31 ms·

If you provide catering services to ICE maybe you'd have people getting political about who's eating your food. If you're producing water and only allowing hate

If you provide catering services to ICE maybe you'd have people getting political about who's eating your food. If you're producing water and only allowing hate groups to consume it, sure maybe you'll have this happen, but otherwise these examples are strawmen. Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug. The way their platform is built is setup to manipulate people, and that platform is being used at scale to do so in ways facebook knows is fucking up the world. Its very existence is political at this point.

luckylion 6y ago
> They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. I don't really take issue with that, Germany even has that codified, and we're very far from being free-speech-absolutists. Media companies are compelled by law to air political ads by all political parties without checking them, judging them or commentary. Short of being obviously illegal, there's nothing they can do which lead to our center-left state media being told by the supreme court to air the far-right (actually far right, with skin heads, boots and all the stops, not just anti-low-skill-immigration conservatives) NPD's spot. > Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug. But not really. They exist, but the platform isn't "filled" with them. The vast majority on FB is not political. I'm sure that FB would be quite okay with not having politics at all. Sure, people are on the platform, but they'd rather have engagement around cat pictures, celebrity news and similar things, because people shouting at others about their ideology aren't buying sneakers. They're not a political advertising company that relies on political ads as their primary funding. Banning political speech is simply not an option, because some people sometimes want to argue about politics, and you're going to have to fight your users if you don't allow that. You never want to fight your users.

luckylion 6y ago

> They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. I don't really take issue with that, Germany even has that codified, and we're very far from being free-speech-absolutists. Media companies are compelled by law to air political ads by all political parties without checking them, judging them or commentary. Short of being obviously illegal, there's nothing they can do which lead to our center-left state media being told by the supreme court to air the far-right (actually far right, with skin heads, boots and all the stops, not just anti-low-skill-immigration conservatives) NPD's spot. > Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug. But not really. They exist, but the platform isn't "filled" with them. The vast majority on FB is not political. I'm sure that FB would be quite okay with not having politics at all. Sure, people are on the platform, but they'd rather have engagement around cat pictures, celebrity news and similar things, because people shouting at others about their ideology aren't buying sneakers. They're not a political advertising company that relies on political ads as their primary funding. Banning political speech is simply not an option, because some people sometimes want to argue about politics, and you're going to have to fight your users if you don't allow that. You never want to fight your users.