Facebook ‘lets vigilantes in Ethiopia incite ethnic killing’

On the one hand, I believe in safe harbor & don't think a company is responsible for policing itself perfectly. There's a lot of hard to understand situations across the world, and then understanding people's use of a language is radically harder still. It's terrible, but bad is going to keep happening, and it's not just Facebook's fault problem. Societies need a realistic expectation of what they might expect, need their own stake in how they will help steer moderation & pick what moderation happens. This is a lose lose game, and it's one society can't just keep flunking social media on: it has to have it's own skin in the game.

On the other hand, a company which cannot be even the faintest bit responsible for it's platform has an obligation to allow users their own defense, has to promote society getting it's own skin in the game. Facebook fails at this miserably. It retains a worthless, undignified pretense of authority- has their own moderation system- yet it fails, flails, & is perpetually incompetent. Allowing the people to form their own defenses on social networks seems a requirement for civilization. We can't & shouldn't allow sole arbiters to decide, particularly not one's that are so incompetent. It seems unlikely any government would do any better. To me, this implies that we need to open the doors, throw wide the possibilities of moderation, and let users begin to devise their own moderation systems & safeguards. Facebook has fallen far short of the base, bare minimum, but I don't think they should have to figure out how to police every engagement, don't see how they could fulfill the minimum. Rescinding connectivity to the world does not seem fit. But their reckless failure signals clearly their abdication, signals that the platform must be open to other more active & vigilant forces. The platform needs to open, for the base minimum protection of the world.

Radical suggestion: People are responsible for the actions they take, and not the actions of others. If I pick up a machete and begin lopping limbs off Canadians, that's my bad, not Facebook's.

But a Czech user selling "rifle" (in Czech: blue jeans!) was suspended for having violated the ban on sale or use of weapons.

Elsewhere on the Hacker News, someone describes how they lost 7 years of work because some algorithm flagged several of their old videos at once and YT deleted the whole channel.

If this is the rule of the robots, it is way more terrible than we expected. For its complete randomness.

Is the polarization and following conflict due to a one time event, pushing the social equilibrium beyond an irreversible threshold—like rainforests transitioning into savannah—or is it an ongoing process kept alive by interactions and stressors mediated and amplified through online networks?

The only way to measure the causal effect of Meta presence is by shutting down services for longer periods in order to gauge the difference.

It's such a lazy take, no they don't.