Facebook is the medium, not the publisher though.

The people who built the radio didn't get called before an international criminal tribunal; it was the broadcasters who did.

> The people who built the radio didn't get called before an international criminal tribunal; it was the broadcasters who did.

FB is both though. They built the system & tech (the ‘radio’), and via their algos/policies also control what gets spread and to what extent (the ‘broadcasting’).

It’s not at all clear cut.

Facebook built the internet?

I was recently in a small town in Myanmar where they have public electricity 4 hours a day. I noticed that most of the plugs were used to charge mobile phones, a device that many had never even seen just a mere two years ago.

Now, consider that it's common across South-East Asia to have very basic data plans that allow you to navigate Facebook for free (or at heavily discounted rates). https://www.mmtimes.com/business/technology/20685-facebook-f...

For a huge lot of these subscribers Facebook is the Internet.

People in the developed world who after gone through innumerable Internet phases and fads, and who presumably have more experience and a better sense of its subcultures, still have a hard time to distinguish fake from legit news.

How do you think a small towner in Myanmar who went from zero to Facebook overnight would fare?

That is a depressing thought. From zero to FB. I think the fact that FB has shielded much of the developing world from the Internet at large, gets too little press. We accept FB here because they don't get to cut off the rest of your Internet. Imagine if you only had FB and not the rest of the Internet... horrible.

I think it's better to have Facebook-only than no internet at all. If those are the options, I'd pick Facebook too.

Are you speaking as an informed and responsible user? If so, then you disqualify. A more appropriate outlook to the situation would be to imagine Facebook as the only options that young children have. It's not just about how you use it, it's also about how it indirectly affects the people around you because of the pervasive lack of due diligence. Facebook as the only option might offer some boons, but is it worth it? I think most of us would agree that if we objectively weighed the pros and cons of the "real" Internet some solid arguments could be made that its more positive sides make up for its darker corners in spades. Could Facebook pass a similar test?

Really? What is the facebook-only internet providing on top of the sms and phone calls of feature phones that would make you pick that flood of targeted advertisements? Remember that you can't e.g. follow the shared links on your feed. And the free facebook I have used on my travels does not let you to load images.

To some extent yes. In developing countries (including Myanmar) they are pushing free “access” to the internet via the Facebook app. So for a lot of people in these countries Facebook is essentially the internet.

Interestingly, there's a parallel for this in the Rwandan genocide. A lot of the violence was prepared and fueled by a Hutu-run radio station:

>Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), which broadcast racist propaganda, obscene jokes and music, becoming very popular throughout the country. One study finds that approximately 10% of the overall violence during the Rwandan genocide can be attributed to this new radio station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Preparation_f...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

The two founders and one announcer were sentenced to life, subsequently ~30 years in prison, the people who built this particular radio and the broadcasters together

Facebook owns and operates the radio station though

Exactly. The big platforms are getting to mature to get a pass on this stuff anymore.

> people not be allowed to communicate with each other

People should not be allowed to communicate certain things which lead to harm to other people, no. I don't understand why this gets turned into "people not be allowed to communicate" (implying "at all"?).

The picture I was trying to paint, albeit not very well, was that there was no group that we could trust to decide which things people should be allowed to say, and which things they shouldn't be. (I didn't get the point across very well, so we ran in to a race condition after I decided to retract it. Sorry.)

If we think that Facebook should decide what's permissible, then that's US culture being the global nanny. If we let the local government decide what's permissible, then you better watch out because every single genocide in history has involved demonizing the victims as the real danger (so, their speech would be pointed at as "harmful" and banned, the perpetrators would be painted as organizing a just revolution). The worst genocides were conducted with state support, and wouldn't be stopped if local national governments were moderating Facebook. Forming a special panel to decide which groups deserve to get their message out seems like a very dangerous and poorly motivated concentration of power. I can't think of any other ways to decide which speech is dangerous and ban it, therefore I conclude we're stuck with not doing it.

Outside of human based moderation the real issue is that Facebook is deciding what will people see on the feed all the time. People somehow try to liken Facebook to post office, or whatever, like it's some dumb pipe. It is not.

Facebook shows you from the feeds of your "friends" whatever the company decided. Probably based on some algorithms, but it could be millions of cats rolling over the keyboards for it's not public what Facebook really does.

Third parties analyze and weaponize this behavior for many things from comercial interests, to justifying murder, to incitement to violence.

Facebook needs to be held responsible for its algorithms. Somehow. Stupid autonomous car makers will eventually be held accountable for their algorithms too. It's not like they can put some crap in their EULA and be done with it.

PS: Add to it that Facebook is the internet in some places. It's not just one of the websites.

There's one thing I don't understand when people say things like this. Who would enforce this? Well governments would. And so you want our government to have the overt right to spy on people and punish them for private speech that the government will be the final arbiters of deciding right versus wrong on? I mean think about this. History has shown that it's not a question of if but when bad actors take over governments. And even when the actors are not overtly malicious this would be a dubious idea.

Many people today wish we had a more open world, myself among them. Do you know we didn't used to even have passports? There was no 'schengen zone.' You could freely travel between nations as a human. But as a "temporary war measure" passports began to be required in WW1. And once governments had that new level of power and control, they of course not only did not relinquish it but expanded it magnitudes over. In the US income tax was another "temporary war measure." Government is not your enemy, but it is also not your friend. Beware of the implications of granting power to an authority who does not, or at some time will not, necessarily have your best interests in mind.

I do not agree.

People should be allowed to communicate period.

People should not be allowed to harm other people.

Well, which one? Some communications are harmful to third parties.

Can you give an example?

Traditionally libel/slander are the obvious examples, but modern examples include identity theft (A takes out a loan from B in the name of C => harm to C), security breaches (A leaks C's password from B's website), "revenge porn", outing people's sexuality without their consent (can get people killed), terrorist radicalisation (A convinces B to murder C), and so on.

"Well, which one? Some communications are harmful to third parties."

A recent example of this are the ability for conspiracy theorists to communicate news stories after these mass shootings that these attacks were staged or the victims are "Fake". This further pushes harmful propaganda that there is not a real threat to students in schools, and the "third party" children are the ones who suffer from this communication.

It's countries filled with uneducated people who don't understand how to evaluate information that are vulnerable to this kind of propaganda. I think a more fundamental long-term solution is to fix the education and critical thinking problem. After you've done that, you can allow free speech, and democracy for that matter. By default, people aren't competent to safely handle free information because they're so easily manipulated into violence.

For example, see every war ever. In any war, both sides believe they're right, but they can't both be right, so one or more is always wrong. They just can't see it because they can't process information safely.

I would say vanilla education had nothing to do with, if it's that what you mean. Daily, I come across extremely well college educated folks ( including engineers) that are under the sway of Facebook and WhatsApp fake forwards. They were swayed by Radio, TV and Newspapers before, now the medium has changed. The story is the same in the USA or Europe or Myanmar. There are no special critical thinking courses out there where people sign up and learn to "think effectively". People have been swayed by propaganda before and they will continue to be. Saying "education" in this context feels like you are leaning towards saying that only if the people in these "third world uneducated country" learn better, this wouldn't happen. That's not right is it?

> They can't both be right

And this is where you are lacking critical thinking. Single issue wars and issues with only two sides are rare enough that I'm not sure any have ever existed. Its definitely possible for both sides to be right (and wrong) and its definitely normal that educated people won't agree no matter how long they discuss an issue.

I'll permit myself a moment of extreme cynicism and say that two warring parties can both be right even on a single issue.

"I would be better off with that bloke's resources".

I'm not sold on the idea that wars are fought for ideals. There is a lot of coincidental wealth transfer when countries fight. Why else travel long distances to kill people you don't know?

Why can't they all be right?

It's not like there's a big man in the sky telling everyone that wars must only be fought between two opposing sides with identical motives on a logically comparable continuum.

It's not even like wars must even be based on positions that can be meaningfully called right or wrong. Or that most wars can be meaningfully interpreted as "two sides". Even within the allies of world war 2, you would have a variety of factions and motivations, as well as minority players with diametrically opposed views and beliefs.

That would be all of them. There's plenty of people right here in the United States who think Infowars is a real news outlet.

> I think a more fundamental long-term solution is to fix the education and critical thinking problem.

And who is going to do that? Governments have no incentive to do that because lack of critical thinking in citizens is a major factor to ensure they they can get away with exploitation and prevent them from revolting..

"And who is going to do that?"

Private companies try to offer primary education in some developing countries. Since the problem is not only lack of resources, but lack of infrastructure to use those resources (no trained teachers etc.) this is a plausible path forward. I have no statistics of the results. Is it just one more scheme to funnel aid money into investors pockets? I have no idea.

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21660063-where-gover...

Currently all educational system teaches students to respect and obey authority. So right now, in our society, people first obey, then only they ll think to question the authority..The primary education from private companies is probably going to be the same.

Teaching students critical thinking, means they are encouraged and taught to ask questions first, before obeying. Governments like a population that just would work obediently and pay taxes without questioning, than a populace that ask questions at every turn. So they would prevent the kind of education that can lead to such a population...

"Currently all educational system teaches students to respect and obey authority."

Well, all public education is based on the Prussian template so what would you expect :)

But seriously...

I think the tendency of the masses to follow the perceived leader is a facet of the human psychology rather than the result of a nefarious scheme.

From what I can tell of the education of my kids in Finland, the teachers really try to walk a tight rope between having small kids behave in an orderly manner as a group and not to stifle individual creativity and will to learn.

You need some authority and and respect of it in schools. Otherwise it would turn into a lord of the flies remake. I presume your critique is directed towards overbearing, paternalistic unnecessary harsh discipline.

I think the amount of this depends on the country you are discussing and and you need to be more specific. All primary education systems are not alike.

>I think the tendency of the masses to follow the perceived leader is a facet of the human psychology rather than the result of a nefarious scheme.

May be to an extent. But you cannot deny that this is exaggerated by social pressure and training from child hood. For example, in most school, the obedience is seen as a foremost quality of a good student.

Imagine the animals in the wild and how they can be tamed by training them in a specific way. You can see how a small man or woman is able to control a large animal such as an elephant or tiger in this fashion.

When you look at that, and when you see how, if the people put their minds, they can so easily revolt/react against the increasingly oppressive actions from governments, and how they don't, just like a tiger or lion can so easily refuse to obey their trainer, but they don't, only because of their training they have received from their birth, and the thought of not obeying just does not cross their minds..

You see, you have to stop looking at the people individually, and have to look the populace as a single entity. Like a reagent in a test tube. You pour in the obedience and compliance and you get more work and taxes out of it (and less unwanted reactions). You pour things like nationalism and patriotism into it, and you get lives to expend in the name of service of nation. You pour dreams of a better tomorrow, and you get votes...

"You see, you have to stop looking at the people individually, and have to look the populace as a single entity."

I think all revolutions are started by tiny groups of inspired people, and the hoi polloi will follow them, or don't, based on the current general mood and the network effects they instigate.

That's also an inspiring thought. To make a change, you don't need to convince everyone. Just a tiny group will suffice, and if the dice fall correctly, everyone else will just follow along.

This, of course applies to both beneficial and pathological changes as well. The coarse grained group mind of the population is not familiar with ethics. That's why free speech and oppressing complete dick heads such as neonazis live in a delicate balance. A small group can cause harm to a society.

Basically, we need to build a society were each member is inclined to think for themselves, and not inclined to just go with what ever that is "out there"..

The funny thing here is that, since such a society won't lend itself to control easily, the governments does not want this. They want a population that can be controlled easily, but then as you said, they can also be controlled by a small group causing major harm, and the government's solution to that is regulating free speech.

So governments wins on both fronts and people lose on the same.

And even if they try, because there is economic incentive (educated population -> better competition on the global market), people will still accuse them of pushing propaganda and brainwashing, and they'll fight the changes.

Reality is often more insidious than that... Most issues are (sadly) not of a binary nature but created through misunderstanding and different evaluation functions between parties. In general, every position has some „truth“ or „value“ to it that other positions are not able to subsume.

For example, immigration in Europe... some people want to make it easier others want to curb it completely. Who is right? There are arguments for both sides and your individual preferences and experiences determine which one you will find more convincing. There is no binary right or wrong over all cases.

I can't tell you which side is wrong, but I can tell you which side is trying to oppress certain groups of people just because they're foreign.

If you are referring to the immigration example, it’s not that easy. By digging into this position you won’t really be able to reach people on the other side who on some level at least - do - have some justifiable grievances with some aspects of immigration. I am staunchly pro immigration but I realize it’s a big challenge for some people and to move forward we should realize that simple heuristics are not going to be the easiest way to the place where we all want to be.

I am from Myanmar. I have many doctor friends and friends with a degree from US having this kind of bias or hatred and trusting all the fake facebook information they want to believe. It is not about education. It is the same in the US. People will believe what they want to believe.

> It's countries filled with uneducated people who don't understand how to evaluate information that are vulnerable to this kind of propaganda.

I see plenty of similar sentiments in my facebook feed.

> In any war, both sides believe they're right, but they can't both be right

If you assume that there is an objective, external moral “right” defined in a very particular kind of way, this may be true, but that hidden premise is far from universally aceepted.

You'd have to solve the language barrier first. Burmese speakers will not be able to read stuff written in Rohingya language.

If you lack access to critical facts, then critical thinking can only do so much. Trust may be the best thing you have.

> After you've done that, you can allow free speech

Who are you do "allow" or "disallow" free speech?

"Disallowing" free spech is actually a human rights violation. Isn't it? So what you're doing here is you're providing weasel moral grounds for human rights abuse.

Do you mind if I e-mail you some writings? I'd like to get your opinion on them. I agree with what you say, and I'm brainstorming solutions to the lack of education and critical thinking / bs filtering [first at home, eventually abroad]