9 ms·

I don't disagree with you (I mean, facebook not being required to allow free speech isn't really even something you can disagree with to begin with anyway - it'

• pjc50 8y ago
  Terrible people can organise terrible consequences that spread off facebook and into the "real world".
  • shittyadmin 8y ago
    Okay, but what of things like cannabis or prostitution. Major legal changes in these spaces have started online and many people would seek to see things like this banned in such a system. Heck, I'm sure some people would describe those changes as "terrible consequences".
    • pjc50 8y ago
      That's what taking a side includes; Facebook have to listen to the politics and decide what's legitimately arguable either way and what's harmful per se. It does not mean picking a side and then only allowing that side to post. The opposite of this is iTunes' "ban all politics" policy.
    • prolepunk 8y ago
      The major difference here, is that people who promote cannabis or sex work aren't Nazis.
      • watwat1 8y ago
        Or antifa
• timClicks 8y ago
  Social platforms amplify and normalize those messages. I'm willing to bet that they create more closet racists than they reveal.
• prolepunk 8y ago
  Because when people like this aren't silenced and laughed at, from some angles they seem like normal people and not the ones promoting monstrous ideas. No everyone have well informed world view.
  • pandler 8y ago
    Which sounds like a fine argument to make when dealing with the more extreme cases, but where do you draw the line of who gets silenced? The question is whether we are comfortable with corporations assuming the role of thought police - corporations that are not subject to the same discrimination standards that we hold our government(s) to. It sounds to me like "informed world view" as a general standard for evaluation really just means "whatever world view is in vogue at the time", and is designed as an exclusive criteria. Think of how many cultures, customs, ethnicities, sexualities, philosophies, etc, were previously not part of the acceptable, "informed" world view, as well as those that previously were and are now considered taboo or unethical.
    • prolepunk 8y ago
      I just outlined the criteria in the comment above -- if you believe people who don't look like you aren't people, and don't deserve the same rights and shouldn't exist, you're a Nazi. Yes "whatever world view is in vogue at the time" is the informed world view. I wouldn't want to live by the rules of Genghis Khan, or the rules of Germany in late 1930s. All of the things that are now considered taboo or unethical are taboo or unethical. For example, can you justify slavery through this lens?
      • slavik81 8y ago
        There are lots of things that are widely believed unethical for no particularly good reason. People are raised into a set of beliefs and they mostly stick with them, especially when there's rarely a reason to re-examine those beliefs. One example of something widely believed to be unethical is nudity. There is a belief that seeing a human being in its natural, naked state is inherently harmful and that nakedness itself is shameful. I'm not a nudist; I very much prefer wearing clothing. I just think it's a good example, because few people ever think about it. Everybody just wears clothing and only weirdos don't. The mechanism by which it causes harm is rarely examined. (The increasing reverence towards natural things in recent years suggests to me that people may be more open to reexamining that belief, making it a more effective example.) It's not that the majority are always wrong. Just sometimes. And not just in the past or in some other society.
• PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  This has nothing to do with wanting Facebook to police your friends list for you. It's about allowing racists and other toxic bigots to use Facebook to push their agendas, recruit others, and harass their victims en masse.
  • ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > It's about allowing racists and other toxic bigots to use Facebook to push their agendas, recruit others, and harass their victims en masse." If Facebook had existed in the 1950s: "It's about allowing commies and other liberal lunatics to use Facebook to push their agendas, recruit others, and harass their victims en masse." When you ask the tech industry to build a muzzle, don't forget that it fits onto you just as easily as onto the people you hate.
    • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      That's an important consideration, but taken to extremes it's basically appeasement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement Don't try to resist bad people, don't try to protect their victims, because they might turn around and push back. Where does it end? When are we finally allowed to take action?
      • staunch 8y ago
        A reasonable question but I think it's caused by confusion. The answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship. The answer to unjust violence is just violence, not appeasement.
        • prolepunk 8y ago
          > The answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship. Good luck wasting your precious time arguing with Nazis while Reichstag is burning.
          • 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• stevenwoo 8y ago
  The folks who run /r/askhistorians had to go through several years of adjusting their rules until they found a solution for holocaust deniers - don't give them a platform to speak - they are just trolling and wasting the time of rebuttals and any re-publication is used by holocaust deniers to authenticate their views. https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subreddit-banned-holocaust-deniers-and-facebook-should-too.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...
  • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    I wonder if there's some organized downvoting happening in this thread. "History forum blocks mass Holocaust denial" should not be controversial, even on HN.
    • bena 8y ago
      Especially when it's a simple statement of facts.
  • prawn 8y ago
    I enjoy how strict r/askhistorians is, but the result of their policies is fewer (better) questions and definitely fewer comments. That won't fly with something like Facebook watching the bottom line, engagement, etc. Strict policies on a subreddit essentially rule out a huge swathe of people who might be interested, but be unable/unwilling to pose a solid question or have the expertise to respond.
• deegles 8y ago
  > Why do you want Facebook to silence people like this? Because people use it to recruit and radicalize more members. Because being exposed to those ideas makes them more acceptable over time. Because if no one tells them that those views are bad then they feel they are ok to keep repeating.
  • mikec3010 8y ago
    > if no one tells them that those views are bad then they feel they are ok to keep repeating. I'd say quite the opposite: the more "persecuted" your group claims to be, the more resilient and special they feel about themselves. This is true in highly manipulative individuals as well as radical political groups.
    • sangnoir 8y ago
      There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes containing a problem and more attainable than complete eradication.
• geofft 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this (and the obvious rebuttal of "What about the people who think $your_politics should be silenced in polite society"). I think my answer is that these particular ideas - ethnic nationalism and its friends - are deceptively simple explanations for problems in the world, and therefore platforms for publishing, especially platforms for short-attention-span publishing like Facebook or Twitter, should be particularly cautious in whether they let themselves be used by these ideologies. It is easy to say that the reason that Americans or Greeks or Germans are struggling with their lives is all the Mexicans or Muslims or Jews, and that if only society weren't spending resources on these other people, things would be better for us. I can fit that in a sentence. It is much harder to talk about the complex effects of local, national, and international politics over decades if not centuries; about specific instances of poor leadership or corruption; about the proper interpretation of data; about things that really need papers or books to discuss. I claim that - universally - these longer explanations are more likely to be right. "It's these damn Others" is too simple to fit the observed data, but even listing each complexity in the observed data and whether the explanation fits or not it is a paper's worth of discussion. Not everyone will recognize that these positions are the positions of awful people. Some will find the simplistic answer appealing. This is arguably a bug in human cognition - but if a platform is designed for humans, it makes perfect sense to take human bugs into account.
  • tynpeddler 8y ago
    You make a good point but what you're talking about is effectively the beginning of the end of liberalism. While it sounds simple to say in this case that "people aren't rational, therefore we're going to control their speech and we're technically a private company so nah nah nah," you are in fact opening a huge can of worms with incredibly far reaching consequences. I don't blame Facebook for refusing to take a stand on this point. As much as people like to accuse Facebook and Zuckerberg of being greedy and arrogant, I think on this point they've shown a remarkable amount of humility. Sticking to the same principles that have guided humanity's most successful decisions for the past 200+ years while being constantly mocked by the mob shows an incredible amount of restraint. People who think no platforming tens of millions of people is a simple decision are the reckless and arrogant ones with no regard for how serious such a decision really is. If tens of millions of Americans lack the competence and morality to be allowed to talk freely amongst themselves, why do we let them raise kids and vote?
• mikec3010 8y ago
  One angle that I haven't seen covered is the "gang" nature of hate groups. They advocate for the commission of murder, either directly or obliquely. That could be one line in the sand that could be drawn. No groups may promote the extermination of, or by extension, scapegoating society's problems on, a group of people. The scapegoating could be aligned to implicit murder because none of these groups is advocating for assisting or "rehabilitating" that scapegoated group. Further, offering a means to join a hate group affords anyone an "immediate membership to a gang", in the sense that an otherwise disempowered person can quickly appear menacing by aligning himself with an established hate group and facebook is the vehicle he uses to advertise it
• bduerst 8y ago
  Because racists aren't interested in discourse or even slightly concerned with the hit to reputation in outing themselves. They're seeking platforms to reinforce and spread their prejudicial bias, which Facebook and Twitter provide. I think Jean Paul-Sartre said it best: >Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    Funny that Sartre said that after being a lifelong champion of Lenin and Stalin's way of dealing with power which had nothing to do with free discourse. And that, even after we all knew about the atrocities of the soviet regime, when the honeymoon stage was clearly over.
    • bduerst 8y ago
      Except he didn't. Sartre was a Marxist and was critical of Leninism, publicly attacking the Soviet Union's abuses of human rights and freedom. He was one the first to out the Soviet labor camps. Also, Sartre said that quote in the Anti-Semite and Jew in 1945, before most of his writing of the Soviet Union (not after).