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Comment by jdhn | Hacker News Reader

They have Ted Kaczynski on that list despite the fact that he's in prison for the rest of his life, and that he wouldn't use Facebook even if he was out. Is his presence on this list an indicator that Facebook is paying more attention to users/groups that talk about him a lot or share his ideals?

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Maybe the latter. They have people on the list who have been dead for 76 years.

They also have Aum Shinrikyo listed as such even though they changed their name to Aleph (which is not listed) decades ago.

Long dead Hitler and Goebbels are included too, but why stop there? Where's Joseph Stalin and Vlad the Impaler.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21083819/pages/facebo...

Exactly. Where's Che Guevara? Another of the monsters of the 20th century and still quite popular as an icon.

Vlad the Impaler might have been overdoing things, but he did stuff that pretty much standard practice during the Middle Ages. Stalin on the other hand should totally be on that list.

And don't get me started on the Romans.

After the Romans captured Carthage they murdered 450,000 of its inhabitants.

This makes Caesar's Place in Las Vegas very culturally problematic.

And how about the indigenous Inca & Maya people, nobody wants to see their human sacrifice culture celebrated on Facebook (Mel Gibson exposed the ugly truth in Apocalypto)

And the Spanish Inquisition, Bluebeard, Ivan The Terrible, Robespierre, Lenin, Beelzebub and Donald J. Trump?

The ban list is way too short.

With the exception of Lenin, I don't think contemporary political positions hold a great deal of water for any of these people. The list probably isn't an objective scale of atrocity, it's probably proportional to the volume of content that Facebook actually sees.

> And how about the indigenous Inca people, nobody wants to see their human sacrifice culture celebrated on Facebook (Mel Gibson exposed the ugly truth in Apocalypto)

Apocalypto focussed on the Maya, who aren't even from the same continent as the Inca.

You’re right I always mix them up, corrected

How does it make Caesar’s Palace problematic? The Punic Wars were long over by the time Julius Caesar was fighting Gauls. He literally overthrew the republic which caused that mass murder in Carthage a century earlier.

Are you trying to be sarcastic? Satire is dead because no one can tell any more. The internet is so vast that at least a few people have your absurd opinion, possibly including you.

I'm guessing the list is based on political salience, not just how "bad" a person is.

There probably aren't that many Vlad the Impaler apologists in the world, given that he's a functionally irrelevant person to be an apologist for. That's perhaps less the case for Stalin, but even Marxist-Leninists (seem) to make fewer excuses for Stalin-the-human than neo-Nazis do for Hitler-the-human.

> There probably aren't that many Vlad the Impaler apologists in the world

Literally the entire genre of Vampire literature disagrees.

> Literally the entire genre of Vampire literature disagrees.

I wasn't under the impression that there was any particular political message behind contemporary vampire fiction. Dracula itself is full of political messages, but probably not the ones you're thinking of[1].

[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828327

Why not Marx and Mao? Could never understand why some murder memes are OK but others are not.

Stalin, perhaps. Not sure Marx particularly advocated murder.

Karl Marx, the 19th century philosopher and economist, is not particularly well known for murdering people.

Where is Mao ?

They have a bunch of dead Nazis on that list, like Adolf Hitler, Rudolph Hess, and Adolf Eichmann.

Presumably these folks aren't using facebook so I can only assume that, uh, younger nazis have adopted these names as noms de guerre?

Since Facebook creates profiles even for people not on Facebook, I wonder if their system has an internal profile for people like that…

And Benito Mussolini for hate :)

They have Adolf Hitler on the list, he is dead as far as I know unless Facebook as confirm the conspiracy that he never died?

Everyone missing the bleeding obvious: keywords for their moderation bots, if post contains keyword, flag it for manual moderation, or even downrank it so it doesn't show up that often in news feeds.

Although with how much the MAGA-crowd evokes the name of Hitler/Nazis to compare the current administration with it, maybe not...

>"Although with how much the MAGA-crowd evokes the name of Hitler/Nazis to compare the current administration with it, maybe not... "

Okay, but I want you to acknowledge just how much Blue Team did this exact same thing during the last administration.

Consider it an anti-godwin measure and it's still a win, whoever is saying it.

>>Although with how much the MAGA-crowd evokes the name of Hitler/Nazis to compare the current administration with it, maybe not...

I have not seen this widely used, and when it is often it is in the context of "And they called us Nazi's" or something to that effect.

The number of "MAGA-Types" comparing Biden to WWII Germany is a faction of the number of people that used the same comparison for Trump.

Neither are accurate, but Godwin demands that everything we dislike is just like fascism

//for the record, because I have not. I am neither Republican or Democrat I support the largest 3rd party in the US, they who can not be named....

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