Somali feminist: Facebook is being used to silence me | Hacker News Reader

Somali feminist: Facebook is being used to silence me

bbc.com

57 pointscommoner15 comments

Controversially, I don´t think this is something Facebook can do much about. People like that (I mean those who report her) are this way online, offline, everywhere. The fault is with the people, not the tool they use.

What should facebook do here?

- Find the people responsible and... fine them? Deplatform them? Shame them publicly? Any of these would need Facebook account to be unequivocally tied to one´s identity. Do we want FB to be tied to our SSN/ID card number/DNA sample?

- Ensure better moderation by adding more people instead of machines. And somehow make sure the opinions and morality of those people are... correct? This case is quite clear cut, but in other cases there is much moral ambiguity. Where should the human moderators lean?

- Ensure free speech for everyone. We see where this is going, swastikas and big Qs everywhere and fabebook being sued left and right.

- Ensure free speech for just the acceptable opinions - this is what they are trying to do, with the results we see. Plus it brings a lot of trouble with determining which opinions are acceptable where, which is another can of worms.

I don´t see an answer to this problem... And it seems facebook is struggling unsuccessfully to find it, too.

Edited for clarification.

> Ensure better moderation by adding more people instead of machines. And somehow make sure the opinions and morality of those people are... correct?

They are ostensibly providing a moderated platform with a published set of editorial rules, so what would be the problem in actually executing this competently?

What does competently actually mean though?

> The fault is with the people, not the tool they use.

I agree with that. The humanity ain’t good enough for Facebook’s community standard. Who do you think we should abolish — the humanity, or Facebook?

> I don´t see an answer to this problem

One simple solution is to ban advertisements on the web. To survive, Facebook, Google and similar will have to charge users for the services, this treating them as customers, not the product.

I agree. I vote: eliminate Facebook!

> The fault is with the people, not the tool they use.

No. The fault here is clearly with Facebook, they've allowed their report function to be weaponised. They need to stop automating shit and actually get human eyeballs on reports.

And if a post/account gets x numbers of false reports, then ignore future reports of that post/account, and disable the accounts (or set to ignore reports from) the accounts doing the reporting.

It's beyond trivial to fix, they don't want too though, else they would have.

Not by the way they MISDESIGNED their entire site interaction, communication and editorial control system! True enough.

Facebook management and engineering are all LAZY: technologically and morally.

> Ensure free speech for everyone. We see where this is going, swastikas and big Qs everywhere and fabebook being sued left and right.

Sued for what?

Censorship can whack all moles that are not the elite establishment. And yet the masses want censorship so we only get to hear the elite dominant narrative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com