Facebook polarizes people? Sure thing. But which media doesn’t? Aren’t CNN, FoxNews etc. doing the same? Society could use some whistleblowers from those companies as well ;)
I’m not excusing FB. I just say that we should be careful not to ally now with those who have no public interest in mind
If someone on Facebook says something blatantly slanderous / libelous, you can't sue anybody. Ditto with Youtube, etc. etc. So if you're going to say disinformation, its best to do it on Facebook.
EDIT: Downvotes? I'm sure everyone has heard the story of "Liars on Facebook / Amazon reviews / Yelp are killing my business". You literally can't win vs the liars on these platforms. FoxNews / CNN are legally not allowed to make libelous / slanderous claims. But go to Facebook / Amazon Reviews / Yelp (etc. etc.), and suddenly you see slander / libel / lies all over the place.
Because our laws are ineffective at policing that behavior on the internet.
What, are you gonna ask the authorities to extradite him into the US to show up in his appropriate court date?
Everyone knows that you pay offshore troll farms for your negative reviews / disinformation these days. EDIT: Heck, there's a huge market for fake offshore accounts. You can buy fake offshore accounts and do the negative trolling yourself these days. (3rd world citizen "farmed" thousands of accounts on Facebook, to bypass the moderators. 3rd world person sells those accounts to someone nasty, and then the nasty person uses the account to troll / harass / misinform)
Its a well known fact that moderators mostly look at new accounts. 3rd world citizen actively using an account and look vaguely "humanish" for 30 days is enough to bypass the bulk of Facebook moderation.
You ain't winning this battle. Not with the current set of laws, not with the current set of techniques being used. You have a better chance of suing Fox News / CNN. Seriously.
Basically allow suing a class as a whole, where if the class loses each member (named in the suit up front) gets a lien?
Or perhaps if you can identify the tree of dissemination, you can roll up all the harm from each individual actor and apply it against a higher level instigator to get the entire pyramid (up to that instigator’s level) worth of damages out of one actor.
Swatting and Doxing are two kinds of content that must be moderated, and I believe we can morally say that these two behaviors must be stopped. Revenge porn maybe as well, and some other rules of the internet.
I don't know where to go for "fake reviews" or how to police that behavior. I simply am not imaginative enough to come up with a law or rule that's useful. Its clearly damaging behavior. More of a thing on Amazon than Facebook really, but it still happens on social media (Facebook reviews, Yelp).
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
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The fact of the matter is: Facebook trolls __don't even bother__ lawyering up. They don't even care. They know they're immune through a combination of technique + laws.
They might be immune due to the techniques they used, but if so that is an argument against allowing anonymity, which is what lets trolls say what they want with impunity.
Even if they weren't anonymous, they're physically outside of the USA and therefore outside the reach of the US Civil Court system.
I think I'd be in favor of a US PKI-based ID issued by the Post Office. Post Office easily verifies addresses of every US Citizen. Whether or not to make online ID's mandatory is... well... a different question.
But knowing if someone is a US citizen or not (with verification through simple PKI / certificates) would go a long way. Maybe reviews for US-based items / stores would require a US id for example, to be posted on Amazon. Or, maybe anonymity would be allowed by default, but with a civil court case Amazon would be obligated to disclose the ID of the individual who posted the review.
I don't watch 24/7 so I know someone's going to respond with a Tucker Carlson quote that's like: "The Vaccine is killing people" and unfortunately, even for that, there's technically accurate data to back it up. I'm not saying that's RIGHT but I'm saying why Fox news is still on the air.
But the idea is that we __want__ people to do that. No one likes it when lawyers tell them "you can't legally do that", even when the lawyer is on their side.
Fox News / CNN has a team of lawyers whose job is simply: making sure what they air is legal. All news teams have this, to varying effects. (Maybe not fact checking every article ever written, but at a minimum, lawyers provide advice and review every now and then).
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In any case, Fox News / CNN will not ever say anything blatantly slanderous / libelous. Its why they word things in certain ways. They could have footage of X literally shooting Y in the face, and they'll describe it as "Alleged suspect X allegedly shot Y in the face".
That's a result of this "lawyer training". They're wording their articles so that suspect X won't be able to sue them for libel / slander. You won't find any such weasel words in any social media post.
You can also see how FoxNews (and other media) are reacting to the libel / slander claims of Dominion Voting (the makers of the vote machines that Fox News claims were insecure). That's a factual claim and directly damages Dominion Voting's business. Fox News overreached severely, and are now backpedaling and cooperating with Dominion Voting's lawyers (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-media-laws...).
We've got concession articles and "takebacks" from Fox. Its not perfect, but the legal system does in fact have emergency stopgap measures to pull a media company back from the brink.
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You won't even get that far on social media. You can't even pass step 1 of the suing process: naming the person to sue.
You can sue the person who made the defamatory statements...That's basic defamation law.
If you mean that you can't sue Facebook, that's due to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
If you mean that it's difficult to sue people making slanderous statements on Facebook, that's true, but it's not impossible and plenty of people have succeeded in suing people who slandered them on Facebook.
It's a very different story for Facebook. Since their content is user-submitted and they aren't the government, they're actually able to legally censor content if they want to. Additionally, their users are largely not the press and not even Americans, so they don't have the same constitutional rights anyway.
So there may or may not be some sort of moral equivalence here, but there are very obvious reasons they don't get the same treatment legally and from Congress.
Finally, Facebook lied in Congressional hearings. As far as I know, neither Fox nor CNN has done that. This is the Al Capone tax evasion they always get people on. It's why Michael Flynn went to prison and why Bill Clinton got impeached. You can get away with all manner of outrageous and immoral but not necessarily illegal behavior if you just tell the truth about it under oath.
The press has no special rights or privileges, as much as they'd like the plebs to think otherwise.
> but there are very obvious reasons they don't get the same treatment legally and from Congress.
Extremely obvious indeed. Why would the Democrats attack their own propaganda arm?
> Finally, Facebook lied in Congressional hearings. As far as I know, neither Fox nor CNN has done that.
Instead they just give permanent talking head platforms to the people who did lie during congressional hearings (Brennan, Fauci etc.)
who exactly lied? and why aren't they charged if it's the case?
Note a separate possible key difference, though. It's not illegal for US citizens to sow internal discord, and it's technically not "illegal" for foreign intelligence services and troll farms to do it, either, since they aren't subject to US law, but when foreign actors try to sow internal discord in the US, the US government has the legal right to step in and attempt to stop them. They don't have that right when US citizens or US press operations are doing it.
Alex Jones whistleblower: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/magazine/alex-jones-infow...
The worst of it is that there's a toxic cycle between the social media companies and the old media companies, especially talk radio. The old media companies produce outrage articles which circulate on social media to stir the culture war, producing fodder for more outrage articles.
There's no solution to the hate speech and incitement to violence problem that doesn't involve banning some conservative pundits, so this goes round and round.
(Have a look at which traditional media sources have been cited in mass shooter manifestoes, for example)
This is a gross distortion of the problem. Facebook has been caught actively promoting conspiracy theories and societal discord because it increases engagement (in my case it drove me from the site but the plural of anecdote is not data). Most recently it was reported that “angry” reactions were weighted five times more than “likes”.
This is not just backseat driving concerns, Facebook’s also is a major driver of our culture and societal values whether we like it or not. Nor is it Monday-morning quarterbacking, these concerns were raised by Facebook’s own employees. To let them abuse our social harmony for ad revenue is short sighted.
As an exercise one can watch today’s news and count how many news made them angry vs. how many were neutral/positive.
> they don’t get a similar PR which they well deserve.
Not sure where this came from. We just had a leader spend four years calling them fake news. Why don’t you name an organization instead of just referring to “the media” (which includes everything from Infowars to The Intercept).
By the end of last year, they changed it so the angry reaction specifically gets a zero bonus, but love/sad still get boosted. Apparently this did not affect engagement.
I got this all from the Washington Post article on the subject.
It is about making FB responsible for the consequences of the content they promote.
FB has long ago gone far past the point of being any kind of neutral carrier, yet they cling to the carrier exemption like stink on a dead rat.
FB actively curates every shred of content by their criteria, and promotes or silences it accordingly; this is done on a scale orders of magnitude larger than any news organization.
The fact that FB's editorial criteria is entirely focused on their perceived path to profits, and not on any kind of moral compass or value to the society from which they extract value is also relevant.
FB's business model is to poison the common well for their own profit, and they literally DGAF if people get killed along they way, as they already have in Myanmar and other countries due to fanned hatred and ethnic cleansing, or in the US and EU from fomenting anti-vax conspiracy dezinformatsiya mania.
It is long past time to hold FB accountable for the consequences of their editorial decisions, just as any other publisher is responsible for their content. Just because the editing/curating is done algorithmically is no reason to evade responsibility.
This is the key point to recognize.
It's not about making Facebook responsible for everything anyone posts to Facebook.
1) just one person posts it, and
2) it is displayed in a literal reverse-chronological timeline, and
3) displayed only to the people who directly follow them,
then yes.
But, as soon as FB starts analyzing it, curating it, and using their humans or algorithms to promote, amplify, or extend the spread of it, FB becomes responsible.
That item has been selected, curated, approved, and amplified by FB, by their criteria, whoever first posted it (whether the post was from a truly organic FB member, a RUS dezinformatsiya shop, a FB employee, or some other source is irrelevant at that point).
This is no less responsibility than a news editor choosing which of their reporters' stories, or newswire stories to publish on the front vs 17th page, or run at the head of the national news, or just send to the local stations to run as they please.
The editors didn't write the content, but they DID curate, select, and selectively amplify (or de-amplify) it.
FB has the freedom to curate and amplify what they choose for their own purposes.
It is long past time for FB to live up to, and be held to, the responsibilities of their editorial actions (regardless of the level of automation - it's FB's algos, not the users').
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Second, all the things that the mob wants to hold Facebook accountable for ("genocide", "election interference", "disinformation" and others) are perfectly legal content for any newspaper or publisher to disseminate, so I'm not sure what the desired course of action is here.
It is not merely a mob that wants to hold FB accountable - it is people who actually think about more than a relexive mantra that all tech should be exempt from responsibility.
If the content that actually inflames genocide, election interference, and disinformation (yes, it is all real despite your clever quoting to act as if it these are some kind of empty accusations) is indeed perfectly legal for any newspaper or publisher to disseminate, then FB should have zero problem being held just as responsible as any newspaper, and should indeed volunteer to be held to those standards.
Yet in contrast, FB instantly, reflexively, and vigorously opposes any* suggestion that they should be anything but an ignorant carrier like a telephone company that connects two parties in a tel call. The mere fact of FBs vigorous opposition shows that FB knows that they would have deep problems living up to such a standard.
It is not legal to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, and it is not legal to incite riots or insurrection, yet FB has, via its relentless amplification of both dezinformatsiya and insurrection incitement, resulted in real deaths.
The desired course of action is to 1) implement steps to prevent this sort of action in the future, and 2) to hold to account those responsible for those actions, who quite clearly showed wanton disregard for the consequences of their actions.
We are not talking about links to piratebay. If I post a picture of a cat, someone else may own the copyright to that; there is no way for a reviewer to tell.
This matters a great deal because by arguing against Safe Harbor you want to make Facebook legally responsible for stolen cat pictures because how they order their newsfeed with a popularity algorithm.
Today, any website is already responsible for their own publishing, and has Safe-Harbor for user-comments; the New York Times benefits from this as well.
If you want to make a narrow argument that Facebook should not have Safe-Harbor for illegal outcomes attributable to the algorithm itself, in its totality over all of Facebook content, rather than any individual post, then by all means. I am sure an intrepid prosecutor could pursue this line of argument today.
> The desired course of action is to 1) implement steps to prevent this sort of action in the future, and 2) to hold to account those responsible for those actions, who quite clearly showed wanton disregard for the consequences of their actions.
That seems pretty generic.
Prosecutors in the US are extremely powerful; they are populist, as they often need to be elected; their Democratic base is incensed.
They have every reason and incentive to prosecute those who have posted on Facebook for Riot Act violations; this doesn't seem to have happened; why?
I totally agree that we shouldn't hold them responsible for stolen cat pics posted, and I'd argue that 1) FB can and TBF, probably are, taking measures, and 2) for the copyright issue, I would argue that they should have the same safe harbor as anyone else - if FB receives a takedown notice and responds promptly (as defined however in the safe harbor regs), they are fine. The users would see a 'Sorry, this image/audio/link/whatever removed due to copyright issues." message. I see no reason this would work any differently regardless of the FB amplification algo - only more people would see the disappointing message when it got yanked after notification.
>>They have every reason and incentive to prosecute those who have posted on Facebook for Riot Act violations; this doesn't seem to have happened; why?
You'd have to ask them directly; I've no access to their thoughts. Maybe they are already. Maybe they are discussing it. Maybe it takes a long time because it would be a difficult case to build against a new technological structure and they're already working the problem. I could see similar opportunities to use RICO statutes, but IANAL, and don't know how to solve that problem in detail. Maybe FB donates to every prosecutor in the country. Maybe the prosecutors don't see the opportunity we described, or think this would be breaking too much new legal ground and want the legislature to give more clear go-ahead first. <-- That is what I think is needed by making curation teams and algos responsible in (roughly) the same way that editors are responsible.
No need, everything CNN puts out is the same for everyone and can be viewed by anyone.
Now we have the facebook `whistleblower` in Britain this week with her scripted performance calling for more state control over online speech. The ruling class want the power of free speech contained and the dominance of the traditional bourgeois fully restored.
The book `Revolt of the Public` goes into this in detail and it explains much of the upheaval we're seeing. I highly recommend it.