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US politics is so fucked - Fake news is bad - Government taking out fake news is actually bad?? - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgemen

US politics is so fucked - Fake news is bad - Government taking out fake news is actually bad?? - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay??? Now it becomes a shouting match to get Facebook to ban posts/people they don't like. Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match.

cheez 6y ago
Government has a monopoly on legal use of violence so a monopoly on accepted expression would be the logical next step for power hungry people. That's why it's undesirable. I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.
ehsankia 6y ago
Facebook is a business, the government is not. Facebook can remove whatever it wants, the government can't. First amendment applies to the government.
- lmm 6y ago
  The first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable. We need better protection for free speech that applies to corporate platforms (or perhaps to just apply the same common carrier rules we apply to the phone system to other platforms).
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3]. Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/File%3ACoat_of_arms_of_the_East_India_Company.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    Not true. The Dutch West Indies Corporation, one of the largest in history, existed before and during the ratification of the U.S. constitution. You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      If you think the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm, you’re being utterly delusional.
      - oneplane 6y ago
        The Dutch West Indies Corporation ate entire countries for breakfast, and wasn't hiding it either. While tech companies can certainly play a role in communication when overthrowing governments, they aren't usually rolling in to other countries and taking over whatever they want.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
      - JamisonM 6y ago
        The British East India was also founded around the same time. Their cultural impact was at the time certainly as vast as Facebook's, the company literally passed laws in India. The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
        sjwright 6y ago
        I don't agree that laws influence culture.
  - im_down_w_otp 6y ago
    The East India Trading Company preceded the writing of the First Amendment by some distance, and that company for some period accounted for fully 1/2 of all global trade. Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
- ffggvv 6y ago
  no one is saying it’s illegal. they’re disagreeing with the policy. just like many would cry if fb banned lgbt content even thought it would be legal
- chroem- 6y ago
  So what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? This is not a good precedent.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them. Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value. It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    The grocery store reserves the right to refuse service to whomever they want, so long as they are not a protected class. Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
    - chroem- 6y ago
      If Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A announce tomorrow morning that they are refusing service to all people who voted for a Democratic candidate in the last few election cycles (something that's within the realm of plausibility), what would be your initial reaction?
      - three_seagrass 6y ago
        You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses? Political party is not a protected class, so those businesses are well in their right to do so (despite being sued by shareholders for eliminating half their revenue). It's the same way that those businesses reserve the right to kick out Nazis and alt-right scum.
three_seagrass 6y ago
The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech. There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
- sneak 6y ago
  > The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech. Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store. This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher. It's an end run around the constitution.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    First, only Apple devices have the issue of limited store access, which is a tangential antitrust problem unto itself. Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
    - realusername 6y ago
      > First, only Apple devices have the issue of limited store access, which is a tangential antitrust problem unto itself. Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store. If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
      - 6y ago
neilv 6y ago
My impression (albeit, based partly upon my poor understanding of the world as a child) is that there used to be more general US clarity about the goodness/badness of propaganda, censorship, the press, etc. I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better. Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.) And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.) I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative. Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.
newacct583 6y ago
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay??? That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.
- ergocoder 6y ago
  It's not very different. Who is the third party? Why do we trust them? Is their process rigorous, public, and auditable? It seems like just another private org that can determine what is true or false. If someone has to do the job, I'd rather my government do it.
wsc981 6y ago
> - Government taking out fake news is actually bad?? Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0]. > - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay??? Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether. I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof. Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way). --- [0]: https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458 https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458
rideontime 6y ago
> Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match. Or who spends the most on ads. > Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.
geofft 6y ago
Facebook is a private company and is subject to competition. The government is not. We might have worried about Prodigy and CompuServe restricting speech (and we literally did, and that got us Section 230), but they're irrelevant now. We might have worried about MySpace, but it's irrelevant now. But the decisions the US government made in the 1990s and 2000s are incredibly relevant today, despite multiple changes in which party had the upper hand. The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders. Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.

cheez 6y ago

Government has a monopoly on legal use of violence so a monopoly on accepted expression would be the logical next step for power hungry people. That's why it's undesirable. I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.

ehsankia 6y ago

Facebook is a business, the government is not. Facebook can remove whatever it wants, the government can't. First amendment applies to the government.

lmm 6y ago
The first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable. We need better protection for free speech that applies to corporate platforms (or perhaps to just apply the same common carrier rules we apply to the phone system to other platforms).
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3]. Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/File%3ACoat_of_arms_of_the_East_India_Company.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  Not true. The Dutch West Indies Corporation, one of the largest in history, existed before and during the ratification of the U.S. constitution. You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    If you think the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm, you’re being utterly delusional.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      The Dutch West Indies Corporation ate entire countries for breakfast, and wasn't hiding it either. While tech companies can certainly play a role in communication when overthrowing governments, they aren't usually rolling in to other countries and taking over whatever they want.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
    - JamisonM 6y ago
      The British East India was also founded around the same time. Their cultural impact was at the time certainly as vast as Facebook's, the company literally passed laws in India. The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
      - sjwright 6y ago
        I don't agree that laws influence culture.
- im_down_w_otp 6y ago
  The East India Trading Company preceded the writing of the First Amendment by some distance, and that company for some period accounted for fully 1/2 of all global trade. Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
ffggvv 6y ago
no one is saying it’s illegal. they’re disagreeing with the policy. just like many would cry if fb banned lgbt content even thought it would be legal
chroem- 6y ago
So what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? This is not a good precedent.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them. Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value. It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  The grocery store reserves the right to refuse service to whomever they want, so long as they are not a protected class. Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
  - chroem- 6y ago
    If Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A announce tomorrow morning that they are refusing service to all people who voted for a Democratic candidate in the last few election cycles (something that's within the realm of plausibility), what would be your initial reaction?
    - three_seagrass 6y ago
      You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses? Political party is not a protected class, so those businesses are well in their right to do so (despite being sued by shareholders for eliminating half their revenue). It's the same way that those businesses reserve the right to kick out Nazis and alt-right scum.

three_seagrass 6y ago

The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech. There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.

sneak 6y ago
> The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech. Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store. This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher. It's an end run around the constitution.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  First, only Apple devices have the issue of limited store access, which is a tangential antitrust problem unto itself. Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
  - realusername 6y ago
    > First, only Apple devices have the issue of limited store access, which is a tangential antitrust problem unto itself. Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store. If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
    - 6y ago

neilv 6y ago

My impression (albeit, based partly upon my poor understanding of the world as a child) is that there used to be more general US clarity about the goodness/badness of propaganda, censorship, the press, etc. I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better. Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.) And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.) I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative. Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.

newacct583 6y ago

> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay??? That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.

ergocoder 6y ago
It's not very different. Who is the third party? Why do we trust them? Is their process rigorous, public, and auditable? It seems like just another private org that can determine what is true or false. If someone has to do the job, I'd rather my government do it.

wsc981 6y ago

> - Government taking out fake news is actually bad?? Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0]. > - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay??? Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether. I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof. Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way). --- [0]: https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458 https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458

rideontime 6y ago

> Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match. Or who spends the most on ads. > Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.

geofft 6y ago

Facebook is a private company and is subject to competition. The government is not. We might have worried about Prodigy and CompuServe restricting speech (and we literally did, and that got us Section 230), but they're irrelevant now. We might have worried about MySpace, but it's irrelevant now. But the decisions the US government made in the 1990s and 2000s are incredibly relevant today, despite multiple changes in which party had the upper hand. The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders. Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.