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There are a lot of reasons to dislike Facebook, and I myself have almost entirely stopped using it. However, most of these politicians are yelling at Facebook f

by woah 8y ago

There are a lot of reasons to dislike Facebook, and I myself have almost entirely stopped using it. However, most of these politicians are yelling at Facebook for only one reason: they want to bully it into implementing whatever censorship they desire. You don’t see politicians hauling the inventor of email onto TV and demanding that someone do a better job of censoring email. They know that email is a decentralized system, and for this reason it is respected as a neutral medium of communication (at least in countries who don’t censor the entire internet). Facebook having an easy to dislike figurehead and centralized company behind it makes it much easier to turn into a bogeyman. This can get citizens in liberal countries who would never agree to a great firewall to agree to some kind of censorship of Facebook. Hopefully someone can make a decentralized social network/messaging platform catch on sooner rather than later, so that we can return to a world where blanket censorship is considered wrong, instead of something for politicians to aspire to.

curo 8y ago
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are starting to make editorial decisions of what counts as hate speech, what accounts and pages should be banned/removed, what affect do algo changes have on the content surfaced, what suggestions should show up in auto-suggest or the front page, etc. I don't see the same choices being made in regards to Gmail spam filters for instance. I'd say we're at a time when this conversation is necessary. And I'm not one to trust the politicians with this decision, but it'd be nice if he showed up to some open forum on the topic.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  They're doing that largely because governments have forced them to: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook...
pteredactyl 8y ago
Exactly. Also hopefully we can create a world where politicians aren't enemies of the people.
dylan-m 8y ago
> You don’t see politicians hauling the inventor of email onto TV and demanding that someone do a better job of censoring email. I wish they would. That guy's (http://inventorofemail.com/ http://inventorofemail.com/) a piece of work :b
snowwrestler 8y ago
When I send an email, it goes to the group I sent it to, every one, every time. When I post to Facebook, it goes to some percentage of my friends, some of the time, different every time, totally unpredictably. Plus Facebook sends them all sorts of content they didn't ask for, like recommendations, ads, an article some friend "liked", etc. Facebook practices censorship as a business model. It's not a neutral communications platform; it hasn't been since they started running the timeline with an algorithm. It's a publishing operation. No government made them do that. The point of these government hearings is to make them acknowledge and be accountable for the censorship and promotional decisions they are already making.

by woah 8y ago

curo 8y ago

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are starting to make editorial decisions of what counts as hate speech, what accounts and pages should be banned/removed, what affect do algo changes have on the content surfaced, what suggestions should show up in auto-suggest or the front page, etc. I don't see the same choices being made in regards to Gmail spam filters for instance. I'd say we're at a time when this conversation is necessary. And I'm not one to trust the politicians with this decision, but it'd be nice if he showed up to some open forum on the topic.

nitwit005 8y ago
They're doing that largely because governments have forced them to: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook...

pteredactyl 8y ago

Exactly. Also hopefully we can create a world where politicians aren't enemies of the people.

dylan-m 8y ago

> You don’t see politicians hauling the inventor of email onto TV and demanding that someone do a better job of censoring email. I wish they would. That guy's (http://inventorofemail.com/ http://inventorofemail.com/) a piece of work :b

snowwrestler 8y ago

When I send an email, it goes to the group I sent it to, every one, every time. When I post to Facebook, it goes to some percentage of my friends, some of the time, different every time, totally unpredictably. Plus Facebook sends them all sorts of content they didn't ask for, like recommendations, ads, an article some friend "liked", etc. Facebook practices censorship as a business model. It's not a neutral communications platform; it hasn't been since they started running the timeline with an algorithm. It's a publishing operation. No government made them do that. The point of these government hearings is to make them acknowledge and be accountable for the censorship and promotional decisions they are already making.