Assuming you support facebook's move to remove this content, would you not also support the removal of similar content that you also consider objectionable? Do you not hope that this leads to more content removal or is this the only piece of content that you consider necessary to remove?

By my estimation -- and there are certain individuals where this might not be true -- if you support this you likely _want_ this to be a continued effort to remove objectionable content.

Surely, you can see how objectionable things can be different?

I find most religious content to be objectionable. But for the most part, it is benign. In general, someone's religious beliefs don't affect me. Once it starts to call for the ill treatment of others, though, I think it should be removed. So religion-based anti-LGBTQ content should be removed (for example).

Holocaust denial stems from a long history of anti semitism, which in itself tends to advocate the poor treatment of others and enbraces a certain amount of dehumanizing language. All for something they cannot help and doesn't actually affect others. We know that hate groups embrace this. We also know it happened - we have pictures. It is simply lies to get folks to treat others badly. So, removal.

I think they are referring to Zuckerberg using "Facebook should not be the arbiter of truth" as justification for not taking action in the past.

Who defines unreasonable?

Should Newton stop being explained beacause he is flawed? Or do we need a disclaimer in every single video about mechanics?

What about photons as small pieces of matter?

Ehat about the existence of God?

Sorry, but Newtonian physics, the particle nature of photons, and the simple existence of god are not examples of intolerance. If censorship on the basis of intolerance is, in fact, a slippery slope that is connected to these benign topics, you'll need to show how they're actually connected

Edit: oh, I see. You're one of several responders who have latched onto OC's use of the word "reasonable" and are disengenuously attacking that word outside of the actual context. Excellent example of attacking the weakest form of somebody's argument and applying the slippery-slope fallacy from there. We can do better than this, folks.

Well, if you believe in the First Amendment, then Facebook itself gets the freedom to decide what does and doesn't go on its platform.

If you want something more generic, you could start with hate speech laws in Australia, Belgium, Canada...Spain, Switzerland, the UK, etc. Or even more generally, the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

So, there's plenty of established frameworks to base your work off of and they've been around long enough that we can measure what the impact is.

Facebook could be considered a public square, where they would be required to protect it's users free speech and lose their own ability to censor by choice. This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.

Having the right to do something doesn’t make it a good idea. The issue here isn’t about Facebook having the right to do it.

The question was: "Who defines unreasonable"?

As a matter of fact, the answer is: Facebook. That _does_ seem like the issue to me.

I think that you're moving the goalpost from "who decides" to "is it a good idea". To which I've already answered: yes, it has a proven track record.

I'll make a principled stab at it.

If you ban Holocaust deniers, then you're in the business of drawing lines, proclaiming what is truth. This is a powerful position and many will wish to use it for more than just the Holocaust. They will initially do so by presenting a variety of outrageous content which maybe should be banned, applying public pressure, and their initial targets will be reasonable.

But the outrage industry is big these days, and its targets are many. I shall present some recent evidence of its working. Consider a figure like, say, Bruce Gilley, who I was just reading about this past week: he's an academic who says non-mean things about colonialism. A public outrage drive, started by Maoist philosopher Joshua Moufawad-Paul (author of "The Communist Necessity") got his publisher to cancel a biography of Sir Alan Burns; similar outrage drives have previously attempted to see his doctorate revoked. I have not read his scholarship and have no reason to suppose his work to be excellent; however, I should prefer that academic degrees are not revoked after the fact for failing to conform to any particular orthodoxy.

Yet these are the times that we live in: we are increasingly censored by the mob. Facebook content moderation is an obvious target and there is no doubt will be targeted. The categories will expand. Facebook's resistance to such measures will either be heroic, or profoundly inadequate.

So consider: Is the Republican party under Donald Trump a hate group? Is it legitimate for them to have Facebook operations? Surely if you work in Silicon Valley you know someone who considers it a hate group, and believes it should not be permitted a Facebook presence. That is where this ends up. It is not a long and tortuous path. And as hateful as Holocaust denial is, it is possible that Facebook might make the world a better place in the end by allowing it, that they may say, "We are not the content police. No one is."

There is such a thing as factual truth. That we, as a society, have reached a point where we lost the basic concensus of that is very troubling. Denying the Holocaust is like denying gravity. Both things, the Holocaust and gravity, are factually true. We have to be able to call people out for denying that. And while denying gravity is just stupid, denying the holocaust is outright dangerous.

Taking steps against that are thus justified.

It is factually true! And yet there are many disputes over the facts in our world, and the "Fact Check" is an entire genre of opinion journalism these days, and Facebook is already applying censorship based on these opinions.

Take, for instance, this overtly right-wing partisan here, John Stossel, also writing within the past week: https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2020/10/07/fake-fac...

I have little traffick with John Stossel's work, and will not attest to any specific claims about wildfires, but Facebook's idea of "fact checking" this specific video involves groups like Climate Feedback, who are apparently empowered to lie about Professor Stefan Doerr of Swansea University reviewing his video.

This is not about Stossel, whose work I will not condone here. This how much you should trust Facebook to be an effective arbiter of Factual Truth, which should be very near zero. And there's a word for enforcing the "Factual Truth" like this: it's called Orthodoxy.

I am being downvoted by the enforcers of orthodox opinion here. Which brings me to the real reason that you shouldn't worry about a slippery slope from Facebook becoming the arbiter of Fact: Because you actually want the slippery slope to happen! You are confident that they will use their power to censor your political enemies and enforce your orthodoxies on the world.

<3

The fact that this post is grey depresses me that HN is full of Holocaust-denying, or more likely, libertrarian Ayn Rand-fetishizing jerk-offs...

Might as well vehemently argue that the earth is flat, if you think the Holocaust was faked.

I am confident that none of the people who downvoted such a comment believe the Holocaust was faked.