.

Last night they shot a neighborhood watchman in my neighborhood (we have neighborhood watch to try and prevent late night kidnapping/disappearing by military).

We lobbied hard to get Facebook to take down this page and others where the Tatmadaw are attempting to cover up the truth.

So what happens if you are an FB grunt sitting in Myanmar?

Do they have people there?

Does that local manager have experience dealing with tanks driving into the parking lot?

I try to understand how this decision came to be and I have no idea? A standardised set of rules would surely lead to many many more pages being taking down. And why now and not last week?

Because Myanmar people lobbied for it.

The military is shooting its own people, kidnapping them in the middle of the night, and torturing them.

Over 10 protestors dead and 50+ injured, as they are using live rounds on protestors. Over 500+ disappeared or kidnapped. Protestors killed include two teenagers shot in the head, one of them a medic. They also shot at ambulance. They’ve threatened to kill doctors. Stole the covid vaccination after beating doctors trying to stop them.

Last night they shot a neighborhood watchman in my neighborhood.

Be assured I condemn violence of all sorts. My question still stands how such decisions are made?

References please.

Facebook takes down main page of Myanmar Military. Myanmar Military takes down main service of Facebook (eventually, if they didn't already do.)

The question here is: would (some) misinformation be worth it to avoid total blackout. And I mean this places other than North America and Western Europe.

In huge swathes of the world, internet and facebook are interchangeable. And where democratic values are strong enough, any government can take down the main channel of (free, non-governmental sanctioned) information for a whole country.

It really does seem that this time, it wasn’t the United States that was responsible for the coup. If we were responsible you would see a lot of high level politicians on both sides saying that they were pleased that the people of Myanmar had overthrown a terrible despot (we do this even when, and especially when, the previous “despot” was democratically elected). And then you would see previously unavailable resources being opened up to the west. But this is not what is happening here; it looks to be just a power play by Myanmar’s military leadership.

Interestingly, Costa Rica went as far as to disband their entire army because in a poor and unstable state, having any military can actually be a big liability in terms of having frequent coups.

Well, here goes another thread about free speech vs. ethical discourse, where atleast one side uncompromisingly refuses to put themselves in the shoes of the other.

Just to fast-forward this thread a bit for everyone:

- Free speech doesn't exist on some for-profit company's platform. Communities should be moderated on some ethical standard for the benefit of peace

- Free speech trumps ethics and peace -- without free speech, we have neither

indeed. and it's pointless anyway to discuss this from an ideological perspective. FB is only looking out for their financial interests. they just make a bet with the best expected return. in this case it's pretty safe to bet on the side of the US, EU governments who oppose the coup. and they do something rather than nothing maybe to regain some favors with western countries or they feel they need to do it to claim consistency with past actions.

I have an also-unpopular third option:

The graph of freedom of speech versus personal liberty looks like the Laffer curve for government income vs tax rate.

One end is zero for obvious reasons; the other end is also zero because it is a power vacuum, one which e.g. charismatic narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths exploit it to rise to power and they kick away the free speech ladder after they get it.

So are you saying that the current people in charge are the "charismatic narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths" who exploited the power vacuum that existed with the creation of the internet and are now kicking away the "free speech ladder?"

Nope. The internet isn’t the origin of the idea of total freedom of speech without any constraints, and such personalities have been whipping nations to commit genocides since before my now-deceased parents were born.

>Free speech trumps ethics and peace -- without free speech, we have neither

I really don't understand the purpose of these fortune cookie slogans. First off, how does 'ethics' vanish if we curb free speech? Like is there a date where we solved ethics and now every moral framework that does not value freedom of speech highly is just invalid, like some sort of math problem?

Regarding peace it's just flat out wrong. Of course you can have peace without free speech, probably much more of it. Of course it's worthy asking if sacrificing speech for more peace is justified or not.

But in all seriousness can we stop being dogmatic and unthinking about free-speech, which is in itself kind of ironic? You can debate everything, just not whether free speech is debatable apparently.

You can make the claim that ethics are a way people agree on what is acceptable or not and for this agreement to happen you need to have freedom of expression in the first place. Otherwise its just the whims of the ruler instead of a system of values.

> I really don't understand the purpose of these fortune cookie slogans. First off, how does 'ethics' vanish if we curb free speech?

Ethics are normative. They shift over time and everyone contributes, partly through speech. Restricting speech cripples this long-running, civilization ethical discussion.

You are engaged in sawing off the branch we're all standing on.

I doubt this exonerates Mark Zuckerberg.

It's a man who proposed Xi Jinping to name his firstborn.

Him attacking some minor military junta is barely symbolic.

turn the tables to consider actual reality: if a country like the US would be at the receiving end of meddling and influence by a Myanmar social media business at the scale of facebook, then any key-employee of the company would have been declared a terrorist, taken to black sites or murdered by drones. That's about the level of hypocrisy that we deal with when discussing Facebook's actions in Myanmar over the past years.

It's horrible injustice Americans not only get away with war crimes and aren't held accountable by the IIC, but also technocrats and buerocrats working for these public companies are able to do so with impunity.

Facebook's "interference" in Myanmar consists of hosting comments supportive of the government whilst it was committing genocide and being criticised internationally for not intervening, and choosing to take down a single government propaganda outlet after a military coup.

Facebook has "interfered" more against the interests of sitting US presidents without a single black ops operation against its staff.

alright well, I guess I have to say well done Facebook in this case.

As long as it aligns with your views it is not slippery slope?

Do you have somewhere in my comments I've argued about slippery sloping in regards to Facebook?

Facebook should really come down from their high horses and let legal entities decide of stuff like this. They're a utility. (not saying that in a bad way, becoming a utility is the ultimate startup achievement)

>Facebook should really come down from their high horses and let legal entities decide of stuff like this

If you've followed this conversation at all for the last 5-10 years, there's no way it makes sense to think that these decisions are somehow driven by Facebook'(or any tech company's) desires. Leaving aside the intense liberal values personally held by Zuckerbeg, Page, Brin, Dorsey, et al, the responsibility for speech policing is a can of worms that the tech platforms have been consistently and loudly opposed to. It's the baying of illiberal lunatics (primarily on the left, in recent years) and the associated PR and regulatory threats that have forced them into this position.

Thanks, I didn’t realize that. I guess that’s why Dorsey wanted to create an open protocol that would be free from these.

If you follow this topic, it has been clear that FB and Twitter do not want to be the decider of truth.

They want to be a utility for communication. They would much prefer government decide it.

But many people are like "government being the decider of truth" is bad.

So this is where we are at; the private companies can ban whomever it wants and play the decider of truth.

Being a utility comes with (some) regulation. I think it is far past time that this occurred.

It's interesting, Aung San Suu Kyi (with a freedom nobel-price) is/was responsible for the expulsion, killing and raping of rohingya's. But when the military takes over that's a big nono.

BTW: Hitler was also democratically elected, wouldn't have been the worst thing if the Wehrmacht made a coup then, like for example "operation valkyrie".

She was not. AASK never had any authority over the military. At all. Military was legally above elected government before the coup, controls all the courts, legally guaranteed 25% of the legislature, wrote the constitution, and the comander-in-chief was never appointed by elected government. Military never answered to AASK or took orders from her or the president.

At best, you could call AASK an apologist for military. But that ignores that she was really their prisoner even while “free”, and the delicate negotiation she engaged in an attempt to build a civilian government, as flawed as it was.

>At best, you could call AASK an apologist for military.

Ah yes, then shes definitely not responsible...irony off.

>>she took the podium on Wednesday at the United Nations’ highest court to defend her homeland against accusations of genocide, arguing that there had been no orchestrated campaign of persecution.

>>Instead, she insisted that what foreign observers have called an organized, years-long campaign of atrocities against the Rohingya has been exaggerated and misconstrued.

2019/12/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-k...

2018/07/07 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/world/asia/myanmar-rohing...

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

I don’t feel like arguing with people who don’t really know anything about Burma or her situation.

She had no involvement in the military’s decisions in Rakhine state. Yes, she defended the perpetrators at ICJ, either as part of a political strategy of reconciliation with military, or because she just felt like defending them because she secretly likes what happened. You guess which explanation is more likely.

>I don’t feel like arguing with people who don’t really know anything about Burma or her situation.

And i don't feel like arguing with someone who defends a genocide denier, and explains it with "who don’t really know anything about Burma or her situation".

>either as part of a political strategy of reconciliation with military, or because she just felt like defending them because she secretly likes what happened. You guess which explanation is more likely.

Sound like the later one, defending a genocide for "reconciliation with military" is pure evil, and is never a sound strategy.

This is pure hysterics. You have to back up what you say with arguments.

I wrote that already, and no i don't back it up with arguments but with facts...what do you have?

>>she took the podium on Wednesday at the United Nations’ highest court to defend her homeland against accusations of genocide, arguing that there had been no orchestrated campaign of persecution.

>>Instead, she insisted that what foreign observers have called an organized, years-long campaign of atrocities against the Rohingya has been exaggerated and misconstrued.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-k...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/world/asia/myanmar-rohing...

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

The civilian government is also under investigation. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/anaylsis/2019/11/21/Myanm...

Again, the elected civilian government has zero control or decisions or power over the military and border affairs (border affairs, home affairs ministry controlled by military). So when ARSA or AA attack military outposts and police stations, and the Myanmar military chooses to shell villages, kill civilians, and commit war crimes, causing a refugee crisis (or “genocide” as westerners like to throw around) at no point do civilians or the elected government have anything to do with it.

Again why then are they investigated, your story sound too easy and one-sided, if you dont have an argument, you just say "we can just speculate."

Fact is:

-Aung San Suu Kyi defended actively a genocide for not being one, while speaking in The Hague.

-The civilian government was informed and partially included in the genocide.

Both points are fact, and NOT speculations.

What, exactly, do you mean by the “civilian government was partially included in the genocide?”

The military does not take orders from civilian government, it’s the other way around. Civilian gov has no legal or de facto control over Tatmadaw, or border control, or home affairs (police, courts). There is no civilian legislative control over Rakhine operations. Tatmadaw just does whatever they wants.

And anyone who speaks against their actions is imprisoned. If AASK spoke against them they would have imprisoned her again, like they just did. The politics AASK is dealing with are complex.

>>A day earlier, in yet another legal challenge, a Rohingya rights group launched a case calling on courts in Argentina to prosecute military and civilian officials – including Aung San Suu Kyi – under the concept of universal jurisdiction, which pushes for domestic courts to investigate international crimes.

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/anaylsis/2019/11/21/Myanm...

https://burmacampaign.org.uk/argentinean-courts-urged-to-pro...

>If AASK spoke against them they would have imprisoned her again

She could just stay at the Haag and tell the truth...how about that?

The complaint filed in Argentina does not establish any responsibility for genocide by Aung San Su Kyi.

You did not even read the Article:

“The Rohingya people are facing an existential threat. For decades, the Myanmar authorities have tried to wipe us out by confining us to ghettos, forcing us to flee our home country and killing us. The global community must act now to end this genocide and bring those responsible to justice,” said Tun Khin, President of BROUK.

Shame on you!

Can you link me to any statements she's made where she condemns the genocidal actions of the military?

Read her statement she made at ICJ. I think you’ll find the situation is more complex than the simple narrative the international media presents.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/12/transcript-aung-sa...

If military never answered to her or took orders, control all the courts like you said, what is the point of the coup?

We can only speculate.

There are different factions in the military, one of which was the architect of Burma’s democratic transition, the other which opposes the transition (who current dictator/CIC is part of).

The military miscalculated, as they didn’t intend for ASSK or NLD to outsmart them in constitution of their own design. Military had expected to win enough seats with their proxy party + military appointed seats to prevent NLD choosing a president. But NLD won enough seats to choose president, and their chosen president gets to appoint commander-in -chief (military must confirm). Never before had a president appointed the CIC. The military saw this has a threat to their power. They do not want to be under any civilian control. And Min Aung Hlaing (current dictator) is also probably afraid of genocide charges if he is no longer in power.

Because she was gaining more support/momentum, and she is going toward the direction the military doesn't like.

The coup proves that she never really had any authority to begin with.

>that she never really had any authority to begin with.

Why then the lies about the genocide?

Maybe she is actually a genocider reborn. Maybe she isn't.

What we know is that she doesn't really have any authority.

If she does something the military didn't like, whoops there's a coup.

If the military is likey or feels so so about it, then it's fine.

If the military wants her to do something, she probably has to.

The coup proves that.

Western people are out of touch. You cannot speak up or playing a martyr in these countries because they will actually kill you and your family and everyone involved.

To answer your question, we'll probably never know.

Apparently, you probably don't know either since your question implied that she had authority.

>Western people are out of touch. You cannot speak up or playing a martyr in these countries because they will actually kill you and your family and everyone involved.

Quite the opposite, you think that was different in Hitlers reich? Do you think peoples who denied concentration camps and had no authority (but knew about it) where innocent?

>If the military wants her to do something, she probably has to.

That's is and was the lamest excuse for every human being ever!

Is it interesting? You leave out any argument for the implied statement that the democratically illegitimate government will be better for the Rohingya people. Presumably any coup is better than no coup.

I think that is interesting.

I for one welcome our Silicon Valley elite overlords who will protect me from dangerous speech.

Aung San Suu Kyi oversaw a genocide against the Rohingya. Didn't see FB take down her page then

She did that before the capitol riots, which seems to be the inflexion point at which Facebook threw out their old dogma of political neutrality.

The hallowed halls of insider trading were breached by a man in a Viking hat, surrounded by press photographers as he did so, while his minions rushed in to claim control of the country as they walked in an orderly line through the velvet rope turnstiles. Any fair minded person would see this as an legitimate attempt to overthrow the government, necessitating extraordinary intervention by a website.

And yet here we are :-/

I'm not sure she has much of choice. Had she gone up against the the military (who were behind the genocide). They would most likely have deposed of her earlier rather than waiting until now. At least in power she might have been able to "soften the blow" somewhat.

I'm in favor of Facebook taking down absolutely any page, whether it agrees with my political views or not. Why? Because Facebook's power comes from network effects. The more people, across the political spectrum, find their interests to be blocked on Facebook, the less people will find value in Facebook in general. Over time, this means Facebook is committing suicide. This is the best possible outcome for humanity.

Die Facebook, die.

I'm not sure this is a realistic worldview though. This supposes there will be a facebook competitor. As the decades march on, perhaps there will be, but it might not be till we're long gone. There still isn't a competitor to Google, for example.

Parler was a competitor to Twitter, and you saw how that played out. The next competitor is going to have to deal with that quandary.

> This supposes there will be a facebook competitor

Why does there have to be a competitor? I think we will do fine without social media.

Those on social media are more powerful than those off it. The most obvious example is that large Twitter audiences can be monetized, whether by selling a book or asking for Patreon subscribers. That seems to imply social media is here to stay, in one form or another.

It's a bit of a "rules for rulers" paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGr... in the sense that power structures exist independently of whether we like them or not.

More powerful in some ways. When I deleted my Facebook account, I certainly lost a platform for communication with a few thousand friends. But I gained so much time. I regained mental energy and focus. I basically immediately gained time to study and doubled my income (which is a more useful form of power in my opinion).

From another perspective, I also think the benefits of Facebook are ephemeral. Yes, many people use these platforms right now for turning themselves into commodities; but other platforms and methods certainly exist, are longer lasting, and you don’t have to worry about a sudden ban.

I completely disagree.

People who manage to monetize $platform are probably tiny, tiny %.

Also there are negative consequences of using social medias.

Duckduckgo is a competitor to Google. Its based on Yandex and Bing, two other competitors to Google.

Noone needs Facebook, it serves no valid purpose for the human race. Same with Twitter. We don't need them, and we don't need competition for them. They should go away with no replacement.

Source: was Facebook engineer. Listened to Fuckerberg make one too many all-hands speeches about engagement. Resigned several years ago.

The practical reality is that sharing photos of some group event with the other people at that event is easy in Facebook, and hard to imagine how to do that without some analogous service. I'm aware that many people use Facebook for other odd things but this was Facebook's original use case, and the literal source of its name, and it is still useful for that.

Even if you could come up with some alternative or even decentralised way of doing that, this doesn't change the fact that you're addressing the purpose of Facebook, rather than proving your claim that "it serves no purpose". At university (pre-Facebook) I had a friend who ran a Facebook-like server for sharing photos amongst our group of friends. That need was already there and strong enough he wrote code for it.

Facebook runs a huge amount of different services. Some of them have value, but they are ones that people had and have other alternatives for. This doesn't mean that Facebook as a whole has value, as the whole is more evil than the sum of its parts. Anything of value will not be lost as we de-Facebook the planet.

Also, the original use case of Facebook was for Mark and his buddies to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates and share inside information on them. Despicable.

Would yoy be interested in doing an AMA? Seems like you have a lot to say and I'd be down to listen.

I'm not really wanting to accumulate a fanbase that's interested in my opinions just because I have them, and I doubt I have anything worthwhile to say about just any random question. I add my contributions where I think I have something worthwhile to say -- if others appreciate my contribution as well that's a win-win. Thanks for your interest, its flattering, but I don't see an AMA working out.

In this post, you also commented (but deleted now):

> Fuck small businesses. Fuck big businesses too. Death to capitalism.

Perhaps you’d enjoy Venezuela. As a small business owner myself I don’t take too kindly to this comment, but would like to offer some advice.

Maybe go out and start a business or cause your passionate about and that interests you. This anti-capitalism / business attitude negativity is toxic for you. I’ve traveled pretty decently all over the world and yet to find a country that provides the opportunity of the US. You can literally do most anything you want, and it sounds like you being a previous FB employee you are super smart and probably not desperate for income in the short term.

I deleted it because it was overly emotive and didn't constructively add to the conversation. It being deleted, you were welcome to have ignored it.

Since you didn't, however, you should know that your advice is pointless. Everything you've achieved will be lost. All your loved ones will die, along with your enemies. All the same is true for me.

Ah, I think I see... you're saying that Facebook is an overall net negative to society. Even you now acknowledge that it has some uses, but you consider them to be outweighted by its negatives.

Your original comment made out that Facebook has no uses at all. I think you were just trying to really emphasise your point that it's a net benefit overall, but you've ended up saying something totally different. I know that sounds pedantic but it undermines your point because most people will read its literal meaning (like I did) and then just think, oh, this comment is factually incorrect.

Hardline stances like this just lose people. C’mon, _no_ benefit whatsoever?

I quit fb around 2015 or so and it bit me when dealing with groups/events and social exchanges. Meetup wasn’t as big and it’s still not as good as fb since less people use it.

Fb marketplace is more useful for me than craiglist usually, but both are good to check.

Why not just use iOS Messages or whatever Android app Google has anointed for the next 15 minutes for messaging?

What I’ve always wondered is what the issue is with using essentially any gallery service (or even a cloud drive with semi-public links for this) and just send that link to those people via their email address. Why would I need to use a service like Facebook for that?

Additionally, I’ve never grasped what those Facebook features supposedly used for private communication elevate them over simple email use in general. I’ve found them more cumbersome to deal with than email, to be honest.

> Duckduckgo is a competitor to Google. Its based on Yandex and Bing, two other competitors to Google.

Interesting. Can you elaborate? Like is DuckDuckGo using some of Yandex’s open source? Or the Bing search API?

This is their writeup on it, I think they get some kind of permission based on serving their ads but I'm not positive.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview

> Noone needs Facebook, it serves no valid purpose for the human race

Billions of people find value in facebook and use it daily. Who are you to make that call?

They'll be able to find value in nonmonopolized and nonalgorithmic versions of the services that Facebook has gobbled up, just like they did before Facebook existed.

I'm not making that call, I'm making a prediction and hoping it comes true, and contributing to a discussion that may possibly, in some small way, contribute to it coming true. If you look around this thread, you'll notice some other people that seem to be aligned to this. I'm not the first to point these things out, and I won't be the last. As a former Facebook employee, I have a responsibility to speak up.

When you use the word valid, you're making a judgement call. You have no right to decide what's valid or not.

On the broader point, you're making a strong assertion. Facebook is probably the most popular consumer product in the history of the world (apart from maybe Coke). You brush off what they do as just providing services that others had provided before Facebook "gobbled" them up, or providing some services that no one really needs or can be trivially replicated.

It's a big claim and there's a huge payoff if you're right. There are thousands of companies trying to pick away at facebooks services, but despite that Facebook usage and engagement grows every quarter.

You can speak up and make your prediction and hope it comes true. But it looks like wishful thinking at this point and it's underlying premise is wrong IMO. Trying to challenge Facebook or encourage others to do so with that framework won't work.

> despite that Facebook usage and engagement grows every quarter

How much of that growth is through aquisition though? Facebook was losing photo sharing, so they bought instagram, they were losing messaging, so they bought WhatsApp.

Its all well and good to say Facebook has value, and thats because they are using a behemoth (almost, but not quite monopolistic) position to squeeze competitors.

Take Facebook Marketplace, it has a huge number of posts that probably equals Craiglists - and they did that because they already captured peoples attentions. And they'll do it with their next product - hell they are still pushing their Portal picture frame on people.

Incredibly narrow minded. FB page is a godsend for a lot of small businesses, especially during the pandemic.

A friend of mine's 85 year old mom post her activities daily on FB. Great joy and peace of mind for my friend, as they live ocean apart. The old lady wouldn't gonna stop using FB, or wait for a different platform that suits your world view.

By all means, work on a better solution, don't just speak up if you feel strongly about it. My apologies if I don't take it very well idealistic view that disregards other people's way of life.

People did all of the things they now do on Facebook before, using email, phone calls, SMS, Flickr, slide film, photo albums, phone books...

Facebook can't claim credit for natural human activity just because Facebook's network effects give most people no choice in what digital city to live.

Doesn't this get boring at some point? By now everyone should be aware of the implications of using Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp and they still use it. Must it be the pure evilness of Facebook which manipulates the whole world or might it be possible that they are actually providing value to people?

Just because other people don't agree with that call, doesn't mean he's not allowed to have an opinion.

I appreciate your support in this discussion, but please don't assume my gender. My pronouns are they/them. Thank you!

So, "... doesn't mean they're not allowed to have an opinion"?

yes, that is awesome! thank you!

I don't need Facebook but it sure is the best way to share my underwater photographs with friends. Nothing else provides the same usability, reach, or ability to engage with other users.

Well, there is Instagram... also owned by Facebook :-)

I do agree that there isn’t a alternative for fb groups. And marketplace is better than Craigslist in my area.

The Facebook competitor is "not using Facebook".

I haven't used it for ten years, can't say I miss it.

The thing that brought me back is marketplace. Its super difficult to sell on craigslist you get so much spam and super long feedback loops. As a side hobby I buy, trade and sell Danish and Mid Century Modern furniture and finding a market is hard. So begrudgingly I use facebook and chat. It actually is a terrible product but there is nowhere else to tap into such a big market without paying a premium in purchase percentage.

What is particularly bad about it? Did you try Let Go?

You can still create an account and use Parler.

...and be on an FBI watch list.

What if, just hear me out, we collectively decide we don’t really like the fb style social media and there actually isn’t a replacement. What if we just moved on?

I get what you are saying but don't you think that Facebook selectively taking down some pages based on political considerations actually increases their power and not decreases it?

Only if they are permitted to maintain a pseudo-monopolistic position in their market. So their own self destructive behavior, coupled with legal and societal push for options in the social network market.

The legal aspect may include legislation to forbid governmental organs and/or employees (of note) to use platforms such as FB and Twitter to disseminate and or engage the "public". If they engage the "public" then the platform must be open to "public" without restriction.

Like when Infowars, Alex Jones, Donald Trump, the Parler community as a whole, became more popular and enjoyed popularity for years on end after they got banned?

Toxicity, violent rhetoric, racism, conspiracy theories, and lies in general all seem to thrive on social media. The Streisand effect is also a real thing. But there doesn't appear to be a meaningful overlap between the two after about a month.

Infowars gained a huge number of people when that guy was deplatformed, but that kind of nonsense needs a constant influx of new people when people eventually get burnt by believing something like Sandy Hook never happened, Q is real, Jews and black people are the cause of all your problems because you're special, etc and hard evidence gets presented. People wise up and peel off.

Something's going to change, soon.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/facecrook-dealing-with-a-...

Censoring an entire continent*

As soon as I see a dumb typo like that the rest of the article imo is now trash

It's the kind of typo a spellcheker would overlook. Maybe the article could have used more proofreading but so what? Somtimes content is more important than presentation.

If the person who wrote it didn't proofread it, then the content likely hasn't been thought through.

every writer knows its notoriously hard to proofread your own writing. you know how it is supposed to read and your brain just kind of goes on autopilot.

Doesn't work since big tech all works together to crush dissent and anything that goes against their business model.

Look at how attacked any right wing site is - they go after their ISPs, their CDNs, their DNS registrars, their hosting companies.

The Internet has got to the point that you cannot even operate a business if it goes against the "values" of big tech, or they chop all your arms off.

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