Forcing channels like Facebook to be neutral carriers only makes sense if they're a natural monopoly, which they aren't.
The same cannot be said for Facebook or Google at the moment even if some of us prefer Google+, HN, Twitter and Duckduckgo personally.
(That said Duckduckgo can go mainstream soon for what I know and Google+ is IMO constantly one or two good and well timed moves away from eating Facebooks userbase.)
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc are de facto worldwide communication channels. The degree to which they are the totality of communication is a function of their popularity, and this is the reason why it is so desirable to control speech on these platforms.
Personally, I'm disgusted that twitter is the official medium of the POTUS.
Yes, it is good to have more transparent insights into what the POTUS is doing. I just think that Twitter being an official policy platform for the country is concerning. Further, I think the impulsive and childish nature of the current POTUS should be severe cause for alarm.
I think it actually speak volumes about those who surround the POTUS and what a poor job they do as "handlers" -- shouldn't we have far more professionalism at that level?
But to your point, it was previous that this made it easier to spin the angle that the public sees...
It just makes me lose faith that anyone at the supposedly most elite positions really know what they are doing - they all seem so incompetent and looks like idiots, and it makes me want to acquiesce to their authority even less. Basically, it undermines and de-legitimatizes the power structure.
Moral policing? This article is about the opposite-- Facebook telling its "moral police" not to moderate posts from pro-government posters.
The article also features a claim that someone at Facebook guided pro-government posters in the government to use dog whistles to get around their filters. Hence changing "muslims" to "migrants."
Not much evidence is given for the claim, but it's there.
If people would stop using FB, rather than complaining about it, perhaps this would not be an issue?
Perhaps the answer is to make the concept of social networks no longer cool; or even make them undesirable. I think it's pretty clear they are not, anyways.
I use whatsapp, line, email and photo sharing services that allow me to easily share and communicate thoughts and media with exactly who I want. It's more personal, not addictive, creates better relationships, and helps me focus more on who I am rather than how others perceive me. And of course I don't have to use facebook and be a part of all its oft-criticized problems.
For hundreds of millions of people Facebook is the messaging system. There's postal, telephone, email, FB messaging. It's also the most used. I think you need to come up with solutions that assume it, or an equivalent, will continue to be a principle and primary means of communication for billions of people.
Just the myriad of other articles complaining about FB implicitly promoting hate by taking no responsibility for what is posted.
Facebook should not be tampering with and editorializing private communications or the public square, which they have become.
Would be it more OK if it was about Venezuelan pro-government mafia?
Well no, this article is about moral policing you do not agree with.
It would be a cleaner argument if Facebook merely viewed itself as a platform and a government found the need to restrict it within their boundaries, but Facebook has it's own rather mysterious law that it applies in an arbitrary fashion.
They only follow the law, kind of, or they skirt around it until someone holds a fire to them. And they can still threaten to pull out most or all economic activity from a country as "punishment".
It is clear to me that there is some sort of regulation that needs enacted against multi-homed and distributed companies. Now how that is enacted across most countries in the world, I don't know. Cooperation seems to be somewhat lacking these last few years.
This is a classic case of the race to the lowest common denominator. When the "community" is so large and diverse and often in opposition to each other, there can be no good standard other than free speech. This is why we had such strange issues of white supremacist content along with gay rights and atheist content being censored. If you censor one group because some people are offended by it what are these tech companies going to do when pressured by china, saudi arabia, israel, europe, etc to ban content they find offensive. They would ultimately have no choice but to simply ban everything that everyone finds offensive or lose market share.
Sadly, I think this is just the beginning of the censorship wars. Tech companies have set precedent the past few years which is going to cause them a lot of problems in the future. Usually the young "liberal" people lead the way in tech but they are usually followed by the much larger religious and conservative groups. The tech companies might agree with the censorship requests of today, but I doubt they'll like the censorship requetss of tomorrow. An organized conservative/religious censorship movement that mimics the recent liberal censorship movement can't be that far off.
Countries that wish to implement legal-based censorship don't care if an internet company has implemented moral-based censorship.
What defense does FB or tech companies have against people who say they consider atheism or gay rights to be immoral or offensive? None.
What happens when criticizing a religion is considered hate speech? Wouldn't we have to ban atheism? What happens when people say they find content about gay marriage offensive?
Moral-based censorship opens the floodgates to unlimited censorship.
Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other.
Filtering should be a tool available to individuals and delegatable to groups that are aligned with their own standards. As long as we don't get that there should be zero surprise about strain between differing standards.