7 ms·

Facebook bans QAnon conspiracy theory accounts across all platforms

31 points by grawprog 6y ago

timonoko 6y ago
Yes they did. I got permabanned yesterday, no reason given. I guess mostly because I was interested in coloring war-time photos in http://sa-kuva.fi http://sa-kuva.fi and they clearly have nationalistic, fascist and russophobic bias.
- smt88 6y ago
  It seems as though they openly have a nationalist bias, as do almost all companies. And I'm not sure you can accuse them of "russophobia" when they are an active Kremlin target. It's more plausible that one of their anti-hacking, anti-disinformation algorithms was over-zealous.
  - timonoko 6y ago
    The fact is that finnish-speaking moderators seem to operate from Russia. I have been banned for using russian words like "DURAK" and "GOVNO" about Putin for example. Very few real Finns know what they mean.
grandpoobah 6y ago
I just received a seven day suspension from Twitter for calling Q followers retarded. The last time I received a suspension from Twitter it was for calling out somebody for being racist. These machine learning algorithms don't seem to be much more effective than a word blacklist.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > I just received a seven day suspension from Twitter for calling Q followers retarded. It could be due to some filter feeling that it is inappropriate to use “retarded” as an insult, because it is disrespectful to people with actual mental disabilities. I am around forty, but twice in the last couple of years a person half my age has taken great offense to me using the term “mentally retarded” to describe people who are actually, well, mentally retarded. So, I suspect that the euphemism treadmill is gradually consigning “retarded” to obsolete vocabulary in any context, and those who continue to use it may be seen as horrible people.
  - xupybd 6y ago
    Yep I think the term is differently abled now. It seems the terms last awhile then some people use them as insults. The term gets retired and a new one stands in its place.
    - hayz 6y ago
      That is interesting. Differently abled sounds like a much worse passive-aggressive insult than retarded. At least retarded is technically right...
      - BoiledCabbage 6y ago
        > At least retarded is technically right... Mentally retarded as a phrase is no more "technically right" than "moron", "idiot", or "imbecile". All medical terms that preceded "retarded" for describing intellectual disabilities. You just like it because it happens to be the term that was being used at the time you learned it. It doesn't make it any more right or wrong. There is a medical term for the concept, its starts to become widely and popularly used as an insult, the medical profession comes up with a new term. > Up until around the 1960s, the terms "moron", "idiot", "cretin" and "imbecile" were all genuine, non-offensive terms to refer to people with mental intellectual disabilities and low intelligence. These words were discontinued in that form when concerns arose that they had developed negative meanings, with "retard" and "retarded" replacing them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        I think there's basically no way to get around the fact that a) society, for its own protection, needs a term for "Person you shouldn't trust alone in a room with a small child" b) nobody ever wants to be identified, personally, with that term, whatever that term is
      - mckirk 6y ago
        George Carlin would never run out of material in today's age.
cannedslime 6y ago
Everytime these Silicon Valley platforms remove "Q-tards" or "Russian bots", they take the opportunity to weed out ideological adversaries.
hhas01 6y ago
Good. QAnon is just good old-school Blood Libel†, updated and expanded for the 21st century’s connected digital world. Depriving it of its free high-traffic soap boxes is the best way to interrupt its transmission from the hardcore lunatics to everyone else. Let them piss off back to Parler and 8chan where they can enjoy their Nazi circle-jerks in relative silence. Let’s see if FB actually sticks it this time, though it must really gouge them to do so: just think of all that quality engagement they’re giving up! -- †Previously used by European Protestants to justify burning all the Catholics and by European Catholics to justify burning all the Jews, Q-ers aren’t even subtle about who they intend to burn next, just as soon as they reach their critical mass of numbers and hatred. See also: Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Weimar Republic, etc, etc, etc. Strange how conspiracy theorists, who are voracious compulsive pattern matchers, always fail to match those patterns!
mcntsh 6y ago
As a very left-leaning person who doesn't at all follow these types of conspiracies, I can't help but feel uneasy about decisions like this. Facebook is so ubiquitous and influential that it can be used to sway public opinion. That's scary. But isn't it also scary the other way? The fact that the content which can be posted there, the content so wide-reaching it can be used to sway public opinion, is controlled by a private company? In my opinion, a communication platform this large should be governed by the same free-speech laws we enjoy offline.
- krapp 6y ago
  >In my opinion, a communication platform this large should be governed by the same free-speech laws we enjoy offline. It is. The same free speech laws that allow Facebook and other platforms to exercise editorial discretion and ban unwanted content also allow newspapers, television and radio to choose what to publish and what not, allow businesses to refuse service and the posting of bills, and me to tell Jehovah's Witnesses to get lost when they show up at my door. Your right to free speech doesn't include a right to force platforms to host that speech. It's up to the so-called marketplace of ideas to decide whether or not your speech is worth spreading, and just as vendors can choose to stock a particular product or not, platforms can choose to host particular speech or not. Even Ben Franklin recognized this[0]. As a publisher he refused to publish libelous and slanderous speech, yet recognized the right of other publishers to do so if they wished. And yes, this implies that the marketplace of ideas can, potentially, reject a particular kind of speech and that some forms of speech may be more difficult to find a platform for than others. Free speech doesn't imply that all forms of speech must be treated equally or given equal merit, or that society cannot make distinctions between one form of speech and another, or discriminate between truth and falsehood, accepting one and rejecting the other. In a marketplace of ideas, it follows that not all ideas are equal. If society decides to toss QAnon into the bargain bin of cultural relevance, that's perfectly valid. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065586
  - mcntsh 6y ago
    The scale of Facebook and the role it plays in today's society stems way beyond the newspaper. In an age where communication mainly happens online, it is more comparable to a telephone, or even the internet itself. For (hundreds of) millions of people, Facebook IS the internet. You could say "well $telecom can choose to censor certain words that go through their phone lines, or block websites, just like a store can choose to stock a particular product or not" but let's be honest, they're different scenarios.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
It's this something like the third or fourth time they've said they're banning QAnon?
jeegsy 6y ago
Its always interesting how censorship is framed in western democracies versus the more putatively authoritarian countries.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  It appears some folks object to the word "censorship". By my understanding of what the word means, what Facebook is doing is in fact, censorship even if folks believe that its for a good reason and because its a 'private' company, they should be able to do so freely. In any case, when issues like these come up, both camps always arrive at the same 2 conclusions so its a waste of time.
Fjolsvith 6y ago
Why? What big crimes have been caused by QAnon conspiracy theory? Or, is is possible that this movement may be swaying voters in a particular, undesirable, direction?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's the same conspiracy that caused that guy to walk armed into a pizza joint demanding to see the sex trafficking in its basement when it had no basement.

31 points by grawprog 6y ago

Yes they did. I got permabanned yesterday, no reason given. I guess mostly because I was interested in coloring war-time photos in http://sa-kuva.fi http://sa-kuva.fi and they clearly have nationalistic, fascist and russophobic bias.

smt88 6y ago
It seems as though they openly have a nationalist bias, as do almost all companies. And I'm not sure you can accuse them of "russophobia" when they are an active Kremlin target. It's more plausible that one of their anti-hacking, anti-disinformation algorithms was over-zealous.
- timonoko 6y ago
  The fact is that finnish-speaking moderators seem to operate from Russia. I have been banned for using russian words like "DURAK" and "GOVNO" about Putin for example. Very few real Finns know what they mean.

grandpoobah 6y ago

I just received a seven day suspension from Twitter for calling Q followers retarded. The last time I received a suspension from Twitter it was for calling out somebody for being racist. These machine learning algorithms don't seem to be much more effective than a word blacklist.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> I just received a seven day suspension from Twitter for calling Q followers retarded. It could be due to some filter feeling that it is inappropriate to use “retarded” as an insult, because it is disrespectful to people with actual mental disabilities. I am around forty, but twice in the last couple of years a person half my age has taken great offense to me using the term “mentally retarded” to describe people who are actually, well, mentally retarded. So, I suspect that the euphemism treadmill is gradually consigning “retarded” to obsolete vocabulary in any context, and those who continue to use it may be seen as horrible people.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Yep I think the term is differently abled now. It seems the terms last awhile then some people use them as insults. The term gets retired and a new one stands in its place.
  - hayz 6y ago
    That is interesting. Differently abled sounds like a much worse passive-aggressive insult than retarded. At least retarded is technically right...
    - BoiledCabbage 6y ago
      > At least retarded is technically right... Mentally retarded as a phrase is no more "technically right" than "moron", "idiot", or "imbecile". All medical terms that preceded "retarded" for describing intellectual disabilities. You just like it because it happens to be the term that was being used at the time you learned it. It doesn't make it any more right or wrong. There is a medical term for the concept, its starts to become widely and popularly used as an insult, the medical profession comes up with a new term. > Up until around the 1960s, the terms "moron", "idiot", "cretin" and "imbecile" were all genuine, non-offensive terms to refer to people with mental intellectual disabilities and low intelligence. These words were discontinued in that form when concerns arose that they had developed negative meanings, with "retard" and "retarded" replacing them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        I think there's basically no way to get around the fact that a) society, for its own protection, needs a term for "Person you shouldn't trust alone in a room with a small child" b) nobody ever wants to be identified, personally, with that term, whatever that term is
    - mckirk 6y ago
      George Carlin would never run out of material in today's age.

cannedslime 6y ago

Everytime these Silicon Valley platforms remove "Q-tards" or "Russian bots", they take the opportunity to weed out ideological adversaries.

hhas01 6y ago

Good. QAnon is just good old-school Blood Libel†, updated and expanded for the 21st century’s connected digital world. Depriving it of its free high-traffic soap boxes is the best way to interrupt its transmission from the hardcore lunatics to everyone else. Let them piss off back to Parler and 8chan where they can enjoy their Nazi circle-jerks in relative silence. Let’s see if FB actually sticks it this time, though it must really gouge them to do so: just think of all that quality engagement they’re giving up! -- †Previously used by European Protestants to justify burning all the Catholics and by European Catholics to justify burning all the Jews, Q-ers aren’t even subtle about who they intend to burn next, just as soon as they reach their critical mass of numbers and hatred. See also: Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Weimar Republic, etc, etc, etc. Strange how conspiracy theorists, who are voracious compulsive pattern matchers, always fail to match those patterns!

mcntsh 6y ago

As a very left-leaning person who doesn't at all follow these types of conspiracies, I can't help but feel uneasy about decisions like this. Facebook is so ubiquitous and influential that it can be used to sway public opinion. That's scary. But isn't it also scary the other way? The fact that the content which can be posted there, the content so wide-reaching it can be used to sway public opinion, is controlled by a private company? In my opinion, a communication platform this large should be governed by the same free-speech laws we enjoy offline.

krapp 6y ago
>In my opinion, a communication platform this large should be governed by the same free-speech laws we enjoy offline. It is. The same free speech laws that allow Facebook and other platforms to exercise editorial discretion and ban unwanted content also allow newspapers, television and radio to choose what to publish and what not, allow businesses to refuse service and the posting of bills, and me to tell Jehovah's Witnesses to get lost when they show up at my door. Your right to free speech doesn't include a right to force platforms to host that speech. It's up to the so-called marketplace of ideas to decide whether or not your speech is worth spreading, and just as vendors can choose to stock a particular product or not, platforms can choose to host particular speech or not. Even Ben Franklin recognized this[0]. As a publisher he refused to publish libelous and slanderous speech, yet recognized the right of other publishers to do so if they wished. And yes, this implies that the marketplace of ideas can, potentially, reject a particular kind of speech and that some forms of speech may be more difficult to find a platform for than others. Free speech doesn't imply that all forms of speech must be treated equally or given equal merit, or that society cannot make distinctions between one form of speech and another, or discriminate between truth and falsehood, accepting one and rejecting the other. In a marketplace of ideas, it follows that not all ideas are equal. If society decides to toss QAnon into the bargain bin of cultural relevance, that's perfectly valid. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065586
- mcntsh 6y ago
  The scale of Facebook and the role it plays in today's society stems way beyond the newspaper. In an age where communication mainly happens online, it is more comparable to a telephone, or even the internet itself. For (hundreds of) millions of people, Facebook IS the internet. You could say "well $telecom can choose to censor certain words that go through their phone lines, or block websites, just like a store can choose to stock a particular product or not" but let's be honest, they're different scenarios.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

It's this something like the third or fourth time they've said they're banning QAnon?

jeegsy 6y ago

Its always interesting how censorship is framed in western democracies versus the more putatively authoritarian countries.

jeegsy 6y ago
It appears some folks object to the word "censorship". By my understanding of what the word means, what Facebook is doing is in fact, censorship even if folks believe that its for a good reason and because its a 'private' company, they should be able to do so freely. In any case, when issues like these come up, both camps always arrive at the same 2 conclusions so its a waste of time.

Fjolsvith 6y ago

Why? What big crimes have been caused by QAnon conspiracy theory? Or, is is possible that this movement may be swaying voters in a particular, undesirable, direction?

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's the same conspiracy that caused that guy to walk armed into a pizza joint demanding to see the sex trafficking in its basement when it had no basement.