8 ms·

> “The whole thing got fairly well contained, and that’s in big part because Facebook was able to take action.” So who gets to decide what gets “contained” on

> “The whole thing got fairly well contained, and that’s in big part because Facebook was able to take action.” So who gets to decide what gets “contained” on the internet now? The government has a really, really bad track record of using these sorts of “options” for suppressing dissent. Historically it’s been absolutely abusive.

krapp 6y ago
>So who gets to decide why gets “contained” on the internet now? The government has a really, really bad track record of using these sorts of “options” for suppressing dissent. Historically it’s been absolutely abusive. Whomever owns a platform gets to decide what gets published or not published on that platform. They get to make the rules, enforce them and change them as they will, where the law of the land permits. That has always been the case.
- zests 6y ago
  Are you implying that Facebook is a publisher?
  - _jal 6y ago
    Are you implying 'publisher' is a special category with special legal privileges and/or obligations?
    - egao1980 6y ago
      more responsibility under US and other nations' laws. Basically publisher is liable for publishing hate speech - platforms are not.
      - krapp 6y ago
        There is no liability for publishing hate speech in the US. There is also, crucially, no liability for not publishing hate speech in the US.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Section 230 makes no distinction between "publishers" and "platforms", at least not where the ability to moderate or editorialize content is concerned. It doesn't require a platform to be politically neutral, or to only moderate content which is strictly illegal, nor does it forbid the exercise of editorial discretion. Facebook is allowed to do what they're doing and the question of whether that makes them a "publisher" or "platform" isn't relevant. ... I'm just assuming that's where you were going with this. Here's an exhausting HN thread on an Ars Technica article explaining further: [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803998 [1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-internet-law-politicians-love-to-hate-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - triceratops 6y ago
    They're the publisher of things they write and publish themselves. For example, the Facebook engineering blog. They are not the publisher of what their users post, even if they perform moderation of that content. That's the law. There's no "publisher"/"platform" hat that a company has to select before going into business.
kspacewalk2 6y ago
This isn't about government. Facebook is a corporation, it owns the platform, it decides what gets contained on its property (subject to applicable laws, of course, but not confined to only those laws). By signing up, you agree to their control over the platform. Control could be the bare minimum required by law, could be mercilessly removing any and all controversial speech - that's their discretion, just like it's completely your discretion whether to log on or to buzz off. They'll censor at whatever level works best for their core business of selling your attention to advertisers. Outside of applicable laws, you have no "rights" on this private platform you're provisionally allowed access to, and any attempt to sugar-coat that fact is just corporate PR-speak to avoid needless user attrition.
- n0nc3 6y ago
  This is an extremely lazy argument. Our generation has seen entire sectors of the economy subsumed within monopolies. The consolidation is unprecedented in the modern era. These monopolies have a degree of political influence that makes them hard to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense. We have seen what the financial sector has chosen to do with its political influence. Why would we expect anything different from new media companies like Facebook? People need to stop and ask themselves if the core enlightenment principles of toleration, free expression, and free association are worth protecting. Once abandoned, they will not be easy to resurrect.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    Facebook and co. don't have monopolies on places where you can voice your opinion. Blogs still exist. Newspapers exist (even very extremists ones). Telegram exists, forums exist, etc. What Facebook and co. may have a monopoly on is channels of mass outreach. However, I don't think that there is or should be a right for your opinion to be widely disseminated by a third party.
    - n0nc3 6y ago
      I would say that Facebook is similar to a 18th century tavern. It's a place where people meet and talk. Fortunately for 18th century humans, there were many pub owners who exercised varying degrees of control over the activities of their patrons. Some banned radical politics, and some did not. In our present era of concentrated control, we have a small handful of pubs controlled by a similarly small number of wealthy oligarchs. Recall that the Green Dragon tavern was the unofficial headquarters of the American revolution.
speedgoose 6y ago
Facebook decides the rules and everyone can report content that break them, and then outsourced and stressed Facebook employees judge if the reported content fit the rules or not. In the article they mention a fast line for reports from a few organizations.
logikomaha 6y ago
This is such a tiring argument. Corporations are the stewards of their domains. If someone wants to exercise their own freedom of speech, they’re welcome to start their own self hosted blog. It won’t have the same reach, and it won’t be as visible, but it will be just as free as freedom of speech ever was. If someone started posting their un-cited drivel, racist rants, and society harming misinformation on my hard drive, I’d want it purged. It’s my responsible as a citizen to maintain the health of my system and maintain reasonable discourse with those I disagree with. Is it “oppression” or an “infringement of our rights” or the “nanny state” when a HackerNews mod deleted a racist post or personal attack on another community member? I think not...
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  So, why so much outrage, when some non-US country bans LGBT groups on some of their platforms? Or trans groups? Or pro-choice (abortion) groups? Or pro Hong Kong groups? All of them are welcome to start their self hosted blogs, aren't they? You either have free speech, and host stuff you personally disagree with, or just call it 'moderation with political bias' (or some other kind of bias), if you only leave stuff you personally agree with. You never know, when you'll be the one facebook disagrees with, and then it's too late.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    Because being anti-LGBT is morally wrong, that's why. It has nothing to do with legality or with freedom of expression. I really don't understand how we can start equating LGBT rights with outright hate speech.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Who gets to decide what definition of morals Facebook should use to answer these questions? Why should Facebook choose your particular moral framework to work with? Yeah, I know, you're right. Everybody else is sure that their moral framework is right, too. So why does yours get to rule? What is your basis for saying that yours is right and theirs is wrong? You may in fact be able to give a defense of your moral framework. That defense seems right to you, and to those who agree with you. But defenders of other moral frameworks can do that, too. Which self-consistent and defensible (per the adherents) moral framework should be the one to rule Facebook, and why?
adkadskhj 6y ago
And the same argument has been made about child porn and etc. Eg, people have said we can't use encryption because of it's ability to enable child predators. So yea, the power and ability to suppress content based on illegal activity has downsides - it's a necessity. We can't strictly avoid the topic entirely and allow everything everywhere for very obvious reasons. So if we're not allowing everything everywhere then we agree that there are lines, and those lines have to be drawn. So we're already on the "slippery slope", we're just debating where exactly to draw the lines. To me this stance from Facebook is one of the very few things i agree with from them. Much of the uninformed viral and outage based discourse is doing nothing but harming humanity in my eyes and tools to spread it are helping no one. We're in an information war time and while i support controversial information about race, gender identity and any other "hot topics"; i definitely do not support toxic discourse on these subjects that don't even attempt to inform or constructively discuss.
a4444f 6y ago
Wankers write history, hysterics write whiningly.

krapp 6y ago

>So who gets to decide why gets “contained” on the internet now? The government has a really, really bad track record of using these sorts of “options” for suppressing dissent. Historically it’s been absolutely abusive. Whomever owns a platform gets to decide what gets published or not published on that platform. They get to make the rules, enforce them and change them as they will, where the law of the land permits. That has always been the case.

zests 6y ago
Are you implying that Facebook is a publisher?
- _jal 6y ago
  Are you implying 'publisher' is a special category with special legal privileges and/or obligations?
  - egao1980 6y ago
    more responsibility under US and other nations' laws. Basically publisher is liable for publishing hate speech - platforms are not.
    - krapp 6y ago
      There is no liability for publishing hate speech in the US. There is also, crucially, no liability for not publishing hate speech in the US.
- krapp 6y ago
  Section 230 makes no distinction between "publishers" and "platforms", at least not where the ability to moderate or editorialize content is concerned. It doesn't require a platform to be politically neutral, or to only moderate content which is strictly illegal, nor does it forbid the exercise of editorial discretion. Facebook is allowed to do what they're doing and the question of whether that makes them a "publisher" or "platform" isn't relevant. ... I'm just assuming that's where you were going with this. Here's an exhausting HN thread on an Ars Technica article explaining further: [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803998 [1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-internet-law-politicians-love-to-hate-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-230-the-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- triceratops 6y ago
  They're the publisher of things they write and publish themselves. For example, the Facebook engineering blog. They are not the publisher of what their users post, even if they perform moderation of that content. That's the law. There's no "publisher"/"platform" hat that a company has to select before going into business.

kspacewalk2 6y ago

This isn't about government. Facebook is a corporation, it owns the platform, it decides what gets contained on its property (subject to applicable laws, of course, but not confined to only those laws). By signing up, you agree to their control over the platform. Control could be the bare minimum required by law, could be mercilessly removing any and all controversial speech - that's their discretion, just like it's completely your discretion whether to log on or to buzz off. They'll censor at whatever level works best for their core business of selling your attention to advertisers. Outside of applicable laws, you have no "rights" on this private platform you're provisionally allowed access to, and any attempt to sugar-coat that fact is just corporate PR-speak to avoid needless user attrition.

n0nc3 6y ago
This is an extremely lazy argument. Our generation has seen entire sectors of the economy subsumed within monopolies. The consolidation is unprecedented in the modern era. These monopolies have a degree of political influence that makes them hard to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense. We have seen what the financial sector has chosen to do with its political influence. Why would we expect anything different from new media companies like Facebook? People need to stop and ask themselves if the core enlightenment principles of toleration, free expression, and free association are worth protecting. Once abandoned, they will not be easy to resurrect.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Facebook and co. don't have monopolies on places where you can voice your opinion. Blogs still exist. Newspapers exist (even very extremists ones). Telegram exists, forums exist, etc. What Facebook and co. may have a monopoly on is channels of mass outreach. However, I don't think that there is or should be a right for your opinion to be widely disseminated by a third party.
  - n0nc3 6y ago
    I would say that Facebook is similar to a 18th century tavern. It's a place where people meet and talk. Fortunately for 18th century humans, there were many pub owners who exercised varying degrees of control over the activities of their patrons. Some banned radical politics, and some did not. In our present era of concentrated control, we have a small handful of pubs controlled by a similarly small number of wealthy oligarchs. Recall that the Green Dragon tavern was the unofficial headquarters of the American revolution.

speedgoose 6y ago

Facebook decides the rules and everyone can report content that break them, and then outsourced and stressed Facebook employees judge if the reported content fit the rules or not. In the article they mention a fast line for reports from a few organizations.

logikomaha 6y ago

This is such a tiring argument. Corporations are the stewards of their domains. If someone wants to exercise their own freedom of speech, they’re welcome to start their own self hosted blog. It won’t have the same reach, and it won’t be as visible, but it will be just as free as freedom of speech ever was. If someone started posting their un-cited drivel, racist rants, and society harming misinformation on my hard drive, I’d want it purged. It’s my responsible as a citizen to maintain the health of my system and maintain reasonable discourse with those I disagree with. Is it “oppression” or an “infringement of our rights” or the “nanny state” when a HackerNews mod deleted a racist post or personal attack on another community member? I think not...

ajsnigrutin 6y ago
So, why so much outrage, when some non-US country bans LGBT groups on some of their platforms? Or trans groups? Or pro-choice (abortion) groups? Or pro Hong Kong groups? All of them are welcome to start their self hosted blogs, aren't they? You either have free speech, and host stuff you personally disagree with, or just call it 'moderation with political bias' (or some other kind of bias), if you only leave stuff you personally agree with. You never know, when you'll be the one facebook disagrees with, and then it's too late.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Because being anti-LGBT is morally wrong, that's why. It has nothing to do with legality or with freedom of expression. I really don't understand how we can start equating LGBT rights with outright hate speech.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Who gets to decide what definition of morals Facebook should use to answer these questions? Why should Facebook choose your particular moral framework to work with? Yeah, I know, you're right. Everybody else is sure that their moral framework is right, too. So why does yours get to rule? What is your basis for saying that yours is right and theirs is wrong? You may in fact be able to give a defense of your moral framework. That defense seems right to you, and to those who agree with you. But defenders of other moral frameworks can do that, too. Which self-consistent and defensible (per the adherents) moral framework should be the one to rule Facebook, and why?

adkadskhj 6y ago

And the same argument has been made about child porn and etc. Eg, people have said we can't use encryption because of it's ability to enable child predators. So yea, the power and ability to suppress content based on illegal activity has downsides - it's a necessity. We can't strictly avoid the topic entirely and allow everything everywhere for very obvious reasons. So if we're not allowing everything everywhere then we agree that there are lines, and those lines have to be drawn. So we're already on the "slippery slope", we're just debating where exactly to draw the lines. To me this stance from Facebook is one of the very few things i agree with from them. Much of the uninformed viral and outage based discourse is doing nothing but harming humanity in my eyes and tools to spread it are helping no one. We're in an information war time and while i support controversial information about race, gender identity and any other "hot topics"; i definitely do not support toxic discourse on these subjects that don't even attempt to inform or constructively discuss.

a4444f 6y ago

Wankers write history, hysterics write whiningly.