15 ms·

Censorship is so repugnant, yet so complicated. What should be prohibited to be said, if anything? Who draws the line?

• dudus 6y ago
  Exactly. It's possible these accounts are fake, paid by the own politicians to spread misinformation and fake news. But it's possible it's not. Brazilian courts have also become increasingly political which means a large portion of the population won't agree with their decision. It's ugly, and I have no idea what Facebook can do.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    Facebook has to follow the law. Now, we can debate if the law is fair or not, but distributing in Brazil the content of these accounts goes against the law.
    • jasonlingx 6y ago
      The Brazilian Supreme Court is asking Facebook to block accounts globally, not only in Brazil.
      • coliveira 6y ago
        The issue is that members of Bolsonaro's fake news group were moving abroad to continue spreading their "content" from outside Brazil.
      • boring_twenties 6y ago
        Asking? Is that what they're doing?
        • User23 6y ago
          More or less. I doubt Mr. Bolsonaro is going to make much effort to enforce this ruling, even if he could.
          • rbanffy 6y ago
            He (illegally) ordered the executive's counsel to represent the group against the judicial orders.
        • sizeofchar 6y ago
          No, they have fined Facebook for not complying with this decision for the past two months and are increasing the fines if Facebook keeps refusing to comply.
      • oscargrouch 6y ago
        The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory. It doesnt matter where the original account is stored. Those accounts are part of a large network of fake news spreading, with a lot of cash apparently originating from the country government itself.. The individuals themselves keep all the free speech rights.. they can go to newspapers, social media or speak on the streets. The only thing that is blocked its the accounts that are bounded to this fake news network process being judged by the supreme court. Free speech cant be used as an excuse to constantly commit abuses and crimes that menace to demolish democratic institutions. Democracy must have means to protect itself from malicious actors that are massively lying in a industrial scale fomented by big money from populists that dreams becoming dictators. If part of this money is public, this is even worse. We should have learned at least one or two about how the proto-fascists used every immoral and even illegal trick in the book to turn a democratic society into a fascist nightmare.
        • jasonlingx 6y ago
          > The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory. If you read the article it’s saying the court is asking Facebook to block delivery of certain content globally, not only within Brazil. And they are threatening a local Facebook employee with criminal liability, which is the reason Facebook says it has complied with the order while appealing it.
          • oscargrouch 6y ago
            The individuals in question, after being blocked on portuguese language, just changed their profiles as they were in english. It was just a matter of people that follow them changing their preferences making the court order ineffective. (Again their content were being delivered to Brazilian followers) Than the court sent another order to block the content for Brazil of those specific profiles, in a way the content were not delivered to brazilian citizens. This is exactly what the court order is saying.. Now if Facebook or Twitter cant act on geolocation, its a technical problem, that they need to solve, as its just a matter of blocking based on geolocation of the people who are seeing that content, the target, and not just the source. I've read the court order, and it does not cover people from other nationalities, as if we follow whats being said on the court order, they are not the target. Now if Facebook cant deliver this, they are just asking to loose the battle giving its pretty easy to destroy the narrative. BTW, Brazil are more akin to Europe's convention to free speech, as to remediate things like "hate speech" learning from the past with the way fascist regimes spread out over Europe. I dont know why Facebook feels entitled somehow to think the US way of seeing and working with free speech should be forced on others sovereign nations.
• save_ferris 6y ago
  I don’t have answers to these questions, but it does seem to me that the internet has a fundamental incompatibility between being a space that enables or encourages (relative) anonymity on social media platforms, and being a space that strives to accept all kinds of speech, regardless of the content. As long as users are able to remain anonymous, content will continue to be pushed that drives some users towards adopting censorship. And as long as people feel their right to speech threatened, there will be a desire to remain anonymous. I honestly don’t see a clean way out of that scenario, but that’s just my perception.
  • quaintdev 6y ago
    Even non anonymous users spew out whatever narrative they believe in and a large population does it without verifying facts.
    • roamerz 6y ago
      One person’s spew is another’s gospel. Many a brave soul have died for the right to spew. 🇺🇸
      • boomboomsubban 6y ago
        When has anyone ever died for that right? Names and dates please.
        • smabie 6y ago
          I dunno, Jesus? 0 ad.
          • rbanffy 6y ago
            And he would have beaten the shit out of Bolsonaro if he ever claimed to be a Christian in front of him.
          • boomboomsubban 6y ago
• caiob 6y ago
  It used to be that if I bought a book at a book store and that book published false information, I could sue the writer but not the book store. Now, with the book store censoring books I'm fully in my rights to sue the book store for it.
• controversy 6y ago
  Don't prohibit speech. That's it. Repugnance is part of life. If you suppress speech, you only push it underground. Light is the best disinfectant. Daryl Davis, a black musician, attends Klan rallies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw). By knowing who to speak with, he's helped people out of that racist pit. I extend speech so far to include calls to violence. Then you know who to watch and who to protect. Hiding this does nothing but make intel harder to get. You can't try to prevent radicalization, because you've pushed it so far out of the light, it might as well be a mole. They'll still eat the roots of your modern democracy, but you'll be surprised.
  • lifeformed 6y ago
    What about spam? Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information? There's always an exception. Some amount of moderation is always necessary, and naturally there will always be gray area cases.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > What about spam? Spam filtering isn't censorship because the recipient doesn't want to receive it. Censorship is removing access to material the recipient would otherwise choose to view. > Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information? All of these things have illegal non-speech components (fraud, child abuse), so you can go arrest the perpetrators directly and leave the platforms out of it.
      • joshuamorton 6y ago
        But do you leave up the porn?
        • 6y ago
• Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  Nothing should be censored. Yes, not even <insert-bad-thing-here>. Content should be curated, not censored.
  • pjkundert 6y ago
    K-means clustering. This is a solved problem.
• coliveira 6y ago
  People seem to forget (for some strange reason) that there are actually laws against things that you can say. For example, defamation laws are in place to punish the distribution of much of what is today qualified as "fake news". If you spread false news on purpose, or if you threat someone of violence, if you make racist comments (in countries like Brazil), these are situations where you can suffer consequences for things you say or write. In other words, free speech is not an absolute right as some want us to believe. A communications platform cannot be considered legal if it enables crimes to be committed with no consequences.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    One complicating factor is that the United States guarantees rights that many countries do not, which can cause confusion. And another that often gets thrown is the "is social media a public square or private property" question. FWIW, simply enabling a crime to occur is not necessarily illegal.
    • coliveira 6y ago
      It is not ilegal if the enabler has no way to stop the crime. This is different if you can show that someone is committing a crime and the enabler doesn't want to stop it.
    • peteretep 6y ago
      > One complicating factor is that the United States guarantees rights that many countries do not And further it fills a large part of American identity and backstory, to the degree that they don’t seem to realise most rich countries with free citizens get on just fine without it
      • smabie 6y ago
        Just like China, gotcha.
        • peteretep 6y ago
• Lammy 6y ago
  Careful, that's how RMS got canceled.
  • peteretep 6y ago
    What does this sentence mean?
    • rumanator 6y ago
      > What does this sentence mean? It means precisely what happened to RMS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and_cancellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Call-outs_and... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
    • fsflover 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299156
  • jariel 6y ago
    "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia,"[129][130] Stallman wrote that those "should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness," I'm sorry, this is not a bad example of 'cancel culture'. It's funny because this is the argument that sometimes anti free speech people put forth because they believe that 'free speechers' are just protecting truly bad people. Harvey Weinstein was cancelled because he was very bad, for example. This is fine. Stallman cancelled himself here, or at least, if you're going to support pedophellia and kiddie porn, then, well, you have to live in a small bubble.
    • Lammy 6y ago
      Cancel culture is so ableist.
• guerrilla 6y ago
  One way to go would be to allow prohibition only of whatever is harmful and move the debate explicitely to what is harmful and how to decide that. As to the who decides what is harmful, I think one good option would be for it to be decided democratically by only those involved. The key there is consent. Who's involved though? That's the hard part I think.
• puranjay 6y ago
  So much of the strife we're seeing in the world right now stems from information now, maybe for the first time ever, being truly free. All the gatekeepers of information are no longer relevant. This means that the truly delusional can spread their conspiracy theories and get people to believe them. But it also means that people caught within exploitative power structures can spread their stories - see MeToo as an example. The strife stems from the very old, very firm order collapsing under this assault of free information. It's a little scary, to be honest, but I also believe it has the potential to be create a more just world. Facebook's role, in my view, should be to ensure that this information remains truly free. The old order still tries to influence the spread of this free information (bot farms, paid influencers, etc.). If you can stop this, I think you're doing a good job.
  • refurb 6y ago
    So much of the strife we're seeing in the world right now stems from information now, maybe for the first time ever, being truly free What strife in particular? From a US point of view, we've had several instance of race riots in the past. And those were far worse than what we see now. And in terms of conspiracies, those have always existed. Maybe they move faster, but think of the conspiracies around JFK's assassination. Those were broadly known long before the internet arrived. Plus, we see a lot more thanks to the internet. A good example is holocaust denial. Those people were always around. And I haven't seen any data to suggest holocaust denial is any more prevalent than in the past, despite people having more exposure to it. I'm not sure much has changed.
  • lopmotr 6y ago
    Some of the truly delusional have always had plenty of power and ability to spread their theories - religious people. Free information will hopefully reduce that rather than enhance it. Modern small-time delusions like anti-vax or white supremacy are nowhere near the scale and badness of, say Islam. But since Islam is well established, people turn a blind eye.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Religions aren’t homogeneous wholes. The overwhelming majority of adherents to all(?) religions are peaceable people. We just don’t hear much from them.
• rumanator 6y ago
  > Censorship is so repugnant, yet so complicated. The court ordered Facebook to ban sock puppet accounts controlled by people suck as the leader of Bolsonaro's party and a major backer that were used to spread libellous accusations targetting anyone or anything that might jeopardize Bolsonaro's political plans. Prevention's someone from creating a false profile to persecuted you with fabricated accusations is hardly censorship. In fact libel and slander laws are not censorship.
• rbanffy 6y ago
  Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is not free speech. This is what these people were doing - calling for the ousting of the head of the judicial branch, calling for a military coup, spreading hatred and slandering prominent figures from the left... They need to answer for that.
  • whatthesmack 6y ago
    > Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is not free speech. That's a commonly-held belief, but runs contrary to the history and law behind the quote. That particular quote was an example in a US Supreme Court case that was decided poorly and later changed (in 1969 I think). In the US, I believe threats of violence or harm are covered by the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". So the speech has to meet several qualifications to "not be free speech". What those people were doing on Facebook in Brazil would very likely be considered protected speech in the US. Not that what applies in the US applies to Brazil, but since the quote was from a US case, I figured it was with commenting. Here's a good article about the quote's history: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
    • dahart 6y ago
      > In the US, I believe threats of violence or harm are covered by the First Amendment That's not true. That's way too vague and broad of a claim. In general, specific threats of violence and harm are explicitly not free speech and not protected. And if they're not specific, they're not really "threats". Incitement, fighting words, and other speech often involved in fights where violent threats are made (such as slander and perjury) are all US exceptions to free speech that extend past the imminent lawless action clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations