Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels | Hacker News Reader

Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels

labas.livejournal.com

117 pointsgeorgecmu53 comments

"Goebbels had thus demanded all German soldiers, having stayed in Paris for six months, be transferred to the Eastern Front to negate any “adverse” effects of billeting in the French capital."

Corrupted by the enemy, always a problem with occupying forces.

The American version of this is "Your Job in Germany".[1] This was made for US occupation troops in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra and written by Theodor Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), an unexpected collaboration that seems to work. The message: "You are in an enemy country. Take no chances. No fraternization with any of the German people."

It's become harder to view this video. The YouTube version, uploaded directly by the US National Archives [2], is now "age restricted". Of the Internet Archive versions, only the Ogg Vorbis version is still playable.

See it now, before the Thought Police delete all the copies as "hate speech".

Understanding what went wrong after WWI is helpful in understanding what went wrong in Afghanistan. It's not directly comparable, but it's important to know that the US had, in the past, changed minds and societies by military force, successfully.

[1] https://archive.org/download/YourJobInGermany1945/YourJobInG...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A

I agree that this video is very important to archive and make available to view. I don't disagree with Youtube's decision on age restriction. I watched the video, and there are several scenes showing dead bodies. I think making that available, but age restricted, is a fair compromise.

YouTube age restricted videos are pretty much made impossible to view without revealing to YouTube your identity (they ask for a credit card transaction or a copy of your id) if you have a European account.

"The minimum age for enlisting in the UK armed forces is 16"

"You can start your application when you're 15 years and 7 months"

If you can go to war, you should be able to watch war videos on YouTube.

I always wondered how come in the US you cannot watch porn before 18, or drink before 21, but you can go to war at 16.

I am not sure if this is still correct, but you could play in a porn movie but not be allowed to watch it either.

>I am not sure if this is still correct, but you could play in a porn movie but not be allowed to watch it either.

Likely not, in 2021. I believe in most states in the US, it's considered CSAM if the subject is under 18 and the material is sexual in nature.

> having stayed in Paris for six months, be transferred to the Eastern Front to negate any “adverse” effects

China allowing it's students 3 or 4 years! overseas unmanaged to study is insane by comparison. No idea what they are thinking.

American warning for students - https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/newss-dont-be-a-pawn-a-...

> China allowing it's students 3 or 4 years! overseas unmanaged to study is insane by comparison. No idea what they are thinking.

That's because they have people on campus making sure to apply pressure even away from the mainland! [0] Or because studying is only an excuse to get a long term visa... [1]

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/19/universities-confucius-...

[1] https://www.axios.com/china-spy-california-politicians-9d2df...

+ with families back in China there is an additional leverage to use.

Downloading the mp4 version of the archive worked fine for me. And I‘m in Germany :-)

He shared a newly discovered unpublished document written by Goebbels with other historians. He did not make a comment in his post, because he felt the document itself was comical enough to be funny.

This was in no way propaganda since the order was about German soldiers contracting VD in Parisian brothels.

Facebook banned it/him.

He makes his own point pretty concretely...

> It must be stressed that any objective investigation of history and research of the past becomes simply impossible if quotations from primary sources are grounds for punishment. Any curtailing of documentary evidence leads not to peace in the community but to the preordained failure to learn from history. It eventually allows the tragedies of the past to be repeated anew.

I've always wished to live in a world where high end science and humanities research happens on the open internet so that people outside academia (like myself) can participate as a member of an interested audience.

With YouTube removing videos about CoVid from people who are actively working/researching the virus (because they disagree with the CDC and WHO guidelines), and FB removing historical artifacts by a Historian because such things must only happen behind paywalled journals that only large universities can afford, I worry that the internet is moving away from being a place where information is freely available.

I still think that everyone should host their own blog and have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to and have independent editorial control. But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics and see how consensus slowly forms at the end of rigorous debate among experts.

> But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics

That disappeared a long time ago...

As someone without a Facebook account: Facebook was never the "open internet". If you want everyone to be able to see something you found, wrote, or created, don't just share it on Facebook.

If you think about that old school ideal Internet, you also have to think about other ideal like everyone can start a server. It's not possible anymore. If you relies on VPS, it's no better than Facebook.

Sure, as an individual, you can afford a server hardware, but not the network. ISP is as same as Facebook.

Also, it's so cheap to DoS the server single person can afford. If you relies on CDN, that's another Facebook.

I'm not as pessimistic as you are regarding VPSes. There are providers that care about free speech, but you'll almost only hear about them in a negative light because they host content from people with disgusting views.

There is also tech like IPFS or even Tor, which provide censor-resistant options.

The problem is most likely that the moderators do pattern matching for certain key phrases rather than trying to understand its intention. Automatic tools can really only do this.

This is very common in moderation and censorship. It's a problem, because you get false positives like this, and some topics becomes impossible to discuss, even for people that discuss them in a neutral manner. It also makes it very easy for people with actual Nazi sympathies and other extremist views to hide from censorship by not mention the wrong key phrases that matches the patterns.

Why must we force mainstream dumbed down platforms to open up. Moving the discussion to somewhere open will bring people over and create new safe areas where this content can be discussed.

In all likelihood, the business model where users can get a free service for trading their data to advertisers cannot sustain a reasonably qualified human moderation service. So bots it is, but bots cannot really understand human culture and behave like mindless sledgehammers.

If FB et al. are one day required to provide human moderation, they will go bankrupt. Or they will be forced to charge users money to cover the costs.

Doesn't this make Facebook a proud supporter of the Doomed-to-Repeat-it camp?

Let me just ask the obvious question here: why publish this on Facebook at all? I genuinely want to understand why people keep using it as a primary publishing source.

He was a historian sharing a document he discovered with other historians.

Are scientists and researchers not allowed to use Facebook to share information?

Is Facebook allergic to data or facts?

Might I suggest using a personal/professional website that you control. You could even pay someone to set this up for you. But nobody uses those any more. Could it be that that’s the real issue: voluntarily handing over control of your contacts, data and reputation to an entity like Facebook – at no cost to the user – by default and then complaining about not being in control?

It doesn't seem likely that a person can have social interaction with others if everyone sets up their own website.

...at least not until some distributed social network becomes standard.

I guess, as sad as this may sound (and rightly so), it may be time for some kind of standardized robot-disclaimer, to be included in a message and declaring intend to bots, which must be honored by any content filters. – Clearly, message parsing and, depending on this, the reputation of authors, both informing that parsing and also resulting from this, have entered the posthuman age.

You'd think scholars interested in doing serious research on original source documents would have better ways of publishing than relying on Facebook.

Hopefully this drives uptake of those better ways. And if better ways don’t exist, this is a call for improvements (integrating with Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, SciHub, mailing lists/rss, etc).

Honestly I'm getting tired of this sort of moderation on social networks. It has nothing to do with scholarly channels, or Nazi this and that for me; I just don't sympathize with censorship I guess and there's always going to be some false positives and negatives when you start going down that path. It just feels like a waste of everyone's time to me.

Having said that, I think you're right about hoping it leads to better avenues, as I think there's a real need for it.

Yeah, because networks without moderation have gone over pretty well. Srsly, FB is not the solution for everything.

Even the large media organizations are contorting their output for attention on social media; what chances do the independent professionals have to bring attention to their work while ignoring those platforms?

I can understand why large media organizations are but why do independent professional want to attract the joe six pack of the world opinion which makes up the bulk of facebook traffic?

They don't. Historians follow other historians on twitter and facebook. It is professional networking. Joe Six Pack doesn't care about the stuff my wife is posting on twitter, but the editor at some press who would be reviewing her book might.

There are many better ways of doing research.

The obvious speculation is that this person did not use any of those better ways because the document is a forgery. If it is a forgery, the author would be promoting neo-Nazi propaganda.

Just to be clear, you're accusing a researcher of being a neo-nazi, forgery, and spreading nazi propaganda.. because they chose to make a historical document widely accessible?

I'm saying that if the researcher is incapable of using any of the reputable ways of publishing research, we have to consider it possible there is a reason for that.

Why do you think the historical document is legitimate, other than this LiveJournal post?

I was motivated to think of these use cases of sharing research when I found out a project to scan, transcribe and translate thousands of hand written journals was done by sending memory cards back and forth. I thought maybe Fossil scm would be a good option with file blob and wiki support, but the learning curve isn’t there, people take the path of least resistance.

I think a lot of research groups are still in list-servs, and I haven’t seen any social networks catering to advancing cross disciplinary research. Maybe something could be built on top of LibGen ?

He found a new unpublished order from Goebbels, and thought he'd share it with other historians.

That seems pretty reasonable.

Such as?

This is so bizarre. The guy is posting literal Nazi propaganda - as in literally a document written by Goebbels, finds it removed from Facebook for violating community standards, and concludes that the reason must be that Facebook is sympathetic to Goebbels' worldview?

Is this a good-faith accusation?

It read like hyperbole meant to emphasize the need for Facebook to publish a credible reason when they remove material.

That is, not giving a reason invites speculation.

I believe it was a tongue-in-cheek accusation. But the line of thinking was that this piece of text should be considered so embarrassing to Goebbels due to its obvious wrong headedness, that somebody sympathetic to him or the Nazi movement might want to hide it to avoid the embarrassment.

I’ve had people get pissed at me for trying to explain a political issue. “Just tell me what is correct and how to vote!!”

Zero interest in comprehension.

These people would do very well in any sort of cult.

That was my reading, although I'm not as unsympathetic to Facebook's moderators here as he is. He wrote that "I did not comment on any of Goebbels’ words, considering them to be so obviously preposterous that its sheer absurdity rendered any additional commentary redundant," and...really? If you are a moderator charged with flagging pro-Nazi commentary on Facebook, you have undoubtedly seen post after post after post after post of "obviously preposterous" Nazi propaganda that people not only take at face value, but cheer for and put on signs and organize rallies around. When a moderator comes across this particular Nazi propaganda posted as-is with no commentary, it's nice to believe that they'll think "ah, perhaps I should stop now and deeply research this man, and consider that he is a Russian academic who has written papers on German-Soviet interactions and conflicts leading up to World War II, which I should now read the abstracts of in order to determine where his personal sympathies might lie." But they won't. Because that's not really their job.

1. The document is NOT Nazi propaganda. It was the short document which described a proposal to isolate German soldiers who have spent too much time in Paris, as they might have caught VD from prostitutes. This was a common problem at the time that also affected the US troops on leave there. He did not provide any commentary on the subject in his post, but noted in his blog that it's a ridiculously overzealous notion to send soldiers all the way to the eastern front, just because they spent time in Paris.

2. He questions whether the Russian Facebook mods that censored him were Nazi supporters, exactly because the document in question makes Goebbels look like an idiot. So yes, that's a good faith question to raise.

Here in Germany "Mein Kampf" is illegal to sell. I was always amazed that it was available in the US (or so I heard). I guess they took "free speech" serious.

I guess the public opinion has changed on that one by now.

Personally I think it is better if such things can be accessed and discussed, so that their arguments can be properly refuted.

(Facebook is a private company and can do what they want, of course).

> Here in Germany "Mein Kampf" is illegal to sell.

It's not that simple. (in short, unedited and uncommented reprints are problematic (but not directly established as "illegal to sell" currently I'd say), pre-1945 printings are fine, commented editions exist and are fine)

A commented edition was published recently (within last two years), but iirc it was the first of its kind?

Edit: pasting comment to post below here, because HN doesn't let me post

It seems this state of affairs was quite convenient for the government, and when the copyright expired, they decided to continue making it not legally available: https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/adolf-hitlers-mei...

Seems to be true that it could be sold in antique shops and offered in libraries (not sure if any did offer it).

Until 2016 all new printings were stopped on copyright grounds by the state of Bavaria. Hitlers registered address at time of death was in Munich, so the state of Bavaria acquired his assets and used that to stop printings (internationally not often successful, and with the exceptions of US and GB, where the rights had been sold to Random House by Hitlers publisher), but 2016 (70 years after death of the author) the copyright expired. Copyright was fairly straight-forward legally, commented editions now are too.

Why go as far as usa when it's readily available at libraries and for sale in many many European countries? Even some versions with comments are legal in Germany itself.

Because it is a point about free speech in the USA (facebook being a US company), not availability of the book in other countries.

Significant events in US history, such as the Abolitionist movement, women's rights, the Civil Rights era, et cetera, would not have been as easily accomplished without freedom of speech being defined the way it has been in the US.

The fact is, you can't have freedom of speech if your also not allowing people to engage in hateful speech, no matter what most "progressives" would tell you.

"literal Nazi propaganda"

Do you think this document makes the German military look good?

Well, I don't, but that doesn't seem like the right rule. I also certainly don't think that, say, genocide makes the speaker (whether Goebbels or a modern-day advocate) look good, but that hardly seems like a reason to permit people to post advocacy of genocide!

The very definition of extremist ideologies is that they are extremist, and that reasonable people who haven't been infected with it don't agree. But - by and large - we don't see that as a reason to allow open advocacy of extremism. Clearly Goebbels had a target audience in mind that he thought could be convinced to agree with him.

So I think a rule "You cannot post things by Goebbels that advocate Nazi ideology" makes sense, and I think a rule "You cannot post things by Goebbels that advocate Nazi ideology, unless reading and pondering that document would leave the average reader less convinced of the merits of Nazism" does not make sense.

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