9 ms·

Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels

117 points by georgecmu 5y ago

Finnucane 5y ago
You'd think scholars interested in doing serious research on original source documents would have better ways of publishing than relying on Facebook.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Hopefully this drives uptake of those better ways. And if better ways don’t exist, this is a call for improvements (integrating with Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, SciHub, mailing lists/rss, etc).
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Honestly I'm getting tired of this sort of moderation on social networks. It has nothing to do with scholarly channels, or Nazi this and that for me; I just don't sympathize with censorship I guess and there's always going to be some false positives and negatives when you start going down that path. It just feels like a waste of everyone's time to me. Having said that, I think you're right about hoping it leads to better avenues, as I think there's a real need for it.
    - Finnucane 5y ago
      Yeah, because networks without moderation have gone over pretty well. Srsly, FB is not the solution for everything.
- dogleash 5y ago
  Even the large media organizations are contorting their output for attention on social media; what chances do the independent professionals have to bring attention to their work while ignoring those platforms?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I can understand why large media organizations are but why do independent professional want to attract the joe six pack of the world opinion which makes up the bulk of facebook traffic?
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      They don't. Historians follow other historians on twitter and facebook. It is professional networking. Joe Six Pack doesn't care about the stuff my wife is posting on twitter, but the editor at some press who would be reviewing her book might.
- powera 5y ago
  There are many better ways of doing research. The obvious speculation is that this person did not use any of those better ways because the document is a forgery. If it is a forgery, the author would be promoting neo-Nazi propaganda.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Just to be clear, you're accusing a researcher of being a neo-nazi, forgery, and spreading nazi propaganda.. because they chose to make a historical document widely accessible?
    - powera 5y ago
      I'm saying that if the researcher is incapable of using any of the reputable ways of publishing research, we have to consider it possible there is a reason for that. Why do you think the historical document is legitimate, other than this LiveJournal post?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I was motivated to think of these use cases of sharing research when I found out a project to scan, transcribe and translate thousands of hand written journals was done by sending memory cards back and forth. I thought maybe Fossil scm would be a good option with file blob and wiki support, but the learning curve isn’t there, people take the path of least resistance. I think a lot of research groups are still in list-servs, and I haven’t seen any social networks catering to advancing cross disciplinary research. Maybe something could be built on top of LibGen ?
- koheripbal 5y ago
  He found a new unpublished order from Goebbels, and thought he'd share it with other historians. That seems pretty reasonable.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  Such as?
unnamed76ri 5y ago
Almost as if Facebook has an allergic reaction when things outside of a narrow worldview get posted.
geofft 5y ago
This is so bizarre. The guy is posting literal Nazi propaganda - as in literally a document written by Goebbels, finds it removed from Facebook for violating community standards, and concludes that the reason must be that Facebook is sympathetic to Goebbels' worldview? Is this a good-faith accusation?
- tyingq 5y ago
  It read like hyperbole meant to emphasize the need for Facebook to publish a credible reason when they remove material. That is, not giving a reason invites speculation.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  I believe it was a tongue-in-cheek accusation. But the line of thinking was that this piece of text should be considered so embarrassing to Goebbels due to its obvious wrong headedness, that somebody sympathetic to him or the Nazi movement might want to hide it to avoid the embarrassment.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    I’ve had people get pissed at me for trying to explain a political issue. “Just tell me what is correct and how to vote!!” Zero interest in comprehension. These people would do very well in any sort of cult.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    That was my reading, although I'm not as unsympathetic to Facebook's moderators here as he is. He wrote that "I did not comment on any of Goebbels’ words, considering them to be so obviously preposterous that its sheer absurdity rendered any additional commentary redundant," and...really? If you are a moderator charged with flagging pro-Nazi commentary on Facebook, you have undoubtedly seen post after post after post after post of "obviously preposterous" Nazi propaganda that people not only take at face value, but cheer for and put on signs and organize rallies around. When a moderator comes across this particular Nazi propaganda posted as-is with no commentary, it's nice to believe that they'll think "ah, perhaps I should stop now and deeply research this man, and consider that he is a Russian academic who has written papers on German-Soviet interactions and conflicts leading up to World War II, which I should now read the abstracts of in order to determine where his personal sympathies might lie." But they won't. Because that's not really their job.
Animats 5y ago
"Goebbels had thus demanded all German soldiers, having stayed in Paris for six months, be transferred to the Eastern Front to negate any “adverse” effects of billeting in the French capital." Corrupted by the enemy, always a problem with occupying forces. The American version of this is "Your Job in Germany".[1] This was made for US occupation troops in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra and written by Theodor Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), an unexpected collaboration that seems to work. The message: "You are in an enemy country. Take no chances. No fraternization with any of the German people." It's become harder to view this video. The YouTube version, uploaded directly by the US National Archives [2], is now "age restricted". Of the Internet Archive versions, only the Ogg Vorbis version is still playable. See it now, before the Thought Police delete all the copies as "hate speech". Understanding what went wrong after WWI is helpful in understanding what went wrong in Afghanistan. It's not directly comparable, but it's important to know that the US had, in the past, changed minds and societies by military force, successfully. [1] https://archive.org/download/YourJobInGermany1945/YourJobInGermany1945.ogv https://archive.org/download/YourJobInGermany1945/YourJobInG... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A
- mrbuttons454 5y ago
  I agree that this video is very important to archive and make available to view. I don't disagree with Youtube's decision on age restriction. I watched the video, and there are several scenes showing dead bodies. I think making that available, but age restricted, is a fair compromise.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thepangolino 5y ago
    YouTube age restricted videos are pretty much made impossible to view without revealing to YouTube your identity (they ask for a credit card transaction or a copy of your id) if you have a European account.
  - aaron695 5y ago
dilippkumar 5y ago
I've always wished to live in a world where high end science and humanities research happens on the open internet so that people outside academia (like myself) can participate as a member of an interested audience. With YouTube removing videos about CoVid from people who are actively working/researching the virus (because they disagree with the CDC and WHO guidelines), and FB removing historical artifacts by a Historian because such things must only happen behind paywalled journals that only large universities can afford, I worry that the internet is moving away from being a place where information is freely available. I still think that everyone should host their own blog and have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to and have independent editorial control. But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics and see how consensus slowly forms at the end of rigorous debate among experts.
- oliv__ 5y ago
  > But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics That disappeared a long time ago...
- tdeck 5y ago
  As someone without a Facebook account: Facebook was never the "open internet". If you want everyone to be able to see something you found, wrote, or created, don't just share it on Facebook.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ezoe 5y ago
  If you think about that old school ideal Internet, you also have to think about other ideal like everyone can start a server. It's not possible anymore. If you relies on VPS, it's no better than Facebook. Sure, as an individual, you can afford a server hardware, but not the network. ISP is as same as Facebook. Also, it's so cheap to DoS the server single person can afford. If you relies on CDN, that's another Facebook.
koheripbal 5y ago
He shared a newly discovered unpublished document written by Goebbels with other historians. He did not make a comment in his post, because he felt the document itself was comical enough to be funny. This was in no way propaganda since the order was about German soldiers contracting VD in Parisian brothels. Facebook banned it/him. He makes his own point pretty concretely... > It must be stressed that any objective investigation of history and research of the past becomes simply impossible if quotations from primary sources are grounds for punishment. Any curtailing of documentary evidence leads not to peace in the community but to the preordained failure to learn from history. It eventually allows the tragedies of the past to be repeated anew.
alephnil 5y ago
The problem is most likely that the moderators do pattern matching for certain key phrases rather than trying to understand its intention. Automatic tools can really only do this. This is very common in moderation and censorship. It's a problem, because you get false positives like this, and some topics becomes impossible to discuss, even for people that discuss them in a neutral manner. It also makes it very easy for people with actual Nazi sympathies and other extremist views to hide from censorship by not mention the wrong key phrases that matches the patterns.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Why must we force mainstream dumbed down platforms to open up. Moving the discussion to somewhere open will bring people over and create new safe areas where this content can be discussed.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  In all likelihood, the business model where users can get a free service for trading their data to advertisers cannot sustain a reasonably qualified human moderation service. So bots it is, but bots cannot really understand human culture and behave like mindless sledgehammers. If FB et al. are one day required to provide human moderation, they will go bankrupt. Or they will be forced to charge users money to cover the costs.
bob229 5y ago
How foolish we have been to privatise our public square
User23 5y ago
Doesn't this make Facebook a proud supporter of the Doomed-to-Repeat-it camp?
masswerk 5y ago
I guess, as sad as this may sound (and rightly so), it may be time for some kind of standardized robot-disclaimer, to be included in a message and declaring intend to bots, which must be honored by any content filters. – Clearly, message parsing and, depending on this, the reputation of authors, both informing that parsing and also resulting from this, have entered the posthuman age.
hrbf 5y ago
Let me just ask the obvious question here: why publish this on Facebook at all? I genuinely want to understand why people keep using it as a primary publishing source.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  He was a historian sharing a document he discovered with other historians. Are scientists and researchers not allowed to use Facebook to share information? Is Facebook allergic to data or facts?
  - hrbf 5y ago
    Might I suggest using a personal/professional website that you control. You could even pay someone to set this up for you. But nobody uses those any more. Could it be that that’s the real issue: voluntarily handing over control of your contacts, data and reputation to an entity like Facebook – at no cost to the user – by default and then complaining about not being in control?
    - koheripbal 5y ago
      It doesn't seem likely that a person can have social interaction with others if everyone sets up their own website. ...at least not until some distributed social network becomes standard.

117 points by georgecmu 5y ago

You'd think scholars interested in doing serious research on original source documents would have better ways of publishing than relying on Facebook.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Hopefully this drives uptake of those better ways. And if better ways don’t exist, this is a call for improvements (integrating with Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, SciHub, mailing lists/rss, etc).
- derbOac 5y ago
  Honestly I'm getting tired of this sort of moderation on social networks. It has nothing to do with scholarly channels, or Nazi this and that for me; I just don't sympathize with censorship I guess and there's always going to be some false positives and negatives when you start going down that path. It just feels like a waste of everyone's time to me. Having said that, I think you're right about hoping it leads to better avenues, as I think there's a real need for it.
  - Finnucane 5y ago
    Yeah, because networks without moderation have gone over pretty well. Srsly, FB is not the solution for everything.
dogleash 5y ago
Even the large media organizations are contorting their output for attention on social media; what chances do the independent professionals have to bring attention to their work while ignoring those platforms?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I can understand why large media organizations are but why do independent professional want to attract the joe six pack of the world opinion which makes up the bulk of facebook traffic?
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    They don't. Historians follow other historians on twitter and facebook. It is professional networking. Joe Six Pack doesn't care about the stuff my wife is posting on twitter, but the editor at some press who would be reviewing her book might.
powera 5y ago
There are many better ways of doing research. The obvious speculation is that this person did not use any of those better ways because the document is a forgery. If it is a forgery, the author would be promoting neo-Nazi propaganda.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Just to be clear, you're accusing a researcher of being a neo-nazi, forgery, and spreading nazi propaganda.. because they chose to make a historical document widely accessible?
  - powera 5y ago
    I'm saying that if the researcher is incapable of using any of the reputable ways of publishing research, we have to consider it possible there is a reason for that. Why do you think the historical document is legitimate, other than this LiveJournal post?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I was motivated to think of these use cases of sharing research when I found out a project to scan, transcribe and translate thousands of hand written journals was done by sending memory cards back and forth. I thought maybe Fossil scm would be a good option with file blob and wiki support, but the learning curve isn’t there, people take the path of least resistance. I think a lot of research groups are still in list-servs, and I haven’t seen any social networks catering to advancing cross disciplinary research. Maybe something could be built on top of LibGen ?
koheripbal 5y ago
He found a new unpublished order from Goebbels, and thought he'd share it with other historians. That seems pretty reasonable.
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
Such as?

unnamed76ri 5y ago

Almost as if Facebook has an allergic reaction when things outside of a narrow worldview get posted.

geofft 5y ago

This is so bizarre. The guy is posting literal Nazi propaganda - as in literally a document written by Goebbels, finds it removed from Facebook for violating community standards, and concludes that the reason must be that Facebook is sympathetic to Goebbels' worldview? Is this a good-faith accusation?

tyingq 5y ago
It read like hyperbole meant to emphasize the need for Facebook to publish a credible reason when they remove material. That is, not giving a reason invites speculation.
technothrasher 5y ago
I believe it was a tongue-in-cheek accusation. But the line of thinking was that this piece of text should be considered so embarrassing to Goebbels due to its obvious wrong headedness, that somebody sympathetic to him or the Nazi movement might want to hide it to avoid the embarrassment.
- treeman79 5y ago
  I’ve had people get pissed at me for trying to explain a political issue. “Just tell me what is correct and how to vote!!” Zero interest in comprehension. These people would do very well in any sort of cult.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  That was my reading, although I'm not as unsympathetic to Facebook's moderators here as he is. He wrote that "I did not comment on any of Goebbels’ words, considering them to be so obviously preposterous that its sheer absurdity rendered any additional commentary redundant," and...really? If you are a moderator charged with flagging pro-Nazi commentary on Facebook, you have undoubtedly seen post after post after post after post of "obviously preposterous" Nazi propaganda that people not only take at face value, but cheer for and put on signs and organize rallies around. When a moderator comes across this particular Nazi propaganda posted as-is with no commentary, it's nice to believe that they'll think "ah, perhaps I should stop now and deeply research this man, and consider that he is a Russian academic who has written papers on German-Soviet interactions and conflicts leading up to World War II, which I should now read the abstracts of in order to determine where his personal sympathies might lie." But they won't. Because that's not really their job.

Animats 5y ago

"Goebbels had thus demanded all German soldiers, having stayed in Paris for six months, be transferred to the Eastern Front to negate any “adverse” effects of billeting in the French capital." Corrupted by the enemy, always a problem with occupying forces. The American version of this is "Your Job in Germany".[1] This was made for US occupation troops in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra and written by Theodor Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), an unexpected collaboration that seems to work. The message: "You are in an enemy country. Take no chances. No fraternization with any of the German people." It's become harder to view this video. The YouTube version, uploaded directly by the US National Archives [2], is now "age restricted". Of the Internet Archive versions, only the Ogg Vorbis version is still playable. See it now, before the Thought Police delete all the copies as "hate speech". Understanding what went wrong after WWI is helpful in understanding what went wrong in Afghanistan. It's not directly comparable, but it's important to know that the US had, in the past, changed minds and societies by military force, successfully. [1] https://archive.org/download/YourJobInGermany1945/YourJobInGermany1945.ogv https://archive.org/download/YourJobInGermany1945/YourJobInG... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A

mrbuttons454 5y ago
I agree that this video is very important to archive and make available to view. I don't disagree with Youtube's decision on age restriction. I watched the video, and there are several scenes showing dead bodies. I think making that available, but age restricted, is a fair compromise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thepangolino 5y ago
  YouTube age restricted videos are pretty much made impossible to view without revealing to YouTube your identity (they ask for a credit card transaction or a copy of your id) if you have a European account.
- aaron695 5y ago

dilippkumar 5y ago

I've always wished to live in a world where high end science and humanities research happens on the open internet so that people outside academia (like myself) can participate as a member of an interested audience. With YouTube removing videos about CoVid from people who are actively working/researching the virus (because they disagree with the CDC and WHO guidelines), and FB removing historical artifacts by a Historian because such things must only happen behind paywalled journals that only large universities can afford, I worry that the internet is moving away from being a place where information is freely available. I still think that everyone should host their own blog and have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to and have independent editorial control. But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics and see how consensus slowly forms at the end of rigorous debate among experts.

oliv__ 5y ago
> But I also want to see YouTube and Facebook succeed as internet companies by enabling regular people like me listen to experts disagree about controversial topics That disappeared a long time ago...
tdeck 5y ago
As someone without a Facebook account: Facebook was never the "open internet". If you want everyone to be able to see something you found, wrote, or created, don't just share it on Facebook.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ezoe 5y ago
If you think about that old school ideal Internet, you also have to think about other ideal like everyone can start a server. It's not possible anymore. If you relies on VPS, it's no better than Facebook. Sure, as an individual, you can afford a server hardware, but not the network. ISP is as same as Facebook. Also, it's so cheap to DoS the server single person can afford. If you relies on CDN, that's another Facebook.

koheripbal 5y ago

He shared a newly discovered unpublished document written by Goebbels with other historians. He did not make a comment in his post, because he felt the document itself was comical enough to be funny. This was in no way propaganda since the order was about German soldiers contracting VD in Parisian brothels. Facebook banned it/him. He makes his own point pretty concretely... > It must be stressed that any objective investigation of history and research of the past becomes simply impossible if quotations from primary sources are grounds for punishment. Any curtailing of documentary evidence leads not to peace in the community but to the preordained failure to learn from history. It eventually allows the tragedies of the past to be repeated anew.

alephnil 5y ago

The problem is most likely that the moderators do pattern matching for certain key phrases rather than trying to understand its intention. Automatic tools can really only do this. This is very common in moderation and censorship. It's a problem, because you get false positives like this, and some topics becomes impossible to discuss, even for people that discuss them in a neutral manner. It also makes it very easy for people with actual Nazi sympathies and other extremist views to hide from censorship by not mention the wrong key phrases that matches the patterns.

ipaddr 5y ago
Why must we force mainstream dumbed down platforms to open up. Moving the discussion to somewhere open will bring people over and create new safe areas where this content can be discussed.
inglor_cz 5y ago
In all likelihood, the business model where users can get a free service for trading their data to advertisers cannot sustain a reasonably qualified human moderation service. So bots it is, but bots cannot really understand human culture and behave like mindless sledgehammers. If FB et al. are one day required to provide human moderation, they will go bankrupt. Or they will be forced to charge users money to cover the costs.

bob229 5y ago

How foolish we have been to privatise our public square

User23 5y ago

Doesn't this make Facebook a proud supporter of the Doomed-to-Repeat-it camp?

masswerk 5y ago

I guess, as sad as this may sound (and rightly so), it may be time for some kind of standardized robot-disclaimer, to be included in a message and declaring intend to bots, which must be honored by any content filters. – Clearly, message parsing and, depending on this, the reputation of authors, both informing that parsing and also resulting from this, have entered the posthuman age.

hrbf 5y ago

Let me just ask the obvious question here: why publish this on Facebook at all? I genuinely want to understand why people keep using it as a primary publishing source.

koheripbal 5y ago
He was a historian sharing a document he discovered with other historians. Are scientists and researchers not allowed to use Facebook to share information? Is Facebook allergic to data or facts?
- hrbf 5y ago
  Might I suggest using a personal/professional website that you control. You could even pay someone to set this up for you. But nobody uses those any more. Could it be that that’s the real issue: voluntarily handing over control of your contacts, data and reputation to an entity like Facebook – at no cost to the user – by default and then complaining about not being in control?
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    It doesn't seem likely that a person can have social interaction with others if everyone sets up their own website. ...at least not until some distributed social network becomes standard.