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Facebook removed a fact-check on anti-abortion video after Ted Cruz complained
- rpmisms 7y agoI am pro-life, with the exception of medical emergencies. I'm not going to argue about that. Seeing the discourse going downhill like this hurts, since it's just one more broad-brush tool to use against a different side.
- pjc50 7y ago"Going" downhill? https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9827886/abortion-clinic-attacks-mapped https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9827886/abortion-clinic-attack... "Since 1977 there have been eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 186 arsons targeted at abortion clinics and providers across the United States. In some cases, a small group of clinics have been targeted multiple times."
- ashes-of-sol 7y agoPerhaps instead of "pro life", a better moniker would be "forced birth"
- jtbayly 7y agoAnd 1.3 million murders per year by abortionists.
- dvt 7y agoYour inflammatory pseudo-counter-argument doesn't change the fact that abortion in cases of non-life-threatening births remains morally problematic. The personhood debate is nontrivial and unless, like e.g., Peter Singer, you're willing to (excuse the pun) throw the baby out with the bathwater, justification for mid-to-late-term abortions is quite difficult and rife with edge cases.
- AlexandrB 7y agoHowever forcing someone to carry a baby to term is also morally problematic. Even non-life-threatening births carry risks of bodily harm.
- cybersnowflake 7y agoNobody, (in most cases) forced the woman to get pregnant and not use birth control, and wait until you were a full developed baby who could feel pain. Pregnancy is the equivalent of pressing a magical button and teleporting another person against their will into your body. If this magical button existed in its literal form it would obviously wouldn't be legal for the person who chose to teleport you into their body to then kill you at a whim.
- dvt 7y ago> However forcing someone to carry a baby to term is also morally problematic There are plenty of pro-choice arguments, but this is not a very good one. Coercion is often justifiably used when lives are at stake. For example, the government might "force" sick people in a quarantine given an epidemic outbreak. What you want to show is that the fetus is not a person and, therefore, doesn't have the same rights as the mother. This is difficult, but not impossible -- although there are some concessions that need to be made along the way.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- spamizbad 7y agoNot to mention the psychological trauma of carrying a child that can be "safely" birthed but will immediately begin a slow, painful death after leaving the womb. This is the typical case for most so-called "late term abortions" that everyone clutches their pearls over. Anyway, I find people's thinking around the morals of abortion to be quite fluid . The termination rate of pregnancies with chromosomal abnormalities far exceeds the percentage of people who identify as "pro choice" and cannot be explained simply by pro-choice people being more prone to fetuses with such conditions.
- ndidi 7y agoAre you accusing everybody who is pro-life of doing or supporting this? Because that's really what it sounds like.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI believe that pcj50's point is that the debate has not been "going" downhill. It's been down, at the very bottom, for a very long time, and there's nowhere further down to go (short of a real shooting civil war).
- vernie 7y agoThe most I've ever seen it evoke from pro-lifers is something along the lines of "ya hate to see it"
- ryguytilidie 7y agoJust to recap: -One person lamented discourse relating to abortion "going downhill". -Someone pointed out that its hard to say its going downhill when its been happening since the 70s. Your takeaway: "SO YOU THINK ALL PEOPLE WHO ARE PRO LIFE DO THIS?" Its simply impossible to have those inputs and create this output without having a massive, obvious agenda. Maybe take that elsewhere?
- tathougies 7y agoI mean, that is terrible, but abortion clinics commit millions of murders each year according to pro-lifers, so your comment falls on deaf ears.
- AlexandrB 7y agoThey forget all the manslaughter by mothers who miscarry, plus all the fratricide when one twin absorbs another. It's a god damn slaughter in America's uteruses!
- tathougies 7y agoOMG, like literally no ethicist has ever thought of these things. Thank goodness for anonymous hacker news users for thinking the really deep thoughts!
- bdamm 7y agoGlobally? In the United States, this is not true[1]. Anti-choicers can claim whatever they want but we still shouldn't be repeating false data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...
- tathougies 7y agoFrom your own link... from 1978 to 1997, there were more than a million abortions each year. But... now that we know abortion clinics only murder a few hundred thousand, that makes them like twice as good as they used to be. That's how this works, right?
- bdamm 7y agoLooking at the data with compassion, I would say that access to abortion didn't result in more abortions. In fact, the opposite occurred; access to abortions appears to have reduced the abortion rate over the long term. So if you are truly pro-life, then you would want abortion to be very easy to access; this will save (prevent the "murder" as you say) babies by the millions. Obviously it isn't access alone, though, probably the real cause is that increased access to abortion comes with increased sex education and access to birth control for women, which in turn lowers the rate of unexpected pregnancies, which in turn lowers the rate of abortions. Now if only we could all agree on improving sex ed!
- cybersnowflake 7y ago8 murders in 42 years for something as hotbutton as abortion? Wow...given how the msm constantly carries on about this stuff you'd think prolifers were flying planes into abortion clinics every other day. Every so often I see stories of people murdered because they didn't want an abortion, why not keep a running tally of that? How does that stack up against the 60 million deaths since 73 for the other side? How many of those have been for babies that had fully developed nervous systems are are biologically indistinguishable from babies that are already born? Wanna bet its higher than 8?
- bdamm 7y agoUnborn babies are always biologically distinguishable from babies that are already born. Unborn babies haven't yet taken a breath, have not been exposed to light, and still gather nutrients from the placenta. Inflation of the lungs happens immediately after birth, among a cascade of other events that happen quickly following birth, clearly distinguishing an unborn baby from a born baby.
- hnbroseph 7y agoi feel like this may be equivocating on "biologically distinguishable", particularly given the chosen examples.
- tathougies 7y ago> Inflation of the lungs happens immediately after birth, among a cascade of other events that happen quickly following birth, clearly distinguishing an unborn baby from a born baby. But like literally none of this happens in the case of premature enough babies who often need intubation, and yet who -- if intentionally killed -- would trigger a murder investigation
- rand4321 7y agoSo we can freely kill people who haven't seen light?
- nocturnial 7y agoI agree. The discourse in your country doesn't seem to revolve about facts any more. At the moment it's just political. I'm wondering why this is on HN at all. We all know whatever is going to be said about this topic is going to be political eventually. (wow fastest downvote ever, I just posted this, like 5 seconds, and it already got a downvote :)
- warbird 7y agoAgreed on all points. I've lurked HN forever and consider it one of my very few feel-good places online. This post, and (already) some of the comments are not appropriate to my understanding of the site. Edit: to be clear, by "feel-good" I do not mean "positive," emotionally, just not subject to the same level of useless vitriol common elsewhere--which is where this thread is going.
- hos234 7y agoThe US is just much much larger than all other Western democracies. Sensitive topics are going to be much more political and take their time to resolve. It's like comparing how a group of 10 people resolve issues versus a group of 300. The dynamics are very different given the information asymmetry.
- jimbob45 7y agoIs it just me or does putting FACT CHECK above an article immediately make anyone else not want to click on that article?
- scoobyyabbadoo 7y agoSame here, just makes me think who has connections to get themselves declared fact checker. Can you imagine how awesome it must be to have major media outlets coo about how whatever you the fact checker says should not be questioned?
- hnbroseph 7y ago> says should not be questioned do you have examples of this happening?
- sterileopinions 7y agoThis comment is a dog whistle. Why are HN moderators allowing this account to post comments on this forum? Here is a previous comment on this account: >tBut the progressive revolution has entirely skipped over the struggles of non-Jewish whites merely because of their skin color. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972062 and another one: >Let's just be honest here, the only people experiencing fall-out from the Epstein case are not Je-yank https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20918028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20918028 It is very very concerning that HN moderators police tone but not substance and allows accounts like this one to proliferate conspiracy theories.
- scoobyyabbadoo 7y agoI noticed the sudden drop of points in my comments score in the past hour, which I must deduce is you going through and downvoting all my posts? Please remember the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- AlexandrB 7y ago> Rose retaliated on Twitter, claiming the doctors were “abortionists” and therefore not impartial. > They said that the code of conduct established by the International Fact-Checking Network (ICFN) stipulates that fact-checkers not advocate or take policy decisions on issues which they fact-check. The argument they seem to be making is that describing basic medical facts is biased because the facts are inconvenient to the anti-abortion argument and therefore not impartial. This is a continuation of the GOP war on science and it's sad to see Facebook take it seriously. If this stands, I expect to see anti-vaccine advocates make similar arguments, painting doctors as "vaccinists" and therefore not impartial. At that point, might as well not bother with fact-checking.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- coryrc 7y agoI'm so glad big tech screens videos for the correct political viewpoint. Nobody could have predicted events like this.
- jjulius 7y agoThey screened videos to ensure the facts pertaining to a medical procedure were correct. The fact check itself had nothing to do with politics.
- jMyles 7y ago> It had nothing to do with politics. Surely you can see that this is impossible. There is no component of a video like this which has "nothing to do with politics."
- ceejayoz 7y agoLet's say 30-40% of the population takes the political position that the eye is directly attached to the knee. Saying that's not true isn't a political position, even if the falsehood it's debunking is one.
- jjulius 7y agoNo, it's not. Please re-read my post. I said that "the fact check itself" is not political. I did not defend the political bias of the video itself. You would also do well to actually read the article, especially the screenshot of the fact-check. You'll notice that the fact-check, per my post, simply addresses the facts of the issue and does not make a single political statement. Edit: You also modified my statement when quoting me, making it more ambiguous than I had written it. Please be sure to quote people accurately in the future.
- hartator 7y agoThe thing is FB is not fact checking leftist videos the same way they were doing with the right. Untrue facts about guns for example are never pointed out. Like almost every guns are semi-automatic. Including revolvers and handguns. Making banning semi-automatic weapons in profit of handguns a non-sense.
- dvt 7y agoIt's unfortunate that big tech is essentially acting as a "morality arbiter" in such cases -- perhaps we need not only a separation of church and state, but also of tech and state.
- otachack 7y agoThe separation of church and state has been doing wonders, so far. \s
- yourbandsucks 7y agoWhy the sarcasm? Are people being defenestrated in Prague and I didn't notice? Religious conflict has been on a huge downswing for like 300 years.
- Barrin92 7y agoIf I had to make a guess the users comment aims at the American system where a privatisation of religion in combination with unrestricted free religious speech has mostly let to radicalisation. The alternative would be models like the UK, Germany or Denmark, where although churches have state representation, the reverse is also true and the state has effectively securalised and reigned religious institutions in.
- yellow_postit 7y agoHow are they in this case? Seems like a straightforward fact based claim. The one side claimed there is never a medical reason for terminating a pregnancy and the fact check organization listed a series of such medical condition such.
- jowsie 7y agoWhat's stranger is that the person claiming there's no medical reason for termination then goes on to list an acceptable medical reason for termination (ectopic pregnancy).
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- test45 7y agoToo much centralized cnotrol.
- bdamm 7y agoAt some point there's going be some form of court system(s) evolve out of this, or else case law is going to lay down some rough guidelines for companies like Facebook that are going to have to operate their own internal courts. I could imagine a court overturning a decision by an internal company court on censorship, for example. Maybe it's already happening.
- yellow_postit 7y agoLetting people share medical information and pay to promote it seems like a never ending recipe for problems. I’m sure someone at FB has done the math on just blocking all this content.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoThis video is absurd. The headline on the video "Abortion is never medically necessary", but then goes on to state that "removal of an ectopic pregnancy" doesn't count because it's not an abortion. Umm, OK. She's really just defined all of the "medically necessary abortions" as not abortions.
- claar 7y agoThis comment has it correct; she defines abortion in a specific way (a common practice in documents / research papers / etc), and then makes a claim using this specific definition. The definition is left out of the headline, understandably and predictably, leaving a flamewar about a straw man.
- kadoban 7y agoThis does not sound like a good-faith definition of terms. It's a no-true-scottsman instead, which is not a common practice, or at least not a reputable one.
- hnbroseph 7y agoi don't think the act of defining a term for later usage in an argument can be described as "no true scotsman", which is typically a mid-argument dismissal of a counterexample that contests a generalization. to be such they would have had to (for example) been in the midst of debating the topic, and said something like "but a real abortion..." where their operating definition of "abortion" was effectively changed.
- astine 7y agoThe term for this is a "stipulative definition." [1] It's only a fallacy if one does not clarify that one is using a stipulative definition instead of a more common one. 1. https://www.thoughtco.com/stipulative-definition-1692143 https://www.thoughtco.com/stipulative-definition-1692143
- claar 7y agoThe embedded video in the article is logical in its assertions and therefore doesn't leave room for argument (obligatory replies to this comment aside). Unfortunately, logical arguments in an emotionally charged topic are usually heard as inflammatory, as many logical married individuals can attest. So this political tug-of-war response should come as no surprise.
- simion314 7y agoI am not from US so can someone explain why the antiabortion thing seem rise in this last year? Is there some elections and some party is trying to gain votes or some social media trend? My question is about the timing(why now?) and not on "who is the good/bad guy" here.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe Supreme Court's rightward shift under Trump is likely to have significant impact on the legality of abortion in the US.
- simion314 7y agoIs Trump and his group declared anti-abortion? Would this gain more votes the one lost? I was thinking that our politicians would use a technique to say or do something controversial at convenient time so all media and public would be distracted from the actual thing happening. This smells like such a thing but it is probably what you said;
- dragonwriter 7y agoThe currently-posted national Republican platform (presumably written during the 2016 election cycle, given the “current adminstration” reference) says this: “Through Obamacare, the current Administration has promoted the notion of abortion as healthcare. We, however, affirm the dignity of women by protecting the sanctity of human life. Numerous studies have shown that abortion endangers the health and well-being of women, and we stand firmly against it.” [emphasis added] So, yeah, Trump’s “group”, stands “firmly against” abortion. https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/ https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/
- SamReidHughes 7y agoIt just happens that conservative judges would overturn Roe vs. Wade, or other rulings, leaving states free to outlaw abortion. So there's a coalition between pro-life people and more sagebrushey sort of conservatives, who like conservative justices for their upholding of the bill of rights and having a universalist outlook.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoPart of the issue with fact checkers is how charitably they are interpreting the words. For example: Weather Reporter: The sun will rise at 6 AM Tomorrow Fact Checker: False. The language talking about sun rise is implying that the sun rotates around the earth, and that has been known to astronomers to be false for centuries. In her video, Lila Rose is saying that abortion as defined as intentionally killing the fetus is not medically necessary. From the captions on the video: "Now, you could perhaps do an early delivery if she's experiencing or she has a very severe condition that you need to deliver that baby early, but in that situation you don't go in with a needle or forceps to destroy that baby before birth. You give that baby a fighting chance, and that is not an abortion." She is saying that the baby may die as a consequence of early delivery, but the goal is early delivery, not the destruction of the baby. Fact check says "Certain medical conditions such as placenta previa and HELLP syndrome can make abortion a necessary medical procedure in order to prevent the mother's death." My guess that Lila's response would be that that it is the early delivery that is saving the mother's life, not the abortion. The mother's life would still be saved if the baby survives through appropriate medical care. I don't know if Lila is Catholic, but a lot of her reasoning seems to fall under the "Principle of Double Effect." http://sites.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/doubleeffect.html http://sites.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/doubleeffect.html "Classical formulations of the principle of double effect require that four conditions be met if the action in question is to be morally permissible: first, that the action contemplated be in itself either morally good or morally indifferent; second, that the bad result not be directly intended; third, that the good result not be a direct causal result of the bad result; and fourth, that the good result be "proportionate to" the bad result. Supporters of the principle argue that, in situations of "double effect" where all these conditions are met, the action under consideration is morally permissible despite the bad result." The argument is that doing a delivery with intention to save the mother's life is good, even if it has the consequence that the fetus dies, since the death of the fetus was not the intention, and thus would not be called an abortion, since the fetal death was a secondary effect and not the primary intended effect. The issue with the fact check is that the fact-checkers were so eager to label something they disagreed with as false, that they did not appreciate the nuance.
- bdamm 7y agoAnd among "other medical conditions" would sit ectopic pregnancy, which not only you cannot deliver, you cannot even allow it to get to 12 weeks or the mother could die, so no attempt at delivery would make sense. How much medical case history would need to be in a fact-checking judgement to be accepted as fact?
- 29_29 7y agoASK HN: We really need a politics tab at the top of hackernews. Can we make that happen?
- austincheney 7y agoPerhaps that is not a great idea. It would be nice to have more politically volatile discussions pushed into a corner. Unfortunately, political discussions online among strangers are often less than productive.
- mrfredward 7y agoNot sure how others feel, but personally, I'd be more interested in a tab that shows everything except politics rather than a politics tab.
- ulucs 7y agoI can get behind a tech-only tab which hides political/non-technological posts. Watching American software developers/computer scientists making unsubstantiated grand claims on foreign political matters or mathematics/economics proves to be bad for my blood pressure.
- 29_29 7y agoHey Guys, to widen the discussion and make this more searchable, I'd hope for your feedback here for the whole community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20966349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20966349
- kelnos 7y agoI'd rather not. Most political stories get flagged to death unless there's something specifically interesting about them that HNers would find interesting. Unfortunately, we occasionally end up with something like this, where it _is_ interesting from a public/private policy perspective, but the political aspects are too strong and overcome that.
- danShumway 7y agoI'm seeing a couple of comments on here to the effect of, "what did you expect when you started asking companies to screen/moderate content?" This is not a good example of screening being impossible to do, or being too subjective to nail down. Facebook moderated the video on largely neutral terms; not asserting that abortion was right or wrong, just that the claims the video made were scientifically false. It should be the type of fact-check that Republicans can get behind: objective and verifiable. This specific story isn't that Facebook can't fact-check, it's that ultimately Facebook is willing to define neutrality based on what Lawmakers are complaining about at the moment. It is specifically Facebook's commitment to "neutrality" in this case that makes it easy for biased groups to manipulate the platform. I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that increased calls for global moderation may have unintended side effects, and on average I tend to disagree with people who conflate neutral tools with complicity. But this particular story is definitely evidence in the opposite direction -- that Facebook is not opinionated enough, and that a commitment to avoiding even the appearance of bias can lead companies to make ineffective, gutless moderation decisions.
- pessimizer 7y ago> This specific story isn't that Facebook can't fact-check, it's that ultimately Facebook is willing to define neutrality based on what Lawmakers are complaining about at the moment. No, for me it's that what constitutes "neutrality" shifts with the powers that be, and in this case it shifted quickly; because abortion is an issue that facebook doesn't care about, it was willing to go with a scientific consensus, but when a politically powerful person insisted that the scientific consensus wasn't "neutral" it abandoned it. We're watching the process of moderation in real time, not watching the corruption of a process that has never existed: of neutrality creation that is entirely independent of power. The solution isn't that Facebook isn't cleaving the the standards you hold to be objective enough. That's just kicking the can down the road. Get enough power to dominate Ted Cruz, and you can get him to delete the video yourself. edit: I'm not against Facebook moderating their platform, but they should have all of the editorial responsibilities and liabilities that come with that. Which, instead of this process happening informally, puts it into the justice system where standards can be publicly agreed upon.