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So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It

So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.

csense 6y ago
We're getting onto our own slippery territory here. If I let someone into my living room, and that person makes political statements I don't like, I'm free to ask them to leave and not come back, or tell other people in my living room that I think the statements are factually incorrect. If Facebook lets someone onto their website, and that person makes political statements Facebook doesn't like, why can't Facebook ask them to leave and not come back, or tell other people on Facebook that Facebook thinks the statements are factually incorrect? Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook?
- ramblerman 6y ago
  > Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook? Unless you have 22% of the worlds population passing through your living room this is a pretty poor analogy. Maybe the town square is more apt.
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    Everyone has more of a right to a public space (like a town square) than a private living room or a private website (hadn't occurred to me that being publicly traded may have implications actually). As I've written in another recent comment, the problem is when Facebook or other networks become quasi-official sources for public communication. If the primary means that the government thinks I will find out about public health orders, mandatory business shutdowns, etc. becomes social media, I'm very concerned about the messy mix that "public space" and "private space" that Facebook will become.
    - DougN7 6y ago
      I fear social media IS the primary place that a lot of people get their news. That is a huge problem because of all the propaganda, fake news, knee jerk reactions and everything else that is spread there.
      - TallGuyShort 6y ago
        Agreed - I think it's a distinct problem, though. Crowdsourcing news where the crowd is ignorant and uneducated is harder to fix than what I'm getting at, because the only ethical way to do it is to convince people en masse to be better about identifying credible sources and thinking critically. But I'm actually more concerned about a state where overnight the government can ban normal day-to-day activities, and if you're on a 30 day ban from Facebook you don't know about it until they're arresting people for surfing. Or, in my town's case, where they've stopped notifying residents of construction-related closures with written notice to each house days ahead of time, and have just started putting it on NextDoor.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - whoopdedo 6y ago
    The correct analogy would be if someone is standing in the Walmart parking lot. And last I checked U.S. law permits Walmart to tell them to leave.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - banads 6y ago
      Are there any other non-corporate "parking lots" with anywhere close to the same network effects?
      - quicklime 6y ago
        Not a parking lot, but a lot of suburban communities are built around large shopping malls, operated by companies like Westfield. It’s not exactly conducive to protests, as the malls are private property and there’s no significant pedestrian traffic anywhere else.
        HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Such arrangements are not conducive to the political process, and that should worry everyone. If something can be used against someone it can also be used against you.
        banads 6y ago
        by putting "parking lots" in quotations, I was meaning to ask for the alternative digital equivalent to major platforms like FB and Twitter.
        closetohome 6y ago
        If we're continuing the parking lot analogy, it's like there's an almost unending grid of parking lot after parking lot, and you can travel to any of them instantaneously and for free. Some parking lots have a lot of people, so you'd rather go there if you want to be heard, but nothing is stopping you from setting up shop in an empty lot, and nothing is stopping people from visiting your lot. Now, given that major social network advertise pretty much everywhere, this might not be an entirely fair analogy. Some parking lots have ads for them posted in every other parking lot. But it's a point worth making that access is relatively egalitarian on the internet.
  - Verdex 6y ago
    I feel your point here is important. Facebook has a lot of power. To the point where I feel they owe the public more than they would if they were a small entity with a narrow reach. There are two principles here: 1) it's a problem if you have enough power to force the weak to cover the expenses of your failures and 2) if you have a lot of power you also have the ability to defend yourself from assholes and malicious actors. So, for point 1, if facebook decides that they want to dump trash into residential areas, they could silence everyone on facebook who complains. They could also call up their friends at twitter et al and convince them to do the same in exchange for whatever massive corporations like these days. Because of this possibility, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited. For point 2, if facebook becomes inundated with assholes or (heaven forbid) malicious trolls who make relentless fun of the font that facebook uses for posts and every post that everyone sees is just complaints about fonts, then facebook has the capability to create a special asshole facebook website and marketing campaign to convince the assholes to go somewhere else. They have the ability to switch out the font. They can fund research into powerful AI techniques that can group all the font complaints together so that only people who want to see that crap will see that and everyone else can have a good experience. Because of facebook's ability to deal with malicious (or social incompetence that is indistinguishable from) behavior, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited. On the other hand, if we're talking about an individual (or otherwise small and powerless organization) running a personal blog (or your living room), they have extremely limited ability to force other people to deal with their platform. And they also have extremely limited ability to deal with malicious behavior if they didn't otherwise have the right to curtail freedom of speech. In these cases, I want them to have greater rights because the likelihood of them being able to use these rights to oppress others is minimal AND their necessity of them needing them to defend themselves is greater.
- air7 6y ago
  It would be more like if another guest demand that you ask that person to leave because they didn't agree with the comment.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > I'm free to ask them to leave and not come back And you're free to not ask them to leave, also... which is what we're arguing Facebook should be.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    If you’re arguing that they shouldn’t do something, that’s different from arguing that they can’t do something. I’m a free speech advocate, but the First Amendment does not apply to private corporations except in very rare circumstances.
- jariel 6y ago
  First, the rules are different in commerce than they are for private property. Second, some entities are so big they constitute a public good, even if they are not recognized as such. If Google Search started to openly promote one side of politics and not the other, the regulations would hit hare and fast. Third, this idea of 'populism' is a little warped. People agree or disagree with the nature of the protests to varying extent. Don't assume that the press and those writing letters to FB, or definitely FB employees themselves, are in any way representative of anything. Fourth, it's in the company's interest to try to remain 'neutral in whatever terms that might mean. Finally - it's in everyone's interest for said platforms to have consistent, objectively applied, and hopefully independently monitored criteria and operations for managing what they take down and not. Zuck should not be involved in any of the day to day operations, and should not be commenting on any specific situation or post.
- anoncake 6y ago
  > Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook? Far from both your living room and Facebook so its exact location is merely of theoretical interest here.
vmception 6y ago
Facebook is only in this tone-deaf quagmire because they got in the business of censoring at all. Now they created the expectation for them to choose and they said no. Whoops. Going to be funny when the Public Health Orders all start targeting social media.
- justin66 6y ago
  > Facebook is only in this tone-deaf quagmire because they got in the business of censoring at all. Being the antenna for Donald Trump to broadcast constantly to the internet was going to be a quagmire no matter what.
supercanuck 6y ago
You know what would help. More alternatives. What if Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc were all still independent or there was interopability between Google Circles, Facebook and whatever else? Watch how fast Facebook would adapt and be monitoring news and trying to conform to the public opinion if they felt they needed to compete. The only reason we're in this position is because a reduction in real competition in the market and the only power they fear is that of democratically elected representatives. Elizabeth Warren had this right. Break up the platforms, and force social networks to allow a download of your data in a json format and move to a seperate service. Easily. That is the ONLY regulation we need.
- lanevorockz 6y ago
  Social Media are the real monopolies. For the first time we have a business that are provided for free and that are based on the concept of monetising its users. There is zero accountability and it is the closest we will get to a natural monopoly. It's interesting how they also collude with each other by defaming competitions and circularly maintaining this monopoly. Good example is Apple/Google process to accept new social media companies. It's nearly impossible and to a much higher standard they hold themselves.
  - ISL 6y ago
    Phone books existed long before the internet. I feel old writing this, but once a upon a time, phone-book companies (often the phone company, but not always) would deliver a phone book to every address with a phone. This was paid for almost-entirely by the advertising sold by the phone-book company. If a company or person wasn't in the phone book, they pretty much didn't exist. All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > force social networks to allow a download of your data in a json format and move to a seperate service. In markets concerned with serving European users, GDPR already allows you to download your data. Facebook has allowed one to download all of one’s own messages, pictures, etc. for many years now. The problem is that, in order to avoid infringing on other people’s privacy rights, downloaded data has to be anonymized: you can see your own messages as your own, but anything from another user will just be identified with a random identifier instead of their real name. This then makes it a challenge, when you want to import the data into a new service, to have all those messages associated with your friends’ accounts on the new service.
dagmx 6y ago
There are lots of options between full on censoring and not doing a thing. Displaying that certain prominent posts aren’t accurate is a good start, much like what Twitter did.
- elwell 6y ago
  "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" [Warning this message is inaccurate]
  - dguaraglia 6y ago
    Actually, that was marked as glorifying violence.
    - elwell 6y ago
      I responding to this "Displaying that certain prominent posts aren’t accurate is a good start, much like what Twitter did." not being quite enough in this case.
- fsociety 6y ago
  Warning this message is considered misinformation by the president of the United States of America.
pstuart 6y ago
Facebook is quite happy to censor speech. Facebook banned me for 3 days for commenting on a previous ban where I had said "white people suck" and "white people are savages", both for pictures contrasting white people protesting vs PoC and First Nation people protesting. Disclaimer: I am very white. I was not promoting hate.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It just seems hard to believe that calling people savages isn’t intended to promote hatred of them.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    It's a play on the fact that native americans have traditionally been referred to as savages, and this was my commentary on "the pot calling the kettle black".
  - pstuart 6y ago
    You are ascribing intent when I've repeated that was not my intent. I believe that you intend to promote white nationalism by your disingenuous engagement. Do you find that agreeable? If not, why? edit: It looks like you don't find it agreeable but can't articulate why. Shall I ascribe intent there as well?
- nilkn 6y ago
  That seems reasonable to censor. Regardless of intent, that language clearly does promote hate. I don’t see why it matters if you’re white yourself.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Context is everything. The first case was a collection of half a dozen pictures of white people protesting that they want hair cuts, vs. half a dozen pictures of PoC asking not to be killed. > that language clearly does promote hate How does that promote hate? > I don’t see why it matters if you’re white yourself I'm criticizing the group I belong to. Words get misconstrued all the time. You just demonstrated that. Edit: because I can't respond to your reply to this, @nilkn, I will say here that you appear to be one of the following: * Not able to comprehend what I'm trying to communicate * A troll * A white supremacist I'm not saying that to attack you, I'm honestly puzzled that you can't understand what I'm saying. I'd be happy to try and reach a mutual understanding with you but something tells me that would be a fool's errand. What is clear, is that you are projecting your assumptions as my intent. And your assumptions are wrong.
trhway 6y ago
>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. It would help to make things clear if FB in their terms of service would specifically and explicitly excluded public officials from limitations on hate, violence inciting and other otherwise prohibited on the platform speech,and marked that speech accordingly. Or let an official to explicitly checkbox such exception in his/her profile or may be at individual post level, a la carte style with separate checkboxes for hate speech, racism, etc., and mark such his/her post as made under that exception - "This post is published under the hate speech, [comma separated iterator over the checked checkboxes' values] exception requested by this public official"
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Would it help? I would expect that to just make things worse, as the right to freer speech on Facebook becomes an explicit asset with unequal allocation. An informal policy seems much less dangerous.
  - trhway 6y ago
    Well, that unequal allocation has been working fine with ads - one can say much more as long as it is clearly marked as political or commercial ad.
- briffle 6y ago
  Right, so the people that are registered with the US political Party ANP (American Nazi Party) Or many other parties you have never heard of could then check the box, and be free to say whatever they want. Or is Facebook going to police it only for a few popular political parties in the US, and not censor which political parties get speech?
  - trhway 6y ago
    I meant public officials. As there is at least some public interest in giving them platform, and there is at least some minimal check/scrutiny for them - their voters.
- 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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tomc1985 6y ago
I'd agree with you but private entities are not bound to freedom of speech. Only government forums
- lanevorockz 6y ago
  Sorry but you are incorrect. Platforms have protections while they act as a free and open forum. This protection ceases to exist the time you start fiddling with the content. Obviously, Terms of Service are there to filter the garbage out but any double standard can end up with your Platform credentials revoked and your business down the drain.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    Those protections afford immunity to civil claims related to copyright and infringing content. It does not apply to matters of decency. Many online platforms have booted their bigots and hate speech without any consequences to their ability to continue hosting content. Please do not conflate civil torts with criminal hate speech
    - 42lux 6y ago
      Not only have they booted the bigots and hate speech it's only because they booted it that they florished. That's also the reason alternative "public spaces" exist without that kind of moderation... think 4chan,8chan etc. It doesn't matter where you draw the line or anyone of us it matters that the line is there for everyone. When twitter bans an experiment of an account that was just tweeting Trumps tweet s as onces from themself. They should also ban Trump if they are not banning him but other people for the same choice of words it leaves a bad taste. Facebook is on another level in myanmar facebook was used as a tool to organize an ethnic cleansing. Free Speech is the modern "we just followed orders" of tech companies.
  - Traster 6y ago
    Your comment doesn't even slightly reflect the law. I don't know why people keep spreading this. Section 230(c): > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Furthermore section 230 (c)(2) states: > any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected So to be clear, it's not that the law is unclear on this, it's very clear on this: The publisher has no responsibilty to consider whether speech is constitutionally protected at all. Not only is there no qualification that these platforms need to meet in terms of moderation, but the law actively states that the platform can moderate speech. Citation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
kec 6y ago
The US president is the single most powerful person in the world. If he says "Hey $literally_any_media_outlet, I'd like to make a statement, want to swing by the rose garden in 20?" The media will fall over themselves to do so. I don't think you could come up with an example of someone who would be less harmed by being banned from social media than the potus. Even if for some reason you don't buy that, social media could easily justify a ban by differentiating between his personal and official government accounts.
- tarkin2 6y ago
  Both facebook and twitter give the president something more than traditional media: retweets, engagement, reaction, analysis etc. The whole 'the only good democrat is a dead democrat' and glorifying violence would have been much harder to do with traditional potus press statements. Twitter and Facebook allow him to use these new tools, despite his tendency to incite violence. They help to enable him. And it's their choice. And they thus make his words much more effective.
dodgyb 6y ago
But Facebook does regulate the feeds of their users by employing algorithms to surface content that they think the user will engage with, and so get bucks for the eyeball. This distinguishes them from libraries, the only other similar platform for unmediated content. Libraries treat all information as equal and curates it as such. Facebook does not treat information equally, this means it is already moderating content. Facebook already censors content that politicians deem unsavoury, so why should one political message get a free pass while another is removed?
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  Sorry to be a little pedantic, but libraries do not treat all information as equal. There are far, far fewer books written by nazis in the library and most of them are by former high ranking members of the 3rd Reich so students and historians can research the Second World War and The Holocaust. Even access is limited in some libraries for some information like technical libraries and books describing the manufacturing or design of dangerous materials.
  - dodgyb 6y ago
    I am not sure librarians are the ones who decide that a particular subject is socially or technologically dangerous. The point still stands, the information that libraries provide is organised to an open standard defined by information science, not an opaque algorithm that is subject to the whims of its creators.
- asiachick 6y ago
  Libraries have a featured books section or many of them do. Someone decides what is featured. If they are pro X they'll feature pro X books. Similarly they have limited space. Someone decide which books to take in and which books to throw out. Libraries have also banned books.
  - dodgyb 6y ago
    The featured books section is not curated specifically for you and you also have the choice to avoid that bookcase.
babesh 6y ago
There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. It biases elections by giving them an even bigger microphone than the other people running. Apply the same standards to all.
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  A free pass on what exactly? This has gotten so crazy, I can’t believe people are protesting Facebook for not censoring a politician. Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. Do people really think that censoring, or even annotating, the President’s words will change how people feel about them? Like someone is going to read Trump’s message, think “oh right, mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud,” then read an annotation from CNN and conclude “oh never mind, Trump lied.” On the contrary, it will lead to further entrenchment of division as they retreat to the comfort of their pre-existing views. Are people serious about this?? It seems obvious that the most likely outcome of censorship or editorializing is more entrenchment of views and pre-existing beliefs, not less. Nobody who is already listening to Trump is going to suddenly stop because Twitter or Facebook shows them a CNN article next to a “fact check” label. It’s just so ridiculous, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation. What happened to teaching people critical thinking and not to believe everything they read on the internet? And what the heck is “violent speech?” Just close the page if you don’t like it. My goodness.
  - gilbetron 6y ago
    I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
      Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others. And most importantly, who decides what is a lie? Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say. There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?
abc_lisper 6y ago
This is a false dichotomy. If a leader publicly prods his followers to attack some one on FB or Twitter, should they stand back?
- kube-system 6y ago
  If we're using the word "attack" to refer to a legal action, I think that is something that is very important for voters to be aware of.
  - abc_lisper 6y ago
    Not legally, sticks and stones.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      Calling for violence is illegal in The Netherlands if I recall correctly.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Then the speech is illegal and not an example of a reason the dichotomy would be false.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  You can make a coherent argument that they shouldn't, but that would require much heavier censorship on Facebook's part than is present today. How many Facebook posts glorifying the looting were left up uncontroversially?
- dvt 6y ago
  There's legal recourse for this (see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, among the many other SCOTUS rulings curbing free speech in special cases). Social media companies are not the arbiter, the courts are.
  - Natsu 6y ago
AgentME 6y ago
* If someone criticized newspapers for yellow journalism and inciting violence with sensationalism, would it seem so weird to push the newspapers to regulate the content posted on themselves? * Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers? I'm not sure if these questions imply anything about how social media sites should deal with regular small-audience / low-influence users, but I think any platform sharing influential posts to a large audience has similar responsibilities to a newspaper.
- atq2119 6y ago
  This is a very good point. Ultimately, the comparison between government censorship and social networks' decision to spread somebody's message falls flat because of the different baseline: If governments do nothing, there is no censorship. Governments have to decide to take action for there to be censorship. If social networks do nothing, nobody gets to spread their message through them. Social networks have to take action (write software, run servers) for messages to be spread. This difference changes the calculus of moral and ethical responsibility.
philjohn 6y ago
Maybe platforms shouldn't allow politicians on there full stop.
specialist 6y ago
Facebook's defense is that they're just the pipes, like a telco, and can't be held liable for the content. What is the free speech argument for automatic algorithmic recommenders?
tarkin2 6y ago
> So long as their speech remains legal He incites violence. Facebook and Twitter's tools give him a fuller engagement with the population.
kukx 6y ago
Yes, exactly. Sun is the best disinfectant. We should not allow speech to be banned, because then we do not know what people think anymore. If we suppress the free expression we may find that really bad ideas are silently spreading without being challenged. And it may end up really badly for all of us when people holding these ideas suddenly surface. You do not need majority to make quick and radical changes.
mc32 6y ago
People don’t think forwards and we’re hypocritical. They’re all for censoring or not censoring if it aligns with their agenda. And they’ll do a 180 when it benefits them. I believe the Gores’ dream of the PMRC may yet come to fruition for different reasons...
throwquestion24 6y ago
So if an elected official posts a picture of themselves naked or with their nipples out it won’t be censored?
- klahtnun 6y ago
  Sure, why not? It is illegal for police to enforce laws on certain public officials in certain circumstances. IIRC members of congress can't be stopped for a traffic violation on the way to a vote, or something like that. The ancient Romans didn't allow prosecution of some public officials while in office for a similar reason. Their courts could too easily be abused as a political tool. It's not unreasonable to leave public officials unmoderated while they're in office. The real problem here is that we're letting private companies make the decision. We should pass a law that requires unrestricted free speech on any platform of a certain size. And then give users optional moderation tools. Users could toggle a button that says "Show me fact-checking along side controversial topics" but it would all have to be opt-in.
  - throwquestion24 6y ago
    Because Facebook has already made some decisions on this topic and pretty much all nudity and female nipples are banned. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/19/facebook-nudity-policies/4483805002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/19/facebook-nudi... https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/08/06/facebooks-censors-strike-again-is-america-to-blame/#2636e55b7054 https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/08/06/faceboo...
satya71 6y ago
Facebook is not only in the business of publishing people's speech, it is also in the business of curating people's information input. They are only defending their obligations for the first of the businesses, not the second.
wwweston 6y ago
You're worried about "whatever is the popular opinion of the day" but want to leave that job to voters? You're talking about censorship as if it's something civil institutions have responsibility for, but private institutions shouldn't be doing? Your comment is concerned about slippery slopes, but doesn't consider the one we're already skiing down where we discourage institutions from taking responsibility for accuracy?
- tossAfterUsing 6y ago
  "censoring elected officials" is exactly the job of voters, no?
- ColanR 6y ago
  > we discourage institutions from taking responsibility for accuracy Facts are often debatable; the set of facts that need to be accurate is also debatable; and you are suggesting that both of those debates be settled unilaterally by expecting (requiring?) the institution to "take responsibility for accuracy." Note that public pressure (read: popular opinion of the day) will almost certainly be the deciding factor in how those debates are settled by those institutions. Are you suggesting that it is wrong for institutions to abstain from "bowing to the popular opinion of the day" in how they censor speech?
  - wwweston 6y ago
    Where facts are debatable, the responsibility to accuracy would include a description of their basis and the limits of that basis. Where there's less room for debate, responsibility includes an obligation to avoid "shape of the earth: views differ" approaches. If individuals and institutions don't take up this kind of responsibility, then there's no such thing as discourse, only speech as indulgence. And the value of popular opinion is directly related which one of those is used in constructing it. Individual and institutional responsibility, however, will remain orthogonal to that.
    - ColanR 6y ago
      Discourse is when individuals are willing to argue civilly with people who believe fundamentally different things, and are able to do so without concern for 'watching their words'. Whether they are engaging in an informed discussion or an uninformed one is between the people talking. For anyone else to insert themselves into the conversation, public or not, and claim to have The Real Facts is arrogant. For an institution to attempt to referee the conversations it is privy to, prevents actual truth from being discovered. To require institutions to referee in that way? Is another act of arrogance: placing oneself above 'the other people who have to be kept in line'. To leave those institutions at the mercy of popular opinion, to referee as the mob sees fit, is insanity. At least, that's the way I see it. Thank goodness we're still allowed to disagree on this.
SeeTheTruth 6y ago
You're worried about free speech - but what happens when an elected official calls for violence against a group of people? What happens when those calls for violence are answered and people die? There is a reason yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech, and companies should be in the business of censoring speech that incites violence.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress It's explicitly not the job of Congress. That's the point of the First Amendment. Regulating free speech is up to private enterprise, using private enforcement methods like de-platforming (old school: you can't spew your drivel inside my bar) and shaming.
- emsy 6y ago
  You could argue de-platforming is a violation of the first and amend accordingly.
  - dmicah 6y ago
    I don't think this is the case, unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises.
    - adventured 6y ago
      > unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises. That's not quite accurate. There is precedence for regulating speech in private media for example, as in the case of broadcast networks. Broadcast TV networks are still restricted on speech/expression to this day, as are radio stations. There's nothing to say that social networks can't also be brought under the regulation of the FCC and have their speech and terms of service dictated to them. This turns social media platforms into something more like a utility. All users must be treated equally or the platforms get massive fines. If I were attempting to get this through, I'd argue the major social media platforms are natural monopolies due to reinforcing network effects and the finite nature of user time (there can only reasonably be so many large social networks, and the market has already strongly demonstrated globally that that is a very small number). You can replace a natural monopoly with another (an independent Instagram, allowed to evolve as a threat, possibly could have killed Facebook for example and become the new monopoly), but you can't have 100 Facebooks that will all perfectly compete with eachother (some people will argue that in theory you could, but that would never happen in reality). For whatever niche / category / concept they target, social networks inherently trend toward either consolidation of users or death; it's why the Twitter clones were all killed off in the early days when people were still experimenting with that social concept. It's why there are not dozens of large scale YouTube or Reddit or even Stackoverflow clones (the rather brutal combination of network effects and finite user time wins in all cases and you end up with consolidation of users to just a few viable platforms). The market, largely left to sort things out on its own in the social media sphere, has provided a lot of proof that large social media platforms are natural monopolies.
m00x 6y ago
There's a huge misinformation problem with these platforms. Having the ability to present believable false information isn't something that used to be possible, but now it is. It could lead to censorship, which would be terrible, and we should let people post whatever is legal. A way around this would be to combat the misinformation by making sure the reader has quick access to the facts like Twitter's fact checking.
- fsociety 6y ago
  Believable false information has always spread and always will. I grew up in a rural city and was taught to believe that jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams, aliens were real and the government was hiding them, farms were being oppressed by liberal government in favor of factory farms, ghosts were real, cellphones cause cancer, vaccines cause autism. This shit was always here, but now people completely ignorant to the fact of it spreading now know.
pmarreck 6y ago
> too easy to walk down a slippery slope Which, as you started to say it, is the slippery slope fallacy. I don't see what the problem is with embedding some factchecker work beneath content (NOT "censoring" it, which is a ridiculous statement since I haven't seen this at all) that is making claims unsupported by literally a single Google of the claim with evidence provided by reputable sources. Bad information is harmful, and the vast majority of social media consumers are lazy and reactive and not very good critical thinkers. This wouldn't even be necessary if any sort of critical thinking was taught before college, but it isn't. (And that might even not help, according to some other claims, which again, necessitates the people with the voice being heard giving people good information.) Do you think people have the right to convince other people of something that would be harmful to them, like a charlatan or snake-oil salesman? Ethically, I don't think so, and I don't think it's a "slippery slope" to anything that is an overall bad. Plus, private companies can do whatever the fuck they want. If they want their content to be factual, they have the right to enforce that according to their criteria. Anyone is welcome to create a competing site that allows any and all harmful bullshit to flourish.
seumars 6y ago
Fact checking and censoring are two very different things.
ZenOfTheArt 6y ago
> So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. With all due respect, I disagree entirely, and elected officials censor each other as a matter of doing business. social media sites should be designated as journals and subject to the same ethics as journalists. I think the novelty of harvesting personal data (as in, "Oh, you mean someone cares about my favorite color? Neat!") can be tempered by holding users to the same standard as journalists. Social media sites are just journals. I am not going to allow Tinker Bell to sprinkle her magic pixie dust over Facebook and Twitter to give them some "special" status that allows them to avoid their journalistic responsibilities. They are in the journalism industry; they should lead, not beg for special consideration.
cageface 6y ago
The problem is that social media has made it possible for anyone to reach an audience of billions with a click of a button. This so radically changes the dynamics of how we communicate with each other that some new rules are going to be needed.
koboll 6y ago
>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate who (before he was permabanned) frequently railed on Twitter against the "Jewish media" and mused about the "JQ", which stands for Jewish Question? Who called Jewish critics "shekels-for-hire" and used the phrase "The goyim know!" as an imitation of their involvement in a supposed conspiracy? Who said he wouldn't mind "leading a million Robert Bowers [the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter] to the promised land"? Is that something Twitter is within their rights to ban for, in your view? If so, would that change if he were elected? Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. You break the rules, you get kicked off the private property.
- syrrim 6y ago
  The GP specified elected official, not candidate.
  - kohtatsu 6y ago
    How will candidates become elected officials without access to the platforms their electorate are on? I don't support Paul Nehlen, I just don't think it's that cut and dry.
    - syrrim 6y ago
      I'm not saying the decision of which political candidates to censor should be cut and dry. Just that the decision of which elected officials to censor should be.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > GP specified elected official, not candidate So incumbents get a material campaigning advantage?
    - syrrim 6y ago
cma 6y ago
Why would a politician get a less restricted Twitter than a potential future politician?
deleted 6y ago
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abalone 6y ago
Nonsense, any site that bans racial slurs has already stepped down this slope. “Slippery slope” is a well known logical fallacy.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
malandrew 6y ago
Those 7 points were very solid and shows that Zuckerberg has a lot more integrity here than those that wish to be the thought police.
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
It should be decided by the market. If that can't happen because there is a oligopoly on social media, maybe we should be look at anti-trust suites breaking up large players
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Slippery slope is a fallacy. You realize that these sites are choosing, on their own prerogative, to censor, if it becomes an especially burdensome part of their business they are free to stop.
glangdale 6y ago
It's amusing the "slippery slope" is originally the name of a fallacy, but how now become a simple statement of supposed fact (i.e. "if we do something, we won't be able to, over time, stop ourselves from doing even more of that thing").
ikiris 6y ago
Germany has pretty good history and context on what happens if you follow this to the end.
soraminazuki 6y ago
While I agree that censoring speech should is something that shouldn't be done, I think calls for physical violence is an exception. There's no doubt that some of Trump's tweets in recent days fall into this category. It doesn't need to be deleted entirely, as I also see the importance in preserving statements from public officials, but they can be hidden under a clear warning like what Twitter has done. BTW is threatening violence against fellow citizens even legal?
metalgearsolid3 6y ago
Imagine thinking being anti-racist is the popular opinion of the day
greesil 6y ago
But yet somehow we're capable of determining fact from fiction as individuals but a collection of individuals is unable to do so?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Facebook employees should take some measure of pride in that, he said: "I would urge people not to look at the moral impact of what we do just through the lens of harm and mitigation. That's clearly a huge part of what we have to do - I'm not downplaying that. ... But it's also about the upside, and the good, and giving people a voice who wouldn't have previously been able to get into the news and talk about stuff. And having painful things be visible. I think that matters, too." Employees I spoke with did not seem particularly moved by these answers. "Everyone's grateful we have a chance to address these things directly with him," one told me. "At the same time, no one thinks he gave a single real answer." Another said Zuckerberg appeared "really scared" on the call. "I think he fears his employees turning on him," the employee said. "At least that's what I got from facial expressions and tone." At the same time, another employee told me that Zuckerberg's decision was supported by the majority of the company, but that people who agreed with it were afraid to speak out for fear of appearing insensitive. (An employee who spoke on the call echoed this point.)" So much for "free speech" within Facebook, the company. In this case, "popular opinion" cannot be shared openly.
- fsociety 6y ago
  Free speech is hard when you watch George Floyd get murdered, anti-racism takes a huge leap at censorship against Trump (and labeling is a form of censorship), and then you’re left justifying why Trump’s horrible message should be left untouched. It’s a scary thing to get labeled as a racist because you defend free speech. I think it illustrates why we should shy away from censorship as much as possible. People here saying that social media companies should be considered a utility once they reach a certain size are very on point. I have zero doubts that the anti-racists would happily advocate for Trump to be cut off from electricity/internet/sewage/water. In some way I agree with them but in another there are healthy methods of activism and unhealthy methods of activism. We shouldn’t be encouraging companies with billions of users to weaponize the unhealthy forms. I am interested to see how many people who want Trump’s post labeled have read about the history of censorship in Europe and China. Christianity used censorship a long time ago and what were the primary principles they believed in? Do onto others as you would do onto yourself, love other people, don’t do drugs or commit adultery. Then when you look into the cracks you can see the crusades they went on and all the horrible things that occurred from it. I hope that isn’t the world we recreate.
opportune 6y ago
Social media sites should also feel free to apply the same content standards (no calls for violence or fake news) to all users regardless of their political status. Politicians aren’t entitled to use Facebook or twitter. They can start their own social media site where racism and false statements are allowed
philipov 6y ago
The First Amendment protects citizens from censorship by the government. It doesn't protect the government (or citizens) from censorship by private business. This is why having unregulated private platforms be the primary forum for political discourse is a threat to democracy. If Facebook or any other social media site wants to do that, they should be classified as a common carrier and be regulated by the FCC. "One reason common carriers are licensed is to ensure they provide indiscriminate public access and protect the privacy of the general public." https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/common-carrier https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/common-carrier
michaelmrose 6y ago
If our elected officials use your platform to share lies and hate you cannot morally ask people to be silently complicit. Our elected officials have their own electronic resources. Every senator and congress person has a website. Trump has a website. Anyone with $100 can have a website. Let them distribute hate and lies on their own site.

csense 6y ago

We're getting onto our own slippery territory here. If I let someone into my living room, and that person makes political statements I don't like, I'm free to ask them to leave and not come back, or tell other people in my living room that I think the statements are factually incorrect. If Facebook lets someone onto their website, and that person makes political statements Facebook doesn't like, why can't Facebook ask them to leave and not come back, or tell other people on Facebook that Facebook thinks the statements are factually incorrect? Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook?

ramblerman 6y ago
> Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook? Unless you have 22% of the worlds population passing through your living room this is a pretty poor analogy. Maybe the town square is more apt.
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  Everyone has more of a right to a public space (like a town square) than a private living room or a private website (hadn't occurred to me that being publicly traded may have implications actually). As I've written in another recent comment, the problem is when Facebook or other networks become quasi-official sources for public communication. If the primary means that the government thinks I will find out about public health orders, mandatory business shutdowns, etc. becomes social media, I'm very concerned about the messy mix that "public space" and "private space" that Facebook will become.
  - DougN7 6y ago
    I fear social media IS the primary place that a lot of people get their news. That is a huge problem because of all the propaganda, fake news, knee jerk reactions and everything else that is spread there.
    - TallGuyShort 6y ago
      Agreed - I think it's a distinct problem, though. Crowdsourcing news where the crowd is ignorant and uneducated is harder to fix than what I'm getting at, because the only ethical way to do it is to convince people en masse to be better about identifying credible sources and thinking critically. But I'm actually more concerned about a state where overnight the government can ban normal day-to-day activities, and if you're on a 30 day ban from Facebook you don't know about it until they're arresting people for surfing. Or, in my town's case, where they've stopped notifying residents of construction-related closures with written notice to each house days ahead of time, and have just started putting it on NextDoor.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  The correct analogy would be if someone is standing in the Walmart parking lot. And last I checked U.S. law permits Walmart to tell them to leave.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - banads 6y ago
    Are there any other non-corporate "parking lots" with anywhere close to the same network effects?
    - quicklime 6y ago
      Not a parking lot, but a lot of suburban communities are built around large shopping malls, operated by companies like Westfield. It’s not exactly conducive to protests, as the malls are private property and there’s no significant pedestrian traffic anywhere else.
      - HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Such arrangements are not conducive to the political process, and that should worry everyone. If something can be used against someone it can also be used against you.
      - banads 6y ago
        by putting "parking lots" in quotations, I was meaning to ask for the alternative digital equivalent to major platforms like FB and Twitter.
        closetohome 6y ago
        If we're continuing the parking lot analogy, it's like there's an almost unending grid of parking lot after parking lot, and you can travel to any of them instantaneously and for free. Some parking lots have a lot of people, so you'd rather go there if you want to be heard, but nothing is stopping you from setting up shop in an empty lot, and nothing is stopping people from visiting your lot. Now, given that major social network advertise pretty much everywhere, this might not be an entirely fair analogy. Some parking lots have ads for them posted in every other parking lot. But it's a point worth making that access is relatively egalitarian on the internet.
- Verdex 6y ago
  I feel your point here is important. Facebook has a lot of power. To the point where I feel they owe the public more than they would if they were a small entity with a narrow reach. There are two principles here: 1) it's a problem if you have enough power to force the weak to cover the expenses of your failures and 2) if you have a lot of power you also have the ability to defend yourself from assholes and malicious actors. So, for point 1, if facebook decides that they want to dump trash into residential areas, they could silence everyone on facebook who complains. They could also call up their friends at twitter et al and convince them to do the same in exchange for whatever massive corporations like these days. Because of this possibility, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited. For point 2, if facebook becomes inundated with assholes or (heaven forbid) malicious trolls who make relentless fun of the font that facebook uses for posts and every post that everyone sees is just complaints about fonts, then facebook has the capability to create a special asshole facebook website and marketing campaign to convince the assholes to go somewhere else. They have the ability to switch out the font. They can fund research into powerful AI techniques that can group all the font complaints together so that only people who want to see that crap will see that and everyone else can have a good experience. Because of facebook's ability to deal with malicious (or social incompetence that is indistinguishable from) behavior, I want facebook's freedom to curtail freedom of speech on their private platform to be extremely limited. On the other hand, if we're talking about an individual (or otherwise small and powerless organization) running a personal blog (or your living room), they have extremely limited ability to force other people to deal with their platform. And they also have extremely limited ability to deal with malicious behavior if they didn't otherwise have the right to curtail freedom of speech. In these cases, I want them to have greater rights because the likelihood of them being able to use these rights to oppress others is minimal AND their necessity of them needing them to defend themselves is greater.
air7 6y ago
It would be more like if another guest demand that you ask that person to leave because they didn't agree with the comment.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> I'm free to ask them to leave and not come back And you're free to not ask them to leave, also... which is what we're arguing Facebook should be.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  If you’re arguing that they shouldn’t do something, that’s different from arguing that they can’t do something. I’m a free speech advocate, but the First Amendment does not apply to private corporations except in very rare circumstances.
jariel 6y ago
First, the rules are different in commerce than they are for private property. Second, some entities are so big they constitute a public good, even if they are not recognized as such. If Google Search started to openly promote one side of politics and not the other, the regulations would hit hare and fast. Third, this idea of 'populism' is a little warped. People agree or disagree with the nature of the protests to varying extent. Don't assume that the press and those writing letters to FB, or definitely FB employees themselves, are in any way representative of anything. Fourth, it's in the company's interest to try to remain 'neutral in whatever terms that might mean. Finally - it's in everyone's interest for said platforms to have consistent, objectively applied, and hopefully independently monitored criteria and operations for managing what they take down and not. Zuck should not be involved in any of the day to day operations, and should not be commenting on any specific situation or post.
anoncake 6y ago
> Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook? Far from both your living room and Facebook so its exact location is merely of theoretical interest here.

vmception 6y ago

Facebook is only in this tone-deaf quagmire because they got in the business of censoring at all. Now they created the expectation for them to choose and they said no. Whoops. Going to be funny when the Public Health Orders all start targeting social media.

justin66 6y ago
> Facebook is only in this tone-deaf quagmire because they got in the business of censoring at all. Being the antenna for Donald Trump to broadcast constantly to the internet was going to be a quagmire no matter what.

supercanuck 6y ago

You know what would help. More alternatives. What if Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc were all still independent or there was interopability between Google Circles, Facebook and whatever else? Watch how fast Facebook would adapt and be monitoring news and trying to conform to the public opinion if they felt they needed to compete. The only reason we're in this position is because a reduction in real competition in the market and the only power they fear is that of democratically elected representatives. Elizabeth Warren had this right. Break up the platforms, and force social networks to allow a download of your data in a json format and move to a seperate service. Easily. That is the ONLY regulation we need.

lanevorockz 6y ago
Social Media are the real monopolies. For the first time we have a business that are provided for free and that are based on the concept of monetising its users. There is zero accountability and it is the closest we will get to a natural monopoly. It's interesting how they also collude with each other by defaming competitions and circularly maintaining this monopoly. Good example is Apple/Google process to accept new social media companies. It's nearly impossible and to a much higher standard they hold themselves.
- ISL 6y ago
  Phone books existed long before the internet. I feel old writing this, but once a upon a time, phone-book companies (often the phone company, but not always) would deliver a phone book to every address with a phone. This was paid for almost-entirely by the advertising sold by the phone-book company. If a company or person wasn't in the phone book, they pretty much didn't exist. All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> force social networks to allow a download of your data in a json format and move to a seperate service. In markets concerned with serving European users, GDPR already allows you to download your data. Facebook has allowed one to download all of one’s own messages, pictures, etc. for many years now. The problem is that, in order to avoid infringing on other people’s privacy rights, downloaded data has to be anonymized: you can see your own messages as your own, but anything from another user will just be identified with a random identifier instead of their real name. This then makes it a challenge, when you want to import the data into a new service, to have all those messages associated with your friends’ accounts on the new service.

dagmx 6y ago

There are lots of options between full on censoring and not doing a thing. Displaying that certain prominent posts aren’t accurate is a good start, much like what Twitter did.

elwell 6y ago
"when the looting starts, the shooting starts" [Warning this message is inaccurate]
- dguaraglia 6y ago
  Actually, that was marked as glorifying violence.
  - elwell 6y ago
    I responding to this "Displaying that certain prominent posts aren’t accurate is a good start, much like what Twitter did." not being quite enough in this case.
fsociety 6y ago
Warning this message is considered misinformation by the president of the United States of America.

pstuart 6y ago

Facebook is quite happy to censor speech. Facebook banned me for 3 days for commenting on a previous ban where I had said "white people suck" and "white people are savages", both for pictures contrasting white people protesting vs PoC and First Nation people protesting. Disclaimer: I am very white. I was not promoting hate.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It just seems hard to believe that calling people savages isn’t intended to promote hatred of them.
- pstuart 6y ago
  It's a play on the fact that native americans have traditionally been referred to as savages, and this was my commentary on "the pot calling the kettle black".
- pstuart 6y ago
  You are ascribing intent when I've repeated that was not my intent. I believe that you intend to promote white nationalism by your disingenuous engagement. Do you find that agreeable? If not, why? edit: It looks like you don't find it agreeable but can't articulate why. Shall I ascribe intent there as well?
nilkn 6y ago
That seems reasonable to censor. Regardless of intent, that language clearly does promote hate. I don’t see why it matters if you’re white yourself.
- pstuart 6y ago
  Context is everything. The first case was a collection of half a dozen pictures of white people protesting that they want hair cuts, vs. half a dozen pictures of PoC asking not to be killed. > that language clearly does promote hate How does that promote hate? > I don’t see why it matters if you’re white yourself I'm criticizing the group I belong to. Words get misconstrued all the time. You just demonstrated that. Edit: because I can't respond to your reply to this, @nilkn, I will say here that you appear to be one of the following: * Not able to comprehend what I'm trying to communicate * A troll * A white supremacist I'm not saying that to attack you, I'm honestly puzzled that you can't understand what I'm saying. I'd be happy to try and reach a mutual understanding with you but something tells me that would be a fool's errand. What is clear, is that you are projecting your assumptions as my intent. And your assumptions are wrong.

trhway 6y ago

>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. It would help to make things clear if FB in their terms of service would specifically and explicitly excluded public officials from limitations on hate, violence inciting and other otherwise prohibited on the platform speech,and marked that speech accordingly. Or let an official to explicitly checkbox such exception in his/her profile or may be at individual post level, a la carte style with separate checkboxes for hate speech, racism, etc., and mark such his/her post as made under that exception - "This post is published under the hate speech, [comma separated iterator over the checked checkboxes' values] exception requested by this public official"

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Would it help? I would expect that to just make things worse, as the right to freer speech on Facebook becomes an explicit asset with unequal allocation. An informal policy seems much less dangerous.
- trhway 6y ago
  Well, that unequal allocation has been working fine with ads - one can say much more as long as it is clearly marked as political or commercial ad.
briffle 6y ago
Right, so the people that are registered with the US political Party ANP (American Nazi Party) Or many other parties you have never heard of could then check the box, and be free to say whatever they want. Or is Facebook going to police it only for a few popular political parties in the US, and not censor which political parties get speech?
- trhway 6y ago
  I meant public officials. As there is at least some public interest in giving them platform, and there is at least some minimal check/scrutiny for them - their voters.
6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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tomc1985 6y ago

I'd agree with you but private entities are not bound to freedom of speech. Only government forums

lanevorockz 6y ago
Sorry but you are incorrect. Platforms have protections while they act as a free and open forum. This protection ceases to exist the time you start fiddling with the content. Obviously, Terms of Service are there to filter the garbage out but any double standard can end up with your Platform credentials revoked and your business down the drain.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Those protections afford immunity to civil claims related to copyright and infringing content. It does not apply to matters of decency. Many online platforms have booted their bigots and hate speech without any consequences to their ability to continue hosting content. Please do not conflate civil torts with criminal hate speech
  - 42lux 6y ago
    Not only have they booted the bigots and hate speech it's only because they booted it that they florished. That's also the reason alternative "public spaces" exist without that kind of moderation... think 4chan,8chan etc. It doesn't matter where you draw the line or anyone of us it matters that the line is there for everyone. When twitter bans an experiment of an account that was just tweeting Trumps tweet s as onces from themself. They should also ban Trump if they are not banning him but other people for the same choice of words it leaves a bad taste. Facebook is on another level in myanmar facebook was used as a tool to organize an ethnic cleansing. Free Speech is the modern "we just followed orders" of tech companies.
- Traster 6y ago
  Your comment doesn't even slightly reflect the law. I don't know why people keep spreading this. Section 230(c): > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Furthermore section 230 (c)(2) states: > any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected So to be clear, it's not that the law is unclear on this, it's very clear on this: The publisher has no responsibilty to consider whether speech is constitutionally protected at all. Not only is there no qualification that these platforms need to meet in terms of moderation, but the law actively states that the platform can moderate speech. Citation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

kec 6y ago

The US president is the single most powerful person in the world. If he says "Hey $literally_any_media_outlet, I'd like to make a statement, want to swing by the rose garden in 20?" The media will fall over themselves to do so. I don't think you could come up with an example of someone who would be less harmed by being banned from social media than the potus. Even if for some reason you don't buy that, social media could easily justify a ban by differentiating between his personal and official government accounts.

tarkin2 6y ago
Both facebook and twitter give the president something more than traditional media: retweets, engagement, reaction, analysis etc. The whole 'the only good democrat is a dead democrat' and glorifying violence would have been much harder to do with traditional potus press statements. Twitter and Facebook allow him to use these new tools, despite his tendency to incite violence. They help to enable him. And it's their choice. And they thus make his words much more effective.

dodgyb 6y ago

But Facebook does regulate the feeds of their users by employing algorithms to surface content that they think the user will engage with, and so get bucks for the eyeball. This distinguishes them from libraries, the only other similar platform for unmediated content. Libraries treat all information as equal and curates it as such. Facebook does not treat information equally, this means it is already moderating content. Facebook already censors content that politicians deem unsavoury, so why should one political message get a free pass while another is removed?

3pt14159 6y ago
Sorry to be a little pedantic, but libraries do not treat all information as equal. There are far, far fewer books written by nazis in the library and most of them are by former high ranking members of the 3rd Reich so students and historians can research the Second World War and The Holocaust. Even access is limited in some libraries for some information like technical libraries and books describing the manufacturing or design of dangerous materials.
- dodgyb 6y ago
  I am not sure librarians are the ones who decide that a particular subject is socially or technologically dangerous. The point still stands, the information that libraries provide is organised to an open standard defined by information science, not an opaque algorithm that is subject to the whims of its creators.
asiachick 6y ago
Libraries have a featured books section or many of them do. Someone decides what is featured. If they are pro X they'll feature pro X books. Similarly they have limited space. Someone decide which books to take in and which books to throw out. Libraries have also banned books.
- dodgyb 6y ago
  The featured books section is not curated specifically for you and you also have the choice to avoid that bookcase.

babesh 6y ago

There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. It biases elections by giving them an even bigger microphone than the other people running. Apply the same standards to all.

TechBro8615 6y ago
A free pass on what exactly? This has gotten so crazy, I can’t believe people are protesting Facebook for not censoring a politician. Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. Do people really think that censoring, or even annotating, the President’s words will change how people feel about them? Like someone is going to read Trump’s message, think “oh right, mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud,” then read an annotation from CNN and conclude “oh never mind, Trump lied.” On the contrary, it will lead to further entrenchment of division as they retreat to the comfort of their pre-existing views. Are people serious about this?? It seems obvious that the most likely outcome of censorship or editorializing is more entrenchment of views and pre-existing beliefs, not less. Nobody who is already listening to Trump is going to suddenly stop because Twitter or Facebook shows them a CNN article next to a “fact check” label. It’s just so ridiculous, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation. What happened to teaching people critical thinking and not to believe everything they read on the internet? And what the heck is “violent speech?” Just close the page if you don’t like it. My goodness.
- gilbetron 6y ago
  I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
    Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others. And most importantly, who decides what is a lie? Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say. There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?

abc_lisper 6y ago

This is a false dichotomy. If a leader publicly prods his followers to attack some one on FB or Twitter, should they stand back?

kube-system 6y ago
If we're using the word "attack" to refer to a legal action, I think that is something that is very important for voters to be aware of.
- abc_lisper 6y ago
  Not legally, sticks and stones.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Calling for violence is illegal in The Netherlands if I recall correctly.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Then the speech is illegal and not an example of a reason the dichotomy would be false.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
You can make a coherent argument that they shouldn't, but that would require much heavier censorship on Facebook's part than is present today. How many Facebook posts glorifying the looting were left up uncontroversially?
dvt 6y ago
There's legal recourse for this (see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, among the many other SCOTUS rulings curbing free speech in special cases). Social media companies are not the arbiter, the courts are.
- Natsu 6y ago

AgentME 6y ago

* If someone criticized newspapers for yellow journalism and inciting violence with sensationalism, would it seem so weird to push the newspapers to regulate the content posted on themselves? * Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers? I'm not sure if these questions imply anything about how social media sites should deal with regular small-audience / low-influence users, but I think any platform sharing influential posts to a large audience has similar responsibilities to a newspaper.

atq2119 6y ago
This is a very good point. Ultimately, the comparison between government censorship and social networks' decision to spread somebody's message falls flat because of the different baseline: If governments do nothing, there is no censorship. Governments have to decide to take action for there to be censorship. If social networks do nothing, nobody gets to spread their message through them. Social networks have to take action (write software, run servers) for messages to be spread. This difference changes the calculus of moral and ethical responsibility.

philjohn 6y ago

Maybe platforms shouldn't allow politicians on there full stop.

specialist 6y ago

Facebook's defense is that they're just the pipes, like a telco, and can't be held liable for the content. What is the free speech argument for automatic algorithmic recommenders?

tarkin2 6y ago

> So long as their speech remains legal He incites violence. Facebook and Twitter's tools give him a fuller engagement with the population.

kukx 6y ago

Yes, exactly. Sun is the best disinfectant. We should not allow speech to be banned, because then we do not know what people think anymore. If we suppress the free expression we may find that really bad ideas are silently spreading without being challenged. And it may end up really badly for all of us when people holding these ideas suddenly surface. You do not need majority to make quick and radical changes.

mc32 6y ago

People don’t think forwards and we’re hypocritical. They’re all for censoring or not censoring if it aligns with their agenda. And they’ll do a 180 when it benefits them. I believe the Gores’ dream of the PMRC may yet come to fruition for different reasons...

throwquestion24 6y ago

So if an elected official posts a picture of themselves naked or with their nipples out it won’t be censored?

klahtnun 6y ago
Sure, why not? It is illegal for police to enforce laws on certain public officials in certain circumstances. IIRC members of congress can't be stopped for a traffic violation on the way to a vote, or something like that. The ancient Romans didn't allow prosecution of some public officials while in office for a similar reason. Their courts could too easily be abused as a political tool. It's not unreasonable to leave public officials unmoderated while they're in office. The real problem here is that we're letting private companies make the decision. We should pass a law that requires unrestricted free speech on any platform of a certain size. And then give users optional moderation tools. Users could toggle a button that says "Show me fact-checking along side controversial topics" but it would all have to be opt-in.
- throwquestion24 6y ago
  Because Facebook has already made some decisions on this topic and pretty much all nudity and female nipples are banned. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/19/facebook-nudity-policies/4483805002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/19/facebook-nudi... https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/08/06/facebooks-censors-strike-again-is-america-to-blame/#2636e55b7054 https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/08/06/faceboo...

satya71 6y ago

Facebook is not only in the business of publishing people's speech, it is also in the business of curating people's information input. They are only defending their obligations for the first of the businesses, not the second.

wwweston 6y ago

You're worried about "whatever is the popular opinion of the day" but want to leave that job to voters? You're talking about censorship as if it's something civil institutions have responsibility for, but private institutions shouldn't be doing? Your comment is concerned about slippery slopes, but doesn't consider the one we're already skiing down where we discourage institutions from taking responsibility for accuracy?

tossAfterUsing 6y ago
"censoring elected officials" is exactly the job of voters, no?
ColanR 6y ago
> we discourage institutions from taking responsibility for accuracy Facts are often debatable; the set of facts that need to be accurate is also debatable; and you are suggesting that both of those debates be settled unilaterally by expecting (requiring?) the institution to "take responsibility for accuracy." Note that public pressure (read: popular opinion of the day) will almost certainly be the deciding factor in how those debates are settled by those institutions. Are you suggesting that it is wrong for institutions to abstain from "bowing to the popular opinion of the day" in how they censor speech?
- wwweston 6y ago
  Where facts are debatable, the responsibility to accuracy would include a description of their basis and the limits of that basis. Where there's less room for debate, responsibility includes an obligation to avoid "shape of the earth: views differ" approaches. If individuals and institutions don't take up this kind of responsibility, then there's no such thing as discourse, only speech as indulgence. And the value of popular opinion is directly related which one of those is used in constructing it. Individual and institutional responsibility, however, will remain orthogonal to that.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    Discourse is when individuals are willing to argue civilly with people who believe fundamentally different things, and are able to do so without concern for 'watching their words'. Whether they are engaging in an informed discussion or an uninformed one is between the people talking. For anyone else to insert themselves into the conversation, public or not, and claim to have The Real Facts is arrogant. For an institution to attempt to referee the conversations it is privy to, prevents actual truth from being discovered. To require institutions to referee in that way? Is another act of arrogance: placing oneself above 'the other people who have to be kept in line'. To leave those institutions at the mercy of popular opinion, to referee as the mob sees fit, is insanity. At least, that's the way I see it. Thank goodness we're still allowed to disagree on this.

SeeTheTruth 6y ago

You're worried about free speech - but what happens when an elected official calls for violence against a group of people? What happens when those calls for violence are answered and people die? There is a reason yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech, and companies should be in the business of censoring speech that incites violence.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress It's explicitly not the job of Congress. That's the point of the First Amendment. Regulating free speech is up to private enterprise, using private enforcement methods like de-platforming (old school: you can't spew your drivel inside my bar) and shaming.

emsy 6y ago
You could argue de-platforming is a violation of the first and amend accordingly.
- dmicah 6y ago
  I don't think this is the case, unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises. That's not quite accurate. There is precedence for regulating speech in private media for example, as in the case of broadcast networks. Broadcast TV networks are still restricted on speech/expression to this day, as are radio stations. There's nothing to say that social networks can't also be brought under the regulation of the FCC and have their speech and terms of service dictated to them. This turns social media platforms into something more like a utility. All users must be treated equally or the platforms get massive fines. If I were attempting to get this through, I'd argue the major social media platforms are natural monopolies due to reinforcing network effects and the finite nature of user time (there can only reasonably be so many large social networks, and the market has already strongly demonstrated globally that that is a very small number). You can replace a natural monopoly with another (an independent Instagram, allowed to evolve as a threat, possibly could have killed Facebook for example and become the new monopoly), but you can't have 100 Facebooks that will all perfectly compete with eachother (some people will argue that in theory you could, but that would never happen in reality). For whatever niche / category / concept they target, social networks inherently trend toward either consolidation of users or death; it's why the Twitter clones were all killed off in the early days when people were still experimenting with that social concept. It's why there are not dozens of large scale YouTube or Reddit or even Stackoverflow clones (the rather brutal combination of network effects and finite user time wins in all cases and you end up with consolidation of users to just a few viable platforms). The market, largely left to sort things out on its own in the social media sphere, has provided a lot of proof that large social media platforms are natural monopolies.

m00x 6y ago

There's a huge misinformation problem with these platforms. Having the ability to present believable false information isn't something that used to be possible, but now it is. It could lead to censorship, which would be terrible, and we should let people post whatever is legal. A way around this would be to combat the misinformation by making sure the reader has quick access to the facts like Twitter's fact checking.

fsociety 6y ago
Believable false information has always spread and always will. I grew up in a rural city and was taught to believe that jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams, aliens were real and the government was hiding them, farms were being oppressed by liberal government in favor of factory farms, ghosts were real, cellphones cause cancer, vaccines cause autism. This shit was always here, but now people completely ignorant to the fact of it spreading now know.

pmarreck 6y ago

> too easy to walk down a slippery slope Which, as you started to say it, is the slippery slope fallacy. I don't see what the problem is with embedding some factchecker work beneath content (NOT "censoring" it, which is a ridiculous statement since I haven't seen this at all) that is making claims unsupported by literally a single Google of the claim with evidence provided by reputable sources. Bad information is harmful, and the vast majority of social media consumers are lazy and reactive and not very good critical thinkers. This wouldn't even be necessary if any sort of critical thinking was taught before college, but it isn't. (And that might even not help, according to some other claims, which again, necessitates the people with the voice being heard giving people good information.) Do you think people have the right to convince other people of something that would be harmful to them, like a charlatan or snake-oil salesman? Ethically, I don't think so, and I don't think it's a "slippery slope" to anything that is an overall bad. Plus, private companies can do whatever the fuck they want. If they want their content to be factual, they have the right to enforce that according to their criteria. Anyone is welcome to create a competing site that allows any and all harmful bullshit to flourish.

seumars 6y ago

Fact checking and censoring are two very different things.

ZenOfTheArt 6y ago

> So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. With all due respect, I disagree entirely, and elected officials censor each other as a matter of doing business. social media sites should be designated as journals and subject to the same ethics as journalists. I think the novelty of harvesting personal data (as in, "Oh, you mean someone cares about my favorite color? Neat!") can be tempered by holding users to the same standard as journalists. Social media sites are just journals. I am not going to allow Tinker Bell to sprinkle her magic pixie dust over Facebook and Twitter to give them some "special" status that allows them to avoid their journalistic responsibilities. They are in the journalism industry; they should lead, not beg for special consideration.

cageface 6y ago

The problem is that social media has made it possible for anyone to reach an audience of billions with a click of a button. This so radically changes the dynamics of how we communicate with each other that some new rules are going to be needed.

koboll 6y ago

>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate who (before he was permabanned) frequently railed on Twitter against the "Jewish media" and mused about the "JQ", which stands for Jewish Question? Who called Jewish critics "shekels-for-hire" and used the phrase "The goyim know!" as an imitation of their involvement in a supposed conspiracy? Who said he wouldn't mind "leading a million Robert Bowers [the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter] to the promised land"? Is that something Twitter is within their rights to ban for, in your view? If so, would that change if he were elected? Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. You break the rules, you get kicked off the private property.

syrrim 6y ago
The GP specified elected official, not candidate.
- kohtatsu 6y ago
  How will candidates become elected officials without access to the platforms their electorate are on? I don't support Paul Nehlen, I just don't think it's that cut and dry.
  - syrrim 6y ago
    I'm not saying the decision of which political candidates to censor should be cut and dry. Just that the decision of which elected officials to censor should be.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > GP specified elected official, not candidate So incumbents get a material campaigning advantage?
  - syrrim 6y ago

cma 6y ago

Why would a politician get a less restricted Twitter than a potential future politician?

deleted 6y ago

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abalone 6y ago

Nonsense, any site that bans racial slurs has already stepped down this slope. “Slippery slope” is a well known logical fallacy.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

malandrew 6y ago

Those 7 points were very solid and shows that Zuckerberg has a lot more integrity here than those that wish to be the thought police.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

It should be decided by the market. If that can't happen because there is a oligopoly on social media, maybe we should be look at anti-trust suites breaking up large players

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

Slippery slope is a fallacy. You realize that these sites are choosing, on their own prerogative, to censor, if it becomes an especially burdensome part of their business they are free to stop.

glangdale 6y ago

It's amusing the "slippery slope" is originally the name of a fallacy, but how now become a simple statement of supposed fact (i.e. "if we do something, we won't be able to, over time, stop ourselves from doing even more of that thing").

ikiris 6y ago

Germany has pretty good history and context on what happens if you follow this to the end.

soraminazuki 6y ago

While I agree that censoring speech should is something that shouldn't be done, I think calls for physical violence is an exception. There's no doubt that some of Trump's tweets in recent days fall into this category. It doesn't need to be deleted entirely, as I also see the importance in preserving statements from public officials, but they can be hidden under a clear warning like what Twitter has done. BTW is threatening violence against fellow citizens even legal?

metalgearsolid3 6y ago

Imagine thinking being anti-racist is the popular opinion of the day

greesil 6y ago

But yet somehow we're capable of determining fact from fiction as individuals but a collection of individuals is unable to do so?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

"Facebook employees should take some measure of pride in that, he said: "I would urge people not to look at the moral impact of what we do just through the lens of harm and mitigation. That's clearly a huge part of what we have to do - I'm not downplaying that. ... But it's also about the upside, and the good, and giving people a voice who wouldn't have previously been able to get into the news and talk about stuff. And having painful things be visible. I think that matters, too." Employees I spoke with did not seem particularly moved by these answers. "Everyone's grateful we have a chance to address these things directly with him," one told me. "At the same time, no one thinks he gave a single real answer." Another said Zuckerberg appeared "really scared" on the call. "I think he fears his employees turning on him," the employee said. "At least that's what I got from facial expressions and tone." At the same time, another employee told me that Zuckerberg's decision was supported by the majority of the company, but that people who agreed with it were afraid to speak out for fear of appearing insensitive. (An employee who spoke on the call echoed this point.)" So much for "free speech" within Facebook, the company. In this case, "popular opinion" cannot be shared openly.

fsociety 6y ago
Free speech is hard when you watch George Floyd get murdered, anti-racism takes a huge leap at censorship against Trump (and labeling is a form of censorship), and then you’re left justifying why Trump’s horrible message should be left untouched. It’s a scary thing to get labeled as a racist because you defend free speech. I think it illustrates why we should shy away from censorship as much as possible. People here saying that social media companies should be considered a utility once they reach a certain size are very on point. I have zero doubts that the anti-racists would happily advocate for Trump to be cut off from electricity/internet/sewage/water. In some way I agree with them but in another there are healthy methods of activism and unhealthy methods of activism. We shouldn’t be encouraging companies with billions of users to weaponize the unhealthy forms. I am interested to see how many people who want Trump’s post labeled have read about the history of censorship in Europe and China. Christianity used censorship a long time ago and what were the primary principles they believed in? Do onto others as you would do onto yourself, love other people, don’t do drugs or commit adultery. Then when you look into the cracks you can see the crusades they went on and all the horrible things that occurred from it. I hope that isn’t the world we recreate.

opportune 6y ago

Social media sites should also feel free to apply the same content standards (no calls for violence or fake news) to all users regardless of their political status. Politicians aren’t entitled to use Facebook or twitter. They can start their own social media site where racism and false statements are allowed

philipov 6y ago

The First Amendment protects citizens from censorship by the government. It doesn't protect the government (or citizens) from censorship by private business. This is why having unregulated private platforms be the primary forum for political discourse is a threat to democracy. If Facebook or any other social media site wants to do that, they should be classified as a common carrier and be regulated by the FCC. "One reason common carriers are licensed is to ensure they provide indiscriminate public access and protect the privacy of the general public." https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/common-carrier https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/common-carrier

michaelmrose 6y ago

If our elected officials use your platform to share lies and hate you cannot morally ask people to be silently complicit. Our elected officials have their own electronic resources. Every senator and congress person has a website. Trump has a website. Anyone with $100 can have a website. Let them distribute hate and lies on their own site.