6 ms·

Open Letter from Sandy Hook Parents to Mark Zuckerberg

80 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

atonse 8y ago
I’m expecting some downvotes for this view but in general, Silicon Valley seems to have confused itself on what exactly the first amendment is. That it prevents the GOVERNMENT from stopping you from expressing your views. But even in that case, harassment and abuse isn’t protected speech. But somehow since they’re confused they seem to be perfectly fine with allowing hate groups, abusers, and doxxers run wild on their platforms, even though even the first amendment doesn’t protect them in real life. As part of some collective twisted libertarian dream, these companies give this scum a platform again and again because they profit from it, but hide behind the ideas of libertarianism. I hope they come to their senses sooner rather than later. IF not, I honestly hope we start looking at changing the law to making these companies liable for crimes committed on their platforms.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Hate groups are certainly protected by the First Amendment; see Snyder v Phelps, for example. It's hard to find any behavior on FB that counts as more hateful than that, and they still won 8-1. That doesn't mean FB can't ban them, mind you, since as you rightly point out, it's (mostly) a restriction on government, not private companies.
  - atonse 8y ago
    Their speech is protected. But death threats aren’t.
GW150914 8y ago
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others hand out megaphones with international reach for free, to anyone, and they accept no responsibility for what people do with their megaphones. Mumbling into your can of lager as you wander down the street, covered in feces? Have a megaphone. 9 years old and alone? Megaphone. Complete psychopath? Megaphone. Out and proud neo-Nazi? Have a megaphone on us guys! Then they just stand back and try to maximize engagement and total time spent on their service, and have a ratio of moderators to users that’s so low it’s a rounding error. It’s like having a classroom of a million people with two grossly overworked, underpaid, and traumatized teachers trying to keep a semblance of order. Everyone is free to speak, to be drowned out by sheer volume of numbers and volume. Plus half of students are robots who do nothing, but shout at superhuman rates 24/7.
untog 8y ago
Wow. Flagged already. Very telling that the HN community doesn't even want to talk about this.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- glitcher 8y ago
  Posted again under the non-amp url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614082 Timing it to see if/how long until flagged again.
- hownottowrite 8y ago
  I knew it would be flagged when I posted it but I posted it anyway because it's something people should be talking about.
  - sctb 8y ago
    Being important, or something that people should be talking about, doesn't make an article on topic for Hacker News. What I'm seeing in this thread is a lack of focus on the specifics of the story, plenty of generic irritation, and not as much thoughtful and substantive insight. If we're not getting what we're here for—gratifying our intellectual curiosity—then users are right for flagging the post.
    - hownottowrite 8y ago
      The social impact of technology built by members of the community is 100% on topic. Sometimes that’s messy.
patient_zero 8y ago
I just don't get the point of this letter. Why is it so difficult to leave this particular social network? The biggest problem I have with Facebook is how it evolved from a great place for me to keep up with my more distant friends and family to... whatever it is now. I know I'm an outlier, but I quit Facebook around 2010 or so when I noticed it was being too aggressive in pushing my account to be more public; increasing my curated circle of interest to include friends of friends, and their friends too. When I found I was spending more time negotiating the byzantine system of settings to keep my page private than actually using the site, I knew it was time to go. Is it really such an important website that it must change to suit these folks rather than them finding another way to network with their contacts? It's 2018, and there are options. Perhaps I'm wrong and having a Facebook account is more important in society than I realize?
- omegaworks 8y ago
  >Why is it so difficult to leave this particular social network? From the article, it seems fairly reasonable to determine that these families have stopped using Facebook. The problem is that the groups that are spreading this propaganda are also spreading the private contact information of the families, a practice known as doxxing. People influenced by the propaganda are then able to use non-Facebook mediums (phone/mail/in-person asshattery) to continue their harassment.
  - patient_zero 8y ago
    >The problem is that the groups that are spreading this propaganda are also spreading the private contact information of the families, a practice known as doxxing. Isn't the doxxing the problem then? It seems like the focus is in the wrong place. Don't we already have laws on the books to stop harrassement? Don't we have laws to stop from inciting violence? If we need to strenghen them then that's an opportunity for discussion. Do we need to talk about our free speech laws? I frankly think it's time to have that discussion, and not quite because of the reason you may think. Neither of those discussions is this discussion though, and that's my issue here. Facebook is (as another more eloquent commenter said) a megaphone. Why are we blaming the megaphone?
lcuff 8y ago
It's a complex and emotionally charged issue. A others have said, even truly offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment. A case that went to the Supreme Court back in 2010, Snyder vs Phelps, allowed the Westboro Baptist church to say it's offensive things at the funeral of a slain Iraqi soldier from the location on the sidewalk where the police instructed them to stand. While the First Amendment protects public speech, that doesn't mean I have to allow somebody to stand on my lawn and spew. They have to be 'in public'. An interesting question for me is, should Facebook be considered 'in public'? Is there an argument that it's a venue that is not public? If Mark Zuckerberg invited everybody in America to a party at his house, he wouldn't be obligated to tolerate speech he didn't like. And the people saying awful things have the opportunity to say what they went in various public forums. Their own blogs, the street corner, email. Suppressing speech in every possible forum is clearly a violation of the First Amendment, but what if it's only suppressed in some forums?
- atonse 8y ago
  Facebook can ban every single thing they want. Its their property. They aren’t the government. The first amendment doesn’t remotely apply no matter how hard you want it to.
- berbec 8y ago
  The first amendment prevents the government from censoring you. Facebook can be as draconian with the ban-hammer as they want. Freedom of speech doesn't apply to private enterprise.
Animats 8y ago
The parents are also suing radio talk show host Alex Jones[1], and Wolfgang Halbig [2] for promoting this idea. There they have a case for defamation. Here's Halbig's Facebook page.[3] But blaming Facebook seems misplaced. These guys are on Youtube, Facebook, talk radio, and their own web sites. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968/sandy-hook-parents-sue-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-over-claim-shooting-was-fa https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-theorist-spreads-fake-info-about-sandy-hook-shooting https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-the... [3] https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/ https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/
thaumaturgy 8y ago
I really want someone to come along who has an answer to all this. I sure don't. Just some observations. I think the last decades have been an unprecedented experiment in massively scaled two-way communication. People don't really seem to know how to handle the current stage of this experiment. It was a little easier back when it was much smaller communities on Usenet, or even IRC, and most of the time you recognized the same names and could work things out like everyone had got together for a slightly uncomfortable family dinner. But it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for quite a while. The scale and speed of things is just hard to fathom now, and we really aren't equipped for it. Facebook has shared some responsibility in ethnic atrocities [1] [2] [3]. Different groups are now exploiting Facebook's advertising platform to stir up more social unrest [4]. Facebook isn't the only source of trouble; Reddit and other sites are radicalizing youth [5] and struggling with self-policing their most toxic bits [6]. Everyone's concerned about the loss of free speech. I'm pretty far left politically, I get it. It's a big step, maybe the last, towards tyranny. I've been opposed to forcing websites to police copyrighted content (DMCA, SOPA, PIPA). I've been a little less opposed to forcing them to police sexually exploitative content (FOSTA and SESTA -- although I don't love the execution of it). For people on the political left, who tend to both support free speech and recognize the danger of unregulated firearms, it might be time to take a more careful look at the damage done by massive social networks and ask: what makes this different from gun control? And is there any way to effectively reduce the spread of misinformation, radicalization of people, and incitement of violence on massive social platforms, without suffocating the free exchange of ideas? [1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-countries-facebook-becomes-match/HK9BykGEbbnpnvWWwS32tJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook/u-n-investigators-cite-facebook-role-in-myanmar-crisis-idUSKCN1GO2PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook... [4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-divisive-facebook-ads-bought-by-suspicious-groups-study-idUSKBN1HN2KV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-... [5]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-amer... [6]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...
SirensOfTitan 8y ago
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but individuals and journalists alike should really think through the consequences of having Facebook police content more aggressively. Almost every time I hear someone advocate for speech policing, they mention obviously awful speech (e.g. Nazi Germany, Sandy Hook conspiracy theories) as an example. And I agree, that speech sucks, most of us can agree about that because we have hindsight to educate us. In reality, speech is really murky. From what I recall from history classes, "Nazi" ideas like Eugenics weren't Nazi ideas, they were popular at the time everywhere, including in the US. Anti-semitism was not Germany exclusive (and still isn't). When you find yourself inside a society, it becomes very difficult to separate yourself from its collective delusions. In this, it becomes dangerous for a central authority to police speech: how to agree on which speech is acceptable (past the generally abhorrent speech like that mentioned above) is difficult and bound to either be abused in the worst case or best case many mistakes will be made. Historically, because of the issues mentioned above, I feel against most speech policing in general theoretically. Admittedly, however, I also demographically don't really feel the effects of hate speech, so it's easy for me to take this emotionally distant stance. The best solution I can come up with here is, especially online, a series of filters: bifurcate platforms like Facebook into a feed where content is moderated, and give users options to opt into unmoderated streams (unmoderated to the extent the law allows).
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  What happens when an idealized individual freedom collides with concrete societal need? What happens when "freedom of speech" is used to spread lies, disinformation, and injure the fabric of a country? Is the point of freedom of speech because it leads to a freer people? Or is it for its own sake? If the former, what happens if it's shown that limiting freedom of speech by banning purposeful misinformation helps society as a whole? I kind of think we're there. I'm an ethical utilitarian (well, mix in some contractualism) and I think generally what's best is what benefits the most people most of the time. Maybe that's limiting the voices of those who are trying to deceive people and breed hate.
  - berbec 8y ago
beart 8y ago
When I step back, I realize there are a lot of good reasons not to police this stuff. However, if I down scale Facebook to a 100 user forum that I control, then I would ban this in a heartbeat. I guess subjective morality doesn't scale?
- rurounijones 8y ago
  I think it is the power imbalance / reach / social impact / chilling effect. Subjective morality enforced over 100 people on an optional forum? Meh Subjective morality over billions on a platform that many consider essential (I know, I know) to daily life? Oooof
  - FactolSarin 8y ago
    All morality is subjective, though. Facebook bans some kinds of speech, so the question isn't "should Facebook do that," but "where do we draw the line." Facebook allows almost anything right now, in part because it's a US company and has inherited the US propensity to allow pretty much all speech. But that's not the only way to do it. Banning certain types of speech doesn't necessarily lead to a slippery slope. For instance, in Germany, you can't deny the holocaust and they haven't become some sort of dystopian Orwellian society. I would argue Facebook needs to move more toward that model. Conspiracy theories and misinformation are spreading right now. Hell, I personally know someone who I considered a pretty normal person who's become caught up in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering. Banning groups that promote that kind of garbage make them seem illegitimate (as they are) and no, doing so doesn't infringe on any rights. They're free to make their own website somewhere and spout nonsense. But hey, maybe those kinds of things shouldn't be getting hosted by big media companies like YouTube and Facebook. That just makes them seem legitimate. With great power comes great responsibility. Right now, it seems to me Facebook (and others) want to have the power, but not the responsibility and that's leading us into a new era of propaganda and idiocy.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Is not harassing people, and claiming that things like Sandy Hook didn't happen really subjective morality, though?
untog 8y ago
I know they didn't mean to, but Facebook dug their own grave on this as soon as they started applying algorithms to the news feed. It started off as a means to get people to click more, but it's now very clear that people click on what outrages them more than anything else. And for a lot of people, Facebook is the internet - something FB worked very hard to achieve. So I have sympathy with Facebook because I don't think these issues are easy to solve (yes, of course, ban Infowars. It's a toxic dump. But others will be more debatable). But they also knowingly and deliberately put themselves in the position they occupy today. This mess is making them an obscene amount of money, they should try harder to clean it up.
omegaworks 8y ago
An internet history has demonstrated since Usenet: not only do moderated spaces generate incredible value, unmoderated spaces generally devolve into toxic cesspools as they grow. The moderators of r/AskHistorians understand exactly how propaganda spreads and combats it with clearly-defined content guidelines and strict enforcement for things like holocaust denialism.[1] Sandy Hook propaganda utilizes the same mechanisms of dispersal, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was a link between the sources of this stuff. 1. 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...
jrnichols 8y ago
What I still don't understand about Facebook is that they're letting people charge money for Groups, yet the same very strict content guidelines still apply. Paying adults are unable to have "adult content" of any sort on the site (and their definitions are very broad) but hate speech, Nazi propaganda, radical right wing extremism, and out of touch conspiracy theorists that harass tragedy victims are allowed? Facebook continues to confuse me.

80 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

I’m expecting some downvotes for this view but in general, Silicon Valley seems to have confused itself on what exactly the first amendment is. That it prevents the GOVERNMENT from stopping you from expressing your views. But even in that case, harassment and abuse isn’t protected speech. But somehow since they’re confused they seem to be perfectly fine with allowing hate groups, abusers, and doxxers run wild on their platforms, even though even the first amendment doesn’t protect them in real life. As part of some collective twisted libertarian dream, these companies give this scum a platform again and again because they profit from it, but hide behind the ideas of libertarianism. I hope they come to their senses sooner rather than later. IF not, I honestly hope we start looking at changing the law to making these companies liable for crimes committed on their platforms.

icebraining 8y ago
Hate groups are certainly protected by the First Amendment; see Snyder v Phelps, for example. It's hard to find any behavior on FB that counts as more hateful than that, and they still won 8-1. That doesn't mean FB can't ban them, mind you, since as you rightly point out, it's (mostly) a restriction on government, not private companies.
- atonse 8y ago
  Their speech is protected. But death threats aren’t.

GW150914 8y ago

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others hand out megaphones with international reach for free, to anyone, and they accept no responsibility for what people do with their megaphones. Mumbling into your can of lager as you wander down the street, covered in feces? Have a megaphone. 9 years old and alone? Megaphone. Complete psychopath? Megaphone. Out and proud neo-Nazi? Have a megaphone on us guys! Then they just stand back and try to maximize engagement and total time spent on their service, and have a ratio of moderators to users that’s so low it’s a rounding error. It’s like having a classroom of a million people with two grossly overworked, underpaid, and traumatized teachers trying to keep a semblance of order. Everyone is free to speak, to be drowned out by sheer volume of numbers and volume. Plus half of students are robots who do nothing, but shout at superhuman rates 24/7.

untog 8y ago

Wow. Flagged already. Very telling that the HN community doesn't even want to talk about this.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
glitcher 8y ago
Posted again under the non-amp url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614082 Timing it to see if/how long until flagged again.
hownottowrite 8y ago
I knew it would be flagged when I posted it but I posted it anyway because it's something people should be talking about.
- sctb 8y ago
  Being important, or something that people should be talking about, doesn't make an article on topic for Hacker News. What I'm seeing in this thread is a lack of focus on the specifics of the story, plenty of generic irritation, and not as much thoughtful and substantive insight. If we're not getting what we're here for—gratifying our intellectual curiosity—then users are right for flagging the post.
  - hownottowrite 8y ago
    The social impact of technology built by members of the community is 100% on topic. Sometimes that’s messy.

patient_zero 8y ago

I just don't get the point of this letter. Why is it so difficult to leave this particular social network? The biggest problem I have with Facebook is how it evolved from a great place for me to keep up with my more distant friends and family to... whatever it is now. I know I'm an outlier, but I quit Facebook around 2010 or so when I noticed it was being too aggressive in pushing my account to be more public; increasing my curated circle of interest to include friends of friends, and their friends too. When I found I was spending more time negotiating the byzantine system of settings to keep my page private than actually using the site, I knew it was time to go. Is it really such an important website that it must change to suit these folks rather than them finding another way to network with their contacts? It's 2018, and there are options. Perhaps I'm wrong and having a Facebook account is more important in society than I realize?

omegaworks 8y ago
>Why is it so difficult to leave this particular social network? From the article, it seems fairly reasonable to determine that these families have stopped using Facebook. The problem is that the groups that are spreading this propaganda are also spreading the private contact information of the families, a practice known as doxxing. People influenced by the propaganda are then able to use non-Facebook mediums (phone/mail/in-person asshattery) to continue their harassment.
- patient_zero 8y ago
  >The problem is that the groups that are spreading this propaganda are also spreading the private contact information of the families, a practice known as doxxing. Isn't the doxxing the problem then? It seems like the focus is in the wrong place. Don't we already have laws on the books to stop harrassement? Don't we have laws to stop from inciting violence? If we need to strenghen them then that's an opportunity for discussion. Do we need to talk about our free speech laws? I frankly think it's time to have that discussion, and not quite because of the reason you may think. Neither of those discussions is this discussion though, and that's my issue here. Facebook is (as another more eloquent commenter said) a megaphone. Why are we blaming the megaphone?

lcuff 8y ago

It's a complex and emotionally charged issue. A others have said, even truly offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment. A case that went to the Supreme Court back in 2010, Snyder vs Phelps, allowed the Westboro Baptist church to say it's offensive things at the funeral of a slain Iraqi soldier from the location on the sidewalk where the police instructed them to stand. While the First Amendment protects public speech, that doesn't mean I have to allow somebody to stand on my lawn and spew. They have to be 'in public'. An interesting question for me is, should Facebook be considered 'in public'? Is there an argument that it's a venue that is not public? If Mark Zuckerberg invited everybody in America to a party at his house, he wouldn't be obligated to tolerate speech he didn't like. And the people saying awful things have the opportunity to say what they went in various public forums. Their own blogs, the street corner, email. Suppressing speech in every possible forum is clearly a violation of the First Amendment, but what if it's only suppressed in some forums?

atonse 8y ago
Facebook can ban every single thing they want. Its their property. They aren’t the government. The first amendment doesn’t remotely apply no matter how hard you want it to.
berbec 8y ago
The first amendment prevents the government from censoring you. Facebook can be as draconian with the ban-hammer as they want. Freedom of speech doesn't apply to private enterprise.

Animats 8y ago

The parents are also suing radio talk show host Alex Jones[1], and Wolfgang Halbig [2] for promoting this idea. There they have a case for defamation. Here's Halbig's Facebook page.[3] But blaming Facebook seems misplaced. These guys are on Youtube, Facebook, talk radio, and their own web sites. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968/sandy-hook-parents-sue-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-over-claim-shooting-was-fa https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-theorist-spreads-fake-info-about-sandy-hook-shooting https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-the... [3] https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/ https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/

thaumaturgy 8y ago

I really want someone to come along who has an answer to all this. I sure don't. Just some observations. I think the last decades have been an unprecedented experiment in massively scaled two-way communication. People don't really seem to know how to handle the current stage of this experiment. It was a little easier back when it was much smaller communities on Usenet, or even IRC, and most of the time you recognized the same names and could work things out like everyone had got together for a slightly uncomfortable family dinner. But it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for quite a while. The scale and speed of things is just hard to fathom now, and we really aren't equipped for it. Facebook has shared some responsibility in ethnic atrocities [1] [2] [3]. Different groups are now exploiting Facebook's advertising platform to stir up more social unrest [4]. Facebook isn't the only source of trouble; Reddit and other sites are radicalizing youth [5] and struggling with self-policing their most toxic bits [6]. Everyone's concerned about the loss of free speech. I'm pretty far left politically, I get it. It's a big step, maybe the last, towards tyranny. I've been opposed to forcing websites to police copyrighted content (DMCA, SOPA, PIPA). I've been a little less opposed to forcing them to police sexually exploitative content (FOSTA and SESTA -- although I don't love the execution of it). For people on the political left, who tend to both support free speech and recognize the danger of unregulated firearms, it might be time to take a more careful look at the damage done by massive social networks and ask: what makes this different from gun control? And is there any way to effectively reduce the spread of misinformation, radicalization of people, and incitement of violence on massive social platforms, without suffocating the free exchange of ideas? [1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-countries-facebook-becomes-match/HK9BykGEbbnpnvWWwS32tJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook/u-n-investigators-cite-facebook-role-in-myanmar-crisis-idUSKCN1GO2PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook... [4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-divisive-facebook-ads-bought-by-suspicious-groups-study-idUSKBN1HN2KV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-... [5]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-amer... [6]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...

SirensOfTitan 8y ago

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but individuals and journalists alike should really think through the consequences of having Facebook police content more aggressively. Almost every time I hear someone advocate for speech policing, they mention obviously awful speech (e.g. Nazi Germany, Sandy Hook conspiracy theories) as an example. And I agree, that speech sucks, most of us can agree about that because we have hindsight to educate us. In reality, speech is really murky. From what I recall from history classes, "Nazi" ideas like Eugenics weren't Nazi ideas, they were popular at the time everywhere, including in the US. Anti-semitism was not Germany exclusive (and still isn't). When you find yourself inside a society, it becomes very difficult to separate yourself from its collective delusions. In this, it becomes dangerous for a central authority to police speech: how to agree on which speech is acceptable (past the generally abhorrent speech like that mentioned above) is difficult and bound to either be abused in the worst case or best case many mistakes will be made. Historically, because of the issues mentioned above, I feel against most speech policing in general theoretically. Admittedly, however, I also demographically don't really feel the effects of hate speech, so it's easy for me to take this emotionally distant stance. The best solution I can come up with here is, especially online, a series of filters: bifurcate platforms like Facebook into a feed where content is moderated, and give users options to opt into unmoderated streams (unmoderated to the extent the law allows).

FactolSarin 8y ago
What happens when an idealized individual freedom collides with concrete societal need? What happens when "freedom of speech" is used to spread lies, disinformation, and injure the fabric of a country? Is the point of freedom of speech because it leads to a freer people? Or is it for its own sake? If the former, what happens if it's shown that limiting freedom of speech by banning purposeful misinformation helps society as a whole? I kind of think we're there. I'm an ethical utilitarian (well, mix in some contractualism) and I think generally what's best is what benefits the most people most of the time. Maybe that's limiting the voices of those who are trying to deceive people and breed hate.
- berbec 8y ago

beart 8y ago

When I step back, I realize there are a lot of good reasons not to police this stuff. However, if I down scale Facebook to a 100 user forum that I control, then I would ban this in a heartbeat. I guess subjective morality doesn't scale?

rurounijones 8y ago
I think it is the power imbalance / reach / social impact / chilling effect. Subjective morality enforced over 100 people on an optional forum? Meh Subjective morality over billions on a platform that many consider essential (I know, I know) to daily life? Oooof
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  All morality is subjective, though. Facebook bans some kinds of speech, so the question isn't "should Facebook do that," but "where do we draw the line." Facebook allows almost anything right now, in part because it's a US company and has inherited the US propensity to allow pretty much all speech. But that's not the only way to do it. Banning certain types of speech doesn't necessarily lead to a slippery slope. For instance, in Germany, you can't deny the holocaust and they haven't become some sort of dystopian Orwellian society. I would argue Facebook needs to move more toward that model. Conspiracy theories and misinformation are spreading right now. Hell, I personally know someone who I considered a pretty normal person who's become caught up in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering. Banning groups that promote that kind of garbage make them seem illegitimate (as they are) and no, doing so doesn't infringe on any rights. They're free to make their own website somewhere and spout nonsense. But hey, maybe those kinds of things shouldn't be getting hosted by big media companies like YouTube and Facebook. That just makes them seem legitimate. With great power comes great responsibility. Right now, it seems to me Facebook (and others) want to have the power, but not the responsibility and that's leading us into a new era of propaganda and idiocy.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Is not harassing people, and claiming that things like Sandy Hook didn't happen really subjective morality, though?

untog 8y ago

I know they didn't mean to, but Facebook dug their own grave on this as soon as they started applying algorithms to the news feed. It started off as a means to get people to click more, but it's now very clear that people click on what outrages them more than anything else. And for a lot of people, Facebook is the internet - something FB worked very hard to achieve. So I have sympathy with Facebook because I don't think these issues are easy to solve (yes, of course, ban Infowars. It's a toxic dump. But others will be more debatable). But they also knowingly and deliberately put themselves in the position they occupy today. This mess is making them an obscene amount of money, they should try harder to clean it up.

omegaworks 8y ago

An internet history has demonstrated since Usenet: not only do moderated spaces generate incredible value, unmoderated spaces generally devolve into toxic cesspools as they grow. The moderators of r/AskHistorians understand exactly how propaganda spreads and combats it with clearly-defined content guidelines and strict enforcement for things like holocaust denialism.[1] Sandy Hook propaganda utilizes the same mechanisms of dispersal, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was a link between the sources of this stuff. 1. 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...

jrnichols 8y ago

What I still don't understand about Facebook is that they're letting people charge money for Groups, yet the same very strict content guidelines still apply. Paying adults are unable to have "adult content" of any sort on the site (and their definitions are very broad) but hate speech, Nazi propaganda, radical right wing extremism, and out of touch conspiracy theorists that harass tragedy victims are allowed? Facebook continues to confuse me.