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>Facebook can no longer deny its moral responsibility to try to understand how cyberspace, law, and politics collide in each of the countries where it operates,

>Facebook can no longer deny its moral responsibility to try to understand how cyberspace, law, and politics collide in each of the countries where it operates, nor its responsibility to do something about it. That sentence doesn't make sense. Do something about what? How those things collide? It's very unclear what the author thinks Facebook is supposed to do, or what he thinks Facebook is actually responsible for. Is this a call to regulate posts so there's no fake news, or more, to prevent all speech that can incite bad actions? In perilous regions of the world, sometimes people are arrested for their posts, and can be seen to be connected with others on Facebook, so that they also fall under suspicion. Is Facebook supposed to keep those users safe somehow? I mean, what's the author's gripe? A better article would have mentioned that free speech, a "good thing," albeit sometimes dangerous, is powerfully fostered by Facebook. Give it some credit. It would also have been fairer if it had mentioned how difficult it is to detect and thwart bad actors who find ways to abuse any platform. (Removing trolls from small forums is hard enough.) Instead, it insinuates that Facebook is willfully indifferent. At least it isn't accused of colluding with the bad actors, as sometimes happens when US companies do business overseas.

saas_co_de 9y ago
Yes, it is interesting that the author sees no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. They are happy with a giant global monopolist controlling all speech, as long as they use that power to enforce their political agenda. That is an incredibly dangerous mindset and one that seems to be becoming more pervasive in respectable circles.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Free speech is a dangerous idea by itself, and without democracy and solid institutions, it can easily be the tool of populists and demagogues. It's not an absolute value all on its own.
  - chroem- 9y ago
    Please elaborate on how populism and democracy are two separate entities, when, by definition, both are characterized by majority rule. Are you sure you aren't confusing democracy with republicanism?
    - grzm 9y ago
      Populism stresses a distinction between "the common man" and "the elite", while democracy doesn't have this connotation.
      - chroem- 9y ago
        But why would the difference between populism/democracy even be a useful distinction to make if both served the interests of "the commom man" equally?
        grzm 9y ago
        One measure of a functioning democracy is how it approaches compromise between differing opinions and respecting the rights of those who don't agree with you. Actively pitting one group against another works against this. It can easily lead to what's known as the tyranny of the majority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
        tgragnato 9y ago
        On the other hand some people are worried about the rise of a ruling elite centralized in government, media, and universities, with a partial influence and cooperation of the military industry. The deep state. This group of decision-makers would like the public to think they operate on behalf of the interest of the state and act on the basis of "scientific principles". Arguing that this is essentialy social control and that this constitutes the basis of the "tyranny of the elite" may not be flawed. There's always the need of a balance between extreme tendencies. The liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens has its limits.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Ideals over first principles seems to be their MO
- InternetOfStuff 9y ago
  > Yes, it is interesting that the author sees no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Well, there is such a place. The U.S. However, in Germany, German rules of speech apply. As a German, I consider this a good thing. And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies -- the US were apparently quite happy with the way our constitution balances freedom and responsibility. And, corner cases aside, so am I. I prefer "responsible speech" to the US "wild west speech". This is largely cultural I'm sure. Of course once we accept that Germany can insist on their own model of speech, so can China. Or Syria. Or Thailand. Which I find hardly ideal, given that I'd like to propagate liberal (and, dare I say it, "western") values. But I don't have a decent solution to this conundrum.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > Well, there is such a place. The U.S. That is sort of the point. Once all speech transits corporate networks and those corporations are empowered to censor that speech then the public square protected by the U.S. Constitution no longer exists.
    - weepingprophet 9y ago
      But Facebook already "censors" algorithmically. You are not shown a democratic slice from a marketplace of opinions. You are given a curated echo chamber of voices algorithmically optimized to keep you engaged/enraged. The voices that rise to the top are either the ones with the deepest pockets or the ones that most activate the lizard part of our brains.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > US were apparently quite happy That's not necessarily the case. They may have accepted it as a best compromise, as they did the division of Germany into East and West.
  - RaleyField 9y ago
    > But I don't have a decent solution to this conundrum. I have. The German model is wrong for the reasons you allured to. If states can't be trusted to be arbiter of acceptable speech then they shouldn't have that job. > And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies That would be an appeal to authority and we all know US made few mistakes in the past so I'm not sure why you'd want to use that fallacy. > This is largely cultural I'm sure. Must be. Thinking that the state is always right and bossing people that disagree is historically very German.
- BurritoAlPastor 9y ago
  The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors. When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech. Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
  - chadgeidel 9y ago
    This is so true and something that is confused all the time by “free speech advocates”. It’s quite frustrating actually. I’m not happy about the amplification of speech that social networks offer, but l’m even more unhappy about the attitude of “smart” techies who shrug their shoulders and say “free speech - cant do anything about that”. We can do something about that, but that would mean solving hard problems and not creating another way to type a few hundred words into a text box.
    - leetcrew 9y ago
      what would it look like to solve the problem of "free speech"? im not asking you to give a full implementation, but i am genuinely curious what your vision for the internet would look like for a day to day user.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Correct. But private corporations can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism in how they relate to their customers. Facebook has more customers than any country has citizens so this question is of great importance to how their service continues to grow and impact the world.
    - dgzl 9y ago
      > can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism Liberal Democracy can also be authoritarian. The words you're thinking of are libertarian and authoritarian. Liberty as in free, authority as in ruled.
- walterstucco 9y ago
  > no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution - US is not the only free country in the world, what applies to US might not be desirable in other countries - have you ever considered it? - - US free speech is not a novelty, you can find the same amount of freedom across many western countries and in many of them people are more free than in the US (think about the freedom to join a communist party, apparently freedom of speech in US means you can be a nazi but not a socialist) - the very dangerous mindset is thinking that everybody should bow to the principles of the US constitution, written by the same people that thought it was a good idea to let anyone own hundreds of guns in their homes That mindset brought us the last US rigged elections -and possibly in other countries now - just because nobody in the US told Facebook "you can't be that big, it's too dangerous" You're so obsessed with freedom of speech that you have lost the ability to see that the freedom of a private actor, collecting an outrageous of private user's data, is less important than the right of the public to be protected by abusive behaviour. Such has hate speech.
- yujbbg666 9y ago
  That’s basically the university system right here (where did the leaders of these tech companies come from?) Send one off to seminary and they speak the Bible. Send one off to American business schools and they speak “sound economics” What dominates the news at night? Economy and stock market Not “we built how every many hospitals and schools we needed”. Free speech is gone. We only discuss certain ideas most of the time. TV propaganda helped soften the public up for internet propaganda That sounds dramatic but since I cut out TV (including Netflix) and social media, and only use the internet for my job as a coder or learning new math kind of tasks, thoughts in my head are very different. I’ve cut out a lot of people, but I am way way happier
duckMuppet 9y ago
Exactly. Ironically, China's has the best method of preventing all these horrific problems of speech..
platz 9y ago
The solution to big problems that Facebook creates should not be to give Facebook more power or authority (to ostensibly try to correct those issues). We need to start reclaiming power from facebook, not abdicating more to it.
supercanuck 9y ago
The article is a call to action for Facebook to work with local stakeholders in order to differentiate and treat differently local propaganda from genuine news. The author doesn't believe that Facebook commits enough resources to that effort and cites an email from Facebook that says there isn't a one-size fits all solution, which it seems, to the author, what Facebook is trying to do. The author is also saying that Facebook has a moral imperative because its lack of being involved is causing great harm to people and uses the "Rohingya" as an example. If you country is controlled by a Military Controlled "Junta, than the real name policy has a staggering different effect in Myanmar than if it is in the United States where there is a strong rule of law, for example.
- intended 9y ago
  Hah. If face book did that it would enjoy the same fate as media firms around the world - entire worlds of fact checkers, staffing costs, HR costs - and their profitability would evapirate.
  - supercanuck 9y ago
    It’s happening http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/13/its-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-internets-legal-immunity/?utm_content=buffer42b34&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/13/its-the-beginning-of-the...
narrator 9y ago
It makes more sense when it is acknowledged that "Foreign Policy" is the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of people who are used to running the world. The CFR's main concern is that Facebook allows non-traditional actors, mainly not them or organizations which they do not have control over, to have some influence on the narrative that explains world events to the public at large in each particular country. They consider this an undesirable state of affairs. Thus, Facebook should, in their opinion, work to alter its policies to maintain and even amplify the dominance with regards to narrative setting that the traditional media has given to the traditional narrative authors, which are composed of CFR members and their proxies.
- Zafira 9y ago
  > It makes more sense when it is acknowledged that "Foreign Policy" is the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of people who are used to running the world. You're thinking of "Foreign Affairs".
  - narrator 9y ago
    Oh whoops. I stand corrected. It sounded a lot like the tone of a "Foreign Affairs" article.
tim333 9y ago
Yeah the article is a bit vague. But the stuff happening in Myanmar eg ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire’ [1] helped along by facebook giving platform to people like Wirathu's "Muslims are dogs" type stuff [2] is horrible. Facebook could at least tune their algorithms for more sharing of let's be tolerant and less of let's kill all the outsiders type posts. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-atrocities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanm... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-government-facebook-rohingya.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-govern...
wutbrodo 9y ago
The whole article doesn't make any sense. It's clickbait for people whose brains have buzzword recognition swapped in for critical thinking. He talks about how falsehoods and doctored photos are being spread on Facebook, and that government officials are posted them on their pages. In the absence of Facebook, _only_ those government officials would have a platform. Why on earth would that be better? He even pays lip service to the fact that this communications platform has enabled positive forms of communication as well (ie human rights organizing), and then quickly switches back to a complaint that Facebook didn't remain optimal for the specific workflow that Cambodian human rights workers employed. His argument is fundamentally "don't give the unwashed masses a platform", but he doesn't have the courage/intellectual honesty/self-awareness to say so. I can imagine a contemporary counterpart of this idiot writing the same article about the printing press or the telephone. I've got a very low opinion of Facebook as a company, but these complaints literally boil down to "allowing people to communicate more effectively". Newsflash! People are shitty. They do shitty things with whatever technology they get their hands on. The idea that the pre-Facebook world would be more or less likely to have the norms you like only makes sense inasmuch as the norms you like are oriented around limited communication options for the masses.
- marcus_holmes 9y ago
  The author is a journalist. Facebook is anathema to journalists because without it only journalists would have a voice. With Facebook, everyone has a voice, but no-one has been trained in how to use their voice. The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    > The author is a journalist. Facebook is anathema to journalists because without it only journalists would have a voice. Yea, at some level I don't expect honesty out of journalists: there's no sainthood exam to become a journalist; they're people, and people aren't generally honest. It's just bizarre to see how credulous HN is when it comes to swallowing stuff like this (relatively) uncritically. > The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun. Thanks for pointing this out. I commented on a separate post about Facebook which was written by a "Jim Davies" and I think there was a crossed wire in there.
chiaro 9y ago
The article is fair. Wilful indifference has been the status quo for how social networks have been run for most of their existence, under a kind of techno-libertarian idealist vision of free speech. Child pornography was the first hard check against that, but it's still taken a long time for these companies to realise that they are in control of the narrative through their recommendation engines and filters and content policies and that they need to actively engage with the social responsibility that entails.

saas_co_de 9y ago

Yes, it is interesting that the author sees no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. They are happy with a giant global monopolist controlling all speech, as long as they use that power to enforce their political agenda. That is an incredibly dangerous mindset and one that seems to be becoming more pervasive in respectable circles.

barrkel 9y ago
Free speech is a dangerous idea by itself, and without democracy and solid institutions, it can easily be the tool of populists and demagogues. It's not an absolute value all on its own.
- chroem- 9y ago
  Please elaborate on how populism and democracy are two separate entities, when, by definition, both are characterized by majority rule. Are you sure you aren't confusing democracy with republicanism?
  - grzm 9y ago
    Populism stresses a distinction between "the common man" and "the elite", while democracy doesn't have this connotation.
    - chroem- 9y ago
      But why would the difference between populism/democracy even be a useful distinction to make if both served the interests of "the commom man" equally?
      - grzm 9y ago
        One measure of a functioning democracy is how it approaches compromise between differing opinions and respecting the rights of those who don't agree with you. Actively pitting one group against another works against this. It can easily lead to what's known as the tyranny of the majority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
        tgragnato 9y ago
        On the other hand some people are worried about the rise of a ruling elite centralized in government, media, and universities, with a partial influence and cooperation of the military industry. The deep state. This group of decision-makers would like the public to think they operate on behalf of the interest of the state and act on the basis of "scientific principles". Arguing that this is essentialy social control and that this constitutes the basis of the "tyranny of the elite" may not be flawed. There's always the need of a balance between extreme tendencies. The liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens has its limits.
hkmurakami 9y ago
Ideals over first principles seems to be their MO
InternetOfStuff 9y ago
> Yes, it is interesting that the author sees no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Well, there is such a place. The U.S. However, in Germany, German rules of speech apply. As a German, I consider this a good thing. And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies -- the US were apparently quite happy with the way our constitution balances freedom and responsibility. And, corner cases aside, so am I. I prefer "responsible speech" to the US "wild west speech". This is largely cultural I'm sure. Of course once we accept that Germany can insist on their own model of speech, so can China. Or Syria. Or Thailand. Which I find hardly ideal, given that I'd like to propagate liberal (and, dare I say it, "western") values. But I don't have a decent solution to this conundrum.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > Well, there is such a place. The U.S. That is sort of the point. Once all speech transits corporate networks and those corporations are empowered to censor that speech then the public square protected by the U.S. Constitution no longer exists.
  - weepingprophet 9y ago
    But Facebook already "censors" algorithmically. You are not shown a democratic slice from a marketplace of opinions. You are given a curated echo chamber of voices algorithmically optimized to keep you engaged/enraged. The voices that rise to the top are either the ones with the deepest pockets or the ones that most activate the lizard part of our brains.
- ams6110 9y ago
  > US were apparently quite happy That's not necessarily the case. They may have accepted it as a best compromise, as they did the division of Germany into East and West.
- RaleyField 9y ago
  > But I don't have a decent solution to this conundrum. I have. The German model is wrong for the reasons you allured to. If states can't be trusted to be arbiter of acceptable speech then they shouldn't have that job. > And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies That would be an appeal to authority and we all know US made few mistakes in the past so I'm not sure why you'd want to use that fallacy. > This is largely cultural I'm sure. Must be. Thinking that the state is always right and bossing people that disagree is historically very German.
BurritoAlPastor 9y ago
The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors. When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech. Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  This is so true and something that is confused all the time by “free speech advocates”. It’s quite frustrating actually. I’m not happy about the amplification of speech that social networks offer, but l’m even more unhappy about the attitude of “smart” techies who shrug their shoulders and say “free speech - cant do anything about that”. We can do something about that, but that would mean solving hard problems and not creating another way to type a few hundred words into a text box.
  - leetcrew 9y ago
    what would it look like to solve the problem of "free speech"? im not asking you to give a full implementation, but i am genuinely curious what your vision for the internet would look like for a day to day user.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Correct. But private corporations can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism in how they relate to their customers. Facebook has more customers than any country has citizens so this question is of great importance to how their service continues to grow and impact the world.
  - dgzl 9y ago
    > can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism Liberal Democracy can also be authoritarian. The words you're thinking of are libertarian and authoritarian. Liberty as in free, authority as in ruled.
walterstucco 9y ago
> no place in the modern world for the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution - US is not the only free country in the world, what applies to US might not be desirable in other countries - have you ever considered it? - - US free speech is not a novelty, you can find the same amount of freedom across many western countries and in many of them people are more free than in the US (think about the freedom to join a communist party, apparently freedom of speech in US means you can be a nazi but not a socialist) - the very dangerous mindset is thinking that everybody should bow to the principles of the US constitution, written by the same people that thought it was a good idea to let anyone own hundreds of guns in their homes That mindset brought us the last US rigged elections -and possibly in other countries now - just because nobody in the US told Facebook "you can't be that big, it's too dangerous" You're so obsessed with freedom of speech that you have lost the ability to see that the freedom of a private actor, collecting an outrageous of private user's data, is less important than the right of the public to be protected by abusive behaviour. Such has hate speech.
yujbbg666 9y ago
That’s basically the university system right here (where did the leaders of these tech companies come from?) Send one off to seminary and they speak the Bible. Send one off to American business schools and they speak “sound economics” What dominates the news at night? Economy and stock market Not “we built how every many hospitals and schools we needed”. Free speech is gone. We only discuss certain ideas most of the time. TV propaganda helped soften the public up for internet propaganda That sounds dramatic but since I cut out TV (including Netflix) and social media, and only use the internet for my job as a coder or learning new math kind of tasks, thoughts in my head are very different. I’ve cut out a lot of people, but I am way way happier

duckMuppet 9y ago

Exactly. Ironically, China's has the best method of preventing all these horrific problems of speech..

platz 9y ago

The solution to big problems that Facebook creates should not be to give Facebook more power or authority (to ostensibly try to correct those issues). We need to start reclaiming power from facebook, not abdicating more to it.

supercanuck 9y ago

The article is a call to action for Facebook to work with local stakeholders in order to differentiate and treat differently local propaganda from genuine news. The author doesn't believe that Facebook commits enough resources to that effort and cites an email from Facebook that says there isn't a one-size fits all solution, which it seems, to the author, what Facebook is trying to do. The author is also saying that Facebook has a moral imperative because its lack of being involved is causing great harm to people and uses the "Rohingya" as an example. If you country is controlled by a Military Controlled "Junta, than the real name policy has a staggering different effect in Myanmar than if it is in the United States where there is a strong rule of law, for example.

intended 9y ago
Hah. If face book did that it would enjoy the same fate as media firms around the world - entire worlds of fact checkers, staffing costs, HR costs - and their profitability would evapirate.
- supercanuck 9y ago
  It’s happening http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/13/its-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-internets-legal-immunity/?utm_content=buffer42b34&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/13/its-the-beginning-of-the...

narrator 9y ago

It makes more sense when it is acknowledged that "Foreign Policy" is the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of people who are used to running the world. The CFR's main concern is that Facebook allows non-traditional actors, mainly not them or organizations which they do not have control over, to have some influence on the narrative that explains world events to the public at large in each particular country. They consider this an undesirable state of affairs. Thus, Facebook should, in their opinion, work to alter its policies to maintain and even amplify the dominance with regards to narrative setting that the traditional media has given to the traditional narrative authors, which are composed of CFR members and their proxies.

Zafira 9y ago
> It makes more sense when it is acknowledged that "Foreign Policy" is the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of people who are used to running the world. You're thinking of "Foreign Affairs".
- narrator 9y ago
  Oh whoops. I stand corrected. It sounded a lot like the tone of a "Foreign Affairs" article.

tim333 9y ago

Yeah the article is a bit vague. But the stuff happening in Myanmar eg ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire’ [1] helped along by facebook giving platform to people like Wirathu's "Muslims are dogs" type stuff [2] is horrible. Facebook could at least tune their algorithms for more sharing of let's be tolerant and less of let's kill all the outsiders type posts. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-atrocities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanm... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-government-facebook-rohingya.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-govern...

wutbrodo 9y ago

The whole article doesn't make any sense. It's clickbait for people whose brains have buzzword recognition swapped in for critical thinking. He talks about how falsehoods and doctored photos are being spread on Facebook, and that government officials are posted them on their pages. In the absence of Facebook, _only_ those government officials would have a platform. Why on earth would that be better? He even pays lip service to the fact that this communications platform has enabled positive forms of communication as well (ie human rights organizing), and then quickly switches back to a complaint that Facebook didn't remain optimal for the specific workflow that Cambodian human rights workers employed. His argument is fundamentally "don't give the unwashed masses a platform", but he doesn't have the courage/intellectual honesty/self-awareness to say so. I can imagine a contemporary counterpart of this idiot writing the same article about the printing press or the telephone. I've got a very low opinion of Facebook as a company, but these complaints literally boil down to "allowing people to communicate more effectively". Newsflash! People are shitty. They do shitty things with whatever technology they get their hands on. The idea that the pre-Facebook world would be more or less likely to have the norms you like only makes sense inasmuch as the norms you like are oriented around limited communication options for the masses.

marcus_holmes 9y ago
The author is a journalist. Facebook is anathema to journalists because without it only journalists would have a voice. With Facebook, everyone has a voice, but no-one has been trained in how to use their voice. The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > The author is a journalist. Facebook is anathema to journalists because without it only journalists would have a voice. Yea, at some level I don't expect honesty out of journalists: there's no sainthood exam to become a journalist; they're people, and people aren't generally honest. It's just bizarre to see how credulous HN is when it comes to swallowing stuff like this (relatively) uncritically. > The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun. Thanks for pointing this out. I commented on a separate post about Facebook which was written by a "Jim Davies" and I think there was a crossed wire in there.

chiaro 9y ago

The article is fair. Wilful indifference has been the status quo for how social networks have been run for most of their existence, under a kind of techno-libertarian idealist vision of free speech. Child pornography was the first hard check against that, but it's still taken a long time for these companies to realise that they are in control of the narrative through their recommendation engines and filters and content policies and that they need to actively engage with the social responsibility that entails.