People are clamoring for facebook to censor, mostly because they think that facebook will censor in their political favor

The real problem is that ~40% of America supports/votes for the POTUS, following him on social media, re-shares his memes, etc.

People are looking to generally open communications platforms like Facebook and asking them to censor, but if they carried their logic to its conclusion, the President’s emails, texts, mobile Apps, and press releases should all be censored or blacklisted by communications providers.

If the president sent out content similar to his tweets through a Trump 2020 campaign app on the apple store and android store, should Apple / google remove the app from the store? Should they build in a filter in chrome and Safari to block access to the trump 2020 campaign website?

Where does this logically end?

You want to censor 40% of the country? How can that be logical

My point is that the people asking Zuck to censor are asking to censor 40% of the country.

Personally since I disagree with the 40% I do see it as the “real problem” but I don’t think facebook censoring them is the solution. It might be possible to censor away InfoWars or whatever but I don’t think you can censor away the POTUS and 40% of the country...

I don't think the above poster is claiming it is logical, but the opposite.

The real problem is that you refuse to take people you disagree with seriously. You keep fucking lying about them, you keep pushing people towards their side by being an absolute fucking cunt. Just stop. It's not helping.

Could you please stop creating accounts to do flamewar here? It's not in your interest to do that, first because you're contributing to destroying the community that you're participating in, and second because these sorts of attacks just reinforce the people you disagree with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am taking it seriously. The logic that demands Facebook censor trump from their open platform doesn’t have any clear limiting factor that means that Trump shouldn’t be censored off other communications service providers.

Not a MAGA type by the way. I’ve voted against trump in 3 elections already and will be voting against him again in the fall.

People fail to understand that nothing is static. One minute you’re in, the other minute you’re out.

What was PC today may not be PC tomorrow depending on dynamics.

They don’t understand the same forces they want to use to muzzle someone today can become the force that muzzles them tomorrow.

They like Jack censoring twitter only because he aligns with them. They don’t like Mark right now because he doesn’t 100% align with them.

They don’t care one whit about data retention and third party selling, etc. all they care about is “are you aligned with my narrative today?”

> People fail to understand that nothing is static. One minute you’re in, the other minute you’re out.

This is why Free Speech is so important. Regardless of how inappropriate someone's speech is, or may seem in the present context, they should be allowed to express it as long as they are not directly inciting violence/hate. Not all countries have this Right so let's take a second to appreciate that.

This viewpoint is well represented on HN as well, worryingly.

It may be worrying but it's not surprising. Every common-enough point of view will be well represented in any large-enough population sample, assuming the sample wasn't specifically selected to exclude it.

That's very true, and a point I've made in the past about other opinions (namely, internet trolls). My assumption though, was that HN had a very well educated population, who know the dangers of censorship.

Propaganda: Communication that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. [2] Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies, religious organizations, the media, and individuals can also produce propaganda.

Facebook would look quite interesting if they uniformly censored all governments, activist groups, companies, religious organizations, the media, and individuals attempting to influence an audience and further an agenda.

The only place on the internet that I know has a policy like that is Wikipedia itself, and far from everyone agree that they are effective in enforcing that policy.

What is considered propaganda or hatred has become increasingly subjective

No it hasn't. Propaganda and hatred has just become more sophisticated and super-charged by new tools (social media, Internet etc.) in order to maximize it's spread among the community. These new tools also allow bigots to self-organize, privately in ways never before possible.

I think where you are running into trouble is that you have made the assumption (your own subjectivity) that these are just bigots with no validity.

And what does sophistication of means has to do with the subjectivity mentioned?

Bigotry and it's resulting political/social forms have and will evolve, constantly adapting to retain and grow. Hatred is not "increasingly subjective", hatred has become more sophisticated making it harder to detect.

Not sure how you are coming to this conclusion, yes it can become more sophisticated while also be on a sliding scale of what people consider "hatred" from one year to the next. I'm not sure what is not to grok about this conclusion.

Thank you for this clarification.

But if it has not been increasingly subjective, but harder to detect, then what you are implying, if I do not distord your point of view, is that it is okay to be stricter in policing to catch stop these sophisticated bigots.

But, doesn't being more strict mean that you'll also have more false negatives, that is people that always had "heretic" talk from the point of view of general society, without necessarily being a bigot, but are now being identified as such because the criteria are paint with a broader brush?

And then, wouldn't you agree that this is a restriction of free speech, that people on the other side are arguing to be unacceptable?

> is that it is okay to be stricter in policing to catch stop these sophisticated bigots.

Yes, although of course that depends on your definition of "policing" and by whom (state vs private) Are we still talking about Facebook?

> But, doesn't being more strict mean that you'll also have more false negatives

Yes (in either case above). What you're asking about is the margins, and of course we need oversight to prevent abuse both in the private and public sector.

> And then, wouldn't you agree that this is a restriction of free speech, that people on the other side are arguing to be unacceptable?

Again, not sure if we're still talking FB.

I'm going to bow out now, thank you for the debate.

Hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion. If we forcibly prevent people from expressing their emotions with words and abdicate our responsibility to defuse hatred with dialogue, it will eventually boil over and be expressed with violence.

It's ironic, because mass censorship proponents claim censoring hate prevents violence, when perhaps it actually makes it worse in the long run.

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

-MLK

“If the opposing narrative is blasphemy and heresy, of course we ought to burn the books (and the heretics)”

Comment on Medieval equivalent of HN

The one who views the opposing narrative as only propaganda or hatred, and nothing else.

More mental gymnastics trying to believe whatever Trump has up next on his plate to rant about isn’t propaganda aimed at inciting violence.