The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality.

zuckerbergs policy preference was no censorship of fake news, not no censorship whatsoever.

> The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality.

That's your subjective opinion. Different cultures will significantly disagree with you (and with the Zuck) on what the gray area for nudity and sexuality is.

Different cultures may disagree on what the policy should be, but Zuckerberg has the ability to create nudity rules that are objective, whether you agree with them or not.

For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation.

This is much more difficult for a policy stating that content must not be "misleading". Fact checking is much more problematic, because there can be support for either interpretation, nuance, as well as scientific uncertainty.

The problem in the linked article doesn't seem to be that the rules were ambiguous. Instead it seems as though they were perfectly clear but overruled by leadership because of external pressure. Plus there's this:

> Last week, however, ProPublica reported that explicit misinformation about voting remains rampant on the platform.

Voting misinformation is not ambiguous in the way you describe, yet Facebook doesn't care.

I think we would have to discuss the examples given by propublica[1]. Almost everything I saw was a matter of opinion.

"Your democracy, your freedom is being stripped away from you, and if you allow that then everything this country stood for, fought for, bled for is all in vain"

"the democratic party wants to rig our elections by forcing all voters to vote by mail. Vote by mail WILL lead to fraud"

"“Flooding the nation with ballots that can be stolen, sold, discarded, and forged—THAT’s the path to Leftist victory in November.”

“You think coronavirus is a crisis, wait till you see the voter fraud epidemic we have here in California. And mark my words it’s heading to your state like a diseased bat out of hell.”

“If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.”

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/outright-lies-voting-misi...

> For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation.

Your policy is still ill-defined, though. Do you mean ALL female nipples, or just human ones? Does the ban extend to babies? Who’s going to police that, and how?

Radiolab did an episode on all kinds of Facebook rules, covering the nipple conundrum as part of it. There’s very little that is straightforward about implementing any of them.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...

I agree there are edge cases. Are you saying the nipple issue is harder than moderating politically contested statements of fact regarding the nature of the world we live in?

I thought you were saying that “universal rules for nudity (subcontent: nipples)” are easier to write than “universal rules for fact-checking.“ If so, I disagree. They are either:

a) equally hard, given the common understanding of what “facts” mean nowadays, or

b) nudity is harder, given cultural contexts.

Culture makes a lot of difference for what’s considered nudity (e.g. women breastfeeding goats, as illustrated in the link), and it should matter less for statements about average temperatures for a given region, etc. But the “facts” as presented are contested anyway, since they are derivations based on data + interpretation, even if the interpretation is from >95% of scientists in the relative field.

That makes me lean more towards (a) even though I wish it was (b).

>I thought you were saying that “universal rules for nudity (subcontent: nipples)” are easier to write than “universal rules for fact-checking.“ If so, I disagree. They are either:

I think we still have a misunderstanding. I am saying that enforceable rules for nipples are easier to write, regardless of the cultural approval of those rules. A well written rule can be enforced by only looking at the content that is on the platform ( eg the image). That is not to say people might disagree (its Art!) or they might get it wrong (its a male nipple).

When it comes to statements of fact, this is not the case. The enforcers must draw conclusion based on off platform research, a presumed intent of the post, and/or a presumed interpretation.

I think I’m with you now. The nature of a factual claim is that it refers to other things that must be examined in order to determine if it passes or fails a rule, whereas for many kinds of images there is no external reference that has to be consulted: the content is all right there in the image itself.

In which case I’d have to agree! Thanks for taking the time to clarify it for me.

Exactly! I would say that many other common rules follow the feasibility of images. For example it is easy to test if a post is doxxing, contains swear words, ect.

I saw someone who was posting close-ups of nipples without specifying a gender to make the point that it isn't really that simple.

Is a trans woman's nipple OK? What about a trans man? What if the trans man has large breasts? What if a cis man has large breasts? What about the tattoo nipple of a cancer survivor?

Nothing is simple, there are value judgements at every turn. The implementation is absolutely making judgements.

I still think it is easier than defining truth.

In all above cases you could provide the reviewer with an objective yes/no answer. The reviewer does not need a PHD to know if there is a nipple in a picture.

This is not the case for questions of scientific truth, which other requires understand the scientific consensus with complex nuances.

And of course that doesn't even get into the fact that Facebook isn't about whether you can post something, it's about how algorithms choose to share what you post with others. They can tweak things so your post shows up at the top of everyone's feed, or no one's at all.

not just anything sexual, but mere nudity on social media platforms seems to be controversial. I remember the "female presenting nipples" debacle on Tumblr including pictures of breast-feeding mothers.

"no censorship" apparently means, "don't anger American conservatives", not "everyone can speak and share".

It is probably pragmatic/conventional wisdom that it will kill mainstream adoption if they are openly linked to it. It is deeply stupid but I can't say it is incorrect.

Now they have a point with FOSTA - it was already risky when they don't know if a naked body is 18 or 17.

To be blunt stupid inputs be they customer norms or laws get stupid results - it is how systems work.