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I'm a Romanian and I can confirm that posts and accounts have been blocked, probably because of being reported by the other side. On the other hand, folks, thi

I'm a Romanian and I can confirm that posts and accounts have been blocked, probably because of being reported by the other side. On the other hand, folks, this is a little reminder that censorship is a doubly edged knife ;-) So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it. A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informing and coordinating citizens to fight injustice. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can tell you that no evolution or revolution can happen because of Facebook, only regression. Facebook is poison.

wavefunction 9y ago
I think the cost borne by propagandists from censorship is higher than those organizing protests like those Romania appears to be facing. Censoring modern propaganda greatly limits the damage it can cause, while protestors have more traditional ways of organizing their protests. I am not a fan of censorship but it appears some fraction of credulous humanity requires it to maintain at least a tenuous grasp of reality.
- Varcht 9y ago
  The "propagandists" have unlimited resources compared to the individuals, filtering them on FB is a small battle in a big war. These individuals' "reality" is much more immediately in peril than some perceived danger of your reality being overwhelmed by propaganda. Teach people discernment if you are truly concerned.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  Who decides what constitutes a "tenuous grasp on reality"? Is it those who said that Saddam had WMD? The ones who said that the Democratic primary wasn't rigged? The ones who said that it was ridiculous that the US government was spying on its own citizens? If the censors had their way, all of the above may very well passed into history as undisputed facts.
  - marcoperaza 9y ago
    The ruling class decides of course. That's what all the hand-wringing over populist 'fake news' is about. The politicians, media, think tanks, and other powerful special interests are used to being the arbiters of truth, only allowing effective public debate on the narrow disagreements between them. They are as dishonest as anyone else, but have the resources and sophistication to be less crude about it. Instead of outright lies, they usually misrepresent the truth with selective emphasis, rhetorical tricks, and omitted facts and arguments. Now the internet threatens their control of information and they are trying to use their remaining power to protect their dominance before it's too late.
    - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
      That's exactly right. The powers-that-be are absolutely terrified that they have lost control of the narrative. They have had almost total control over the "public debate" since 1917 when Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, the first official federal propaganda arm. Ever since they have used a variety of legal and illegal (from the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 to Cointelpro) means to keep an iron grip on public discourse. With the of the internet came the (mostly) free, unfettered, uncontrolled dissemination and spread of information. While this has been of utmost concern to the ruling class for several years now, their total failure with the collapse of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which had the complete support of every establishment propaganda arm, was a real shot over the bow (that their defeat came at the hands of a corrupt, carnival barker was salt in the wounds). These attempts at censorship and information control are a last gasp to control the narrative. Unfortunately, the outcome is still very uncertain, with the power of the propaganda of the ruling classes on full display among the multitudes who welcome their calls for censorship of "fake news".
- hiram112 9y ago
  A couple of good replies have already been written, but I'll add another, using the new gold-standard often used to advocate censorship: The Russians pushing out disinformation to help Trump win the US election. Millions of Americans weren't instantly converted from open-border advocates to wanting to build a Wall and limit immigration, thus supporting Trump, because of a few Facebook ads. Propaganda doesn't work in a vacuum. You already need an actual issue to be its catalyst. And censoring anyone who speaks of it, even if it is in an exaggerated way, is probably better in the long run than letting it fester until it really blows up with much more force. I would same thing for this new idea of hate speech that some people prefer to ban.
  - nkurz 9y ago
    And censoring anyone who speaks of it, even if it is in an exaggerated way, is probably better in the long run than letting it fester until it really blows up with much more force. I'm guessing that this was mangled in an edit and some essential word was left out. Or are you saying censorship is the opposite of "letting it fester", and that if we can prevent issues from being spoken about we can prevent them from ever exploding?
    - hiram112 9y ago
      Oh thanks - I did edit it, leaving it even more confusing. I think censoring ideas will lead to groups moving to echo chambers where whatever issue they have, is magnified into something far more absurd than the original issue probably is. And that inevitably leads to violence. It's better for society to allow open debate, even if its uncomfortable, than to just ban users or groups, make ad-hominem attacks, and hope it goes away.
oblio 9y ago
As the Romanian government I'd be careful... Romania has a well developed IT sector (especially for a developing country) and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. I'm also willing to bet that these people as a vast majority weren't voters for the party currently in power. And the Romanian government is far from having NSA's IT prowess (yes, I know that they botched up quite a few things, but you have to keep in mind that the NSA & US government are playing at an entirely different level than most countries in the world except for maybe China, Russia and 3-4 others). At least on the IT front things the blow back could an order of magnitude bigger than what they're trying to do, clumsily.
- Tade0 9y ago
  > and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. Interesting, would you like share some more information on that?
  - snowpanda 9y ago
    My guess is that something about this got changed (2016): https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentives-software-programmers/ https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentiv...
    - Varcht 9y ago
      In November that did change. Micro-enterprise tax It is no longer possible for any company to opt for a profit tax payer status (16% profit tax rate applied to its taxable profits) instead of a micro-enterprise tax payer (1% or 3% tax rate applied to its revenue), even if the company has share capital of more than RON 45,000.
  - mihaifm 9y ago
    It's a new fiscal code that aims to change the way social contributions are payed, but has the side effect of lowering the salaries in the IT sector by about 6%. Many companies are rising salaries to make up for this, but the measure already annoyed a lot of people.
joering2 9y ago
bad_user please use VPN in your country! And to everyone else, Facebook had tremendous oportunity to stand their/our ground and pissed the FTC off with some sort of minute/minutes/hour blackout in terms of net neutrality. Where was Zuckerberg then??? I know when you read it online its just a news; masses won't care. Instead of your profile, if Zuck would put a black page with number to your local representative and inform it will stay for 10 minutes, imagine the outbreak - FTC president would be out of door by then. Instead Zuck did nothing. Truly despicable that was a moment to create history in the name of freedom that Zuck praise his record on. As bad user said -- Facebook IS poison.
andrepd 9y ago
>A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informing and coordinating citizens to fight injustice. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can tell you that no evolution or revolution can happen because of Facebook, only regression. Facebook is poison. I'll add to that. The internet is a great tool for coordinating citizens, spreading information, and fighting injustice. Having facebook, or any similar monolithic capitalist behemoth, in charge of controlling the flow of that information, is a BIG regression. The internet was going to be great. How did it come to this :(
- campuscodi 9y ago
  Russia
  - aportnoy 9y ago
    Russia is definitely the reason behind every problem in the US, including erectile dysfunction, Facebook, the election, and hurricane Harvey
    - seppin 9y ago
      The person pouring petrol on a fire didn't start the fire.
      - SXX 9y ago
        Think where that petrol has come from. Western world indirectly supported corruption and totalitarianism by allowing investment of stolen government money for decades. All oligarchs and families of Russian officials are now citizens of the US / EU and they're your problem.
- taurath 9y ago
  The internet just increases the amount of information flow - what one does with it reflects whatever their values are.
mkempe 9y ago
For now you may think facebook merely facilitates regression. Eventually we'll see them enable repression. The gap is narrow, when one decides to manipulate people by manipulating the news feed they see as well as selling screen space in that "news feed". Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box. When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.
- hrasyid 9y ago
  I don't understand, how is missing your friend's post related to enabling repression?
  - mkempe 9y ago
    It's an example of manipulation. Facebook removed an important item from my "news feed."
    - hrasyid 9y ago
      Did they arrange it so that you didn't see that post (why would they?), or did you just miss seeing it, or is it just ranked poorly by their algorithm? Seems like there's a lot of possible explanations, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it's Facebook's fault/
      - yorwba 9y ago
        An obituary is not going to get shared widely or get many clicks (unless it's a celebrity), so obviously it will be ranked poorly by Facebook's algorithm. But it is Facebook's choice to rank content based on click rates and virality, so in a way they did arrange it so that post would not be seen. "Our algorithm did it." does not absolve anyone of their responsibility in choosing to use that algorithm.
      - mrighele 9y ago
elandybarr 9y ago
Mass reporting is a common censorship tactic on Facebook. There are Facebook groups of Muslim activists who mass report critics of the religion to trigger autobans.
knowThySelfx 9y ago
I agree, FB/Twitter etc, filters or blocks content which doesn't suite their agenda. Saying from experience as well.
knowaveragejoe 9y ago
I really don't like that "fake news" became this term that means "news I disagree with". What it was describing at the time it was coming into popular usage, it mostly described "news" sites that in many cases used scripts to generate their content, and for the most part preyed upon far right sentiments. So yeah, we shouldn't censor "fake news" on the premise that it is something we disagree with, but rather whether it is easily verified as false(as many of these were).
- losteric 9y ago
  "Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news. It's a dangerous phrase, trivially dismissing real news based on emotions and critically attacking propaganda based on facts. Just call things as they are. News, lies, propaganda...
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > "Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news. No, it came into popular usage to refer to propaganda supporting Trump which closely followed what RAND Corp. labelled the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda strategy used by Russia. It was subsequently co-opted by Trump in the way you describe, but that's not how it came into popular usage.
    - RyanZAG 9y ago
      No, you're completely politicizing an issue based on your warped world view. That's just as damaging as fake news. Here's an article from 2014 discussing fake news: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-internet-fake-news-problem/SABBRta88xgqwEPY86oP3M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-intern... Here's an article from 2011 discussing the measures taken against fake news (to little effect) since 2006: https://www.freepress.net/blog/11/12/21/truth-about-fake-news https://www.freepress.net/blog/11/12/21/truth-about-fake-new...
      - 9y ago
adavidoaiei 9y ago
wtf, I am romanian and I posted on all international social networks about this event, It's not only Facebook in this world, be creative guys please.
mlok 9y ago
You are right. We should be wary of Censorship and Facebook is poison. But : Facebook is a social media. Social Medias are not limited to Facebook. Example : https://riseup.net/en https://riseup.net/en
ixtli 9y ago
It sucks that a company is suppressing the will of the people because it's greedy. That said, > So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it. This line of thinking doesn't lead to a society that tries to make things better than they were before. Personally I prefer reminding people that democracy is a 365 day/ year job. Don't avoid doing things because bad people exist in the world: instead, commit to lifelong stewardship of your community along with your fellow community members such that there will always be a conscientious group of people to try to keep bad things from happening.
zaarn 9y ago
It kind of makes me hope that federated networks like Mastodon catch on more. Hugely popular in Japan for not to dissimilar reasons; US Companies not respecting foreign culture and country.
LoSboccacc 9y ago
> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? this has been known since a while, giving power to censor is giving out power to control the population thinking - it always come in the name of the greater good and it always get abused half generation later.
lerpa 9y ago
No we all know Facebook and Google are both trustfully truth providers, that actually has been their goal all along. And if they don't know, we can always count on Snopes to tell it like it is.

wavefunction 9y ago

I think the cost borne by propagandists from censorship is higher than those organizing protests like those Romania appears to be facing. Censoring modern propaganda greatly limits the damage it can cause, while protestors have more traditional ways of organizing their protests. I am not a fan of censorship but it appears some fraction of credulous humanity requires it to maintain at least a tenuous grasp of reality.

Varcht 9y ago
The "propagandists" have unlimited resources compared to the individuals, filtering them on FB is a small battle in a big war. These individuals' "reality" is much more immediately in peril than some perceived danger of your reality being overwhelmed by propaganda. Teach people discernment if you are truly concerned.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
Who decides what constitutes a "tenuous grasp on reality"? Is it those who said that Saddam had WMD? The ones who said that the Democratic primary wasn't rigged? The ones who said that it was ridiculous that the US government was spying on its own citizens? If the censors had their way, all of the above may very well passed into history as undisputed facts.
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  The ruling class decides of course. That's what all the hand-wringing over populist 'fake news' is about. The politicians, media, think tanks, and other powerful special interests are used to being the arbiters of truth, only allowing effective public debate on the narrow disagreements between them. They are as dishonest as anyone else, but have the resources and sophistication to be less crude about it. Instead of outright lies, they usually misrepresent the truth with selective emphasis, rhetorical tricks, and omitted facts and arguments. Now the internet threatens their control of information and they are trying to use their remaining power to protect their dominance before it's too late.
  - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
    That's exactly right. The powers-that-be are absolutely terrified that they have lost control of the narrative. They have had almost total control over the "public debate" since 1917 when Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, the first official federal propaganda arm. Ever since they have used a variety of legal and illegal (from the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 to Cointelpro) means to keep an iron grip on public discourse. With the of the internet came the (mostly) free, unfettered, uncontrolled dissemination and spread of information. While this has been of utmost concern to the ruling class for several years now, their total failure with the collapse of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which had the complete support of every establishment propaganda arm, was a real shot over the bow (that their defeat came at the hands of a corrupt, carnival barker was salt in the wounds). These attempts at censorship and information control are a last gasp to control the narrative. Unfortunately, the outcome is still very uncertain, with the power of the propaganda of the ruling classes on full display among the multitudes who welcome their calls for censorship of "fake news".
hiram112 9y ago
A couple of good replies have already been written, but I'll add another, using the new gold-standard often used to advocate censorship: The Russians pushing out disinformation to help Trump win the US election. Millions of Americans weren't instantly converted from open-border advocates to wanting to build a Wall and limit immigration, thus supporting Trump, because of a few Facebook ads. Propaganda doesn't work in a vacuum. You already need an actual issue to be its catalyst. And censoring anyone who speaks of it, even if it is in an exaggerated way, is probably better in the long run than letting it fester until it really blows up with much more force. I would same thing for this new idea of hate speech that some people prefer to ban.
- nkurz 9y ago
  And censoring anyone who speaks of it, even if it is in an exaggerated way, is probably better in the long run than letting it fester until it really blows up with much more force. I'm guessing that this was mangled in an edit and some essential word was left out. Or are you saying censorship is the opposite of "letting it fester", and that if we can prevent issues from being spoken about we can prevent them from ever exploding?
  - hiram112 9y ago
    Oh thanks - I did edit it, leaving it even more confusing. I think censoring ideas will lead to groups moving to echo chambers where whatever issue they have, is magnified into something far more absurd than the original issue probably is. And that inevitably leads to violence. It's better for society to allow open debate, even if its uncomfortable, than to just ban users or groups, make ad-hominem attacks, and hope it goes away.

oblio 9y ago

As the Romanian government I'd be careful... Romania has a well developed IT sector (especially for a developing country) and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. I'm also willing to bet that these people as a vast majority weren't voters for the party currently in power. And the Romanian government is far from having NSA's IT prowess (yes, I know that they botched up quite a few things, but you have to keep in mind that the NSA & US government are playing at an entirely different level than most countries in the world except for maybe China, Russia and 3-4 others). At least on the IT front things the blow back could an order of magnitude bigger than what they're trying to do, clumsily.

Tade0 9y ago
> and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. Interesting, would you like share some more information on that?
- snowpanda 9y ago
  My guess is that something about this got changed (2016): https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentives-software-programmers/ https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentiv...
  - Varcht 9y ago
    In November that did change. Micro-enterprise tax It is no longer possible for any company to opt for a profit tax payer status (16% profit tax rate applied to its taxable profits) instead of a micro-enterprise tax payer (1% or 3% tax rate applied to its revenue), even if the company has share capital of more than RON 45,000.
- mihaifm 9y ago
  It's a new fiscal code that aims to change the way social contributions are payed, but has the side effect of lowering the salaries in the IT sector by about 6%. Many companies are rising salaries to make up for this, but the measure already annoyed a lot of people.

joering2 9y ago

bad_user please use VPN in your country! And to everyone else, Facebook had tremendous oportunity to stand their/our ground and pissed the FTC off with some sort of minute/minutes/hour blackout in terms of net neutrality. Where was Zuckerberg then??? I know when you read it online its just a news; masses won't care. Instead of your profile, if Zuck would put a black page with number to your local representative and inform it will stay for 10 minutes, imagine the outbreak - FTC president would be out of door by then. Instead Zuck did nothing. Truly despicable that was a moment to create history in the name of freedom that Zuck praise his record on. As bad user said -- Facebook IS poison.

andrepd 9y ago

>A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informing and coordinating citizens to fight injustice. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can tell you that no evolution or revolution can happen because of Facebook, only regression. Facebook is poison. I'll add to that. The internet is a great tool for coordinating citizens, spreading information, and fighting injustice. Having facebook, or any similar monolithic capitalist behemoth, in charge of controlling the flow of that information, is a BIG regression. The internet was going to be great. How did it come to this :(

campuscodi 9y ago
Russia
- aportnoy 9y ago
  Russia is definitely the reason behind every problem in the US, including erectile dysfunction, Facebook, the election, and hurricane Harvey
  - seppin 9y ago
    The person pouring petrol on a fire didn't start the fire.
    - SXX 9y ago
      Think where that petrol has come from. Western world indirectly supported corruption and totalitarianism by allowing investment of stolen government money for decades. All oligarchs and families of Russian officials are now citizens of the US / EU and they're your problem.
taurath 9y ago
The internet just increases the amount of information flow - what one does with it reflects whatever their values are.

mkempe 9y ago

For now you may think facebook merely facilitates regression. Eventually we'll see them enable repression. The gap is narrow, when one decides to manipulate people by manipulating the news feed they see as well as selling screen space in that "news feed". Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box. When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.

hrasyid 9y ago
I don't understand, how is missing your friend's post related to enabling repression?
- mkempe 9y ago
  It's an example of manipulation. Facebook removed an important item from my "news feed."
  - hrasyid 9y ago
    Did they arrange it so that you didn't see that post (why would they?), or did you just miss seeing it, or is it just ranked poorly by their algorithm? Seems like there's a lot of possible explanations, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it's Facebook's fault/
    - yorwba 9y ago
      An obituary is not going to get shared widely or get many clicks (unless it's a celebrity), so obviously it will be ranked poorly by Facebook's algorithm. But it is Facebook's choice to rank content based on click rates and virality, so in a way they did arrange it so that post would not be seen. "Our algorithm did it." does not absolve anyone of their responsibility in choosing to use that algorithm.
    - mrighele 9y ago

elandybarr 9y ago

Mass reporting is a common censorship tactic on Facebook. There are Facebook groups of Muslim activists who mass report critics of the religion to trigger autobans.

knowThySelfx 9y ago

I agree, FB/Twitter etc, filters or blocks content which doesn't suite their agenda. Saying from experience as well.

knowaveragejoe 9y ago

I really don't like that "fake news" became this term that means "news I disagree with". What it was describing at the time it was coming into popular usage, it mostly described "news" sites that in many cases used scripts to generate their content, and for the most part preyed upon far right sentiments. So yeah, we shouldn't censor "fake news" on the premise that it is something we disagree with, but rather whether it is easily verified as false(as many of these were).

losteric 9y ago
"Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news. It's a dangerous phrase, trivially dismissing real news based on emotions and critically attacking propaganda based on facts. Just call things as they are. News, lies, propaganda...
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > "Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news. No, it came into popular usage to refer to propaganda supporting Trump which closely followed what RAND Corp. labelled the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda strategy used by Russia. It was subsequently co-opted by Trump in the way you describe, but that's not how it came into popular usage.
  - RyanZAG 9y ago
    No, you're completely politicizing an issue based on your warped world view. That's just as damaging as fake news. Here's an article from 2014 discussing fake news: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-internet-fake-news-problem/SABBRta88xgqwEPY86oP3M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-intern... Here's an article from 2011 discussing the measures taken against fake news (to little effect) since 2006: https://www.freepress.net/blog/11/12/21/truth-about-fake-news https://www.freepress.net/blog/11/12/21/truth-about-fake-new...
    - 9y ago

adavidoaiei 9y ago

wtf, I am romanian and I posted on all international social networks about this event, It's not only Facebook in this world, be creative guys please.

mlok 9y ago

You are right. We should be wary of Censorship and Facebook is poison. But : Facebook is a social media. Social Medias are not limited to Facebook. Example : https://riseup.net/en https://riseup.net/en

ixtli 9y ago

It sucks that a company is suppressing the will of the people because it's greedy. That said, > So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it. This line of thinking doesn't lead to a society that tries to make things better than they were before. Personally I prefer reminding people that democracy is a 365 day/ year job. Don't avoid doing things because bad people exist in the world: instead, commit to lifelong stewardship of your community along with your fellow community members such that there will always be a conscientious group of people to try to keep bad things from happening.

zaarn 9y ago

It kind of makes me hope that federated networks like Mastodon catch on more. Hugely popular in Japan for not to dissimilar reasons; US Companies not respecting foreign culture and country.

LoSboccacc 9y ago

> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? this has been known since a while, giving power to censor is giving out power to control the population thinking - it always come in the name of the greater good and it always get abused half generation later.

lerpa 9y ago

No we all know Facebook and Google are both trustfully truth providers, that actually has been their goal all along. And if they don't know, we can always count on Snopes to tell it like it is.