In Response to Oversight Board, Trump Suspended for Two Years
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FB should just say, "we're against him and we're exercising our own discretion and prerogative." The bureaucratic worldivew expressed in press releases like this are what created the populist movement that supported him in the first place. Who cares what oversight process this went through if it is just internal bureaucratic theatre to insulate the individual decision makers, and with no national legitimacy?
FB is pretending it doesn't have responsibility for the power it is exercising. Zuckerberg & Co. should just say, "L'internet, c'est moi" and be done with it and try not to contemptibly hide behind words nobody believes. This relentless miasma of bullshit is what people see as totalitarianism, not their coastal opinions.
For example, maybe Israel's leadership should be banned for their frequent propaganda there on why it's actually really great to kill Palestinian civilians because they're all secretly Hamas operatives, somehow.
Though, I expect Facebook singled Trump out as a special case. As awful as he was, there are world leaders out there saying and doing far worse. Perhaps it only counts if it's the USA?
Really? Show us.
I would actually be curious to see other example of a country's leadership explicitly advocating on Facebook for citizens to take extra-legal actions. Perhaps Duterte's calls for killing drug dealers? But I'm not sure if that was actually on Facebook...
This is my I am a big fan of Mastodon! https://joinmastodon.org/
Think of how Parler was treated to get an idea of what I mean. Think of that scene in The Matrix where Neo was rhetorically questioned by agent Smith - "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?".
What good is a platform if you are unable to connect it to the internet?
Private companies have always banned/blocked problematic users. That's not censorship.
The existing CDA protections that are relied upon by social media giants was originally intended to allow content hosting platforms to manage issues that most everyone agreed upon, like "Content hoster should be allowed to remove explicit porn from their public interest bulletin board"
They never realized that social media giants would one day use their content moderation to bend large-scale public opinion to their will on day-to-day political and public health issues.
In addition to the overreach of the CDA safe harbor provision are issues of public accommodation, monopoly control of free speech, and in-kind political donations to candidates and parties that bypass existing election finance restrictions.
That being said, I think it is fair to raise some questions when inyalowda decide to enforce their policies in a seemly arbitrary fashion. Trump is toxic and his presence on social media did nothing to raise the intellectual bar of public discourse. But, he is far from the only world leader to share self-serving, destrucive, and misleading propaganda online. Users should demand clear policies and fair universal enforcement from FB.
But Facebook (and Google, Apple, and many other "platforms") are such an indispensable part of our lives that we should have difficult conversations about what individual rights look like in these quasi-public private spaces. (It's worth noting that the explicit business model of many of these companies is to create gigantic platforms/walled gardens.)
I personally do not believe that many of the norms and common law relating to physical public/private spaces should be transferred to the modern age of digital oligopoly.
If you accept that Facebook, like every platform in Internet history has content moderation rules- then Trump violated them, hence his suspension. Here's my logic chain, I'm open to a critique:
1. Facebook has content moderation rules 2. Trump violated them by inciting a riot or insurrection 3. The penalty for said violation is a suspension
Where is the problem in the chain? That Facebook isn't allowed to moderate content, that inciting a riot isn't punishment-worthy (??), that the punishment is too harsh.... Where is the exact issue?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-disinformati...
Therefore, Facebook is just exerting their market power to push a partisan narrative.
> known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys
The Proud Boys were headed by a man named Enrique Tarrio [0]. Enrique Tarrio is of Afro-Cuban descent [1]. How many white supremacist organizations are headed by people of Afro-Cuban descent?
And before you suggest that he's a token figurehead, how likely do you think it is that an actual white supremacist would join an organization led by a man of Afro-Cuban descent? Do you think that leader would attract many actual white supremacists? Aren't there plenty of other white supremacist groups led by white men?
No, it's simply not believable. The claim fails. Reuters is willingly participating in a disinformation campaign.
"We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."
https://www.newsweek.com/proud-boys-based-stickman-enrique-t...
An actual white supremacist rejected the non-white leader of the Proud Boys and split off to form his own group.
The Proud Boys were not a white supremacist organization. Attempts to use this despicable man's quotes to smear the entire organization (which he rejected) are naked appeals to guilt by association.
Now I personally don't know what all of those limits should be. But I think there needs to be more open discussion from all corners of American society about that. I also think that the platforms should approach this problem with open arms.
As an example of one situation that needs to be limited is that a platform like Google is allowed to ban someone entirely from their services, with 1) no appeal to an independent party and 2) no ability to (quickly) recover data stored with that platform. Every so often, someone posts to HN saying that they lost all access to decades of email and photos because Google's algorithms banned them, and they have no idea how to talk to a human to explain or correct the situation. I think that kind of action from Google needs to be regulated out of existence.
I don't agree, I think the opposite. The government should be working to make them more dispensable. Every company you listed needs aggressive antitrust action from various worldwide governments.
But at the same time, I am sympathetic to arguments that aggregated platforms have efficiencies that are passed down to the everyday consumer, or network effects that make the platforms more competitive against similar platforms elsewhere in the world (e.g., data for training ML models).
There are many definitions of censorship. Government censorship is not the only valid version. To wit, Wikipedia even states "Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies"
Not communicating a piece of information and not helping others in communicating a piece of information is not censorship. Censorship is preventing others from communicating a piece of information by force. Facebook is not doing that, they have just decided not to help communicate some information. Another example would be that you would not be censoring me if you removed a political bumper sticker I placed on your car, even if you leave other bumper stickers placed there by other people in place.
This means that section 230 of the CDA needs to be repealed and that they become liable for what their users submit. They will probably react by censoring even more, making their services even less palatable to more and more people. With a bit of luck that will give the decentralised 'net the push it needs to take the lead.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Yes, that's true. But for most platforms, like Hacker News, that's not a concern, because they don't have that many users.
> The radio station down the road is censoring you because they won't play your music.
That's not really what censorship means, because the radio station only has limited time, and they have to choose what music to play. (This limit on time also creates competition: Since one radio station can't play everything, there will always be many different radio stations, they same isn't true for social networks.)
Oh, so all of the sudden censorship is a matter of scale? I'd like to see a definition of censorship that involves scale in any way.
> That's not really what censorship means, because the radio station only has limited time, and they have to choose what music to play.
Yeah, and Facebook's servers have limited capacity and their bandwidth is billed at-cost. They're limited in the content they can serve, with the difference being that they can scale infinitely. In any case, your liability as a user increases as your share of that content scales. All you've done so far is deflect, without actually making any case. There are hundreds of social networks. You can build your own social network in 5 minutes with Mastodon and a VPS. Failing that, there's hundreds of decentralized and perfectly un-censorable protocols that you can use too.
Facebook is a business. They have every right to refuse you service if you break their rules. End of discussion.
This is a red herring. Facebook doesn't argue that they have to ban Trump to save bandwidth.
> In any case, your liability as a user increases as your share of that content scales.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.
> All you've done so far is deflect, without actually making any case.
This is pretty rich. My first comment in this thread was: "Yeah, I don't have a facebook account either, yet I'm concerned about censorship on facebook, because facebook has enough users in my country to swing any election."
All you've done is to deflect from my main point - the concern about facebooks power to swing elections - by playing wordgames with the word "censorship", making various claims about what isn't censorship without even offering a definition of your own.
> You can build your own social network in 5 minutes with Mastodon and a VPS. Failing that, there's hundreds of decentralized and perfectly un-censorable protocols that you can use too.
Needless to say, none of this engages with my main point either.
I think the term "censorship" is overwhelming understood to refer to cases where the suppression of communication is particularly onerous or harmful. There is a vast range of reasonable moderation that absolutely limits the distribution of communication but I would argue is not harmful, and I think it's unreasonable to refer to all such instances as "censorship."
(I'm not however arguing that this particular action by Facebook doesn't constitute censorship. I'm just arguing that the extremely simplistic definition you provided does not really match broad usage of the term.)
"Why do the people of conscience around the globe say "Death to America"? What do they mean? To the newly elected president of America, Donald J Trump, we say, dear Mr Trump, DEATH TO AMERICA!"
- Ayatollah Khamenei
https://m.facebook.com/khamenei.updates/videos/2205424783776...
Displaying the message "Go vote!" to likely voters of X, while flooding the walls of likely voters of Y with ballast is going to do something. The question is if we want to tolerate this risk of targeted manipulation.
As far as the old capability vs. intent pair goes, it is pretty certain that FB has the necessary capability. As far as intent goes, that can change on a moment's notice.
It is also not just the USA we are speaking of. Facebook campaigns are huge in other democratic states. And they want to add their two cents to the conversation.
How does your worst case scenario derive from this situation, where a user was banned for inciting violence (against the ToS of the platform)?
The point here is the risk of our social communications being concentrated via a few large companies, who have ended up with an enormous amount of power to control speech online globally.
Unless you want to make the claim that speakers are entitled to audiences, that is.
I'm not arguing you're entitle to an audience, either, just that taking your speech from a major player to a much smaller niche player is not nearly equivalent.
Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not seeing the cost differential, either for the speaker or audience. What Facebook is doing is equivalent to saying "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." What's so wrong about that?
Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s not censorship.
I don't think that suspending private property rights is a particularly great idea for society. If we're suspending private property rights now, to copy your last sentence, everyone cheers but they don't seem to realize this will happen to their private property in the future once the other side controls these tools
The protestors were happy to remain outside. There's video evidence of Alex Jones using a megaphone to tell the protestors to walk around the building to the other side, specifically not to enter it.
The protestors were allowed into the building by Capitol Police. The Capitol Police opened the doors for them and ushered them in, offering no resistance. There's video evidence of this as well.
The only casualties were Ashli Babbitt, who was murdered by a still-unidentified member of Capitol staff, and those people who were assaulted by Capitol Police the following evening after the cameras were turned off.
Do your research kid. I can only hope you are joking.
We’ve let only a half dozen websites more or less completely control the internet on the front and backend - far fewer than the number of utilities it would take to turn off someone’s electricity. That kind of power is not just a free speech issue, it’s a national security threat and it’s only being celebrated because it’s being wielded, for now, against people we don’t like.
Imagine a future election where one candidate wants to classify social networks as utilities, and the other candidate wants to do nothing but set puppy orphanages on fire. Candidate 1 has her social media pages cancelled for nebulous violations to a labyrinthine TOS, and she loses the election - because that is how people are reached in the modern world.
In your ideal world of free speech, is Islamic State allowed to post recruiting videos or call for generalized action? If not, is that 'censorship'? Can you openly call for violence? Can you post revenge porn? Can NAMBLA have a Facebook page and sign up underage members?
The only overly simplistic take is imagining that the world's largest communications platform isn't allowed to have rules or a Terms Of Service. That's just incredibly naive- one can't realistically run a planetary scale (hell, even a small town-scale!) platform with no rules on speech. You seem to be advocating that rules themselves are impermissible. This is an unrealistic take, I'm sorry.
I think that Facebook & others would be best served by having more explicit rules and an independent arbitration system- which they've begun with the Oversight Board- that can make common-law style precedent that gets expanded over time. In your example, the banned candidate can apply to be reinstated- hell that's the case right now, Facebook has lost every case brought to the Oversight Board other than the Trump one!
Also please answer- threats, revenge porn, the North American Man Boy Love Association- can they be removed from social media? Wouldn't that be censorship as well?
I'm a bit fascinated by this argument that we should be relying on the government to remove bad speech- that that's somehow not censorship
The current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, did exactly after the 2004 presidential election to reject certification of Bush's win:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
In that sense, it's a very effective double-whammy that pretty much any social-media user has fallen victim to at some point. While Facebook and Twitter certainly aren't benevolent, I completely understand how their unpreparedness to deal with political figures would be misconstrued as censorship or suppression.
Somehow on Facebook or Twitter, censoring another user is always spun as 'an accident' or 'a mistake in the algorithm' or even simply 'an error'. Usually the political left cheer on how cancelling someone everywhere works, thinking that it would never happen to them will later find out that these companies will soon won't be on their side, or any side.
Because they are always on the side of profit.
The chickens on the left are cheering on the wolves eating the other chickens who disagreed with them.
So, vague consistency, and no foresight. What could go wrong
> when conditions permit
> if conditions allow
So. What exactly are these "conditions"?
This was published today, when he is not in office. What restrictions could this refer to?
What will be the new factors in 2 years that aren't present now.
Current ban is based on "violated Facebook’s Community Standards and Instagram’s Community Guidelines"
I don't see what they can possibly re-assess if he isn't on their platform in the first place.
They will monitor his behavior outside of their platform and deem him worthy or not?
The location of the Overton window. Facebook is just hedging it's bets. George Bush is largely accepted by Democrats now many of whom wore F bush t-shirts a decade or so ago.
They've all been doing essentially the same thing. The only way the parties really differ is in the lies they tell to get votes.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'm confused by this line. Whose restrictions on whose peaceful assembly?, and why is it worded so that restrictions on peaceful assembly is included in the list of "markers of civil unrest"? If I recall correctly restrictions on assembly started in response to disease outbreak, and later were sometimes applied to some left wing and some right wing protests. What if it's an unjust restriction on a righteous protest, or an unsafe lack of restriction on a "riot"? Is either situation a marker of civil unrest? Sorry my literal mind is having trouble parsing this.
Facebook should look at the mirror first before assessing the risk of another person or company.
In fact, they are the biggest risk to the entire world and public safety, given that the same disinformation campaigns are still running around its platform before, during and after Trump.
This person likely won’t change, but the process should still be reasonable depending on it’s expected lifecycle and the variety of folks who are going to be evaluated by it.
This is still special treatment. If you or I were banned from Facebook, unless you're good friends with a staff member, we would likely be permanently banned.
Since this is supposedly the maximum penalty available for the reason for the suspension under the new framework, that seems unlikely unless it was for some reason not covered by the same rule.
Now, it may be that the most likely reason for bans are different than this one, but treating different actions differently isn’t special treatment.
What a crazy world.
* Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.88 billion on average for March 2021, an increase of 8% year-over-year.
* Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.85 billion as of March 31, 2021, an increase of 10% year-over-year.
* Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.72 billion on average for March 2021, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
* Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.45 billion as of March 31, 2021, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
Also - does a FB ad on a web page refresh your login and count you as a DAU?
It's possible that some regions are declining faster than others. But if the Midwest is like the rest of the US, a .5% decline isn't something that would be detectable with the naked eye. Even 2x or 3x that wouldn't really be obvious unless you were measuring.
It's not impossible that they're measuring wrong, but the source of this data is their quarterly financial report, not a marketing document.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90598536/facebooks-daily-active-...
Why does anyone care about him OR Facebook at this point?
Exactly. It seems the cry babies on the right have finally admitted defeat after throwing a massive tantrum and vandalising the Capitol.
On the other hand, I also do remember the cry babies on the left threw a massive tantrum on the streets and vandalised many businesses when the results of the 2016 election were contested for years when Trump won and even after.
> If anything happens, it will be Harris who becomes president.
Yeah, And this time the Democrats, Big Tech and the media WILL definitely do everything they can to make sure that happens.
"Section 230 has enabled platforms to absolve themselves completely of responsibility for policing their platforms, while blocking or removing third-party speech — including political speech — selectively, and with impunity."
It's almost like he never left.
You'd think with people wanting to silence him they wouldn't continue giving him a platform by sharing about his problems.
They banned his Twitter account, not remove him from existence. What did you expect?
And there's definitely a lot less drama now with Trump having such a large megaphone. I doubt his blog had anywhere near the reach of his Twitter account.
We have the same policy in our kids middle school.
EU leaders expressed concern over these policies because even they could see that this problematic intervention into the politics of a country is a line that need not be crossed. This extended ban isn't just FB, since other tech platform will likely fall in line.
It will be interesting to see if this will increase Trump's popularity when he does return to social platforms since his fanbase has been starved of his attention.
EDIT - since I'm being downvoted. The bias being referred to isn't strictly left/right leanings in America since FB is a global platform.
Agreed.
> The concentration of power here is worrying.
Also agreed.
> The bias in their corrective action should worry us more, as should the possible extension of these type of actions to other groups.
Aaaaaaaand this is where you lost me. What sort of bias are we seeing here? If anything, Facebook has finally made it's first responsible choice in decades and had a sit-down discussion about a user who broke the rules on their platform. Their corrective action was pretty light too: they're only suspending him, and not even for a duration that could potentially interfere with a (god forbid) 2024 campaign. Only objectionable material has been removed, and his accounts are still up and publicly available.
> It will be interesting to see if this will increase Trump's popularity when he does return to social platforms since his fanbase has been starved of his attention.
Maybe, but the RNC is going to do everything in their power to stop it. You can expect the 2024 GOP lineup to start early and be furnished with crazy characters, because most of the RNC would rather endorse Kanye than give waste any more time with Trump in office.
To expect an even response across all political parties across all governments by the metrics they gave around incitements to violence and danger to the public is a bit unrealistic.
Bias can easily be introduced in every phase of these cases being accessed. Arguably, long before the political and activist leanings are considered.
From that it's not to difficult to see it being extended to other groups.
If it's being flagged, that's an exercise in futility. The end result is that people don't see it on the front page and keep posting it. Then someone goes into all of those posts and points people to this discussion, which is keeping this discussion alive.
But it would be much more efficient if the @dang could just unflag this so the conversation could happen here directly.
EDIT: hey flaggers, thanks for the downvotes. Do you have a better suggestion for how to handle this, or do you just think that discussing a major move by one of the largest tech companies on the planet shouldn't happen on HN?
far less points than comments is penalized by the ranking algorithm
Don't bother asking for a reason or suggestions (They don't have any) I also tried that and they downvoted me to the bottom of the comments section, like this one. Most of them are devoid of reason or having a discussion about Facebook's actions since some of them even work for the tech giant themselves.
So in their case, the only 'sensible' action for them to do is to censor, silence or generate a robotic reply to your response. It's natural for them to reject anyone asking too many good questions.
[0] Unless if the source is from slatestarcodex. HN loves them.
EDIT:
Downvoters and Flaggers: Are you going to answer the parent's question or are you proving us both correct with the above claims?