> ...the US criminal justice system is overwhelmingly preoccupied with procedure and process, often at the expense of justice. This myopia is the product of a technocratic bureaucracy.
> The contemporary incarnation of the peculiar mindset of Anglo-American jurisprudence leads to the question, “Were the rights of all parties, as enumerated by the law, protected?”, eclipsing the much larger issue: “Is this outcome compatible with justice?”
While these comments are in reference to the legal system, I think they are equally applicable to the mindset pervading the oversight of today's tech world.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210308014253/https://likewise.a...
Note - the author is an intermittent HN user, abalashov.
> "As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as 'death to the Russian invaders.' We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
> "Death to the Russian invaders"
"Invaders" is the properly distinguishing keyword here. So, that makes your comment conflicted.
That doesn't negate the fact a non-corporal entity is making big decisions for groups of people, while also holding their shareholder's value (another group of people) in mind.
One way to break conflicted or dissonant views is to ask direct questions about the conflicted statements. Where others have done that, you appear to have evaded answering the question.
> Do we really need to ask that question?
Yes, we really do!
Of course one could argue selling drugs is causing harm, but choice of ingestion of the drug is a distinct and challenging topic in and of its own. Also, the two can't be conflated (well) and the origin of the story was Facebook doing X, where X isn't equal to drugs.
I'm also thinking that enforcement against selling drugs is a governmental view, not a societal view. So, a group representing the larger group thinks "drugs are bad", whereas the larger group doesn't hold that consensus based view. It's the group speaking for the larger group holding that view.
In the case of Facebook's action, Facebook is deciding whether or not the larger group can use certain terminology, or not. Facebook is not deciding whether to address the "occupying forces" themselves, through direct action, like a government would do for the larger group.
Maybe Facebook is like a bunch of Mexican gangsters, though!
I don't see how that definition is incompatible with what many of the gangs are doing to southern Texas and California.
Just because some people (a subset of a given group and their consensus on topics) think Mexican gangster are occupying forces, doesn't actually make them occupying forces. It just means those people are incorrect in their assumptions about what is true, or not, as viewed by the governing group, in a given area.
You’re welcome to try it, but please forgive the Ukrainians if they take the common sense route.
By the way, there’s a reason we admire Tank Man, but we don’t know his identity.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/3/un-general-assembly-...
To be clear, I support the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves against foreign aggression. I just think these constantly shifting Facebook censorship policies are ridiculous.
It’s not really a foreign concept. We don’t deny somebody sunlight or air because they do something we don’t like (we as in non government entities - governments do deny people “air”). The world would be a better place if businesses operated as close to a natural resource as possible and left politics to politicians.
It’s dumb luck that sunlight isn’t provided by some corporation. Systems like that are what we should strive for.
Which laws?
If Russia says that all posts that call the "Special Military Operation" a war are illegal and Ukraine says they are legal, which is correct?
A post breaks a law in 100 countries, but does not break the law in 20 countries. Should all 100 countries file their own removal process? Should there be an army of reviewers who are knowledgeable about all laws reviewing all posts? What about that confusion that different people from different regions are seeing different timelines for the same user.
The US has Federal Laws, State Laws, and City Laws. All of these are laws of the land. No company can keep up with all local laws.
"Breaking the law" is highly subjective by itself. Take the US for example, we have "Freedom of Speech," but that does not protect all speech. Many of these cases go to court taking years to determine if something was or was not protected. Should meta defer all moderation to the legal court system?
What you are suggesting makes sense in a vacuum, but cannot exist in reality.
I would love to see the allied governments talk more about trade pacts, and economic issues.
As for getting your service blocked, look at the GDPR for example. People will self censor themselves entirely if you are important enough. Out of mere fear of being sued over cookies, US regional media sites stopped displaying in Europe voluntarily. That’s something tin pot dictators couldn’t do even when they were clear the content of US news sites was illegal to the point of being punishable by death.
The idea that a company could do something blatantly illegal in my country because it’s legal someplace else is just crazy. Teslas are made in the US, should they follow US road rules when in left hand driving countries?
Such a stance would negate any claim of bettering humanity and represent moral injury to engineers you ask to possess such a hateful species of neutrality.
Giving companies 1st amendment rights was ridiculous, but then giving them protections beyond the 1st amendment that no normal person gets was giving them too much power to control speech in society.
I don't see any easy answer here. I'm as uncomfortable with the amount of influence companies like Facebook yield as anyone but most of the "easy" solutions would, in my opinion, make the situation far worse.
The "they can't do it at scale" argument applies to ICS, but why shouldn't users be subject to liability when they echo something?
We live in an approximation of the infinite monkeys with typewriters. It's relatively easy to find someone judgement-proof who has written pretty much anything that you'd like. Folks with huge audiences can use that to be as defamatory as they'd like without risking liability.
The internet is the de-facto public square, there has to be a public forum that's under the control of the public.
That's not what's happening now by Russia, since Russia has no interest in promoting democracy and considers it a threat. Russia has more casualties in a couple of weeks than the combined military interventions over 20 years by the west.
There's a very BIG difference.
There's really no hypocrisy. Western principles are: freedom, liberty, democracy, individual rights and equal opportunity for all above all.
This explains much everything pretty well. War against any country that goes against these principles is okay. War in order to try and bring those principles to others or protect them is okay.
Similarly, social media used in ways that could put those principles at risk, is not okay. Social media that is used in ways that supports and promotes these principles is okay.
There are a few cases where it is hard to tell if social media is used for or against those principles, and these get tricky, but there's still no hypocrisy. The challenge is understanding if it is for or against the principles.
For example, it is hard to know if implying that the US elections were corrupted and that's why Trump lost is for or against those principles. If the elections were not corrupted, then that idea is against those principles, it is itself the corrupted idea trying to geopardize democracy. But if it is true that the elections were corrupted, then that idea is in fact fighting to protect those principles.
The same thing applies here. Whatever message Facebook in the end feels is helping the principles will be allowed, if right now it's helping Ukraine motivate its troops, rally support and defend itself, then that's going to be the policies. It's all logical from the principles. Ukraine is seen as fighting for its right to democracy, liberty and freedom, and Russia is seen as fighting against that.
Let's assume for a second, that FB do not relax their rules for this conflict. Then they would have to ban a whole sleuth of Ukrainian accounts, including many government accounts such as Ministry of Defense, and probably even Zelensky. You don't have to stretch your imagination to see what the headlines would look like in that case -- "Facebook bans Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression" etc. In a sense, FB was a facing a catch-22 situation, where it's just lose-lose for them, and they had to make a call to swallow the "less poisonous" pill.
Contrast this situation with American war efforts in the middle east and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, where they faced no such conundrum.