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It seems to me on this topic almost everyone (including myself) is in a completely hypocritical position. We want facebook to take action in countries where we
by zpeti 6y ago
It seems to me on this topic almost everyone (including myself) is in a completely hypocritical position.
We want facebook to take action in countries where we disagree, but not take action in areas/countries where we agree. Here is a perfect example.
I imagine most people criticising Facebook here were in favour of facebook wiping the hunter biden story from everywhere. Because one is a conservative government, the other is a risk to electing a left wing one.
The other situation china. Most people find it outrageous that Google tried to get into china by building a censoring search engine. Yet expect Google and Facebook to filter disinformation elsewhere that is a threat to their side, or even just articles sceptical of lockdown.
Unfortunately in both cases we can't have both. These are directly conflicting situations, you can have one, but you can't have both.
- esyir 6y agoAgreed, this isn't any principled approach. This is "I want Facebook to enforce my own personal value set", even if it goes against local value sets.
- ajkjk 6y agoI don't buy the "argument from hypocrisy" at all. The situations are not symmetric because there is a right answer on each side and they give different results. Google should filter information when it's the right thing to do. It should not filter information when it's the wrong thing to do. The superficial symmetry of the two situations is completely irrelevant to which course of action is right and acceptable.
- zapdrive 6y agoAnd who decides what's wrong and what's right? You? Or, Google?
- shillforhumanty 6y agoOut of curiousity, how many Marvel movies have you seen? Star Wars? All of them? Real world is a lot greyer.
- karlkloss 6y agoWell, I want Facebook to just die, is this hypocritical?
- esyir 6y agoNo, but also useless. You wanting Facebook to die as your primary motive gives your opinion zero, if not negative value as far as decisions on Facebook would go.
- hnbad 6y agoNo, the Hunter Biden story was "wiped from everywhere" because it was part illegal (the authentic parts, if they were indeed authentic, would likely have violated revenge porn laws in addition to Facebook's ToS on nudity), part misinformation and part (and this is probably the least important) character assassination. It also wasn't a very successful "wipe" if the story got coverage in various mainstream media. It wasn't a very successful smear campaign because as it turns out, saying "your son may have done an illegal sex thing while on drugs" isn't a very effective smear against someone running against an incumbent who has had credible scandals ticking every one of those boxes himself. You also need to get out of the headspace where you think Biden is "left wing" just because Trump or Modi is so extremely right wing. If you want to see "left wing" criticism on Facebook it's not about Hunter Biden, it's about things like the ("alleged") Uyghur genocide or the portrayal of socialist governments. Biden isn't a socialist, he's a centrist moderate leaning towards fiscal conservatism with some moderately progressive social policies. Even relative to the US population he's barely "left wing". His appeal was literally that he plans to "reach across the isle" and "unite" with Republicans (who, for the record, have shown no such interest themselves). Neither is Facebook, by the way. While Facebook has cracked down on right-wing disinfo campaigns after they gained massive traction after 2016, they've also cracked down hard on socialist accounts and groups, often with no recourse and no clear explanation of which parts of the ToS they allegedly violated. Meanwhile they cozied up to Republican politicians during the Trump era and there have been leaked conversations and memos indicating Zuckerberg & co intentionally pushing for a more right-wing slant to offset the employees' supposed liberal bias. I'm not in support of Facebook wiping "the Hunter Biden story", I'm in support of Facebook enforcing its ToS. But they need to do so transparently and objectively. They aren't doing that, though, and that's a problem. But it doesn't only impact "the right". The right is just more likely to see their own being banned over bannable offenses like explicitly racist remarks and calls to violence and portray it as "censoring conservatives".
- zpeti 6y agoA story about hunter biden is not the same as the material itself, which might have been illegal. Just like obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal, but talking about it isn't, and they most certainly weren't wiped from Facebook and Twitter. Which is an extremely easy example of just what double standards there were during the election. Also - how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case? What your suggesting is ridiculous.