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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

If it's against Russians who are invading Ukraine.

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

What counts as "credible"?

Whatever Meta decides is "credible".

Call for violence is against Russian soldiers invading Ukraine*

I think that additional context is critical

Do they allow call for violence and death threats to these people ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings

Asking for a friend

This is some very whatabouty whataboutism.

Well, don't we have to compare things to other things to see if they make sense ?

How come all of a sudden call for violence and death is ok ? A private company can decide who's worthy of death threats ? and everybody is ok with that ? War crimes happen every day, there are actual genocides happening right now, nobody gives a flying fuck about them, but oh god, Russia ? fuck them !!! Soon enough we'll call every Russians "monsters" for not rioting against Putin

Looks like it took two weeks for the west to fall back to the classic war time demonisation.

Context is only crucial for official allies, not official enemies.

"whataboutism" is a propaganda term meant to excuse double standards and hypocrisy. It doesn't work.

> if the call for violence is against Russians.

It's slightly more nuanced than that. It's not open season on death threats against doxed Russian civilians.

Meta decides what violence is acceptable or not. If you are still on Facebook, you can decide if this is acceptable for you. I would be surprised if they are still here in 10 years. They will probably burn all their money developing the metaverse anyway.

Which is, at the very least, questionable. And risky, because it gives Russia a potential reason to claim "the West" encouraged terrorism against Russia and Russians. At the very least this makes Russian propaganda efforts so much easier...

Well, you don't have to do anything for them to claim something. They can just claim that there is no invasion, that there are no troops there, and that they didn't destroy a hospital... and at the same time claim (on a banned media tool) that you are a terrorist that supported violence against russian military in the same city, Mariupol "which has always been a part of Eastasia".

It's just full on nonsense trolling, but it could go nuclear, and it will have tremendous economic consequences.

> because it gives Russia a potential reason to claim

You have to stop worrying about that. They're still saying they've not invaded Ukraine. They're bombing pregnant mothers in hospitals and claiming they're nazis.

Russia will just make up stuff no matter what.

That is not true. Please try to be careful not to unintentionally spread propaganda.

> allowing posts such as "death to the Russian invaders," although it would not allow calls for violence against Russian civilians.

There's a big difference between self defense against an aggressive war and calls for genocide. Targeting invaders from a country's armed forces is not the same as targeting that country's civilians or largest ethnicity.

You may use Meta's platforms to call for the death of this specific list of approved people/groups only. Any other calls for death are not allowed, although the approved list may change at Meta's sole discretion at any time.

To be fair, I would have the same policy on my own site.

> specific list of approved people/groups

Should we tolerate the intolerant, or in this case, refuse to use violence against the violent?

Absolutely not. Ukrainians have every right to defend their country. I just find the fact that a corporation has essentially put out a list of entities that they want to see (or are at least ok with seeing) killed pretty dystopian. It's basically the "two minutes of hate" from 1984.

To be honest, the first paragraph does say: “the social network changed its hate speech rules to allow users to call for violence against Russians”. It may very well be that its reuters spreading propaganda.

Unless it's been ninja-edited, you've left off the rest of that sentence, which says "in the context of the war with Ukraine". The article also goes on to say "although it would not allow calls for violence against Russian civilians"

... that are actively invading a sovereign nation. RTFA

You are correct.

"We won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," says Meta.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/11/facebook-...

They define credible as: having two "indicators of credibility", such as location or method. That is a considerably higher bar than for any other group. And that's referring to civilians, not soldiers.

In a separate, internal memo, they explicitly say that hate speech and violent speech against Russian civilians is allowed "if the context is the Russian invasion". That's sufficiently vague that the policy allows for dehumanization.

This is already having a real-world impact, even in countries where Facebook explicitly says all hate speech against Russians, even soldiers, is still banned (obviously, as always, enforcement is lacking). See the real-world impact here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/07/antirussian-...

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It's also fascinating that you are being accused of spreading misinformation for telling the truth about what Facebook said. Some can say Facebook's statement is vague, but these are PR professionals who can certainly be as vague or as precise as they want to be.

It highlights the future we are heading towards, if those who want unbridled corporate power to "ban misinformation" end up having their way. The statement Meta made yesterday would get memory-holed the next day.

> violent speech against Russian civilians is allowed "if the context is the Russian invasion"

So it's possible to say "Russia is invading Ukraine, so every Russian must die"?

Also >Emails also showed that Meta would allow praise of the Ukrainian far-right Azov battalion, which is normally prohibited.

You can praise nazis when they are on your side?

> So it's possible to say "Russia is invading Ukraine, so every Russian must die"?

Certainly not, but people on social media are never this precise. Bigotry will be implied, or unclear; but the effects are the same.

> You can praise nazis when they are on your side?

In WW2 Finland was allied with Nazi Germany because the Soviet Union invaded them.

The UK was allied with the Soviet Union because the Nazis invaded them.

You don't have the luxury the choose your friends when the enemy is blowing up your children.

Your account has been used exclusively in the past week to do ideological battle and start flamewars. This isn’t what HN is for.

I’ve never seen an account have 8+ flagged comments in a week while slipping under the mod radar. Must be some kind of record.

EDIT: Wow: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=VictorPath&next=3045...

Yeah, kind of a record.

It’s unfortunate because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802953 was actually an interesting point. But you’ll need to phrase things as questions rather than statements in order to post constructively on heated topics.

(The “phrase statements as questions” trick has helped me, even if I ignore it more than I should.)

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