In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content?
You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned.
Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either.
What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception?
If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules.
There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites.
It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers.
And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1]
It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2]
You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost.
Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...
If Facebook is becoming a defacto ISP in countries it should be subject to the same regulations and really should be required to follow net neutrality rules. Though I don't think those exist in a lot of developing countries(or I guess America also...).
In the end though, it's those country's governments allowing facebook to do this.
These are my realistic thoughts on the matter.
My own personal thoughts...
That shit's downright evil. Government's should absolutely not be allowing facebook to do this. But I feel the same way about ISP's in general owning content providers and favouring their own services.
This practice would be the same as Ford or gm owning a bunch of gas stations and giving preferential prices to drivers of Ford or gm vehicles. I honestly don't understand why it's looked at differently when it comes to internet companies or technology in general.
If a social media company wants to be an ISP or a an ISP wants to be a content provider or host, they really should not be able to give preferential treatment to their own content and companies that do this should be scrutinized heavily for bullshit.
I think that's why Facebook has been getting more criticism and attention in the media than Reddit or Twitter, despite wielding comparable social influence. On the flipside, I also think that's why people are more outraged about the "censorship" issue. If you ban a Reddit user you're just banning some username. If you ban someone on Facebook, you're banishing a person and stifling their voice.
The slippery slope arguments are sensationalist. Facebook had many motivations for implementing this policy, some of them undoubtedly motivated by money, but ultimately I would argue they implemented it because American and western society pushed them to. To the extent that western society has unequivocally decided that racism is very bad and not good, this policy change will also not push us over the edge into total censorship because that's not what we want (and I think it would be difficult to take the stance that that's the direction we're heading in.)
Because FB is not targeted at specific communities of people like HN, and less so reddit, it's welcome to everyone. Everyone is in fact actively encouraged to join. That's their mission. Private spaces that are open to the public often have first amendment protections:
If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.
A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish.
Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...
"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."
But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.
If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.
As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.
Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.
So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.
Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.
By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.
If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).
I've written about this before:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.
All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".
A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)
If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?
My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.
A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.
It's no longer _your_ free speech.
You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.
Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.
Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.
Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.
It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.
Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?
Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.
Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.
>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?
Please point out a single society that has upheld absolute Free Speech as a principle for any significant period of time.
The United States has even killed its own citizens when their free speech collided with national security: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...
That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.
Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.
So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.
What about network neutrality?
Etc etc...
It's not so easy to answer this question.
Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.
And there's no paradox of tolerance with speech - you can tolerate intolerant speech just fine, so long as you police the actions.
This is unrelated. If it is your home, you are free to protect it by any means.
There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.
Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.
A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.
I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.
The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.
No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.
The fact that all your photos, content and friends are on one platform and not the others, obviously.
Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.
A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.
However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.
This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds.
There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.
If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.
So, I'm certain you will find legally hung signs with racist and discriminatory content in certain places.
> If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms
That's outside the scope of the First Amendment. It may not even be possible to pass such a law without infringing on those platforms First Amendment rights... I would expect the SCOTUS to strike any such law down.
Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.
In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.
It's the former. There is no law, at least in the US, that forbids banning people from private property for group membership in general.
With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.
Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.
Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.
Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...
Look at Germany and its Streitbare Demokratie policies. Then look at how AfD polls.
Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?
It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise.
Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms.
Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.
Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to.
That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.
You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?
"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.
Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.
What I actually said is, first, when you don't tolerate intolerance, you become (at least in technique) similar to the people you are fighting. And second, don't be so sure that you aren't the bad guys. And the more absolutely sure you are that you're the good guys, the more I want you to back off and take a really hard look at whether that is actually true, because the bad guys can use exactly your logic (or at least gameskrishnan's) to convince themselves that they're the good guys.
This opening, along with your straw man in the second sentence, shows that you're not debating this topic in good faith.
It would be nice to think that every horrific event in history was simply a case of bad people knowingly doing bad things.
Sure, sometimes it is, when we're talking about a lone actor or despotic leader who just wants to bring about destruction and misery for their own pathological reasons.
But at least as often, everyone thinks they're the good ones fighting for a just cause. As has often been said here before, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. One person's liberating saviour is another's tyrannical occupying force.
It might be easy for us to look at 1930s-40s Europe and judge which side was right and which was wrong, but to an ordinary German or Italian citizen or soldier who didn't have a full understanding of what was going on, and just knew that their country had been economically depressed for too long, it wasn't so clear.
And in plenty of other major conflicts since then, the rightness or wrongness of each side is very hard to discern.
This is not suggesting that racism or bigotry is ever to be endorsed or validated.
But bigotry is usually an expression of a deeper distress that has nothing to do with the target of the bigotry. It's often just scapegoating for a largely unrelated problem.
By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery), it's possible to respond to the real problem and prevent the bigotry and consequent horrors from developing at all.
> By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery)
You think you have it all figured out and you 'get it' now. That's naive in my opinion. And I'm not talking about good and bad, some kind of universalist dualism that informs my every action; I'm talking about being concerned about my friends that may or may not fit certain views on human existence that fascist thought provides. At least try to get where I'm coming from instead of throwing out useless internet jargon ('strawman') without even understanding why I'm reacting so harshly.
I've spent over 7 years undertaking a variety of formal approaches to deep personal introspection, and I've never felt less like I can, or anyone can, "have it all figured out".
But one thing I've learned a thing or two about is the tendency to ascribe the greatest threats and wrongs to some easily-identified "other" without paying adequate attention to the failings and risks in our own group and within our own self.
For what it's worth I spend vast amounts of time thinking about what kinds of approaches to eradicating bigotry and oppression might actually be effective, and what role a humble individual as myself might be able to play in moving the needle over the long term.
To suggest that this is a matter I believe is "not going to hurt anyone" is about as wrong as you could possibly be.
If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.
Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?
Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).
To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s
If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.
As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.
Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB.
I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.
“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper
or printing press was required to print
everything sent their way. Today it's the
centralized websites that also don't have
this obligation.
...
You are not entitled to widespread
distribution. Never have been.
All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses.
Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information.
Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then?
Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this.
Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant?
Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours?
Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?
I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.
No one has to pay attention though.
Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it.
The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis.
In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons:
1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.
2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis"
3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money.
Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.
That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than:
"Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?
I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.
Would you say that the political and judicial system of our societies is fair, or is it biased against minorities? If it's biased, why do you expect it to enforce any such "safety of society" laws in a way that is not similarly biased towards the groups that already are the beneficiaries of that society?
Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous?
Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech?
Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?
If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?
> how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide
I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?
How is that working out in the People's Republic of China? They have a very concrete definition of what dangerous speech and have legions of people to decide whether individual instances are dangerous and to remove them.
Clearly, their system illustrates the hazard of your viewpoint.
And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech, and sincerely so (not saying yes out of fear). Meanwhile, things are much freer than they were. I'm currently reading a Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, set partly in the Cultural Revolution, and it pulls no punches about how awful it was.
Of course you would, polls like all speech are tightly controlled.
And those who deliberately inspire violent behavior with their speech are very, very careful to make sure it's not an explicit call to action. This is not new. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" has been around for a long time.
Sometimes we'll get it wrong, and need to correct it. That's fine. We're capable of that.
What's not fine is throwing up our hands at even the concept of performing that judgment, because it's subjective or whatever. That cedes the public square to extremists, which results in a shittier society.
When we started this game, we had slaves, who were defined as three fifths of a human being for purposes of political representation of slave owners. Voting was restricted to white land-owning men. It's getting better.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Consider this a warning, as we eventually ban accounts of repeat offenders.
You're WAY too hung up on this "who decides?" question, ignoring the reality that either someone has to decide, or that no one should decide and society should simply not regulate speech in any way, ever.
Good luck with the latter if you ever have kids.
With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.
Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].
[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .
Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.
On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?
If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.
Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.
And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.
Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact.
Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary.
Who's to decide the labeling?
This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics.
Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company.
I just think it's bad policy.
If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies.
The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.
This!
A thousand times THIS!
People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them.
(I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)
When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.
???
It never was.
I couldn't watch porn movies on Facebook.
Point is, even if you find the content questionable, it's still allowed to be shared, as long as it's within the laws obviously.
I mean this was the approach they were taking to White supremacist material until now, which was why people were giving them a hard time.
If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”.
It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead?
On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...
FB has become too large and ubiquitous, they shouldn't be all of those.
Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice.
Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because:
1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point?
2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases
3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong
In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it.
How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?
I think another outcome for Facebook is more likely because they seem to be forgetting that they are not the ones creating Facebook, rather they are capitalizing on part of the activity in the relationships amongst their users as long as they can express something relevant to them on Facebook.
They are effectively attempting logical rationing with a lack of emotional meaning to their relationships, and overvaluing what one can learn from subjectivity without truth seeking.
As they said I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed?
Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.
Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.
That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?
In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.
Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.
Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
(Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)
For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:
- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it
- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say
- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources
- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government
- who will be using the service
- is the service a government-allowed monopoly
- etc.
Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.
edit: formatting
Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.
There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.
Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.
But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.
If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.
* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.