Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjunaanand | Hacker News Reader

Sure pen and papers won’t be unethical as much as keyboards they are using to type today.

However if they use a shop as a platform to start selling drugs, that shop owner will be held liable by law, just like facebook.

View on HN

What about phones? I'm sure they use phones in general, should we also ban phones or listen in on everybody by default to avoid it?

The phones allow them to make trades much more effectively.

In addition, they probably use their hands, feet, voice, maybe these should be disabled for people since birth.

You're comparing apples to oranges. We don't expect phone manufacturers or phone companies to prevent people from using phones to send death threats, but Facebook regularly removes death threats sent via Facebook.

The argument being argued here is that it's not viable in practice for Facebook to police every single post, not that it shouldn't do it in principle. Your argument seems to be that Facebook shouldn't police messages at all, like phone companies don't monitor conversations. That's a completely different position that even Facebook wouldn't agree on.

There was another argument made, which I'm referring to.

> "If your business model doesn't work without doing unethical things, your business model should not work."

There's plenty of tools and business in real world where preventing the use of those tools for certain unethical acts is unfeasibly complex, impossible, costly or difficult.

You're ignoring the context in that comment. It was made in reply to "The platforms don't work if they have to police everything". That's what's being discussed; whether it's OK to give a pass to Facebook on some objectionable content because they can't possibly police everything.

In other words, it's understood that Facebook will police as much as they can (as they're already doing); one side is arguing that if they can't police everything they shouldn't exist, the other side is arguing that it's good enough that they police whatever is practical.

That's why your comparison with phone companies doesn't work: Facebook is already expected to monitor some content, the question is to what degree they should be held accountable.

I don't understand what difference it makes whether they are already monitoring certain part of something or not? The effect is still the same. You could also argue that some phones or comm lines provide a way to monitor or get alerts for certain cases such as terrorism etc, but not all lower level crimes.

And governments monitor people in the public, yet they are unable to prevent all crimes of happening. Should governments then not exist at all or the society in general? Should people not exist?

If you really don't understand that the argument

"If phone companies can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (even though nobody expects them to try remove any death threats)"

is fundamentally different from

"If Facebook can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (given that it's their policy to remove death threats)"

then I don't know what to tell you.

There are diminishing returns in the World to block any societally negative behavior. I think that is the key thing here in the argument. Police monitors the city, but they don't stop all bad wrongdoing. There's always underage kids drinking, there's drugs changing hands, there's all sorts of illegal things going on. Some are easier to prevent, some are worse and have worse impacts on the society, it's a spectrum of illegal, immoral or otherwise bad things going on everywhere at once. Just because there's something on spectrum somewhere doesn't mean the whole thing should be shut off or should not exist. Just because police doesn't get all the 17 year olds drinking a pint or two doesn't mean the police or the World should not exist.

You seem to have changed the object of the argument from phone companies to governments/the police, but are still insisting in making a comparison that I'm trying to explain is not valid. (The shift from phone companies to governments just adds another obfuscation step; if you abolish governments, then people will still murder each other. If you abolish Facebook, people won't be able to send death threats over Facebook).

I'll try to make my argument on why your comparisons are not valid one last time as clearly as possible. We have two arguments:

(1) "If phone companies can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (even though nobody expects them to try remove any death threats)" -- you can replace it with "If the government can't prevent all murders, it shouldn't exist (even though nobody realistically expects the government to prevent all murders)" for your latest message.

(2) "If Facebook can't remove all death threats, they shouldn't exist (given that it's their policy to remove death threats)"

I think most reasonable people would disagree with (1). People can reasonably agree or disagree with (2), as they're doing here in this thread.

You seem to disagree with both (which is fine) but refuse to understand that the arguments against (1) are not the same as the arguments against (2). Because of this, you keep trying to convince people who are against (1) but for (2) that they're the equivalent. They're not, so you won't convince anyone like that.

My point is that, all of this is a spectrum of diminishing returns, fighting to stop some sort of behavior that some people may consider to be bad. There's no perfect analogy for anything. The only argument you can make is that Facebook is overall a net bad for the society - which it may well be, but then make that argument, rather than saying that because a platform can't stop people from selling drugs on it, it should be abolished.

Sure.

Facebook isn't one of those, though.

>The argument being argued here is that it's not viable in practice for Facebook to police every single post, not that it shouldn't do it in principle. Your argument seems to be that Facebook shouldn't police messages at all

I'm pretty unconvinced that they should in principle be able to both engage in content moderation and retain safe harbor.

Cellular providers do try to block spam and certain kinds of fraudulent/impersonated content.

A shopping mall isn't liable (in most cases) for the products or services sold by the individual stores yet it can choose to not allow certain businesses (tobacco, gambling, 18+ stores).

Have you seen a completely unmoderated social media site? It's either ultra niche or riddled with spam, fraud, and other low-quality content.

It's really simplistic to only bring up social media when the larger topic is "should private control of common platforms, markets, and network effect relationships be allowed"? The real estate and many critical B2B industries are FAR more insular and controlled by arbitrary groups.

Should McDonalds Inc. be liable for franchises selling expired food and/or should they not be able to control a franchise at all? Franchise contracts are way more controlling than any social media ToS yet people pay to join them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com