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Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

534 points by jimmy2020 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago
Facebook did this back in December too before admitting a "mistake" and reversing it. Get it together please FB. I tried to see what the SWP comments on covid were. They seem pretty mainstream (not covid denialism). Ironically their "demands" from December are now government policy... https://swp.org.uk/schools-are-not-safe/ https://swp.org.uk/schools-are-not-safe/ I'm not sure where I stand on Facebook's (etc) right to remove legal content, but I would like a requirement for any platform to specifically state why they removed content. Too often things are taken down for no reason and get put back up based on twitter outrage rather than any logical basis. YouTube are getting infamous for this...
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  Any time I see one of these "mistakes" I read it as "content got flooded with reports and our automated system took it down"
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I think that would be fine as an initial reason. Having had that back in Dec, you'd think they would put SWP on a safe list? Who knows, I guess. And that's the problem, not so much the taking down as the taking down with zero reason or discussion...
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      This is how the right has been feeling for a while. This is nothing new behaviour-wise for Facebook, the only difference is this gets more favourable media attention.
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        There are some big open questions for us as a society on this. I don't approve of calls for violence and I thought Facebook etc were doing well at free speech until the last year or two. It seems like no one is happy with that anymore.
      - elmomle 6y ago
        Please, don't draw a false equivalency between a major political party that does not play host to violent rhetoric, on the one hand, and groups that where plans (very real, actionable, and actioned-on plans!) to subvert the government are incubated, on the other. Put another way--let's not turn sedition into another us-vs-them political game. That's how democracy ends.
        mrec 6y ago
        The SWP is not by any stretch of the imagination a major political party. ETA: to quantify that a bit, in the 2010 General Election the SWP ran as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Nationally that coalition received 0.04% of votes cast. I can't find any indication that they even put up any candidates in subsequent elections.
        BoorishBears 6y ago
        Does this actually affect the correctness of their point? Acting like a reaction to a politically charged breach of the capitol building is equivalent to a page sharing views about COVID and workers rights getting removed? It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out...
        mrec 6y ago
        I was correcting what looked like a significant misapprehension about the subject of the thread, not arguing for a comparison. Although I can't see anything in throwaways885's comment to suggest that they were talking about the post-Capitol-breach purges. If anything, "for a while" suggests the opposite.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    > "content got flooded with reports and our automated system took it down" I assume this plays a role. I really like facebook meme groups, but every single one inevitably gets "zucced" because of overzealous reports by people who genuinely don't get the problem. They even moderate themselves now to avoid reports.
uberman 6y ago
The organization bills itself (on it's Facebook page) as: The Socialist Workers Party is the largest revolutionary group in Britain My guess is that tag line is causing automated take down issues.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Facebook has been around since 2004, that excuse must have been used before.
  - uberman 6y ago
    I'm sure it has. Perhaps a more recent "revolutionary event" in the USA has prompted a change in automated filtering. Just a hunch though.
    - mcbutterbunz 6y ago
      I would think that any change to automated filtering would allow someone to see which groups would be shut down before actually shutting them down.
mhh__ 6y ago
I assume this is a mistake, although I think they're mad I don't think the SWP are malicious a la some political sects
- Veen 6y ago
  Yes, it seems unlikely this is deliberate. The SWP is about as likely to forment a revolution or incite violence as Judi Dench. They're a bunch of harmless eccentrics.
  - fao_ 6y ago
    Quite literally. The only vaguely-'revolutionary' thing the SWP have done in the last 10 years is provide protest signs for movements that other, more influencial groups of people started.
    - wilsonrocks 6y ago
      If I see any pictures of UK footage I can usually identify the signs the SWP have given out by the font.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    According to the article, it was not just the page that was removed. That could have been a mistake, I suppose. But Facebook also banned "dozens of leading SWP activists". That sounds like a very deliberate action to me.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      To me that sounds even more like an algorithm at work, and quite possibly one more concerned with identifying possible fake accounts than identifying political violence (Relevant context: the SWP is tiny and inconsequential, but very active in coordinating its [unlikely to be violent] messaging and inflating its importance. Nobody would know who its "dozens of leading activists" were to target them. And its local group pages are still up and easily discoverable by searching, so if it was a deliberate action to silence the party it would be a very sloppy one)
threeseed 6y ago
There was also a historical re-enactment page removed in December because they had militia in their title [1] Looks to just be an over-eager moderation engine. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-55215949 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-55215949
- RobLach 6y ago
  It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. Computing systems are do not act on their own. That the system did this was because it was allowed to, or more accurately, told to.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. This is true. > Computing systems are do not act on their own. That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent! How much of your own code have you formally verified? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification) How much of your own code even has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do is shorter than the length of the code? Such that you could even in theory formally verify that the implementation is in some sense "correct"? For that matter.... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in formal language at all? And actually... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in ENGLISH at all? I don't think something like an "extremism filter" can ever be implemented in a bug-free way, because I don't think there's a precise enough definition of what "bug-free" would even mean. The problem of people blaming bad outcomes on "the algorithm" is real, and organizations should take responsibility for misclassifications generated by code that they own and operate. It's unhelpful to pretend like engineers and the organizations they work for have zero agency. However, it's equally unhelpful to pretend like buggy behavior aligns with the intent of the engineer/organization.
mrcartmenez 6y ago
Well, Facebook is run by the far right, like Peter Thiel so no wonder.
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  Facebook is absolutely dominated by the far-right, which is why left-wing groups, pages, and users are being censored en-masse. /s
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Not yet, but FB's incentive structure is anti-left (they're a corporation natch) and their head of public policy is a hardcore Republican that worked for the GWB administration and energy companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan
    - oarabbus_ 6y ago
      How is the incentive structure anti-left? I suppose suspending Trump's account qualifies as "anti-left" these days. Zuckerberg openly stating he supported Black Lives Matter? Anti-left. Facebook deleting PragerU content for "hate speech" before getting reprimaneded? Anti-left. Zuckerberg personally assisting Pete Buttigieg around primary season? ANTI LEFT, I SAY! DIDN'T YOU HEAR HE SAT AT A DINNER TABLE WITH CONSERVATIVES? HE'S ANTI-LEFT! Both Conservatives and Liberals claim Facebook is biased towards the other side, so you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better, and produce some actual, bonafide evidence their "incentive structure is anti-left" besides witchhunting and saying one of their upper middle-managers is a hardcore republican. Care to let us know about the political leanings of Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Cox, who are actually in the C-Suite? Or would you prefer to cherry pick someone in upper middle management who is a staunch republican, which according to you seems to be some kind of heinous crime. Not to mention you're cherry-picking someone who reports to someone who reports to someone etc... who reports to Sheryl Sandberg (COO).
      - tehjoker 6y ago
king_magic 6y ago
Honestly, I'd be happy to see all political groups - left or right - expunged from Facebook. Politics and social media clearly do not mix, as this year has demonstrated all too brutally well.
- harry8 6y ago
  The only way to do that is to expunge Facebook. I'm ok with that but i bet you're not.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  What a stance. Maybe if you advocated for 'no politics on facebook', it would sound better. Social media has given voice to marginalized groups, and people seemingly fear that voice. It's something to take a look at, rather than sweep it under the rug with bans.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    If by “marginalized” we mean “radicals”, then yes. If we mean “minorities”, then you’re probably just propagating the myths that minorities hold far-left-wing views. On the contrary, while minority views skew left-wing, only a minority of minorities hold far-left beliefs and there’s a lot more political diversity among minorities than there is between minority and majority groups. For example, “defund the police” is a popular left-wing mantra, but only a minority of black Americans favor it.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - deleted 6y ago
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    - aaomidi 6y ago
      "radicals" that brought us the 40 hour work week. That brought us birth control. That brought us voting rights for all. All of these were "radical" at their time. The only reason they're not anymore is because they have become mainstream. Maybe you should check your assumptions about how life is and read some history of how we got here. "defund the police" is something that has been vocalized for decades, if not centuries. You should ask yourself what has lead up in your education to accept state monopoly on violence, especially when that violence is enacted unfairly against certain minorities. What makes you think that is "normal", but people wanting cops to be less of a massive force in society are "radical".
ffggvv 6y ago
glad no one can be mad because they are a private company :)
- mcbuilder 6y ago
  Well I actually align with this opinion My politics are certainly by US standards left wing. I supported the recent right wing purge on social media because I thought it was their right to do so, and I support the right of FB to ban whoever they want. The one thing that must not be censored is the internet itself. If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    > If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand. That rings hollow. Your datacenter, ISP, CDN or registrar will boot you.
    - vulcan01 6y ago
      Hypothetical: If I want to print a neo-Nazi newspaper: - Printing services can refuse to print my newspaper. - Shipping companies can refuse to deliver my newspaper. - Heck, my landlord could boot me out of my home for being a neo-Nazi. Is the internet any different? Datacenters and CDNs = Printing services, ISPs = shipping companies.
cesaref 6y ago
now we see the violence inherent in the system. Sorry, had to get that out.
JIBitator 6y ago
"The SWP Facebook page regularly posts in support of Palestine". That explains... ;)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zucker42 6y ago
Stuff like this is a natural consequence of Facebook cracking down on questionable content and acting as an arbiter of truth.
- dc2k08 6y ago
  More to do with certain people with disproportionate influence deciding what isn't allowed to be discussed. A partial list: The displacement of European peoples. Holocaust revisionism. Boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
  - konjin 6y ago
    I always find it funny that holocaust denial is not allowed, yet half the holocaust is never to be called the holocaust. In the west it's said that only Jews were ever to be exterminated. Yet the first work camps were for socialists, the first death camps were hospitals for the disabled, the first extermination camps were for Russian pows and extermination camps murdered 6 million Slavs, Gypsies and homosexuals. There's even a little book written by Hitler himself that details what will happen to the Slavs once he won. But somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      > somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial. How is this the official line? Jews were the primary target but I’ve never ever seen anything ‘official’ claim they were the only ones.
      - konjin 6y ago
        >The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[c] was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust I don't think you can get more of the zeitgeist than the first sentence of a wiki article.
IndySun 6y ago
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And then what? Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow. Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
- walkedaway 6y ago
  > Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    Are you sure that you have an accurate assessment of how bad things are currently vs how bad they would become in a world where access to the Internet was strictly controlled by governments and anonymous/pseudonymous communications were forbidden? Don't you think that the risks in the second scenario are in a different category to the risks in the first one? While being sent to Facebook Jail could limit your social life, it pales besides the threat of Federal Prison.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This is a contrived fantasy, or a realistic question? We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime. Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
      - 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
Well this is an outrage ... Oh, it's the SWP. They've arguably done more to damage left wing politics in the UK than any number of police infiltrators. They're both incompetent, annoying, and persistent. Would be useful to know what post got them banned, but the content moderation is completely opaque.
hirundo 6y ago
It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform, the big platforms lose their power to control the conversation.
- quantified 6y ago
  As long as the same types of ejectable communications are being published across the political spectrum. I assume the SWP was calling for violence against the government or various officials?
- mrec 6y ago
  Generally agreed, although I think that only really applies to control at the social-network level, not to control exerted via e.g. Chrome or DNS or your ISP. This feels like the start of a very long road.
  - convery 6y ago
    Didn't Mozilla recently-ish put out a statement about possibly having a black-list of sorts to remove bad sites / "think of the children"? On mobile so can't search for it but surely someone here remembers the link.
    - mrec 6y ago
      You're probably thinking of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941 The statement was vague and ambiguous and touched a lot of raw nerves, but coming as it did on the heels of major layoffs at Mozilla it felt a bit like Mitchell Baker pulling a "roll hard left and die".
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      Don’t spread FUD. The statement you’re referring to had nothing to do with blacklisting sites.
DataSceince123 6y ago
It needs to be broken up or shut down, it's that simple. Facebook is a voice used for hate against LGBT / socialist / communist groups
u678u 6y ago
Anyone know why they're named Socialist but seem Marxist/Communist? https://swp.org.uk/theory/ https://swp.org.uk/theory/
- hazemotes 6y ago
  All communists are socialists.
- trident5000 6y ago
  I want these people to have the freedom to speak so I can point out how stupid their beliefs are.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Communism is an idea, a philosophy. Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Communism is an idea, a philosophy. “Communism” is a class of philosophies with shared traits. > Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy. “Socialism”, in general, is a class of philosophies of which “Communism” is a more specific subset. In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state at which the philosophy is aimed. OTOH.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      I was only aware of the > In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state part; Eastern Europe had some fun with this route to achievement on that the Socialist stage.
lmilcin 6y ago
I think FB/Twitter and others got bold, but kinda forgot they are also most likely digging themselves deep into regulation hell.
- mc32 6y ago
  It feels like they opened a Pandora’s box. They feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech as they see fit, but now also activists are telling them to shut this or that voice they disagree with. They made this bed themselves.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    > feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech Well they shut down the former president of the USA. They clearly have nothing to fear.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Well... not exactly. I mean it is true they did it. But they got help. Because I remember when all this was starting up two decades ago there were a lot of pressures to block this or that. Maybe hate speech, or maybe you crossed RIAA, or maybe you were of dark complexion and Middle East descent and nobody could tell what your arabic said but it defenitely had to be dangerous. So it became pretty customary to have corporations bring content down when asked to do so and this recent wave of deplatforming is just extension. Basically, that's what happens when you start to compromise on principles and choose the easy path. Instead of letting people exercise their free speech and using existing laws to chase people for when they are impinging on somebody elses rights, we chose to compromise and asked companies to do this without due process. And that was beginning of the slippery slope which now suddenly got much steeper than before.
    - mc32 6y ago
      While the RIAA is problematic, it was done under plausible cover of law. So, I understand following criminal laws and such. As for foreign locales, I think the solution is to operate locally like a Mazda or a PepsiCo has to do. Have locals manage your local ops, of course reporting to HQ. But now they decided to enter the unwieldily realm of figuring out intent of speech and whether it’s crossed moral lines or ethical lines or political lines. That’s just impossible and sets them up for failure. They deserve this failure. They want to dictate TO THE WORLD right and wrong speech UNIFORMLY. That’s utterly ridiculous. So China or Venezuela or Iran said mean things. So what! At least we know what they’re thinking and if serious enough take proper measures. It should not be FB or TWTTR who decide these things.
Animats 6y ago
Next, bookstores purging UK bookstores of old Left Book Club books? This is the trouble with censorship. Where do you stop?
- trident5000 6y ago
  It doesnt stop, the goal posts just keep shifting until it eventually gets directly to you.
- Proven 6y ago
  What's wrong with that? Most bookstores never sold those, they've censored them forever. Public libraries can exercise censorship. Private libraries and bookstores excercise right to property.
convery 6y ago
It's interesting to see how social media reacts to this. The same people that were cheering on conservatives being purged are now crying over how Antifa and socialists doesn't get a free pass. Does anyone know of any good study where participants are asked their opinion on a quote before and after they are told which ideological leader said it?
typenil 6y ago
Good. Maybe this’ll clarify for some people that a tech oligarchy isn’t the optimal way to control speech.
mantap 6y ago
I'd argue this is a good thing. Facebook is not immortal. Every user that Facebook alienates is a win. Already many non-technical people have been moving to Signal after Facebook's new privacy policy. We need better alternatives, not better Facebook.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Sadly, Signal is not the ideal solution either. When I started with the internet, there were countless free/non free email providers, and now nearly everything is gmail, outlook, yahoo, qq, and a few more big ones. We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email. I was talking with my wife that somehow people are OK with a borrowed (rented?) identity for so many things. xyz@gmail.com, +00-00 on whatsapp, etc, and there as only a few wanting to be mail@this-is-my-home-on-the-internet.me, though this is a very different topic.
  - ohthehugemanate 6y ago
    What are the intermediate steps to get there? For me, an intermediate step to a lot of worlds I like better than this one, is for a diverse ecosystem of messengers to compete on security, openness, and guarantees of not surveilling/monetizing users. In the last weeks I've had all my WhatsApp groups of "normal people" start discussing alternative messengers on exactly these terms. They've looked into Viber, Telegram, SMS, Signal, and others. So i'm happy with that.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      Matrix.org - built on matrix, a federated, but somewhat fat protocol -, or one of conversations.im, quicksy.im, blabber.im, www.jabber.de, etc, all built on xmpp. EDIT the point with these is tricky, because they are not all-in-one solutions. People these days tend to think that an app/program == the service, but this is so not the case. I've tried telling people they could use other programs to access gmail, but it was like talking to a wall, and this is serious issue in this - the instant messenger - case as well. I have no idea how to tell people that it's possible to use _something else_ as an interface. Somehow most of them understand that there are different browsers to access the internet, but they don't apply this thinking to other protocols and services. Hence recommendations for services who provide their "own" apps, conversations being the root, quicksy and blabber being derivatives.
pmlnr 6y ago
> They are demanding to be reinstated immediately. LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc. The current "social" media + cloud everything is a bad road, but apparently this - the shutdowns - is the only way to get out of this swamp.
- polar 6y ago
  > If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? Well put.
- mrzimmerman 6y ago
  Agreed except for the cloud part. Buying your own hardware, configuring and maintaining it is a high bar for most people, even technical people. But we do need distributes systems and we need a lot of competition in the hosting space (it’s not terrible now for lost things if they’re small but big services may have problems).
- imgabe 6y ago
  > If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? Facebook is the Internet equivalent of a public accommodation[1]. It is not Zuckerberg's personal home, it is a place open to the public to conduct business. If Facebook is going to set conditions that some members of the public are allowed and not others, it should be clear what those conditions are and when they are and are not met. That said, I do agree that people should flee these places where they're at the mercy of whatever algorithm or ideological fad that takes over the current employees or whatever. But insofar as they aren't we should regulate it the same way we regulate (in the US) hotels, restaurants, and other public-facing businesses to ensure that the whole public has a fair chance to use them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U...
- garbagetime 6y ago
andrepd 6y ago
A good demonstration, to the people (who claim to be) on the left while cheering things like the Trump ban.
bjourne 6y ago
These discussions always end in the same way. "But they are a PRIVATE COMPANY they have the right to do that!" Fuck that. Who is working on decentralized content distribution? We need decentralized free software versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube so that not a single actor has veto power over what content is allowed. Something like torrents, but without torrent sites (which are single points of failure). There's FreeNet, but it's crap and contains child porn. We need something new that ensures the right of Socialist parties (and Nazi parties too, for that matter) to spread their legal propaganda, but can't be used for pedophiles to distribute child porn. Technically, it can't be impossible to create something like that. People have tons of bandwidth and disk space to spare so that shouldn't be a problem either.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The only way you're getting a decentralised system without child porn at all is to allow some moderation. Decentralized consensus-based moderation can probably be relied on to shut down child porn distribution, but soon you're going to run into the problem that large numbers of people signing up to use the service hate Nazis and/or BLM just as much...
benjamoon 6y ago
Tim Berner’s Lee and the Solid project have a good answer to these issues I think. Everyone owns their posts and likes and comments and friends etc. Any new platform can spin up and instantly compete because they just have to make your data more useful to you. It’d be like you owning all your music online and Spotify is just an interface, if you don’t like it you can jump to Apple Music. Or make your own or download some random app off the web that does what you want. The reason a new social network can’t just compete with Facebook is because they have all the data, if the data could stay with us then new platforms offering news ways of interfacing would be popping up all over the place. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Proven 6y ago
  > Everyone owns their posts But that is anti-socialist!
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That sounds like an improvement for sure but it looks like it just shifts the problem to pod providers and hosts. If the web was all pods then the Socialist Workers Party could just as well end up in a situation similar to Parler's in the end.
  - benjamoon 6y ago
    The hope is pod hosts would compete, some could be free and mine your data for ads etc, others could pay and focus on privacy. If that doesn’t work you host your own pod server, as long as it has an address that can be reached by the web that’s all that’s needed.
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
They should have called themselves the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party. Then Zuckerbarf and co would have been most supportive.
robomartin 6y ago
My prediction is that one day the tech community will regret not having stopped these companies cold years ago. What am I talking about? Just search for "Google closed my account", "Facebook closed my account", "Google suspended our business advertising and email", "Facebook suspended our advertising account", "Amazon suspended my business account", etc. These companies have been pulling the plug on people and businesses for years. When they do, there is no recourse whatsoever. It's the closest anyone will get to having to face a totalitarian regime from within a democracy. The tech community should have revolted against this kind of treatment of individuals and businesses years ago. These companies have ruined people and destroyed businesses. Heck, they even drove people --kids-- to suicide! Now, with Parler, Trump, the threat to Australia, this thing in the UK and more they are likely scaring the hell out of people around the world and across a wide spectrum of ideologies and circumstances. What comes next might be easy to predict: The heavy hand of government will likely descend on them around the world. And likely so. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow. What's worse, they will likely be responsible for the creation of onerous regulations that might very well damage other internet companies and make it that much more difficult to do business. In the end, it might all be for the better. No company should have the power to destroy individuals, businesses, political organizations and even force governments with the click of a button. That's the world we live in today. Many think Parler was the first violation of trust. It was not. Thousands have been silenced and erased all over the world before them.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Both the non-corporate funded so called far left and far right pose some business threat to the Internet platforms. In the USA, the democratic DNC and republican RNC get paid off in financial support and will not promote privacy, etc. The more fringe parties don’t get money and are not controlled. They have a history of regarding privacy as important, both left and right. No matter what your political persuasion is, I would like to ask you as a friend to at least consider how dangerous de-platforming is to society.
ryandrake 6y ago
The title is not really accurate. They shut down the Facebook page for the party, not the party itself. Important distinction.
lsiebert 6y ago
Looks like they restored some but not all of what they took down. https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/ https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale. As it is, it's likely similar to "a big neural network said so" which tells the users nothing. Facebook's free to run themselves this way but it's sure dickish. Imagine if the government or your boss made rules that way. "Drivers will be ticketed if our models say so."
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  Sadly par for the course. Games do this to avoid bots improving against detection. Dating apps do it for safety. This is certainly more egregious because it’s about basic speech but by no means is the lack of disclosure new.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    And it makes sense. It's like SEO. It's an adversarial environment without a perfect answer, so keeping the reasons hidden truly does help most everyone. It just sucks that it leaves the false positives hanging out to dry with no explanation and no recourse. And this has all gotten to a scale where those false positives are a huge number of people, even if it's a minuscule fraction.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- csense 6y ago
  One of the problems with this is opening up to criticism, liability, and further argumentation. If you say "We removed them because of their political views," then you get criticized for being openly partisan. If you say "We removed them because their comments were inciting violence," you'll get arguments about how their comments didn't actually tell people to do violent things (for example, in the US I'm sure for the near future, a lot of people will be arguing very loudly whether the specific phrases "fight like hell" and "trial by combat" are metaphorical rhetorical devices or literal instructions to take violent actions.) People will start finding and pointing out situations where you made different decisions in near-identical circumstances, and criticize you for that too. It's better for users if the platform's transparent. But the platform has no incentive to do so. Less than 1% of the time will users say "Okay you told us why this person was banned, we now see the ban's fair, and we'll shut up and go home." Instead, 99% of the time they'll turn your explanation into another reason to be enraged at you, or argue you need to reconsider, or even sue you because that line of reasoning makes you liable. From the platform's point of view, it's usually better to let the reasoning behind a ban be a question mark. > "a big neural network said so" This is part of it too. With ML-driven bans or other actions, it's possible that nobody understands what criteria it uses to make decisions.
teh_klev 6y ago
I wonder if this is the handiwork of the Center for Countering Digital Hate crowd backed by the right wing of UK Labour. They've already pretty much killed The Canary through their lobbying, the SWP would be a natural next target. Though gawd knows why, they're fairly harmless if a wee bit stuck in early 20th century Marxist/Leninist dogma. I've been to a few of their online meetings and I can safely say they're hardly anywhere close to being revolutionaries, and miles away from promoting propaganda by deed. More info: https://www.thecanary.co/investigation/2020/12/01/exclusive-labour-right-linked-to-campaign-to-shut-down-the-canary/ https://www.thecanary.co/investigation/2020/12/01/exclusive-... https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censorship-google-labour-uk https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censorship-...
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > I can safely say they're hardly anywhere close to being revolutionaries https://swp.org.uk/who-we-are/ https://swp.org.uk/who-we-are/ > The Socialist Workers Party is a revolutionary socialist party ... We want to see a revolution ...
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    I'm well aware of that. My point is that these guys are armchair revolutionaries. Revolutions don't always need to be violent. They can be cerebral.
rijoja 6y ago
ah that does it I'm off facebook asap! Will only use it to tell people to get off of it.
TeeMassive 6y ago
Those same people from the Left were probably saying "it's a private company they can do what they want" when conservatives were getting banned en masse. Of course it was only a matter of time before they got purged after their usefulness had ended.
kypro 6y ago
How is this not foreign political interference? The UK media has been preaching to us about dangers of Russian election interference for years at this point, but simultaneously they seem completely unconcerned that a handful of wealthy Americans how the power to censor popular media outlets, entire political movements and political activists at a whim. The SWP is massive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they had millions of followers on Facebook. This isn't some fringe, extremist group by any sane interpretation of those terms. It seems we're now quickly moving on from just censoring those with extremist political views to simply censoring anyone who who dares express a non-establishment political view online.
- ssakamoto 6y ago
  Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.
  - pasquinelli 6y ago
    that can change. what's the cost and the benefit of doing so?
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    That’s been said mockingly and seriously so many times in the last few weeks; it’s literally impossible to tell which this is. Bravo on ambiguity.
  - herostratus101 6y ago
    Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a conservative who opposes basically everything the Socialist Workers Party stands for, but who is more threatened by autocratic tech censorship than by opposing ideas.
    - SllX 6y ago
      There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessage groups, whatever the 3 Google messengers of the day are, XMPP clients and servers, IRC (which is admittedly more than 20 years old), countless dating sites, Reddit, and countless other “social networks”. When the bars re-open, we’ll have those too, and that is an ancient institution. And for what it’s worth, there’s also the comments section of NRO and The Dispatch. Oh, and the forum we’re talking on.
TeeMassive 6y ago
I have a few pet projects that I am working on right now. Basically, 'Build Your Own Cloud'. The idea is to provide a set of plug and play tools that auto configures and secures your servers and services and using a separate device to manage authorized connections. Each household / user will have its own forums, streaming and other services that FAMG usually provides.
deepnotderp 6y ago
First they came for the socialists..
perryizgr8 6y ago
Facebook is a private company and can choose to boot anybody off their website. Deal with it. Create your own Facebook if you want.
samirillian 6y ago
Let's goooooooooo
chloerei 6y ago
Cyberpunk 2021
icedchocolate 6y ago
I’m shocked that people are surprised that censorship escalates. This is the natural consequence. Censorship should be restricted to calls for, threats of or plans of violence, that’s it. And maybe denial of well-documented genocides. Does anyone know any other easy, clear cut, lines in the sand?
fergie 6y ago
Theres a lot of talk of cancel culture these days, but the UK has a long an shameful history of shutting down the hard left. You can argue about whether or not you agree with people like Arthur Scargill, Gerry Adams, Tommy Sheridan, George Galloway or Jeremy Corbyn, but what cant be disputed is that they represent the interests of a large proportion of the electorate, yet they have been treated atrociously by the media. The SWP also falls into this category. I'm not a huge fan of the SWP, but I do respect their engagement, and its really important to have political candidates who dont feel like they have to pander to those in power. The loss of the SWPs voice is a loss for all in the UK.
- kmlx 6y ago
  > of a large proportion of the electorate when is a portion of the electorate “large”? in 2010 the SWP got an amazing 0.04% i don’t think they even participated in the last ones.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    So you're going to simply ignore the list of the names in the part of the comment you're referring to?
  - herbstein 6y ago
    The poster mentioned someone like Jeremy Corbyn too, so they're not exactly just looking at the SWP and their voters.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Do you have examples of where they have been shut down? - not disputing the claim, just unaware of this. In recent years it does feel like conservative voices have been shut down from universities - think Jorden Peterson and Cambridge university. This is alarming is it not? No matter if it is left or right.
forgingahead 6y ago
First they came for the Trumpists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trumpist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. (to be continued apparently!)
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Yes but the Trumpist part is nuanced. Armed people storming political organisations after the call of the ousted person who holds the power of the state, while expecting martial law and denying election results with claims convincing no-one but themselves is when people say somebody should take care these people. It's fundamentally different from people exploring or even advocationg for economical models like communism or questioning geology like the shape of the earth. This is more on par with islamists stockpiling for the jihad and actually taking actions to do it or a looner posting on 4chan about shooting kids and actually go to the school with guns and fire at people. There's a difference between discussing ideas and organising an action, though both are done using the exact same tools - speech. It makes sense to disable the communications of the adversary who is in process of taking you out.
  - forgingahead 6y ago
    Unfortunately there is a huge double standard with this - for Trump, we're mindreading his words were meant to be violent, whereas for his opponents, "context matters", despite unrest and violent action from all sides. I don't advocate for violent speech, but it's important at times like this to be even-handed in our policies, because as I've said before, when a group or specific groups start feeling their voices are being silenced, then violence follows soon after.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      How much of this is on Trump is to be decided by the people who are going to judge him, if ever. Meanwhile everyone is entitled to have opinions on it and advocate these opinions. However, the reality is that we have an overwhelming evidence of dangerous people doing something malicious and getting organised on some platforms, including but not limited to FB. Therefore people in immediate danger and the people who are directly assaulted or feel threatened demand actions to be taken. It's either let it run and turn into civil war or break the circuit before it goes any further. Let's not pretend that this is about intellectual discussions, it's literally about taking power with force. People actually died and they did not die when looting or anything like that but when they were faced with counter force when they attempt to achieve their objective. You either let it run its course and have a memorial day afterwards where you distribute medals to the best killers who survived or intervene in stop the conflict. Some people simply don't believe in the wonders of the war or don't think that there's a good enough cause for having one and currently it happens that these people are in control of the systems.
poxwole 6y ago
Surprise, Surprise
tehjoker 6y ago
More shutdowns: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html
DennisAleynikov 6y ago
this seems hopeless
xupybd 6y ago
This is why we have to take a serious look at how much power social media companies have. They have far more political influence than they should.
NoZZz 6y ago
Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
simonh 6y ago
For any non-Brits, the SWP is the main left of Labour party in Britain. As a student in the 80s I remember them as an earnest, way too serious bunch of ideological zombies ranting into microphones at the Student's Union about the latest crimes against humanity perpetrated by 'Thatcher'. They're the kind of people that come up to you in the street with leaflets about some atrocity in Africa and shout "Would you murder children" at you. I'm not entirely sure they'd recognise what an actual 'Worker' was if they met one. I always found them quite comical. However they are a serious party, they're a highly motivated and active movement with significant influence in the Labour Party grass roots. They're sort of our equivalent of Antifa in that they are a significant organising presence in lefty street protests, but much more politically active and spend a lot of time in conferences and action committees wondering what Capitalism ever did for us. Importantly, they are in no way shape or form a terrorist or criminal organisation. I would not be at all surprised if some ultra-violent or would-be Red Army Faction types joined or associated with them, but that's not at all who the SWP are as an organisation. They're the well meaning, impressionable white middle class girl next door with a class guilt complex and a side shave that's been going to BLM protests. If they are getting banned by Facebook something has gone horribly wrong. Quite possibly some of them got a bit excited and posted things they shouldn't, so I'm not saying this is for sure Facebook's fault, but they're not about to murder any bobbies in Parliament Square.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  You are over-stating the significance of the SWP. Maybe what you say is true of the 80s, but it isn't today. They are not the main party to the left of Labour, the greens are. The greens have 50,000 members and received 850,000 votes in the 2019 election, the SWP has a few thousand members and does not even field candidates. In my experience they have little influence on the Labour grassroots. The SWP's standing among young, idealistic socialists exploded after it emerged that its central committee covered up a series of rape cases in the party. That was in 2013. I have not met anyone who takes them seriously since. After Corbyn was elected many who would have joined the SWP in the past joined Momentum instead. I am shocked that Facebook have banned the SWP. Their faults are something more like a religion - centralised, deluded, outdated. They have no criminal or terroristic aspirations. What kind of precedent does this set?
mgiannopoulos 6y ago
It’s back , decision reversed https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/ https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/
hermitcrab 6y ago
Shutting down a political group's Facebook page is not the same thing as shutting down the group.
barry27 6y ago
What's the big deal? Organisations like this existed before Facebook and will exist afterwards. It's embarrassing for such an organisation to use Facebook anyway. It's like POTUS tweeting. Have some respect for yourselves.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
The grassroots organizing against American government during and following The Great Depression would be flagged and banned from organizing on corporate social media. FDR worked on The New Deal as a response to revolutionary organizing. One man's terrorist was another's freedom fighter. The problem that the world is now going to deal with is that lunatics stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. There is a 20,000 page bill making its way through the political system right now that makes the Patriot Act seem like child's play. There is a lot to be concerned about right now.
Udik 6y ago
We need laws that: 1) Will force social media companies to provide, publicly, reasons for their blockings and takedowns, potentially exposing themselves to libel charges. 2) Allow individuals and organisations whose accounts have been blocked to download all their contents within a period of time after the blocking or removal happened. 3) Enforce standards so that the downloaded contents can be easily uploaded in bulk to alternative platforms.
tim333 6y ago
Restored now: >The UK’s Socialist Workers Party was temporarily booted from Facebook, restored hours later with no explanation given for what the left-wing org deemed a “silencing of political activists.” Dozens of related pages remain banned https://www.rt.com/uk/513407-facebook-ban-socialist-party/ https://www.rt.com/uk/513407-facebook-ban-socialist-party/
vfclists 6y ago
Hilarious. That is like banning the Mum's Against Sweets At Checkouts group. Really, Facebook?
loblollyboy 6y ago
I’ve been asking myself since Trump’s Twitter ban - is it a violation of free speech if the banner is a private corp? To me the obvious answer is no, but I could see how a private Corp could be pressured by the state.
specialist 6y ago
Adjacently: An org's online presence should be claimed, verified by the host. Any actions taken wrt that presence should cc that org. With options for appeal and so forth clearly spelled out. This Kafka-scape of automated curation wouldn't be so fubar if authenticated speech via verified identities and claimed accounts were front loaded to begin with. I understand automated methods for combatting bots and trolls. I don't understand not having procedures and infrastructure for authentic speech.
pcdoodle 6y ago
I dislike everything about socialism but this is bullshit and needs to stop!
yters 6y ago
Facebook just needs to let the misinformation flow, and allow it's users to develop their own critical thinking and fact checking skills.
zach_garwood 6y ago
"Social media is biased against conservatives!"
blacklight 6y ago
I consider the SWP a bunch of anachronistic dinosaurs who stubbornly try and fit the world into a century-old ideology, and they are a laughing stock for many on the left as well. But I just can't put them in the same bucket as the QAnon supporters. The SWP party may be on the fringes of the political spectrum, but they haven't used social media to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation with the goal of subverting the institutions, nor to organize an armed attack against Westminster. Had they done anything similar, I wouldn't think twice before supporting the ban. But if they haven't, we can't ban them just for being anachronistic dinosaurs. There must be a clear line between banning radicalized groups that pose a threat to society and political parties that, in spite of their outdated ideology, haven't posed any threats against society. Unless Facebook wanted to give an example of how their policies stand above all parties and ban a left-wing page after banning a bunch of right-wing pages. But that's a quite weak argument.

534 points by jimmy2020 6y ago

Facebook did this back in December too before admitting a "mistake" and reversing it. Get it together please FB. I tried to see what the SWP comments on covid were. They seem pretty mainstream (not covid denialism). Ironically their "demands" from December are now government policy... https://swp.org.uk/schools-are-not-safe/ https://swp.org.uk/schools-are-not-safe/ I'm not sure where I stand on Facebook's (etc) right to remove legal content, but I would like a requirement for any platform to specifically state why they removed content. Too often things are taken down for no reason and get put back up based on twitter outrage rather than any logical basis. YouTube are getting infamous for this...

BoorishBears 6y ago
Any time I see one of these "mistakes" I read it as "content got flooded with reports and our automated system took it down"
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I think that would be fine as an initial reason. Having had that back in Dec, you'd think they would put SWP on a safe list? Who knows, I guess. And that's the problem, not so much the taking down as the taking down with zero reason or discussion...
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    This is how the right has been feeling for a while. This is nothing new behaviour-wise for Facebook, the only difference is this gets more favourable media attention.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      There are some big open questions for us as a society on this. I don't approve of calls for violence and I thought Facebook etc were doing well at free speech until the last year or two. It seems like no one is happy with that anymore.
    - elmomle 6y ago
      Please, don't draw a false equivalency between a major political party that does not play host to violent rhetoric, on the one hand, and groups that where plans (very real, actionable, and actioned-on plans!) to subvert the government are incubated, on the other. Put another way--let's not turn sedition into another us-vs-them political game. That's how democracy ends.
      - mrec 6y ago
        The SWP is not by any stretch of the imagination a major political party. ETA: to quantify that a bit, in the 2010 General Election the SWP ran as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Nationally that coalition received 0.04% of votes cast. I can't find any indication that they even put up any candidates in subsequent elections.
        BoorishBears 6y ago
        Does this actually affect the correctness of their point? Acting like a reaction to a politically charged breach of the capitol building is equivalent to a page sharing views about COVID and workers rights getting removed? It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out...
        mrec 6y ago
        I was correcting what looked like a significant misapprehension about the subject of the thread, not arguing for a comparison. Although I can't see anything in throwaways885's comment to suggest that they were talking about the post-Capitol-breach purges. If anything, "for a while" suggests the opposite.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  > "content got flooded with reports and our automated system took it down" I assume this plays a role. I really like facebook meme groups, but every single one inevitably gets "zucced" because of overzealous reports by people who genuinely don't get the problem. They even moderate themselves now to avoid reports.

uberman 6y ago

The organization bills itself (on it's Facebook page) as: The Socialist Workers Party is the largest revolutionary group in Britain My guess is that tag line is causing automated take down issues.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
Facebook has been around since 2004, that excuse must have been used before.
- uberman 6y ago
  I'm sure it has. Perhaps a more recent "revolutionary event" in the USA has prompted a change in automated filtering. Just a hunch though.
  - mcbutterbunz 6y ago
    I would think that any change to automated filtering would allow someone to see which groups would be shut down before actually shutting them down.

mhh__ 6y ago

I assume this is a mistake, although I think they're mad I don't think the SWP are malicious a la some political sects

Veen 6y ago
Yes, it seems unlikely this is deliberate. The SWP is about as likely to forment a revolution or incite violence as Judi Dench. They're a bunch of harmless eccentrics.
- fao_ 6y ago
  Quite literally. The only vaguely-'revolutionary' thing the SWP have done in the last 10 years is provide protest signs for movements that other, more influencial groups of people started.
  - wilsonrocks 6y ago
    If I see any pictures of UK footage I can usually identify the signs the SWP have given out by the font.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  According to the article, it was not just the page that was removed. That could have been a mistake, I suppose. But Facebook also banned "dozens of leading SWP activists". That sounds like a very deliberate action to me.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    To me that sounds even more like an algorithm at work, and quite possibly one more concerned with identifying possible fake accounts than identifying political violence (Relevant context: the SWP is tiny and inconsequential, but very active in coordinating its [unlikely to be violent] messaging and inflating its importance. Nobody would know who its "dozens of leading activists" were to target them. And its local group pages are still up and easily discoverable by searching, so if it was a deliberate action to silence the party it would be a very sloppy one)

threeseed 6y ago

There was also a historical re-enactment page removed in December because they had militia in their title [1] Looks to just be an over-eager moderation engine. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-55215949 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-55215949

RobLach 6y ago
It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. Computing systems are do not act on their own. That the system did this was because it was allowed to, or more accurately, told to.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. This is true. > Computing systems are do not act on their own. That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent! How much of your own code have you formally verified? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification) How much of your own code even has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do is shorter than the length of the code? Such that you could even in theory formally verify that the implementation is in some sense "correct"? For that matter.... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in formal language at all? And actually... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in ENGLISH at all? I don't think something like an "extremism filter" can ever be implemented in a bug-free way, because I don't think there's a precise enough definition of what "bug-free" would even mean. The problem of people blaming bad outcomes on "the algorithm" is real, and organizations should take responsibility for misclassifications generated by code that they own and operate. It's unhelpful to pretend like engineers and the organizations they work for have zero agency. However, it's equally unhelpful to pretend like buggy behavior aligns with the intent of the engineer/organization.

mrcartmenez 6y ago

Well, Facebook is run by the far right, like Peter Thiel so no wonder.

1MachineElf 6y ago
Facebook is absolutely dominated by the far-right, which is why left-wing groups, pages, and users are being censored en-masse. /s
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Not yet, but FB's incentive structure is anti-left (they're a corporation natch) and their head of public policy is a hardcore Republican that worked for the GWB administration and energy companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    How is the incentive structure anti-left? I suppose suspending Trump's account qualifies as "anti-left" these days. Zuckerberg openly stating he supported Black Lives Matter? Anti-left. Facebook deleting PragerU content for "hate speech" before getting reprimaneded? Anti-left. Zuckerberg personally assisting Pete Buttigieg around primary season? ANTI LEFT, I SAY! DIDN'T YOU HEAR HE SAT AT A DINNER TABLE WITH CONSERVATIVES? HE'S ANTI-LEFT! Both Conservatives and Liberals claim Facebook is biased towards the other side, so you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better, and produce some actual, bonafide evidence their "incentive structure is anti-left" besides witchhunting and saying one of their upper middle-managers is a hardcore republican. Care to let us know about the political leanings of Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Cox, who are actually in the C-Suite? Or would you prefer to cherry pick someone in upper middle management who is a staunch republican, which according to you seems to be some kind of heinous crime. Not to mention you're cherry-picking someone who reports to someone who reports to someone etc... who reports to Sheryl Sandberg (COO).
    - tehjoker 6y ago

king_magic 6y ago

Honestly, I'd be happy to see all political groups - left or right - expunged from Facebook. Politics and social media clearly do not mix, as this year has demonstrated all too brutally well.

harry8 6y ago
The only way to do that is to expunge Facebook. I'm ok with that but i bet you're not.
aaomidi 6y ago
What a stance. Maybe if you advocated for 'no politics on facebook', it would sound better. Social media has given voice to marginalized groups, and people seemingly fear that voice. It's something to take a look at, rather than sweep it under the rug with bans.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  If by “marginalized” we mean “radicals”, then yes. If we mean “minorities”, then you’re probably just propagating the myths that minorities hold far-left-wing views. On the contrary, while minority views skew left-wing, only a minority of minorities hold far-left beliefs and there’s a lot more political diversity among minorities than there is between minority and majority groups. For example, “defund the police” is a popular left-wing mantra, but only a minority of black Americans favor it.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - deleted 6y ago
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  - aaomidi 6y ago
    "radicals" that brought us the 40 hour work week. That brought us birth control. That brought us voting rights for all. All of these were "radical" at their time. The only reason they're not anymore is because they have become mainstream. Maybe you should check your assumptions about how life is and read some history of how we got here. "defund the police" is something that has been vocalized for decades, if not centuries. You should ask yourself what has lead up in your education to accept state monopoly on violence, especially when that violence is enacted unfairly against certain minorities. What makes you think that is "normal", but people wanting cops to be less of a massive force in society are "radical".

ffggvv 6y ago

glad no one can be mad because they are a private company :)

mcbuilder 6y ago
Well I actually align with this opinion My politics are certainly by US standards left wing. I supported the recent right wing purge on social media because I thought it was their right to do so, and I support the right of FB to ban whoever they want. The one thing that must not be censored is the internet itself. If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand.
- the-dude 6y ago
  > If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand. That rings hollow. Your datacenter, ISP, CDN or registrar will boot you.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Hypothetical: If I want to print a neo-Nazi newspaper: - Printing services can refuse to print my newspaper. - Shipping companies can refuse to deliver my newspaper. - Heck, my landlord could boot me out of my home for being a neo-Nazi. Is the internet any different? Datacenters and CDNs = Printing services, ISPs = shipping companies.

cesaref 6y ago

now we see the violence inherent in the system. Sorry, had to get that out.

JIBitator 6y ago

"The SWP Facebook page regularly posts in support of Palestine". That explains... ;)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zucker42 6y ago

Stuff like this is a natural consequence of Facebook cracking down on questionable content and acting as an arbiter of truth.

dc2k08 6y ago
More to do with certain people with disproportionate influence deciding what isn't allowed to be discussed. A partial list: The displacement of European peoples. Holocaust revisionism. Boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
- konjin 6y ago
  I always find it funny that holocaust denial is not allowed, yet half the holocaust is never to be called the holocaust. In the west it's said that only Jews were ever to be exterminated. Yet the first work camps were for socialists, the first death camps were hospitals for the disabled, the first extermination camps were for Russian pows and extermination camps murdered 6 million Slavs, Gypsies and homosexuals. There's even a little book written by Hitler himself that details what will happen to the Slavs once he won. But somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial. How is this the official line? Jews were the primary target but I’ve never ever seen anything ‘official’ claim they were the only ones.
    - konjin 6y ago
      >The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[c] was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust I don't think you can get more of the zeitgeist than the first sentence of a wiki article.

IndySun 6y ago

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And then what? Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow. Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.

walkedaway 6y ago
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.
- brippalcharrid 6y ago
  Are you sure that you have an accurate assessment of how bad things are currently vs how bad they would become in a world where access to the Internet was strictly controlled by governments and anonymous/pseudonymous communications were forbidden? Don't you think that the risks in the second scenario are in a different category to the risks in the first one? While being sent to Facebook Jail could limit your social life, it pales besides the threat of Federal Prison.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This is a contrived fantasy, or a realistic question? We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime. Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
    - 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

Well this is an outrage ... Oh, it's the SWP. They've arguably done more to damage left wing politics in the UK than any number of police infiltrators. They're both incompetent, annoying, and persistent. Would be useful to know what post got them banned, but the content moderation is completely opaque.

hirundo 6y ago

It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform, the big platforms lose their power to control the conversation.

quantified 6y ago
As long as the same types of ejectable communications are being published across the political spectrum. I assume the SWP was calling for violence against the government or various officials?
mrec 6y ago
Generally agreed, although I think that only really applies to control at the social-network level, not to control exerted via e.g. Chrome or DNS or your ISP. This feels like the start of a very long road.
- convery 6y ago
  Didn't Mozilla recently-ish put out a statement about possibly having a black-list of sorts to remove bad sites / "think of the children"? On mobile so can't search for it but surely someone here remembers the link.
  - mrec 6y ago
    You're probably thinking of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941 The statement was vague and ambiguous and touched a lot of raw nerves, but coming as it did on the heels of major layoffs at Mozilla it felt a bit like Mitchell Baker pulling a "roll hard left and die".
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    Don’t spread FUD. The statement you’re referring to had nothing to do with blacklisting sites.

DataSceince123 6y ago

It needs to be broken up or shut down, it's that simple. Facebook is a voice used for hate against LGBT / socialist / communist groups

u678u 6y ago

Anyone know why they're named Socialist but seem Marxist/Communist? https://swp.org.uk/theory/ https://swp.org.uk/theory/

hazemotes 6y ago
All communists are socialists.
trident5000 6y ago
I want these people to have the freedom to speak so I can point out how stupid their beliefs are.
pmlnr 6y ago
Communism is an idea, a philosophy. Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Communism is an idea, a philosophy. “Communism” is a class of philosophies with shared traits. > Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy. “Socialism”, in general, is a class of philosophies of which “Communism” is a more specific subset. In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state at which the philosophy is aimed. OTOH.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    I was only aware of the > In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state part; Eastern Europe had some fun with this route to achievement on that the Socialist stage.

lmilcin 6y ago

I think FB/Twitter and others got bold, but kinda forgot they are also most likely digging themselves deep into regulation hell.

mc32 6y ago
It feels like they opened a Pandora’s box. They feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech as they see fit, but now also activists are telling them to shut this or that voice they disagree with. They made this bed themselves.
- tomcam 6y ago
  > feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech Well they shut down the former president of the USA. They clearly have nothing to fear.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Well... not exactly. I mean it is true they did it. But they got help. Because I remember when all this was starting up two decades ago there were a lot of pressures to block this or that. Maybe hate speech, or maybe you crossed RIAA, or maybe you were of dark complexion and Middle East descent and nobody could tell what your arabic said but it defenitely had to be dangerous. So it became pretty customary to have corporations bring content down when asked to do so and this recent wave of deplatforming is just extension. Basically, that's what happens when you start to compromise on principles and choose the easy path. Instead of letting people exercise their free speech and using existing laws to chase people for when they are impinging on somebody elses rights, we chose to compromise and asked companies to do this without due process. And that was beginning of the slippery slope which now suddenly got much steeper than before.
  - mc32 6y ago
    While the RIAA is problematic, it was done under plausible cover of law. So, I understand following criminal laws and such. As for foreign locales, I think the solution is to operate locally like a Mazda or a PepsiCo has to do. Have locals manage your local ops, of course reporting to HQ. But now they decided to enter the unwieldily realm of figuring out intent of speech and whether it’s crossed moral lines or ethical lines or political lines. That’s just impossible and sets them up for failure. They deserve this failure. They want to dictate TO THE WORLD right and wrong speech UNIFORMLY. That’s utterly ridiculous. So China or Venezuela or Iran said mean things. So what! At least we know what they’re thinking and if serious enough take proper measures. It should not be FB or TWTTR who decide these things.

Animats 6y ago

Next, bookstores purging UK bookstores of old Left Book Club books? This is the trouble with censorship. Where do you stop?

trident5000 6y ago
It doesnt stop, the goal posts just keep shifting until it eventually gets directly to you.
Proven 6y ago
What's wrong with that? Most bookstores never sold those, they've censored them forever. Public libraries can exercise censorship. Private libraries and bookstores excercise right to property.

convery 6y ago

It's interesting to see how social media reacts to this. The same people that were cheering on conservatives being purged are now crying over how Antifa and socialists doesn't get a free pass. Does anyone know of any good study where participants are asked their opinion on a quote before and after they are told which ideological leader said it?

typenil 6y ago

Good. Maybe this’ll clarify for some people that a tech oligarchy isn’t the optimal way to control speech.

mantap 6y ago

I'd argue this is a good thing. Facebook is not immortal. Every user that Facebook alienates is a win. Already many non-technical people have been moving to Signal after Facebook's new privacy policy. We need better alternatives, not better Facebook.

pmlnr 6y ago
Sadly, Signal is not the ideal solution either. When I started with the internet, there were countless free/non free email providers, and now nearly everything is gmail, outlook, yahoo, qq, and a few more big ones. We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email. I was talking with my wife that somehow people are OK with a borrowed (rented?) identity for so many things. xyz@gmail.com, +00-00 on whatsapp, etc, and there as only a few wanting to be mail@this-is-my-home-on-the-internet.me, though this is a very different topic.
- ohthehugemanate 6y ago
  What are the intermediate steps to get there? For me, an intermediate step to a lot of worlds I like better than this one, is for a diverse ecosystem of messengers to compete on security, openness, and guarantees of not surveilling/monetizing users. In the last weeks I've had all my WhatsApp groups of "normal people" start discussing alternative messengers on exactly these terms. They've looked into Viber, Telegram, SMS, Signal, and others. So i'm happy with that.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    Matrix.org - built on matrix, a federated, but somewhat fat protocol -, or one of conversations.im, quicksy.im, blabber.im, www.jabber.de, etc, all built on xmpp. EDIT the point with these is tricky, because they are not all-in-one solutions. People these days tend to think that an app/program == the service, but this is so not the case. I've tried telling people they could use other programs to access gmail, but it was like talking to a wall, and this is serious issue in this - the instant messenger - case as well. I have no idea how to tell people that it's possible to use _something else_ as an interface. Somehow most of them understand that there are different browsers to access the internet, but they don't apply this thinking to other protocols and services. Hence recommendations for services who provide their "own" apps, conversations being the root, quicksy and blabber being derivatives.

pmlnr 6y ago

> They are demanding to be reinstated immediately. LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc. The current "social" media + cloud everything is a bad road, but apparently this - the shutdowns - is the only way to get out of this swamp.

polar 6y ago
> If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? Well put.
mrzimmerman 6y ago
Agreed except for the cloud part. Buying your own hardware, configuring and maintaining it is a high bar for most people, even technical people. But we do need distributes systems and we need a lot of competition in the hosting space (it’s not terrible now for lost things if they’re small but big services may have problems).
imgabe 6y ago
> If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? Facebook is the Internet equivalent of a public accommodation[1]. It is not Zuckerberg's personal home, it is a place open to the public to conduct business. If Facebook is going to set conditions that some members of the public are allowed and not others, it should be clear what those conditions are and when they are and are not met. That said, I do agree that people should flee these places where they're at the mercy of whatever algorithm or ideological fad that takes over the current employees or whatever. But insofar as they aren't we should regulate it the same way we regulate (in the US) hotels, restaurants, and other public-facing businesses to ensure that the whole public has a fair chance to use them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U...
garbagetime 6y ago

andrepd 6y ago

A good demonstration, to the people (who claim to be) on the left while cheering things like the Trump ban.

bjourne 6y ago

These discussions always end in the same way. "But they are a PRIVATE COMPANY they have the right to do that!" Fuck that. Who is working on decentralized content distribution? We need decentralized free software versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube so that not a single actor has veto power over what content is allowed. Something like torrents, but without torrent sites (which are single points of failure). There's FreeNet, but it's crap and contains child porn. We need something new that ensures the right of Socialist parties (and Nazi parties too, for that matter) to spread their legal propaganda, but can't be used for pedophiles to distribute child porn. Technically, it can't be impossible to create something like that. People have tons of bandwidth and disk space to spare so that shouldn't be a problem either.

notahacker 6y ago
The only way you're getting a decentralised system without child porn at all is to allow some moderation. Decentralized consensus-based moderation can probably be relied on to shut down child porn distribution, but soon you're going to run into the problem that large numbers of people signing up to use the service hate Nazis and/or BLM just as much...

benjamoon 6y ago

Tim Berner’s Lee and the Solid project have a good answer to these issues I think. Everyone owns their posts and likes and comments and friends etc. Any new platform can spin up and instantly compete because they just have to make your data more useful to you. It’d be like you owning all your music online and Spotify is just an interface, if you don’t like it you can jump to Apple Music. Or make your own or download some random app off the web that does what you want. The reason a new social network can’t just compete with Facebook is because they have all the data, if the data could stay with us then new platforms offering news ways of interfacing would be popping up all over the place. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Proven 6y ago
> Everyone owns their posts But that is anti-socialist!
guerrilla 6y ago
That sounds like an improvement for sure but it looks like it just shifts the problem to pod providers and hosts. If the web was all pods then the Socialist Workers Party could just as well end up in a situation similar to Parler's in the end.
- benjamoon 6y ago
  The hope is pod hosts would compete, some could be free and mine your data for ads etc, others could pay and focus on privacy. If that doesn’t work you host your own pod server, as long as it has an address that can be reached by the web that’s all that’s needed.

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

They should have called themselves the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party. Then Zuckerbarf and co would have been most supportive.

robomartin 6y ago

My prediction is that one day the tech community will regret not having stopped these companies cold years ago. What am I talking about? Just search for "Google closed my account", "Facebook closed my account", "Google suspended our business advertising and email", "Facebook suspended our advertising account", "Amazon suspended my business account", etc. These companies have been pulling the plug on people and businesses for years. When they do, there is no recourse whatsoever. It's the closest anyone will get to having to face a totalitarian regime from within a democracy. The tech community should have revolted against this kind of treatment of individuals and businesses years ago. These companies have ruined people and destroyed businesses. Heck, they even drove people --kids-- to suicide! Now, with Parler, Trump, the threat to Australia, this thing in the UK and more they are likely scaring the hell out of people around the world and across a wide spectrum of ideologies and circumstances. What comes next might be easy to predict: The heavy hand of government will likely descend on them around the world. And likely so. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow. What's worse, they will likely be responsible for the creation of onerous regulations that might very well damage other internet companies and make it that much more difficult to do business. In the end, it might all be for the better. No company should have the power to destroy individuals, businesses, political organizations and even force governments with the click of a button. That's the world we live in today. Many think Parler was the first violation of trust. It was not. Thousands have been silenced and erased all over the world before them.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Both the non-corporate funded so called far left and far right pose some business threat to the Internet platforms. In the USA, the democratic DNC and republican RNC get paid off in financial support and will not promote privacy, etc. The more fringe parties don’t get money and are not controlled. They have a history of regarding privacy as important, both left and right. No matter what your political persuasion is, I would like to ask you as a friend to at least consider how dangerous de-platforming is to society.

ryandrake 6y ago

The title is not really accurate. They shut down the Facebook page for the party, not the party itself. Important distinction.

lsiebert 6y ago

Looks like they restored some but not all of what they took down. https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/ https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale. As it is, it's likely similar to "a big neural network said so" which tells the users nothing. Facebook's free to run themselves this way but it's sure dickish. Imagine if the government or your boss made rules that way. "Drivers will be ticketed if our models say so."

alexeldeib 6y ago
Sadly par for the course. Games do this to avoid bots improving against detection. Dating apps do it for safety. This is certainly more egregious because it’s about basic speech but by no means is the lack of disclosure new.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  And it makes sense. It's like SEO. It's an adversarial environment without a perfect answer, so keeping the reasons hidden truly does help most everyone. It just sucks that it leaves the false positives hanging out to dry with no explanation and no recourse. And this has all gotten to a scale where those false positives are a huge number of people, even if it's a minuscule fraction.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
csense 6y ago
One of the problems with this is opening up to criticism, liability, and further argumentation. If you say "We removed them because of their political views," then you get criticized for being openly partisan. If you say "We removed them because their comments were inciting violence," you'll get arguments about how their comments didn't actually tell people to do violent things (for example, in the US I'm sure for the near future, a lot of people will be arguing very loudly whether the specific phrases "fight like hell" and "trial by combat" are metaphorical rhetorical devices or literal instructions to take violent actions.) People will start finding and pointing out situations where you made different decisions in near-identical circumstances, and criticize you for that too. It's better for users if the platform's transparent. But the platform has no incentive to do so. Less than 1% of the time will users say "Okay you told us why this person was banned, we now see the ban's fair, and we'll shut up and go home." Instead, 99% of the time they'll turn your explanation into another reason to be enraged at you, or argue you need to reconsider, or even sue you because that line of reasoning makes you liable. From the platform's point of view, it's usually better to let the reasoning behind a ban be a question mark. > "a big neural network said so" This is part of it too. With ML-driven bans or other actions, it's possible that nobody understands what criteria it uses to make decisions.

teh_klev 6y ago

I wonder if this is the handiwork of the Center for Countering Digital Hate crowd backed by the right wing of UK Labour. They've already pretty much killed The Canary through their lobbying, the SWP would be a natural next target. Though gawd knows why, they're fairly harmless if a wee bit stuck in early 20th century Marxist/Leninist dogma. I've been to a few of their online meetings and I can safely say they're hardly anywhere close to being revolutionaries, and miles away from promoting propaganda by deed. More info: https://www.thecanary.co/investigation/2020/12/01/exclusive-labour-right-linked-to-campaign-to-shut-down-the-canary/ https://www.thecanary.co/investigation/2020/12/01/exclusive-... https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censorship-google-labour-uk https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censorship-...

chrisseaton 6y ago
> I can safely say they're hardly anywhere close to being revolutionaries https://swp.org.uk/who-we-are/ https://swp.org.uk/who-we-are/ > The Socialist Workers Party is a revolutionary socialist party ... We want to see a revolution ...
- teh_klev 6y ago
  I'm well aware of that. My point is that these guys are armchair revolutionaries. Revolutions don't always need to be violent. They can be cerebral.

rijoja 6y ago

ah that does it I'm off facebook asap! Will only use it to tell people to get off of it.

TeeMassive 6y ago

Those same people from the Left were probably saying "it's a private company they can do what they want" when conservatives were getting banned en masse. Of course it was only a matter of time before they got purged after their usefulness had ended.

kypro 6y ago

How is this not foreign political interference? The UK media has been preaching to us about dangers of Russian election interference for years at this point, but simultaneously they seem completely unconcerned that a handful of wealthy Americans how the power to censor popular media outlets, entire political movements and political activists at a whim. The SWP is massive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they had millions of followers on Facebook. This isn't some fringe, extremist group by any sane interpretation of those terms. It seems we're now quickly moving on from just censoring those with extremist political views to simply censoring anyone who who dares express a non-establishment political view online.

ssakamoto 6y ago
Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.
- pasquinelli 6y ago
  that can change. what's the cost and the benefit of doing so?
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  That’s been said mockingly and seriously so many times in the last few weeks; it’s literally impossible to tell which this is. Bravo on ambiguity.
- herostratus101 6y ago
  Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a conservative who opposes basically everything the Socialist Workers Party stands for, but who is more threatened by autocratic tech censorship than by opposing ideas.
  - SllX 6y ago
    There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessage groups, whatever the 3 Google messengers of the day are, XMPP clients and servers, IRC (which is admittedly more than 20 years old), countless dating sites, Reddit, and countless other “social networks”. When the bars re-open, we’ll have those too, and that is an ancient institution. And for what it’s worth, there’s also the comments section of NRO and The Dispatch. Oh, and the forum we’re talking on.

TeeMassive 6y ago

I have a few pet projects that I am working on right now. Basically, 'Build Your Own Cloud'. The idea is to provide a set of plug and play tools that auto configures and secures your servers and services and using a separate device to manage authorized connections. Each household / user will have its own forums, streaming and other services that FAMG usually provides.

deepnotderp 6y ago

First they came for the socialists..

perryizgr8 6y ago

Facebook is a private company and can choose to boot anybody off their website. Deal with it. Create your own Facebook if you want.

samirillian 6y ago

Let's goooooooooo

chloerei 6y ago

Cyberpunk 2021

icedchocolate 6y ago

I’m shocked that people are surprised that censorship escalates. This is the natural consequence. Censorship should be restricted to calls for, threats of or plans of violence, that’s it. And maybe denial of well-documented genocides. Does anyone know any other easy, clear cut, lines in the sand?

fergie 6y ago

Theres a lot of talk of cancel culture these days, but the UK has a long an shameful history of shutting down the hard left. You can argue about whether or not you agree with people like Arthur Scargill, Gerry Adams, Tommy Sheridan, George Galloway or Jeremy Corbyn, but what cant be disputed is that they represent the interests of a large proportion of the electorate, yet they have been treated atrociously by the media. The SWP also falls into this category. I'm not a huge fan of the SWP, but I do respect their engagement, and its really important to have political candidates who dont feel like they have to pander to those in power. The loss of the SWPs voice is a loss for all in the UK.

kmlx 6y ago
> of a large proportion of the electorate when is a portion of the electorate “large”? in 2010 the SWP got an amazing 0.04% i don’t think they even participated in the last ones.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  So you're going to simply ignore the list of the names in the part of the comment you're referring to?
- herbstein 6y ago
  The poster mentioned someone like Jeremy Corbyn too, so they're not exactly just looking at the SWP and their voters.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Do you have examples of where they have been shut down? - not disputing the claim, just unaware of this. In recent years it does feel like conservative voices have been shut down from universities - think Jorden Peterson and Cambridge university. This is alarming is it not? No matter if it is left or right.

forgingahead 6y ago

First they came for the Trumpists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trumpist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. (to be continued apparently!)

mrtksn 6y ago
Yes but the Trumpist part is nuanced. Armed people storming political organisations after the call of the ousted person who holds the power of the state, while expecting martial law and denying election results with claims convincing no-one but themselves is when people say somebody should take care these people. It's fundamentally different from people exploring or even advocationg for economical models like communism or questioning geology like the shape of the earth. This is more on par with islamists stockpiling for the jihad and actually taking actions to do it or a looner posting on 4chan about shooting kids and actually go to the school with guns and fire at people. There's a difference between discussing ideas and organising an action, though both are done using the exact same tools - speech. It makes sense to disable the communications of the adversary who is in process of taking you out.
- forgingahead 6y ago
  Unfortunately there is a huge double standard with this - for Trump, we're mindreading his words were meant to be violent, whereas for his opponents, "context matters", despite unrest and violent action from all sides. I don't advocate for violent speech, but it's important at times like this to be even-handed in our policies, because as I've said before, when a group or specific groups start feeling their voices are being silenced, then violence follows soon after.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    How much of this is on Trump is to be decided by the people who are going to judge him, if ever. Meanwhile everyone is entitled to have opinions on it and advocate these opinions. However, the reality is that we have an overwhelming evidence of dangerous people doing something malicious and getting organised on some platforms, including but not limited to FB. Therefore people in immediate danger and the people who are directly assaulted or feel threatened demand actions to be taken. It's either let it run and turn into civil war or break the circuit before it goes any further. Let's not pretend that this is about intellectual discussions, it's literally about taking power with force. People actually died and they did not die when looting or anything like that but when they were faced with counter force when they attempt to achieve their objective. You either let it run its course and have a memorial day afterwards where you distribute medals to the best killers who survived or intervene in stop the conflict. Some people simply don't believe in the wonders of the war or don't think that there's a good enough cause for having one and currently it happens that these people are in control of the systems.

poxwole 6y ago

Surprise, Surprise

tehjoker 6y ago

More shutdowns: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html

DennisAleynikov 6y ago

this seems hopeless

xupybd 6y ago

This is why we have to take a serious look at how much power social media companies have. They have far more political influence than they should.

NoZZz 6y ago

Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

simonh 6y ago

For any non-Brits, the SWP is the main left of Labour party in Britain. As a student in the 80s I remember them as an earnest, way too serious bunch of ideological zombies ranting into microphones at the Student's Union about the latest crimes against humanity perpetrated by 'Thatcher'. They're the kind of people that come up to you in the street with leaflets about some atrocity in Africa and shout "Would you murder children" at you. I'm not entirely sure they'd recognise what an actual 'Worker' was if they met one. I always found them quite comical. However they are a serious party, they're a highly motivated and active movement with significant influence in the Labour Party grass roots. They're sort of our equivalent of Antifa in that they are a significant organising presence in lefty street protests, but much more politically active and spend a lot of time in conferences and action committees wondering what Capitalism ever did for us. Importantly, they are in no way shape or form a terrorist or criminal organisation. I would not be at all surprised if some ultra-violent or would-be Red Army Faction types joined or associated with them, but that's not at all who the SWP are as an organisation. They're the well meaning, impressionable white middle class girl next door with a class guilt complex and a side shave that's been going to BLM protests. If they are getting banned by Facebook something has gone horribly wrong. Quite possibly some of them got a bit excited and posted things they shouldn't, so I'm not saying this is for sure Facebook's fault, but they're not about to murder any bobbies in Parliament Square.

Emma_Goldman 6y ago
You are over-stating the significance of the SWP. Maybe what you say is true of the 80s, but it isn't today. They are not the main party to the left of Labour, the greens are. The greens have 50,000 members and received 850,000 votes in the 2019 election, the SWP has a few thousand members and does not even field candidates. In my experience they have little influence on the Labour grassroots. The SWP's standing among young, idealistic socialists exploded after it emerged that its central committee covered up a series of rape cases in the party. That was in 2013. I have not met anyone who takes them seriously since. After Corbyn was elected many who would have joined the SWP in the past joined Momentum instead. I am shocked that Facebook have banned the SWP. Their faults are something more like a religion - centralised, deluded, outdated. They have no criminal or terroristic aspirations. What kind of precedent does this set?

mgiannopoulos 6y ago

It’s back , decision reversed https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/ https://swp.org.uk/1049-2/

hermitcrab 6y ago

Shutting down a political group's Facebook page is not the same thing as shutting down the group.

barry27 6y ago

What's the big deal? Organisations like this existed before Facebook and will exist afterwards. It's embarrassing for such an organisation to use Facebook anyway. It's like POTUS tweeting. Have some respect for yourselves.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

The grassroots organizing against American government during and following The Great Depression would be flagged and banned from organizing on corporate social media. FDR worked on The New Deal as a response to revolutionary organizing. One man's terrorist was another's freedom fighter. The problem that the world is now going to deal with is that lunatics stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. There is a 20,000 page bill making its way through the political system right now that makes the Patriot Act seem like child's play. There is a lot to be concerned about right now.

Udik 6y ago

We need laws that: 1) Will force social media companies to provide, publicly, reasons for their blockings and takedowns, potentially exposing themselves to libel charges. 2) Allow individuals and organisations whose accounts have been blocked to download all their contents within a period of time after the blocking or removal happened. 3) Enforce standards so that the downloaded contents can be easily uploaded in bulk to alternative platforms.

tim333 6y ago

Restored now: >The UK’s Socialist Workers Party was temporarily booted from Facebook, restored hours later with no explanation given for what the left-wing org deemed a “silencing of political activists.” Dozens of related pages remain banned https://www.rt.com/uk/513407-facebook-ban-socialist-party/ https://www.rt.com/uk/513407-facebook-ban-socialist-party/

vfclists 6y ago

Hilarious. That is like banning the Mum's Against Sweets At Checkouts group. Really, Facebook?

loblollyboy 6y ago

I’ve been asking myself since Trump’s Twitter ban - is it a violation of free speech if the banner is a private corp? To me the obvious answer is no, but I could see how a private Corp could be pressured by the state.

specialist 6y ago

Adjacently: An org's online presence should be claimed, verified by the host. Any actions taken wrt that presence should cc that org. With options for appeal and so forth clearly spelled out. This Kafka-scape of automated curation wouldn't be so fubar if authenticated speech via verified identities and claimed accounts were front loaded to begin with. I understand automated methods for combatting bots and trolls. I don't understand not having procedures and infrastructure for authentic speech.

pcdoodle 6y ago

I dislike everything about socialism but this is bullshit and needs to stop!

yters 6y ago

Facebook just needs to let the misinformation flow, and allow it's users to develop their own critical thinking and fact checking skills.

zach_garwood 6y ago

"Social media is biased against conservatives!"

blacklight 6y ago

I consider the SWP a bunch of anachronistic dinosaurs who stubbornly try and fit the world into a century-old ideology, and they are a laughing stock for many on the left as well. But I just can't put them in the same bucket as the QAnon supporters. The SWP party may be on the fringes of the political spectrum, but they haven't used social media to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation with the goal of subverting the institutions, nor to organize an armed attack against Westminster. Had they done anything similar, I wouldn't think twice before supporting the ban. But if they haven't, we can't ban them just for being anachronistic dinosaurs. There must be a clear line between banning radicalized groups that pose a threat to society and political parties that, in spite of their outdated ideology, haven't posed any threats against society. Unless Facebook wanted to give an example of how their policies stand above all parties and ban a left-wing page after banning a bunch of right-wing pages. But that's a quite weak argument.