Facebook accused of letting activists incite ethnic massacres in Ethiopia | Hacker News Reader

Facebook accused of letting activists incite ethnic massacres in Ethiopia

thebureauinvestigates.com

41 pointsmhoad17 comments

It’s infuriating how little anyone cares about the Tigray. It’s genuinely a horrific human rights crisis - far more than most today - and yet there’s sparse MSM coverage as well as a lack of general awareness or care about it in the Western world. It’s a genocide with a death toll and impact far exceeding that of the Uyghurs, Palestine, or any media spectacle du jour.

It’s partly driven by social media and the inability of platforms to crack down on hate speech where it causes harm. Despite this, they (in particular Twitter) seem much more vociferous in pursuing more trivial things like suspending people for misgendering or swearing...

The MSM doesnt care because it has little geopolitical significance to the west.

It wouldnt care about the Uyghurs either if stirring up ethnic strife on borderlands weren't such a cheap and effective way of sapping the strength of rival powers.

Or Israel, if it didnt wield such enormous influence within the United States.

> Uyghurs, Palestine, or any media spectacle du jour.

The Uygurs are completely swept under the rug as well, because speaking up might impact cheap gadget imports.

Or where have you seen a Western company or news outlets publicly mentioning the Uyghur genocide?

I believe Intel made the mistake, and promptly apologized and vowed to never do it again.

Its sad to see that such lies are being spread all over the world. You have no idea what you're talking about and spreading misinformation. There is no genocide of Tigray. They are the ones who started the war by attacking the northern command of the defence forces. Most people in Ethiopia were shocked to see the coverage of the war on wester media and how one sided it was. Now nobody trusts BBC, CNN etc... because they have shown themselves to be a tool of governments and not independent

> A senior member of Ethiopia's media accused Facebook of “just standing by and watching this country fall apart”.

Why the hell does one company get hold so much power in the world? More to the point, why does Mark Zuckerberg, an apparently immoral man-boy, get to make decisions like this?

Remember when Myanmar used Facebook to coordinate/incite genocide? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Or when Facebook was being used in Kenya to orchestrate vigilante murders? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47805113

Or how about when Zuckerberg refused to introduce any controls to livestreaming after the New Zealand mosque massacre was livestreamed? https://www.thewrap.com/mark-zuckerberg-defends-facebook-liv...

Facebook only reluctantly banned white supremacists groups. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-bans-white-n...

Or how about in 2016 when a young man's murder was livestreamed and Facebook refused to take down the stream "because it doesn't violate the company's community standards." https://money.cnn.com/2016/06/17/technology/facebook-live-sh...

How the hell did we get into such a dystopian hellscape where one company so brazenly, openly, supports evil? Cyberpunk as a genre is dead because it's no longer fiction.

>Why the hell does one company get hold so much power in the world? More to the point, why does Mark Zuckerberg, an apparently immoral man-boy, get to make decisions like this?

It's a communication platform that some are using to communicate good things and some bad. People seriously talk like Zuckerberg is sitting in his office deciding which country to bring genocide to when it's absurd to think he has made a decision to that effect.

At this point I'm glad nobody owns email (officially) since people here would be calling for it to be censored and for email's CEO to stop causing human rights abuses, too.

> Zuckerberg is sitting in his office deciding which country to bring genocide to when it's absurd to think he has made a decision to that effect

I don't find it absurd at all that one of the most powerful people on earth would make such decisions.

The point is not to give one person such power, not for us to decide if he is just an awkward mostly harmless geek (as portrayed in a movie) or not.

Genocides have happened countless times sans Facebook.

Your Honor, I did not steal that car because theft happened countless times without me.

I think the issue is more deep seated, we should sanction TCP

Propose a solution.

If decentralized, how will you stop incitement to genocide?

If government run, how will you stop political censorship and risk of authoritarian takeover?

If privately run, what changes are you suggested to the current approach?

I don't have a full solution, but as much as possible we need direct democratic control over how the algorithm works and tools to verify that it follows the agreed rules. Social networks should not be owned by "some guy" just as the court and the police, rather work according to the rules of society.

Zuckerberg should probably be compensated for the wealth he created, but he is not entitled to this level of control over sociaty.

Any sort of public control over ranking algorithms will create a situation where the spammers and scammers win. Even sites that rank by timeline suffer from this (Craigslist). I don't see a situation where there is enough control for external people to understand the intricacies, without suffering from spam and eliminating any usefulness.

As an example, check out social competitors like this Holonis (www.holonis.com). They are just pure spam and self-promotion - what naturally happens when people who are incentivized to figure out the algorithm for profit are given more clear mappings between inputs and outputs.

I imagine participation being tied to verifiable (but potentially private in some contexts) real world identity. This is needed for voting to make sense too. In such arrangement it seems not difficult to discourage spamming. As I see spamming strives in circumstances where it is possible to create lots of untraceable identities almost freely.

This a legit post. Not sure why it is downvoted. Typical preachy HN.

Zuckerboerg wants the company to be treated like a publishing platform, just like google. But when legislations they are just a service provider. Stick to a story

Is FB really much worse than Twitter in Ethiopia and Myanmar, and if so how much worse?

This is people being people. People have hated and killed since there have been people, and new communications technologies like the printing press or social media make it worse for some period of time. They didn't even need Facebook to massacre 10 to 100 times the number of people in Rwanda in the 90s. I'm sure there were indeed posts that Facebook could have taken down, but the people perpetrating it or the government who was supposed to be keeping the peace seem more to blame than a company in California. If Facebook actually did accomplish the demand here of efficiently policing the entire globe's communications, it could have been encrypted WhatsApp, or AirDrop, or Signal, or Pleroma, and on and on.

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