The Rohingya genocide was fomented on Facebook. Facebook ignored dire warnings for years from human rights organizations including Amnesty international, Humanrightswatch.org and the UN.
The only thing I see that's wrong about this is that I don't pay the EFF to tell private companies what to do. I pay them to stop the government from turning fascist.
They're not wrong about Facebook being a POS and these new policies making it moreso, though.
Out of curiosity, do you propose any remedy for companies being acting badly? What would you do, if anything, to curb companies doing things like what FB does? What sort of organizations have a role in watching over private companies, informing the public about their activities, and provide guidance on corrective actions?
I haven't been able to think of solutions that aren't worse than what they're doing. I'm extremely wary of the government forcing Facebook to behave a certain way because of the First Amendment.
For profit companies, especially facebook will just follow whatever is popular at the time, they have no morality at all. They had no morality when treating people like absolute shit under oppressive moderation and censoring people like crazy and they will have no morality while ignoring abuses on the platform while using current politics as an excuse to spend less on moderation.
The EFF however is at least supposed to stand for basic human rights. Like free speech. At least it got a mention in the title, but frankly the author of this article doesn't care at all about it, and doesn't understand the basic principle of why it's important to protect the speech of people they disagree with. So taking a plain view, they're a hateful anti-human rights activist. Not sure why i'd listen to what an anti human rights activist has to say.
> So taking a plain view, they're a hateful anti-human rights activist. Not sure why i'd listen to what an anti human rights activist has to say.
You are posting this in a thread and a story about Meta literally saying a certain class of people are considered second class citizens and thus it's perfectly okay to sling slurs and harassment at them.
You do realize this, right? Like you are saying that the company with zero morality telling it's users it's okay to harass people is better than the EFF calling them out. Like if you actually stand for human rights you should be horrified at Meta's actions.
Again, how is any of this relevant exactly to Meta explicitly condoning harassment against people they seem second class citizens? None of what you said has any bearing on my argument at all beyond being a generic free speech argument.
Tolerance is not a moral imperative, it’s a peace treaty. If you don’t participate in the peace treaty of tolerance with others, tolerance won’t be extended to you.
I guess I'm pretty dumb cuz when I hear about the government asking Facebook to censor stuff and they do, sorry, when I hear about the government asking Facebook to kick someone they don't like out of the party because they're saying inconvenient things about the government and they do, it sounds like the government censorship.
FB was doing this on their own during covid, the government simply pointed FB towards content they found concerning w.r.t. public health policy during a global pandemic. FB then made their own calls for their content moderation policy
The general idea is that social media platforms especially at the scale of twitter and facebook are not private parties but public squares, in which free speech must be protected. I think this is obviously true, but there is of course the question of how exactly to draw the line between a large public square and a small private platform. There are many good possible answers.
It could be delimited by user count, by moderation style, by liability accepted (section 230 is frequently brought up as an option). In any case, if you think a billion user platform is a private party, you are plainly wrong.
It's a bit telling that you think a a 6 panel comic is "covering it in detail". If you want an even more simplified version of how this can go, free speech is a human right, and given that you're against free speech we can limit yours and make everyone happy. I'm more than happy to let people play by their own rules in this case.
That is a line pushed by the owners of these privately owned platforms.
But they really are not public squares. They are not publicly owned or managed in the best interests of the users. They are corporate money-making machines. Don't be fooled.
I agree that they are not publicly owned or managed decently, but regardless these are the large publicly available communications platforms that people use these days, in massive numbers. Therefore repressing speech here causes a violation of free speech. That is what's important. "But they are run like shit and against the user's interests" Doesn't somehow justify even more repression.
In a sense, what these companies invested into is capturing the public square, capturing speech, because controlling it allows profitable advert injection, manipulation and generic power. But their awful motives don't mean they were unsuccessful. They were, they have the public square now.
I don't dispute they are massively used and important communication tools. The analogy to a public square is deeply flawed though.
A public space is not a broadcast medium. If I don't want to hear the crazy person shouting, I just have to walk a short distance away. The people who are presented to me are not chosen by some algorithm under the control of the space's owner. I can largely control my interaction with others. If someone is being threatening to others in a public space, then the police will arrest them, and nobody would call that censorship.
They never seem to be grumpy about spam getting deleted.
It’s always “why can’t I be mean to people without consequences?”
Or, “I should be able to be racist/ableist/discriminatory and you have to host my vitriol or else you are violating my freedom of speech, private company!!”
I would love to be able to cure the problem of people being mean on the internet.
I think it's a million dollar idea, if it's possible.
I think it can be done, but it seems that incivility is seen as more profitable, or something?
Twitter Japan, for example, is known for being fairly civil. I think even Elon Musk, at one point, said that Twitter Japan was a model for all of Twitter. Go Elon!
Then Elon took over and actively, it seems to me, promoted incivility. I think he figured that making Twitter, now X, more controversial would promote engagement. But Twitter Japan showed that people could engage civilly and didn't need controversy to promote engagement.
I suspect had Elon chose to make Twitter/X more like Twitter Japan, he wouldn't have lost his advertisers (which apparently were a major percentage of revenue).
But the past is history, and Twitter/X is what it is, and is likely to stay that way I think.
A very good comic. But it would be even better and more accurate if it changed "the people" in
"It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."
to "the unelected multinational corporation". Anyway I'll go tell Human Rights Watch [1] that it's just free association in action and that if Palestinians want to have their stories heard they should just build their own competing media platform with global reach. And the EU Commission should also have a copy of that comic sent to them [2].
Yes, if I kick someone out of my house for being a jerk, and if Google and Facebook globally censor a story, it's the same, because in both cases it's done by people. Thank you for this insightful contribution.
Correct. It is the same, legally, and with respect to the first amendment to the constitution. You cannot force a private (read non-government) entity to endorse, publish, promote, host, etc. anything.
You're free to disagree. But you're not free to force me or HN or anyone else to host your disagreement. To do so would be a violation of their free speech.
Would love to see votes of case law where individuals/people/conpanies have successfully sued/prosecuted/convicted for violating the first amendment rights of other people/entities/companies etc.
I bet spammers would love to argue that deleting their Facebook posts is a violation of their first amendment rights.
2021 article on how FB's response to CSAM were inadequate: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59063768
(2021) FB creates extremists, and that's OK with them? https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radical...
(2024) drug sales https://nypost.com/2024/03/16/us-news/feds-investigating-met...
and on and on. It's hard to believe their mitigations are anything more than legal facades to protect them from maximum culpability.
The emperor may be choosing to wear no clothes, but it was a sheer nighty before.
For everyone else? It’s a feature.
The cruelty is the point.
The only thing I see that's wrong about this is that I don't pay the EFF to tell private companies what to do. I pay them to stop the government from turning fascist.
They're not wrong about Facebook being a POS and these new policies making it moreso, though.
What is a massive red flag to me is the government telling a business what they can and can't publish. Putin, for example, loves to do that.
Still recommended viewing?
I wouldn't give the EFF a dime.
The EFF however is at least supposed to stand for basic human rights. Like free speech. At least it got a mention in the title, but frankly the author of this article doesn't care at all about it, and doesn't understand the basic principle of why it's important to protect the speech of people they disagree with. So taking a plain view, they're a hateful anti-human rights activist. Not sure why i'd listen to what an anti human rights activist has to say.
You are posting this in a thread and a story about Meta literally saying a certain class of people are considered second class citizens and thus it's perfectly okay to sling slurs and harassment at them.
You do realize this, right? Like you are saying that the company with zero morality telling it's users it's okay to harass people is better than the EFF calling them out. Like if you actually stand for human rights you should be horrified at Meta's actions.
If you don’t kick assholes out of your party, the party becomes less fun, and then there are only assholes in the party.
Yes, it is in fact targeting specific people: those who make the party less fun and protecting those who are just trying to have fun at a party.
https://x.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873?s=20
https://www.boredpanda.com/bar-bartender-nazi-punk-iamragesp...
Tolerance is not a moral imperative, it’s a peace treaty. If you don’t participate in the peace treaty of tolerance with others, tolerance won’t be extended to you.
Xkcd covered this in detail, what a decade ago?
https://xkcd.com/1357/
It could be delimited by user count, by moderation style, by liability accepted (section 230 is frequently brought up as an option). In any case, if you think a billion user platform is a private party, you are plainly wrong.
It's a bit telling that you think a a 6 panel comic is "covering it in detail". If you want an even more simplified version of how this can go, free speech is a human right, and given that you're against free speech we can limit yours and make everyone happy. I'm more than happy to let people play by their own rules in this case.
But they really are not public squares. They are not publicly owned or managed in the best interests of the users. They are corporate money-making machines. Don't be fooled.
In a sense, what these companies invested into is capturing the public square, capturing speech, because controlling it allows profitable advert injection, manipulation and generic power. But their awful motives don't mean they were unsuccessful. They were, they have the public square now.
A public space is not a broadcast medium. If I don't want to hear the crazy person shouting, I just have to walk a short distance away. The people who are presented to me are not chosen by some algorithm under the control of the space's owner. I can largely control my interaction with others. If someone is being threatening to others in a public space, then the police will arrest them, and nobody would call that censorship.
It’s always “why can’t I be mean to people without consequences?”
Or, “I should be able to be racist/ableist/discriminatory and you have to host my vitriol or else you are violating my freedom of speech, private company!!”
I think it's a million dollar idea, if it's possible.
I think it can be done, but it seems that incivility is seen as more profitable, or something?
Twitter Japan, for example, is known for being fairly civil. I think even Elon Musk, at one point, said that Twitter Japan was a model for all of Twitter. Go Elon!
Then Elon took over and actively, it seems to me, promoted incivility. I think he figured that making Twitter, now X, more controversial would promote engagement. But Twitter Japan showed that people could engage civilly and didn't need controversy to promote engagement.
I suspect had Elon chose to make Twitter/X more like Twitter Japan, he wouldn't have lost his advertisers (which apparently were a major percentage of revenue).
But the past is history, and Twitter/X is what it is, and is likely to stay that way I think.
"It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."
to "the unelected multinational corporation". Anyway I'll go tell Human Rights Watch [1] that it's just free association in action and that if Palestinians want to have their stories heard they should just build their own competing media platform with global reach. And the EU Commission should also have a copy of that comic sent to them [2].
[1] https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/eu-energetically...
A bar, or a music festival is also possibly an unelected multinational corporation. Still can kick people out.
I wonder, why can’t I go into the lobby of the Sony building in NYC and stand in my soapbox and rant about TimeCube?
Technically, my blog is run by an unelected multinational corporation… I guess when I delete spam, I’m censoring, right?
It’s just not that hard people.
Facebook is t the government.
It’s their choice.
Morally equivalent? Heck no.
I bet spammers would love to argue that deleting their Facebook posts is a violation of their first amendment rights.