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This feels chilling to me, maybe I’m alone. Removing non violent posts that contain: “Calls for protests — even peaceful ones — if they violate the curfew in D

This feels chilling to me, maybe I’m alone. Removing non violent posts that contain: “Calls for protests — even peaceful ones — if they violate the curfew in DC” or “Praise and support of the storming of the US Capitol” feels like such an overreach. It makes me sick. Unpopular speech is the most important, perhaps the only speech that needs to be defended. As Rosa Luxembourg said: those who do not move do not notice their chains. Any discourse that isn’t allowed to happen in popular mediums don’t disappear, it happen underground, and it’s a lot harder to detect. I get removing calls to violence, but I don’t want these tech overlords making these judgment calls.

S4M 6y ago
“Praise and support of the storming of the US Capitol” is non violent for you?
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Last I checked, the US didn't have a law against praising and supporting neo-Nazis. (Hypothetically) If I can praise and support them, the majority of what they advocate being conceptually illegal if implemented, then yes... the First Amendment seems clear that anything shy of advocating and/or planning imminent action is permissible. Of course, Facebook as a private company is under no obligation to follow Constitutional limits on permissible vs non-permissible speech. But should they be?
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    > Of course, Facebook as a private company is under no obligation to follow Constitutional limits on permissible vs non-permissible speech. But should they be? Absolutely not, the first amendment only applies to the government for a reason. Perhaps there should be a government-run equivalent that is subject to the first amendment. Though honestly, I think that would work out horribly. The number of people you can reach by shouting in a town square isn't very high, that's why the government can allow any kind of crank to do it. If you can reach millions...bad things would happen.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      The problem is that network effects create monopolies. Social network effects create monopolies on free speech. I'm not an American, and I still don't know if there was cheating or not, and actually I don't understand whether there is enough data on it to decide, though usually the bigger problem is when a president stays in the president seat forever.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        > Social network effects create monopolies on free speech. Absolutely. Many people want to talk in the public (or at least town) square, which trends strongly towards a few providers (where everybody is), which establishes de facto global free speech limits via those provider's policies. And "moving to another service" isn't a feasible redress. Do we want to live in a world where conservatives only read ConservaPedia, and liberals read LibPedia? Or one where they're exposed to each other's ideas and share some facts? >> the first amendment only applies to the government for a reason. [...] The number of people you can reach by shouting in a town square isn't very high, that's why the government can allow any kind of crank to do it. If you can reach millions...bad things would happen. I'll assume that's the reason you were referring to? If so, we disagree on the intent of the First Amendment. I don't think it's about audience reach, so much as relative power: government has historically had controls not available to private companies. Yet in modern times, Facebook / Twitter / Youtube have as much or more control over their platforms, which are as bigger or bigger than the largest First Amendment-covered venue. So while Facebook or Google can't send the FBI to your door, they can effectively disappear your idea / product from their ecosystems, and there are very few checks on that power, particularly when ranking algorithms are allowed to be shielded from public scrutiny.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    > the US didn't have a law against praising and supporting neo-Nazis Maybe that's the problem?
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      I don't think so? It's a pretty core feature of America's system to ban actions, not speech.
      - africanboy 6y ago
        I am not convinced. Some speeches are omens to terrible actions and they are usually supported by symbols. I've seen the pictures of the Confederate Flag waving in the halls of the Senate, It was pretty disturbing to me. If I am not wrong that never happened before, not even during the Civil war. IMO if the flag entered the Capitol Building in 1860 it would have been normal, but today it has become the symbol of the resistance to the racial integration and the support to the segregation, hence it should be banned and people speaking openly about any "racial supremacy" should face consequences. outside the contexts of "art or science, research or teaching" (quoting the The German Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code) in section § 86a) it is simply unacceptable. After all it is written in the US Constitution that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
        ethbr0 6y ago
        > Some speeches are omens to terrible actions and they are usually supported by symbols Absolutely. Which is why the US Supreme Court has continually debated and weighed First Amendment tension against public safety. To my knowledge, the Confederate battle flag has never flown in the US Capitol. Not in July, 1864, when the Confederate Army stared at it across 6 miles and lightly defended lines [0]. Not after 1939 when it was hoisted in film by Gone with the Wind with sanitized nostalgia for an antebellum past [1]. And certainly not in the 50s and 60s when it was appropriated by the reborn Ku Klux Klan to represent their racist beliefs [2]. But it has been present at all three instances of armed insurrection against the US government -- Civil War, first US terrorist organization, and modern, militant Trump supporters. And ultimately, it's those people's actions, not their ideas or symbols, that are dangerous. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California [3], by way of Jefferson's views [4]: "[Those who won our independence] believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." To consign evil to the shadows is no victory, for there are always shadows. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-washington-dc-came-close-to-being-conquered-by-the-confederacy-180951994/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-washington-dc-ca... [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSEVyzKmlyU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSEVyzKmlyU [2] https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-confederate-flag-flies-as-ku-klux-klan-members-gather-news-photo/113917842 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-confederat... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357 [4] https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/elijah-boardman-0 https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/eli...
- mikedilger 6y ago
  We must be able to discuss and even support things that are currently illegal, including discussion of acts of violence (but not carrying them out, just talking about them), to explore whether or not existing laws might need changes. So this cannot be the boundary between allowed and disallowed speech. In this particular case, I would quickly argue "Hell no, storming the US Capital is illegal for good cause, and I will never condone such acts of violence." But I would allow the discussion. We have to allow the discussion. Because if you draw a line here, then you will be censored when you argue for things like marijuana legalisation and gay marraige while they are still illegal as McCarthyites will censor you based on inciting people to break the law. This is why 'incitement' has such a high bar. I could be wrong. Maybe "praise and support for /storming/" is incitement to violence. I'm glad I'm not a judge that has to make that call. So long as the line isn't drawn on the wrong side of the points I argued above.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    > We must be able to discuss and even support things that are currently illegal, including discussion of acts of violence (but not carrying them out, just talking about them), to explore whether or not existing laws might need changes. So this cannot be the boundary between allowed and disallowed speech. I strongly agree with this. I just don’t agree that you’re entitled to use other people’s publishing resources to do it.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    You can argue that an illegal thing should be legal without inciting people to do it while it's illegal. Under your reasoning, any act of inciting violence could be dismissed as "discussion". There's probably not a clear line in every instance. Whether you think "praise and support" crosses the line, it would be pretty hard to claim it made things better, and pretty easy to see how those words, from the most powerful person in the country, might make a person more likely to continue doing whatever it is they're doing.
    - mikedilger 6y ago
      I agree with all of that in spirit, but I don't think the "under your reasonsing" part accurately reflected my reasoning (maybe it reflected a inference or a poorly chosen word). Incitement intends the act to occur while illegal, and I didn't mean to argue that such a thing should be legal.
Latty 6y ago
This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company. I don't think anyone can solve that. You can't disallow moderation in a space, otherwise you just have people screaming at you all the time. If there is freedom of expression, you can't then also force people to platform things they find abhorrent. The freedom to express surely also includes the freedom not to express. I don't think there are easy answers, and "people should have to have the firehose of the internet sprayed at them unfiltered" seems like a bad take to me. The spread of propaganda to undermine the democratic process is chilling.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company. I don't think anyone can solve that. Protocols instead of platforms: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
  - ajna91 6y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      Holochain is a distributed version control system for the development of social applications / protocols. Imagine if Uber or Airbnb were just protocols, able to be used without the company in the middle - in a fully peer to peer context. You could evolve and improve the rules together with others peers, and start playing new economic and social ‘games’ without any central authority being able to block you from experimenting/doing so. Holochain’s novelty lies in its use of DHT’s to create, store and retrieve data. Like Git source chains, it then uses cryptography to guarantee data integrity in this distributed application context. You’re basically agreeing in advance on which functions to use. Instead of using proprietary functions that are kept secret behind a firewall or limited through an API, Holochain allows you to create and use apps that directly enforce and verify open rules in a 100% distributed peer to peer way. To the best of my knowledge this sort of system hasn’t been seen or invented before. Thy have great descriptions on their website: [from https://holo.host/faq/ https://holo.host/faq/] “Holochain maintains data integrity without the need for global consensus. It uses an agent-centric approach, combining ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic signatures, peer validation, and gossip. An overview: - hApps have validation rules. - Agents have their own local, tamper-resistant hash-chains recording their actions, built upon hApp rules. - Each hash-chain entry is cryptographically signed (multi-party actions, like transactions, are mutually countersigned). - Data is shared to random peers who validate it. - Validators gossip to share good data, warn against bad data, and blacklist bad actors.“ Their code is free software, available on Github here: https://github.com/holochain https://github.com/holochain
cptskippy 6y ago
This isn't any different from removing protesters from private property. Facebook is private property.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  My question to this, is would you take the same line if the censorship was something nakedly egregious? Let's pretend there was a massive Harvey Weinstein-like sexual harassment scandal at Facebook Inc. And Facebook responded by removing any posts mentioning the scandal or blocking the account of any journalists that reported on it. Would you shrug your shoulders and say "private property". If not, then I think you have to admit that Facebook has some obligations to not abuse its moderation powers. If not in the formal legal sense, at least in a cultural and moral sense.
  - koube 6y ago
    In your analogy this is more like Facebook deleting posts that call for sexual harassment, or praise/support Harvey Weinstein. I think people would be ok with that.
    - repsilat 6y ago
      That situation would be more similar to this one, but it isn't their point. I think the grandparent was indicating that this is mostly a debate between the positions "Facebook should be broadly permissive of legal speech" and "Facebook should shape the discussion in ways that benefit the public good". The argument that Facebook has a moral right to do whatever the hell they like is mostly just a cudgel of an argument, though, to be picked up when it suits whichever of the two "real" arguments you support. One refutation of this "private property argument is instrumental" position is the one the grandparent mentioned: That the people making the argument would "support" Facebook taking down speech that they deem "just". If the private property argument only holds for taking down unpalatable speech, it's not a position that's held honestly.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
grecy 6y ago
I agree so much. Of course in this particular situation FB are siding with the existing laws of a well-established Deomcracy, though in a nearby future they could easily side with the laws of a Dictator in some other country, or even just side with whoever happens to be in charge of some country right now otherwise they'll be shut down in said country. It seems pretty risky to allow a private company that controls as much "global voice" as FB does to censor people with no oversight. Surely this will end badly.
tylerjaywood 6y ago
> This feels chilling to me, maybe I’m alone. You are not
dillondoyle 6y ago
Supporting 'the storming' IS a call to and in support of violence and attack on our country. what if it was phrased 'praising and supporting the [armed attack and illegal invasion] of the US Capitol' What about if we were talking about allowing the widespread social propagation of those siding with and advocating for al qaeda on 9/12? A rhetorically extreme comparison in terms of levels of violence BUT to me this is equally as <u>symbolic</u> of an attack on our Democracy and country. Even worse because it was from our own citizens attempting to actively stop Democratic process with weapons.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
What I find chilling is that so much of the freezed peach brigade has relegated so much power to these paper tiger tech companies that they think content moderation is any kind of threat to public discourse. There are zillions of unencumbered ways to have unmoderated discourse on the tubes. The entitlement of having it on the most amplifying platforms is something that people couldn’t dream of a decade ago.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Overthrow of a US election is treason. That is violent at its core. FB has aided and abetted the spinning up of emotion and irrational fear. That they do something to 'put the genie in the bottle' is the least they could do. And its not permanent. The same people can discuss this at length at some future time. Just not during a riot. Lets not pontificate about fine points of personal rights, while the nation's Capitol is under attack?
ReaganFJones 6y ago
Facebook is a private company. It is their right to do what they want on their site. It seems fair that they should do what they believe is right. You're free to say whatever unpopular thing you want, just not everywhere. Given how these events have played out, I suspect many of the tech giants will take similar actions.
duxup 6y ago
They could still call for a peaceful protest, elsewhere. This seems to be limited to a place where it's clear protests aren't peaceful and people are calling on / acting undemocratically and are pretty open about it. Facilitating folks who wish to take undemocratic steps would seem to bring us closer to far more serious restrictions, imposed by those same folks as far as how a democracy is or isn't allowed to operate.
watwut 6y ago
Toward freedom by overturning elections.
afpx 6y ago
Knowing a bunch of people who are part of this mob, I'd have to say that the "peaceful protest" is not at all what they want. They want violence. They want revolt. To be honest, even now, I'm not sure most of them know what they're fighting for. There's no coherent message. What are they even protesting? At a certain point, someone has to call it out as it really is - not what they say it is.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  They're not fighting for. They're fighting against. What are they against? I don't know a bunch of people who are part of this mob, but I'll make a guess. They are against a political establishment that has ignored them and their concerns.
  - afpx 6y ago
    What are their concerns? Income, opportunity?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I suspect yes on both. But also, I think, a sense that the country/society no longer values them, but instead looks down on them. The Democratic Party was once the party of the "working man". Now it regards many of those people as "a basket of deplorables". Bernie appeals to the same kind of people, but the mainstream Democratic Party does not.

S4M 6y ago

“Praise and support of the storming of the US Capitol” is non violent for you?

ethbr0 6y ago
Last I checked, the US didn't have a law against praising and supporting neo-Nazis. (Hypothetically) If I can praise and support them, the majority of what they advocate being conceptually illegal if implemented, then yes... the First Amendment seems clear that anything shy of advocating and/or planning imminent action is permissible. Of course, Facebook as a private company is under no obligation to follow Constitutional limits on permissible vs non-permissible speech. But should they be?
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > Of course, Facebook as a private company is under no obligation to follow Constitutional limits on permissible vs non-permissible speech. But should they be? Absolutely not, the first amendment only applies to the government for a reason. Perhaps there should be a government-run equivalent that is subject to the first amendment. Though honestly, I think that would work out horribly. The number of people you can reach by shouting in a town square isn't very high, that's why the government can allow any kind of crank to do it. If you can reach millions...bad things would happen.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    The problem is that network effects create monopolies. Social network effects create monopolies on free speech. I'm not an American, and I still don't know if there was cheating or not, and actually I don't understand whether there is enough data on it to decide, though usually the bigger problem is when a president stays in the president seat forever.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      > Social network effects create monopolies on free speech. Absolutely. Many people want to talk in the public (or at least town) square, which trends strongly towards a few providers (where everybody is), which establishes de facto global free speech limits via those provider's policies. And "moving to another service" isn't a feasible redress. Do we want to live in a world where conservatives only read ConservaPedia, and liberals read LibPedia? Or one where they're exposed to each other's ideas and share some facts? >> the first amendment only applies to the government for a reason. [...] The number of people you can reach by shouting in a town square isn't very high, that's why the government can allow any kind of crank to do it. If you can reach millions...bad things would happen. I'll assume that's the reason you were referring to? If so, we disagree on the intent of the First Amendment. I don't think it's about audience reach, so much as relative power: government has historically had controls not available to private companies. Yet in modern times, Facebook / Twitter / Youtube have as much or more control over their platforms, which are as bigger or bigger than the largest First Amendment-covered venue. So while Facebook or Google can't send the FBI to your door, they can effectively disappear your idea / product from their ecosystems, and there are very few checks on that power, particularly when ranking algorithms are allowed to be shielded from public scrutiny.
- africanboy 6y ago
  > the US didn't have a law against praising and supporting neo-Nazis Maybe that's the problem?
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I don't think so? It's a pretty core feature of America's system to ban actions, not speech.
    - africanboy 6y ago
      I am not convinced. Some speeches are omens to terrible actions and they are usually supported by symbols. I've seen the pictures of the Confederate Flag waving in the halls of the Senate, It was pretty disturbing to me. If I am not wrong that never happened before, not even during the Civil war. IMO if the flag entered the Capitol Building in 1860 it would have been normal, but today it has become the symbol of the resistance to the racial integration and the support to the segregation, hence it should be banned and people speaking openly about any "racial supremacy" should face consequences. outside the contexts of "art or science, research or teaching" (quoting the The German Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code) in section § 86a) it is simply unacceptable. After all it is written in the US Constitution that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        > Some speeches are omens to terrible actions and they are usually supported by symbols Absolutely. Which is why the US Supreme Court has continually debated and weighed First Amendment tension against public safety. To my knowledge, the Confederate battle flag has never flown in the US Capitol. Not in July, 1864, when the Confederate Army stared at it across 6 miles and lightly defended lines [0]. Not after 1939 when it was hoisted in film by Gone with the Wind with sanitized nostalgia for an antebellum past [1]. And certainly not in the 50s and 60s when it was appropriated by the reborn Ku Klux Klan to represent their racist beliefs [2]. But it has been present at all three instances of armed insurrection against the US government -- Civil War, first US terrorist organization, and modern, militant Trump supporters. And ultimately, it's those people's actions, not their ideas or symbols, that are dangerous. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California [3], by way of Jefferson's views [4]: "[Those who won our independence] believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." To consign evil to the shadows is no victory, for there are always shadows. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-washington-dc-came-close-to-being-conquered-by-the-confederacy-180951994/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-washington-dc-ca... [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSEVyzKmlyU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSEVyzKmlyU [2] https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-confederate-flag-flies-as-ku-klux-klan-members-gather-news-photo/113917842 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-confederat... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357 [4] https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/elijah-boardman-0 https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/eli...
mikedilger 6y ago
We must be able to discuss and even support things that are currently illegal, including discussion of acts of violence (but not carrying them out, just talking about them), to explore whether or not existing laws might need changes. So this cannot be the boundary between allowed and disallowed speech. In this particular case, I would quickly argue "Hell no, storming the US Capital is illegal for good cause, and I will never condone such acts of violence." But I would allow the discussion. We have to allow the discussion. Because if you draw a line here, then you will be censored when you argue for things like marijuana legalisation and gay marraige while they are still illegal as McCarthyites will censor you based on inciting people to break the law. This is why 'incitement' has such a high bar. I could be wrong. Maybe "praise and support for /storming/" is incitement to violence. I'm glad I'm not a judge that has to make that call. So long as the line isn't drawn on the wrong side of the points I argued above.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  > We must be able to discuss and even support things that are currently illegal, including discussion of acts of violence (but not carrying them out, just talking about them), to explore whether or not existing laws might need changes. So this cannot be the boundary between allowed and disallowed speech. I strongly agree with this. I just don’t agree that you’re entitled to use other people’s publishing resources to do it.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  You can argue that an illegal thing should be legal without inciting people to do it while it's illegal. Under your reasoning, any act of inciting violence could be dismissed as "discussion". There's probably not a clear line in every instance. Whether you think "praise and support" crosses the line, it would be pretty hard to claim it made things better, and pretty easy to see how those words, from the most powerful person in the country, might make a person more likely to continue doing whatever it is they're doing.
  - mikedilger 6y ago
    I agree with all of that in spirit, but I don't think the "under your reasonsing" part accurately reflected my reasoning (maybe it reflected a inference or a poorly chosen word). Incitement intends the act to occur while illegal, and I didn't mean to argue that such a thing should be legal.

Latty 6y ago

This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company. I don't think anyone can solve that. You can't disallow moderation in a space, otherwise you just have people screaming at you all the time. If there is freedom of expression, you can't then also force people to platform things they find abhorrent. The freedom to express surely also includes the freedom not to express. I don't think there are easy answers, and "people should have to have the firehose of the internet sprayed at them unfiltered" seems like a bad take to me. The spread of propaganda to undermine the democratic process is chilling.

bergstromm466 6y ago
> This is the fundamental issue when the public square is owned by a company. I don't think anyone can solve that. Protocols instead of platforms: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
- ajna91 6y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    Holochain is a distributed version control system for the development of social applications / protocols. Imagine if Uber or Airbnb were just protocols, able to be used without the company in the middle - in a fully peer to peer context. You could evolve and improve the rules together with others peers, and start playing new economic and social ‘games’ without any central authority being able to block you from experimenting/doing so. Holochain’s novelty lies in its use of DHT’s to create, store and retrieve data. Like Git source chains, it then uses cryptography to guarantee data integrity in this distributed application context. You’re basically agreeing in advance on which functions to use. Instead of using proprietary functions that are kept secret behind a firewall or limited through an API, Holochain allows you to create and use apps that directly enforce and verify open rules in a 100% distributed peer to peer way. To the best of my knowledge this sort of system hasn’t been seen or invented before. Thy have great descriptions on their website: [from https://holo.host/faq/ https://holo.host/faq/] “Holochain maintains data integrity without the need for global consensus. It uses an agent-centric approach, combining ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic signatures, peer validation, and gossip. An overview: - hApps have validation rules. - Agents have their own local, tamper-resistant hash-chains recording their actions, built upon hApp rules. - Each hash-chain entry is cryptographically signed (multi-party actions, like transactions, are mutually countersigned). - Data is shared to random peers who validate it. - Validators gossip to share good data, warn against bad data, and blacklist bad actors.“ Their code is free software, available on Github here: https://github.com/holochain https://github.com/holochain

cptskippy 6y ago

This isn't any different from removing protesters from private property. Facebook is private property.

dcolkitt 6y ago
My question to this, is would you take the same line if the censorship was something nakedly egregious? Let's pretend there was a massive Harvey Weinstein-like sexual harassment scandal at Facebook Inc. And Facebook responded by removing any posts mentioning the scandal or blocking the account of any journalists that reported on it. Would you shrug your shoulders and say "private property". If not, then I think you have to admit that Facebook has some obligations to not abuse its moderation powers. If not in the formal legal sense, at least in a cultural and moral sense.
- koube 6y ago
  In your analogy this is more like Facebook deleting posts that call for sexual harassment, or praise/support Harvey Weinstein. I think people would be ok with that.
  - repsilat 6y ago
    That situation would be more similar to this one, but it isn't their point. I think the grandparent was indicating that this is mostly a debate between the positions "Facebook should be broadly permissive of legal speech" and "Facebook should shape the discussion in ways that benefit the public good". The argument that Facebook has a moral right to do whatever the hell they like is mostly just a cudgel of an argument, though, to be picked up when it suits whichever of the two "real" arguments you support. One refutation of this "private property argument is instrumental" position is the one the grandparent mentioned: That the people making the argument would "support" Facebook taking down speech that they deem "just". If the private property argument only holds for taking down unpalatable speech, it's not a position that's held honestly.
    - ineedasername 6y ago

grecy 6y ago

I agree so much. Of course in this particular situation FB are siding with the existing laws of a well-established Deomcracy, though in a nearby future they could easily side with the laws of a Dictator in some other country, or even just side with whoever happens to be in charge of some country right now otherwise they'll be shut down in said country. It seems pretty risky to allow a private company that controls as much "global voice" as FB does to censor people with no oversight. Surely this will end badly.

tylerjaywood 6y ago

> This feels chilling to me, maybe I’m alone. You are not

dillondoyle 6y ago

Supporting 'the storming' IS a call to and in support of violence and attack on our country. what if it was phrased 'praising and supporting the [armed attack and illegal invasion] of the US Capitol' What about if we were talking about allowing the widespread social propagation of those siding with and advocating for al qaeda on 9/12? A rhetorically extreme comparison in terms of levels of violence BUT to me this is equally as <u>symbolic</u> of an attack on our Democracy and country. Even worse because it was from our own citizens attempting to actively stop Democratic process with weapons.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

What I find chilling is that so much of the freezed peach brigade has relegated so much power to these paper tiger tech companies that they think content moderation is any kind of threat to public discourse. There are zillions of unencumbered ways to have unmoderated discourse on the tubes. The entitlement of having it on the most amplifying platforms is something that people couldn’t dream of a decade ago.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Overthrow of a US election is treason. That is violent at its core. FB has aided and abetted the spinning up of emotion and irrational fear. That they do something to 'put the genie in the bottle' is the least they could do. And its not permanent. The same people can discuss this at length at some future time. Just not during a riot. Lets not pontificate about fine points of personal rights, while the nation's Capitol is under attack?

ReaganFJones 6y ago

Facebook is a private company. It is their right to do what they want on their site. It seems fair that they should do what they believe is right. You're free to say whatever unpopular thing you want, just not everywhere. Given how these events have played out, I suspect many of the tech giants will take similar actions.

duxup 6y ago

They could still call for a peaceful protest, elsewhere. This seems to be limited to a place where it's clear protests aren't peaceful and people are calling on / acting undemocratically and are pretty open about it. Facilitating folks who wish to take undemocratic steps would seem to bring us closer to far more serious restrictions, imposed by those same folks as far as how a democracy is or isn't allowed to operate.

watwut 6y ago

Toward freedom by overturning elections.

afpx 6y ago

Knowing a bunch of people who are part of this mob, I'd have to say that the "peaceful protest" is not at all what they want. They want violence. They want revolt. To be honest, even now, I'm not sure most of them know what they're fighting for. There's no coherent message. What are they even protesting? At a certain point, someone has to call it out as it really is - not what they say it is.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
They're not fighting for. They're fighting against. What are they against? I don't know a bunch of people who are part of this mob, but I'll make a guess. They are against a political establishment that has ignored them and their concerns.
- afpx 6y ago
  What are their concerns? Income, opportunity?
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I suspect yes on both. But also, I think, a sense that the country/society no longer values them, but instead looks down on them. The Democratic Party was once the party of the "working man". Now it regards many of those people as "a basket of deplorables". Bernie appeals to the same kind of people, but the mainstream Democratic Party does not.