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To think that a few months ago, sharing this article would have gotten someone banned from Facebook for sharing "conspiracy theories".
by 908B64B197 5y ago
To think that a few months ago, sharing this article would have gotten someone banned from Facebook for sharing "conspiracy theories".
- secondcoming 5y agoIndeed. The whole thing needs to be looked at. Someone somewhere decided that the topic was taboo and needed to be purged from the internet, and then someone somewhere decided that it was ok that the tpoic gets to see the light of day. It's all quite sinister.
- throwaway6734 5y agoDon't use Facebook
- bumbada 5y agoWe should develop open source decentralized alternatives to it that are easy to use.
- kwthrows 5y agoIt won't change anything. This isn't to do with facebook per-se, you'd just get "unlinked" from whatever arbitrators or aggreggators of a decentralized alternative exist, and still be labeled a social outcast and a conspiracy theorist. It's not a technology problem, rather it's one of imbeciles. It also exists on HN. There is a bevvy of topics we are not allowed to discuss here because dang will point to some arbitrary guidelines saying how "that's not allowed here" and ban you. It's the same shit everywhere. Basically, the moment you step outside of the given narrative and what is and isn't allowed to be questioned, you should have zero (or less than zero, actually) expectation of having a platform where you can voice your concerns, and heaven forbid that your online persona be linked with your personal details, because if it is, you are in so much deep shit it's not even worth it for most people to utter certain words.
- eloff 5y agoI once posted a question about some trans issue on multiple online communities. I forget the exact issue, and I presented both sides of the issue and then where I thought the truth may lie. I was pretty open about not knowing and wanting a discussion. It got shutdown everywhere, so I live on in ignorance because some things are apparently verboten. How does that benefit anyone? There should be nothing so sacred as to be above debate. The problem with this group of tech companies deciding what is true and what is not, is that even if they're right the vast majority of the time, that few percent where they were wrong and silenced that voice actually matter. Nearly every idea we now hold sacred in science was once heretical. If you silence the heretics, how can you have progress? The Catholic church used to do that, during a period we now call the dark ages. We know how this ends. Protecting people from misinformation can't be done with censorship, only by presenting them with the truth.
- gloriousternary 5y agoHonestly I think Mastodon is already about as easy to use as possible. The real problem is the network effect, and the fact that the average person really just doesn't care enough about the benefits you get from it. What we really need is a libre, decentralized social network that's "cool" enough that non-tech people would have FOMO if they don't join. That's a much harder problem, one that I certainly won't be able to solve any time soon.
- SECProto 5y ago> Honestly I think Mastodon is already about as easy to use as possible. The real problem is the network effect, and the fact that the average person really just doesn't care enough about the benefits you get from it. I care a great deal about the benefits of Mastodon! For me, the benefit is that anyone who is obsessive about conspiracy theories, racism, etc have a quarantined social space where they can converse without me having to listen.
- vimy 5y agoMaybe https://bitclout.com/ https://bitclout.com/
- Nursie 5y agoWow no. That's not going to appeal to normal people.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoHahaha I agree with my sibling - I went on a ride with bitclout and enjoyed the camaraderie, but immediately saw how petty people were going to get over losing a buck, ironically ready to call other users scammers at the drop of a hat. If they had a different answer to decentralization than a 2MB/minute block size or a media hosting solution that wasn’t just “allow iframes from YouTube and Vimeo” I would have had more faith, but now that I’ve cashed out I see what the sibling sees, target demographic for a influencer-speculation-exchange is very small.
- cvwright 5y agoNone of us can solve it alone. First we need good tech, like Mastodon. Then we need to move our own digital "lives" onto those better platforms, and start encouraging our friends to join us. For my part, I'm working on a new social app where everything is E2E encrypted [1], so you don't have to trust the server. The main use case is to let parents share photos of their kids in a safer way. I'm hoping this will be a big draw for people who have currently checked out of the creepy ad-tracking platforms. [1] https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
- Tenoke 5y agoYouTube among with many other places are even now censoring it so acting like it's a Facebook problem is counter-productive.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThose someones were CNN/MSNBC producers that decided not to give it the light of day because Trump talked about it first and that means it's unequivocally Bad™ and racist. All 24/7 news networks should be dissolved immediately. They are aggressive cancers that have been ruinous to society. And I still get downvoted. Lol. This community is no better than the social media sites it trashes.
- runawaybottle 5y agoIt’s really crazy how the skeptical crowd (erring on the side of the lab leak theory) are all grayed out. How about we don’t gray those voices out in these discussions. Dispute it, no problem, but somethings do need to be talked about over and over. There’s a million discussions on code complexity, job interviews, etc, because we know it’s a problem we have to keep angling at to come to a truth. Here we have China that is undoubtedly being obstructionist with respect to gaining clarity. We have to keep angling at this if we are ever to get closer. Find me the bat or animal that has Covid-19 in the wild. Until then, we keep discussing. _______ In this murder case, Wuhan Institute of Virology with a focus on bat coronaviruses is SUSPECT #1 in a bat coronavirus outbreak that occurred in Wuhan. /micdrop We owe it to ourselves to continue discussing.
- dang 5y agoThere are plenty of more neutral and thoughtful comments taking the side of the lab leak theory that don't end up in a downvoted or flagged state. The GP comment obviously broke the site guidelines, for example with gratuitous flamebait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- failuser 5y agoYou realize the reason being that Facebook users jump from “virus was leaked from a lab in China” to beating up Chinese-looking people a bit too eagerly. This is why I’m not that much concerned about Facebook rules in this case. Getting expelled from scientific community for not sticking to the most convenient hypothesis is another matter, much more serious.
- seattle_spring 5y agoNot only that, but the originally deleted articles were about an intentionally created and released bioweapon, not an accidental lab leak.
- failuser 5y agoNice bioweapon, barely kills anyone conscriptable. More like an evil pension system relief tool.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bumbada 5y agoActually I knew about Shi's work early on because I talked with experts on the field and I shared all this info without problems. The urge to ban that info in social sites came much later, when politicians got the message and considered that info dangerous(and because the West depended on Chinese supplies). Most politicians are so dumb from the scientific and technical side that it took a long time for them to understand. But it gives us and important lesson: If we want to inform ourselves, we should use alternatives to centralized social media.
- armada651 5y agoI don't think you need to make conspiratorial allegations about the info being judged "dangerous" to explain it. It simply got politicized just as masks got politicized. The more one side advocates it the more the other side discredits it.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoExcept in this case, the left tried to discredit it. If Trump kept his mouth shut, it may have gone down differently (that is, less politicized).
- ravel-bar-foo 5y agoTrump saying something should have no bearing on whether it is true or whether it deserves consideration by the public. I see this as the media over-reacting to Trump (and to Tom Cotton) and now they have egg on their faces.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoYep... we should really have a debate about platform-vs-publisher status of media.
- devwastaken 5y agoPlatform/publisher isn't a thing. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/section-230-basics-there-is-no-such-thing-as-publisher-or-platform-distinction.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/secti...
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoBut it should be.
- beerandt 5y agoThere's no legally spelled out condition, but one editorializes content and the other is content agnostic. The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means they no longer deserve 230 protection.
- michaelmrose 5y agoThis is the way you think the law ought to work not how it is in fact written.
- beerandt 5y ago>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" That's how it's written. It provides protection for hosting controversial content posted by users, based on the fact that the host didn't write it, endorse it, or promote it. If the host has an active hand in doing those things, they are no longer merely hosting. Same goes for surpressing or censoring. The "another content provider" means the host is not involved in determining the content. But treating posts differently based on that content is not meaningfully different than an editor choosing what to publish.
- api 5y agoThat's because Facebook is full of bad actors sharing actual complete bullshit conspiracy theories, and the only thing a company like Facebook can possibly do is a make a "nothing that deviates too hard from the Official Line(tm) rule." Otherwise they have to get into the business of being some kind of scientific review board, which they are in no way equipped to do. Bad faith propaganda at the scale we have seen recently is abuse of free speech, and widespread abuse of a freedom often leads to the curtailment of that freedom.
- nradov 5y agoOfficial line in which country? And what happens when the WHO says one thing, the CDC says something else, and the President contradicts both?
- api 5y agoWhat happens? Facebook eats it from all sides. I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate. This scenario is a curse you get when you are operating a gigantic Internet forum at that kind of scale.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate. Here's an example of this happening[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- tweetle_beetle 5y ago> Otherwise they have to get into the business of being some kind of scientific review board, which they are in no way equipped to do. They're not that far off that to be honest - https://oversightboard.com/ https://oversightboard.com/
- 5y ago
- devwastaken 5y agoBecause people are sharing actual conspiracy theories and killing others. So it's a blanket ban. How many people are so crazed and convinced that the vaccine makes you magnetic/sterile/whatever?
- kent13304 5y agoNot very many
- ipaddr 5y agoConspiracy theories are not harmful that kill people. This is an idea the media spread in the last little while to label non-approved opinions as harmful. Facebook decides to blank ban anything that hasn't been approved by gatekeepers and you approved because you are worried that people might hear on facebook that vaccines cause people to go sterile and not get one? Which one of these things is actually causing harm? Shutting down all discussion or the worry that someone might post and might think the vaccine causes you to be magnetic? It's crazy people are falling for this.
- devwastaken 5y agoIt's not that they "might hear" it's that people in mass already believe in made up propaganda about coronavirus vaccines. The natural result being individuals at risk not getting them, and individuals not as at risk not getting them, resulting in more death and longer lockdowns.
- swiley 5y agoLots of things killed people last year, including the lock down. Being allowed to criticize things like that is what separates us from countries that lack democracy.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoGermany has certain very strict policies about whether you're allowed to discuss certain things, and they outrank the US by 30 positions on the World Press Freedom Index[1]. Sometimes you have to suppress bad actors who willfully push unverified or outright fallacious information in order to have actual freedom of information. [1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
- ineedasername 5y agoIf you say someone committed murder with zero evidence to back it up it's wrong-- at that time-- even if evidence ends up coming out. You still had no basis for such a serious accusation and would still be irresponsible to throw the accusation around as "true". Sometimes people make unfounded guesses based on little/no evidence. Just because it turns out to be correct doesn't mean those people were any more justified-- at that time-- in their unfounded accusations. Of course a person is now justified, with evidence available, to make these claims. It doesn't mean those who made them baselessly out of suspicion and guesses any less irrational for doing so before there was evidence. Making unfounded accusations doesn't retroactively turn an irrational accusation into a reasonable one just because it turns out to be true. It's also worth noting that this is still unproven: it doesn't look good for China, but there's nothing definitive yet.