7 ms·

Facebook content policies tweaked over time to accommodate POTUS

108 points by thelock85 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
riffic 6y ago
Call your congress critters and ask them to look at drafting legislation requiring the Executive branch of government to self-host its own standards-compliant social media site, using government infrastructure. We live in a day and age where ActivityPub exists and the White House could be running its own Mastodon server (well, I would not recommend that exactly, but it could be running something that speaks the same language).
- bmarquez 6y ago
  Why limit it to the Executive branch? I don't want to have to log in to Nextdoor to see what my local politicians are up to either.
- mc32 6y ago
  Why only exec? In any event rather than the official account for the office, they’ll communicate from their personal non gov account —which given first amendment, they have a right to.
  - riffic 6y ago
    okay, widen the scope. Any public official should be communicating from publicly owned and controlled infrastructure.
- Renaud 6y ago
  It's a good idea but I see a couple of drawbacks: - if you use a standard website you get limited feedback. Politicians love twitter and FB because they basically have unlimited retweet/reposts and feedback from their supporters. So using their own system, they would lose that. - A stand-alone governmental system that allows interaction would need people to register specifically to that system. Beyond becoming a massive potential for data collection (potentially in the same vein apps for political parties are doing it) there is no way it could reach a significant portion of the population (beyond its own supporters maybe). - The use of private companies blurs the line between official commentary and a personal one. That's probably also a reason why these people would not want a dedicated governmental infrastructure, it may rob them of this ambivalence. So, the government should have its own system and any public official should only be allowed to interact through that system and not use any other social media platform other than for sharing recipes and pictures of their dogs. Maybe they would then think a bit more before retweeting nonsense and hate[1] and they could be made slightly more accountable. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53212685 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53212685
- Animats 6y ago
  That's "whitehouse.gov". For some reason, it's not updated much. It's about a month out of date right now.
noscrewstoyous 6y ago
love that everyone is expecting some sort of impartiality from advertising companies and data miners policy isn’t the problem, it’s the platform itself
- viraptor 6y ago
  That generalises over almost everything in real world. "Everyone is expecting done sort of impartiality from X companies" is the reason why we have many laws.
  - noscrewstoyous 6y ago
    laws aren’t impartiality! in general you’re never going to get something akin to federal free speech with a privately owned publishing platform!
0zymandias 6y ago
I am not a fan of Facebook and have deleted my account. But Zuck is right in trying to avoid policing political content. It just won’t work. Twitter’s attempts, although idealistic, are a complete failure. Some tweets that are sanctioned are far less harmful than others that aren’t. Some tweets that are allowed are outright lies. Inserting Jack and his buddies as the arbiters of truth is not going to work. And frankly, I don’t want the Twitter exec team to tell me what I should believe or see. I understand that there is more pressure on Zuck to follow. And he may very well have to bend to the outrage of people even though it makes no sense.
- philistine 6y ago
  How can you decide if something is harmful or not ?
  - untog 6y ago
    By establishing initial guidelines and a regular process of evaluating the guidelines, changing them over time. I get that there’s a core question of “what even is harmful?” that many will debate but “I know it when I see it” was the answer for the debate over obscenity and it broadly worked for most people. Sometimes a best effort is better than an endless debate over an final answer.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    History? i.e. track record of prior harm by type of speech? If similar content has demonstrably caused harm before, then chances are high decent it's likely to cause harm again. ASIDE: It occurs to me that the kinds of discussions being had in the modern era, have their counterparts from earlier times. The arguments for and against the freedom to publish holocaust denialism has strong parallels to today's disagreements around freedom of speech, though they clearly predate social media networks. Interestingly, though global approaches to holocaust denialism (in the west) range from strong disapproval to outright bans, the strain of thought has continued to survive, albeit in far lower numbers. Would those numbers be vastly different in a world where those ideas were more freely permitted to flourish?
- 6y ago
mxcrossb 6y ago
This is why I find all this talk about free speech completely disingenuous. From the start, these websites had rules to moderate content. They’ve just been afraid to enforce them against the president.
- cageface 6y ago
  They've been moderating content since they introduced algorithmic feeds. If they want to claim to be neutral then bring back a simple chronological feed of the people I follow.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    You can just switch to "Latest Tweets" mode by clicking the little stars button at the top right.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Which is by the way completely ridiculous. The presidential office is not synonymous with whichever person currently inhabits it. When Donald Trump chooses to communicate on private platforms he ought to be treated like any other user. If the president were to walk into a bar and start smashing tables, unless you're in a banana republic, he'd be thrown out. If he wants to communicate in a public manner and not follow private rules the president has official channels precisely for that reason. The personification of the American presidential office is bizarre and also sadly not new.
flyinglizard 6y ago
POTUS is one side of it, and Facebook is a very big regulatory target if it decides to start a pissing contest with the elected US government; but apart of that, half of the voting Americans voted for POTUS and silencing their elected official is quite alienating too.
- aniro 6y ago
  More like half of those that cast votes in the last Presidential Election cast votes for the sitting POTUS (well, technically a significant number less than half but that argument is pointless b/c of the electoral college). It turns out that group represents less than 20% of the population (~63 million out of ~328 million is less than 20%). If alienating them is an unintended byproduct of simply labeling a verbal invective that incites violence and provably presents lies to the detriment of public health might be a worthy venture in content moderation. The mere act of labeling outright lies and calls to violence as such really shouldn't be so controversial.
  - spoopyskelly 6y ago
    Social media platforms should only moderate illegal content, not things they (you) don't agree with.
    - aniro 6y ago
      First Amendment guarantees were created to prevent The Government from regulating speech, not to private entities from doing so. Are they private or public entities? Are they required to use their technologies and resources to publish any and all content that isn't explicitly illegal? What if some content is deemed illegal in some jurisdictions and not illegal in others? If a community decides to ban a piece of art (such as a book, or a photograph, or a movie) should the platform then be liable for moderating that content specific to that location? Doesn't that imply that in order to accomplish that task they MUST track user location? What a win that would be, legislation that requires location tracking in order for compliance to occur. Should "Legal" be the ultimate arbiter of what is right, or what is just? How has that worked out for us in the past?
justapassenger 6y ago
Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations policing and setting standards of content and political discussions. I hate how discussions look online about politics, but I worry that instead of pushing for accountability of public figures, through democratic tools and institutions, articles like that focus on trying to get a private police up and going. Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc censoring more and more content from public figures won’t change the fact that USA have a racist president and that tons of people support him. And while I think it’s a valid question how much of their racist and discriminatory content they should be allowed to say before they’re thrown out of office, it shouldn’t be decided by Silicon Valley.
- Animats 6y ago
  Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations policing and setting standards of content and political discussions. Yes, and it's a worry. Twitter and Facebook are entitled to label or comment on inflammatory posts, but if you're willing to post non-anonymously, what you put up should stay up. High volume trolling by anons, though, needs to be detected and stopped. That's bulk spam, not discourse. As a kid, I used to walk past the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, a house in a residential neighborhood in Arlington, VA. They had a big sign: "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". They were a local joke. We survived that.
  - justapassenger 6y ago
    I personally think that having 3 tier policy is reasonable. Anonymous - anything can be removed. If you attach your name to it - internet companies should still be able to remove really bad content, as in the end they’re private business. But for highly ranked elected politicians, especially president, bar for removal should be really really really high. But at the same time, adding context and flagging demonstrably false statements is no brainier that companies are falling behind on
  - panic 6y ago
    > We survived that. Just because we survived something doesn't mean we weren't affected by it. I'm not saying this is what you're doing here, but this argument -- I survived this, so you can too -- is often deployed by abusers to justify perpetuating a cycle of abuse. I think in general it's better to ask whether or not something is actually good rather than whether or not we are able to survive it.
sacks2k 6y ago
Why is it that I can have a group called 'the only good cop is a dead cop' and this doesn't violate any of Facebook's terms? It's clearly a hate group that is biased against an entire group of people. Aren't we supposed to be against bias and bigotry? Or is it accepted because it's a group that isn't liked? I also see death threats on Twitter all the time to: white people, republicans, white people, Jewish people, and police officers. These are allowed to persist to this day. Ice cube, for instance, had a cartoon ripped straight out of anti-semitic propaganda from the Nazi era and it was taken down after many weeks because of a 'copyright violation'. Yet, if I even hint that I don't agree with BLM or underage trans surgery, I will get booted off of Twitter for hate speech and if I'm not anonymous, mobs of people will attempt to get me fired from my job and kicked out of society. The system does need to be changed. We need to start with the uber-progressive tech companies that take it upon themselves to stifle the speech of people they deem unworthy. Nobody should be able to have this much control over the population and it's definitely going to start affecting our elections. It's so much more powerful than the handful of fake Russian ads that were purchased in an attempt to sway voters (which wouldn't have caused stadiums of people to come out to see Trump when he was running in 2016). The reason we have Trump today is a direct result of this meddling. Trump and his team realized that all he needed to do was create the perfect sound byte and they would run with it and it would give him free advertising. He cast a net out and social networks and the media ran right into them every, single, time. His team was also the most tech savvy. They used data mining companies to find out the best ways to get votes and played the social media game better than anyone. Obama did almost the exact same thing in 2008. His team exploited a Facebook app that allowed them to get information on you and your friends when you installed it. I still remember all of the tech magazines lauding his campaign as revolutionary, genius, and the the new way of political campaigns. It clearly violated Facebook's TOS and user privacy. Yet, we saw no investigations. It's proof once again that it has more to do with politics than anything else. Progressive and liberal candidates and supporters of progressive and liberal causes can get away with murder. I just wish we had true equality instead of special treatment for select groups of people.
- throwaway4715 6y ago
  Sounds like you have a persecution complex because your positions aren't well liked. I'd suggest you look at the data around who and what is popular on Facebook. It supports none of what you've written. Sometimes it's not the kids who are wrong...
kyle_martin1 6y ago
https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE
NN88 6y ago
whats stopping a new titan website from ignoring this pressure?

108 points by thelock85 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Call your congress critters and ask them to look at drafting legislation requiring the Executive branch of government to self-host its own standards-compliant social media site, using government infrastructure. We live in a day and age where ActivityPub exists and the White House could be running its own Mastodon server (well, I would not recommend that exactly, but it could be running something that speaks the same language).

bmarquez 6y ago
Why limit it to the Executive branch? I don't want to have to log in to Nextdoor to see what my local politicians are up to either.
mc32 6y ago
Why only exec? In any event rather than the official account for the office, they’ll communicate from their personal non gov account —which given first amendment, they have a right to.
- riffic 6y ago
  okay, widen the scope. Any public official should be communicating from publicly owned and controlled infrastructure.
Renaud 6y ago
It's a good idea but I see a couple of drawbacks: - if you use a standard website you get limited feedback. Politicians love twitter and FB because they basically have unlimited retweet/reposts and feedback from their supporters. So using their own system, they would lose that. - A stand-alone governmental system that allows interaction would need people to register specifically to that system. Beyond becoming a massive potential for data collection (potentially in the same vein apps for political parties are doing it) there is no way it could reach a significant portion of the population (beyond its own supporters maybe). - The use of private companies blurs the line between official commentary and a personal one. That's probably also a reason why these people would not want a dedicated governmental infrastructure, it may rob them of this ambivalence. So, the government should have its own system and any public official should only be allowed to interact through that system and not use any other social media platform other than for sharing recipes and pictures of their dogs. Maybe they would then think a bit more before retweeting nonsense and hate[1] and they could be made slightly more accountable. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53212685 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53212685
Animats 6y ago
That's "whitehouse.gov". For some reason, it's not updated much. It's about a month out of date right now.

noscrewstoyous 6y ago

love that everyone is expecting some sort of impartiality from advertising companies and data miners policy isn’t the problem, it’s the platform itself

viraptor 6y ago
That generalises over almost everything in real world. "Everyone is expecting done sort of impartiality from X companies" is the reason why we have many laws.
- noscrewstoyous 6y ago
  laws aren’t impartiality! in general you’re never going to get something akin to federal free speech with a privately owned publishing platform!

0zymandias 6y ago

I am not a fan of Facebook and have deleted my account. But Zuck is right in trying to avoid policing political content. It just won’t work. Twitter’s attempts, although idealistic, are a complete failure. Some tweets that are sanctioned are far less harmful than others that aren’t. Some tweets that are allowed are outright lies. Inserting Jack and his buddies as the arbiters of truth is not going to work. And frankly, I don’t want the Twitter exec team to tell me what I should believe or see. I understand that there is more pressure on Zuck to follow. And he may very well have to bend to the outrage of people even though it makes no sense.

philistine 6y ago
How can you decide if something is harmful or not ?
- untog 6y ago
  By establishing initial guidelines and a regular process of evaluating the guidelines, changing them over time. I get that there’s a core question of “what even is harmful?” that many will debate but “I know it when I see it” was the answer for the debate over obscenity and it broadly worked for most people. Sometimes a best effort is better than an endless debate over an final answer.
- phs318u 6y ago
  History? i.e. track record of prior harm by type of speech? If similar content has demonstrably caused harm before, then chances are high decent it's likely to cause harm again. ASIDE: It occurs to me that the kinds of discussions being had in the modern era, have their counterparts from earlier times. The arguments for and against the freedom to publish holocaust denialism has strong parallels to today's disagreements around freedom of speech, though they clearly predate social media networks. Interestingly, though global approaches to holocaust denialism (in the west) range from strong disapproval to outright bans, the strain of thought has continued to survive, albeit in far lower numbers. Would those numbers be vastly different in a world where those ideas were more freely permitted to flourish?
6y ago

mxcrossb 6y ago

This is why I find all this talk about free speech completely disingenuous. From the start, these websites had rules to moderate content. They’ve just been afraid to enforce them against the president.

cageface 6y ago
They've been moderating content since they introduced algorithmic feeds. If they want to claim to be neutral then bring back a simple chronological feed of the people I follow.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  You can just switch to "Latest Tweets" mode by clicking the little stars button at the top right.
Barrin92 6y ago
Which is by the way completely ridiculous. The presidential office is not synonymous with whichever person currently inhabits it. When Donald Trump chooses to communicate on private platforms he ought to be treated like any other user. If the president were to walk into a bar and start smashing tables, unless you're in a banana republic, he'd be thrown out. If he wants to communicate in a public manner and not follow private rules the president has official channels precisely for that reason. The personification of the American presidential office is bizarre and also sadly not new.

flyinglizard 6y ago

POTUS is one side of it, and Facebook is a very big regulatory target if it decides to start a pissing contest with the elected US government; but apart of that, half of the voting Americans voted for POTUS and silencing their elected official is quite alienating too.

aniro 6y ago
More like half of those that cast votes in the last Presidential Election cast votes for the sitting POTUS (well, technically a significant number less than half but that argument is pointless b/c of the electoral college). It turns out that group represents less than 20% of the population (~63 million out of ~328 million is less than 20%). If alienating them is an unintended byproduct of simply labeling a verbal invective that incites violence and provably presents lies to the detriment of public health might be a worthy venture in content moderation. The mere act of labeling outright lies and calls to violence as such really shouldn't be so controversial.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Social media platforms should only moderate illegal content, not things they (you) don't agree with.
  - aniro 6y ago
    First Amendment guarantees were created to prevent The Government from regulating speech, not to private entities from doing so. Are they private or public entities? Are they required to use their technologies and resources to publish any and all content that isn't explicitly illegal? What if some content is deemed illegal in some jurisdictions and not illegal in others? If a community decides to ban a piece of art (such as a book, or a photograph, or a movie) should the platform then be liable for moderating that content specific to that location? Doesn't that imply that in order to accomplish that task they MUST track user location? What a win that would be, legislation that requires location tracking in order for compliance to occur. Should "Legal" be the ultimate arbiter of what is right, or what is just? How has that worked out for us in the past?

justapassenger 6y ago

Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations policing and setting standards of content and political discussions. I hate how discussions look online about politics, but I worry that instead of pushing for accountability of public figures, through democratic tools and institutions, articles like that focus on trying to get a private police up and going. Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc censoring more and more content from public figures won’t change the fact that USA have a racist president and that tons of people support him. And while I think it’s a valid question how much of their racist and discriminatory content they should be allowed to say before they’re thrown out of office, it shouldn’t be decided by Silicon Valley.

Animats 6y ago
Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations policing and setting standards of content and political discussions. Yes, and it's a worry. Twitter and Facebook are entitled to label or comment on inflammatory posts, but if you're willing to post non-anonymously, what you put up should stay up. High volume trolling by anons, though, needs to be detected and stopped. That's bulk spam, not discourse. As a kid, I used to walk past the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, a house in a residential neighborhood in Arlington, VA. They had a big sign: "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". They were a local joke. We survived that.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  I personally think that having 3 tier policy is reasonable. Anonymous - anything can be removed. If you attach your name to it - internet companies should still be able to remove really bad content, as in the end they’re private business. But for highly ranked elected politicians, especially president, bar for removal should be really really really high. But at the same time, adding context and flagging demonstrably false statements is no brainier that companies are falling behind on
- panic 6y ago
  > We survived that. Just because we survived something doesn't mean we weren't affected by it. I'm not saying this is what you're doing here, but this argument -- I survived this, so you can too -- is often deployed by abusers to justify perpetuating a cycle of abuse. I think in general it's better to ask whether or not something is actually good rather than whether or not we are able to survive it.

sacks2k 6y ago

Why is it that I can have a group called 'the only good cop is a dead cop' and this doesn't violate any of Facebook's terms? It's clearly a hate group that is biased against an entire group of people. Aren't we supposed to be against bias and bigotry? Or is it accepted because it's a group that isn't liked? I also see death threats on Twitter all the time to: white people, republicans, white people, Jewish people, and police officers. These are allowed to persist to this day. Ice cube, for instance, had a cartoon ripped straight out of anti-semitic propaganda from the Nazi era and it was taken down after many weeks because of a 'copyright violation'. Yet, if I even hint that I don't agree with BLM or underage trans surgery, I will get booted off of Twitter for hate speech and if I'm not anonymous, mobs of people will attempt to get me fired from my job and kicked out of society. The system does need to be changed. We need to start with the uber-progressive tech companies that take it upon themselves to stifle the speech of people they deem unworthy. Nobody should be able to have this much control over the population and it's definitely going to start affecting our elections. It's so much more powerful than the handful of fake Russian ads that were purchased in an attempt to sway voters (which wouldn't have caused stadiums of people to come out to see Trump when he was running in 2016). The reason we have Trump today is a direct result of this meddling. Trump and his team realized that all he needed to do was create the perfect sound byte and they would run with it and it would give him free advertising. He cast a net out and social networks and the media ran right into them every, single, time. His team was also the most tech savvy. They used data mining companies to find out the best ways to get votes and played the social media game better than anyone. Obama did almost the exact same thing in 2008. His team exploited a Facebook app that allowed them to get information on you and your friends when you installed it. I still remember all of the tech magazines lauding his campaign as revolutionary, genius, and the the new way of political campaigns. It clearly violated Facebook's TOS and user privacy. Yet, we saw no investigations. It's proof once again that it has more to do with politics than anything else. Progressive and liberal candidates and supporters of progressive and liberal causes can get away with murder. I just wish we had true equality instead of special treatment for select groups of people.

throwaway4715 6y ago
Sounds like you have a persecution complex because your positions aren't well liked. I'd suggest you look at the data around who and what is popular on Facebook. It supports none of what you've written. Sometimes it's not the kids who are wrong...

kyle_martin1 6y ago

https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE

NN88 6y ago

whats stopping a new titan website from ignoring this pressure?