3 ms·

Moral absolutism on freedom of speech is a sympathetic position to take, but not one what’s all that practical... If I exercised my right to freedom of speech

Moral absolutism on freedom of speech is a sympathetic position to take, but not one what’s all that practical... If I exercised my right to freedom of speech to sock puppet thousands of Twitter bots as Facebook accounts to discuss your alleged sexual deviancy, flooded the channel with creative via photoshop, then claimed “ma rights.” would you seriously feel the same way? Facebook is going to stumble through this hard. They’re going to get it wrong, often. They’re at least starting to show how they’re doing content filtering in this article. There’s a world outside of Facebook called the real world where we can meet in person and protest their stupidity if it goes off the rails. Equating Facebook’s wall post feature to the comprehensive number of other ways you can more effectively use your voice... I’m not all the concerned. If Facebook disappeared due to a hardware failure tomorrow, freedom of speech would still be alive and well...

ajsnigrutin 6y ago
But the problem here is the political bias in censorship. If facebook existed 100 years ago, you could say the same thing as now, just the 'good' and the 'bad' groups would be a lot different. And you don't have to wait a 100 years, in my country, if we overly applied the same rules, at the start of the first covid wave, facebook would censor all the science-deniers, and crazy preppers for using masks (because "masks don't help" - our doctors, depending on where you live, probably yours too). Then one random saturday, our government decided you need a mask and gloves to enter any indoor public place (stores,...), and facebook would censor the anti-mask people. We also live in a culture, where we have a few "protected groups", where we censor anything (even jokes) about that (eg. rape jokes), but even those rules, we apply very arbitrarily.... in movies, rape bad, rape jokes bad, unless the person raped is a man, then it's not a crime/thriller, but a "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ). Again, rape jokes are censorship worthy, unless you change one tiny variable, and that makes it all ok. Today atleast.
- logikomaha 6y ago
  The source of the voice is the only thing that I honestly care about. Again, sympathetic but not practical. Banning a Facebook nut job with a hobby and banning the peer reviewed work of epidemiologists are not equal things. I don’t weigh all speech as equal. By the extension of your logic, all speech has equal value. It doesn’t.
  - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    So who do you ban? The paranoid prepper advocating for mask use, while all the doctors say masks are useless? Or antimask denier, who says masks are useless, and doesn't want to wear them, when the doctors say you need to wear a mask? In my country, you could ban both in a single weekend, when we went from "masks are useless" to "masks are mandatory in public indoor places from monday on". If you mix politics into this, it makes it even worse... we were listening for four years how the ameican election was stolen, how the russians hacked everything, etc., and now we listen how it's impossible to hack the election, steal the votes, etc. Who do you ban? The conspiracy theorists then or now? More stupid example? You have religious people in eg. Iran saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And you have instagram saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. On one side, if you advocate that women should cover up parts of their body, that men don't have to, you're a misogynistic hate group, and get banned, unless we're talking about nipples, then it's instagram itself doing the deleting and banning.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > But the problem here is the political bias in censorship. Alleged bias.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

But the problem here is the political bias in censorship. If facebook existed 100 years ago, you could say the same thing as now, just the 'good' and the 'bad' groups would be a lot different. And you don't have to wait a 100 years, in my country, if we overly applied the same rules, at the start of the first covid wave, facebook would censor all the science-deniers, and crazy preppers for using masks (because "masks don't help" - our doctors, depending on where you live, probably yours too). Then one random saturday, our government decided you need a mask and gloves to enter any indoor public place (stores,...), and facebook would censor the anti-mask people. We also live in a culture, where we have a few "protected groups", where we censor anything (even jokes) about that (eg. rape jokes), but even those rules, we apply very arbitrarily.... in movies, rape bad, rape jokes bad, unless the person raped is a man, then it's not a crime/thriller, but a "satirical erotic romantic comedy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Days_and_40_Nights ). Again, rape jokes are censorship worthy, unless you change one tiny variable, and that makes it all ok. Today atleast.

logikomaha 6y ago
The source of the voice is the only thing that I honestly care about. Again, sympathetic but not practical. Banning a Facebook nut job with a hobby and banning the peer reviewed work of epidemiologists are not equal things. I don’t weigh all speech as equal. By the extension of your logic, all speech has equal value. It doesn’t.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  So who do you ban? The paranoid prepper advocating for mask use, while all the doctors say masks are useless? Or antimask denier, who says masks are useless, and doesn't want to wear them, when the doctors say you need to wear a mask? In my country, you could ban both in a single weekend, when we went from "masks are useless" to "masks are mandatory in public indoor places from monday on". If you mix politics into this, it makes it even worse... we were listening for four years how the ameican election was stolen, how the russians hacked everything, etc., and now we listen how it's impossible to hack the election, steal the votes, etc. Who do you ban? The conspiracy theorists then or now? More stupid example? You have religious people in eg. Iran saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. And you have instagram saying that women should cover parts of their bodies, that men don't have to cover. On one side, if you advocate that women should cover up parts of their body, that men don't have to, you're a misogynistic hate group, and get banned, unless we're talking about nipples, then it's instagram itself doing the deleting and banning.
triceratops 6y ago
> But the problem here is the political bias in censorship. Alleged bias.