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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous to assume that "I hate my neighbor and am going to kill him" and "there's a Russian army invading my city, we should set up an ambush" should be held to the same standard of speech. Of course, a larger question is whether Facebook should be the arbiter for this in the first place, but then the content is posted on their own private platform, and unlike a lot of people here I still think they should have 100% control over what they allow and disallow vs the government dictating it.

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It's 2003, the US and UK invade Iraq claiming that they have WMD(which later was proven to be false).

Is it O.K. for Facebook to allow call for violence against Americans and the British? Should Facebook provide secure channel for the organisation of the assassination of T. Blair?

Zuckerberg moved by the struggle of the Palestinians, starts allowing Hamas to organize attacks through E2E encrypted channel on Israeli soldiers and politicians. Maybe when he is on it, should also provide them with historical location data of the person of interest? Is that alright?

Their policies apply to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, not regular citizens

I'm sure that Facebook will be checking the persons targeted on their platform for registration in the Russian army but do you suggest that you are alright for Facebook to facilitate the the mentioned actions as long as they restrict it to soldiers?

They didn't answer. This is a really tough one for them I see

I can't speak about the first part (I assume posts of this nature aren't really going to mention individual soldiers by name), but yes I do think it's okay for Facebook to facilitate violence when it is a clear case of self defense. I think organized guerilla warfare against a powerful invading army is a perfect use case for a neighborhood social network.

Nicholson Baker wrote a novel envisioning the assassination of G.W. Bush. I don't know that it went anywhere, but as far as I know he has never been bothered by the law.

If I'm reading it correctly "violence against Russians and Russian soldiers" seems like it would apply to both civilians and soldiers.

I _feel_ like they're going for politicians when they say "Russians" but :shrug:

I'm not sure when this was edited in, but they seem to have added a line saying that attacks against russian civilians are still not allowed.

>We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

It looks as though the URL has been changed along with the update to the source, the original link was to https://archive.ph/TV8DV#selection-475.71-475.118

At the beginning of the article:

> "We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement."

> unlike a lot of people here I still think they should have 100% control over what they allow and disallow vs the government dictating it.

That's a false dichotomy. There's room for reasonable discussion and moderate legislation in between that 100% and 0% control.

> "there's a Russian army invading my city, we should set up an ambush"

I believe a zero tolerance policy on incitement to violence is the only tenable approach. No matter the cause. Replace "Russian" with "US" and you are on CIA's shitlist.

Actual planning of armed resistance should not be done on Facebook or Twitter anyway.

> Actual planning of armed resistance should not be done on Facebook or Twitter anyway.

It's easy to say that from the safety of your nuclear armed country. We in eastern Europe have to do what we can.

>It's ridiculous to assume that "I hate my neighbor and am going to kill him" and "there's a Russian army invading my city, we should set up an ambush" should be held to the same standard of speech

Yeah, those examples are the easy ones. What about "we should genocide russians"? Where does that lie on your spectrum? Should facebook be allowing such speech?

What about "Let's give all the Russians wet willies?"

There’s no clear line on free speech so we could do endless hypotheticals, but the line has never been at 0% or 100% of all possible speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...

> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising.

Your hypothetical isn’t included in any of the current exemptions to free speech protection.

The US legal standard is imminent lawless action, not just any lawless action. I doubt that some a HN/facebook commenter is going to cause hoardes of people into pour into russia and do illegal action, so that hypothetical is probably legal under US law.

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