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"Wouldn't that same reasoning also apply to moderation, i.e. if you think Facebook's moderation is bad, you should just not go there?" Sure, and I don't! But t

"Wouldn't that same reasoning also apply to moderation, i.e. if you think Facebook's moderation is bad, you should just not go there?" Sure, and I don't! But this thread isn't about my problems or even your problems, it's about Facebook's problems. "How are they controlling people if you acknowledge that going there is voluntary?" People go there because they think they are seeing content shared by their friends, by people they follow and so on. In fact they are seeing a heavily filtered version of that designed to manipulate their own opinions. That's the whole point of the filtering: with the exception of where they label articles as 'fact checked', content that is politically unacceptable to them just vanishes and people aren't told it happens, so they can remain unaware of it. Like any system of censorship, right? "all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't" No, they have to decide that for a very narrow range of issues they've chosen to explicitly specialize in, and organizations frequently disagree with each other about what is or is not true despite that. That's the entire point of competition and why competitive economies work better than centrally planned economies: often it's just not clear what is or isn't true, and "trueness" may well be different depending on who is asking, so different firms just have to duke it out in the market. Sometimes an agreement emerges and competitors start copying the leader, sometimes it never does. Facebook has a disastrously collapsing system here because they are not only trying to decide what's true in the narrow space of social network design, but trying to decide what's true for any possible statement. This is as nonsensical as GOSPLAN was; it can never work. Heck they aren't even a respected authority on the question of what's true in social networking anymore, that's why they had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. Their competitors beat them. To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale.

lavabiopsy 5y ago
I don't understand what you mean, that's not censorship. To use an analogy, when you tell everyone you don't like Star Wars, your friends will likely decide to only talk to you about Westworld and not talk to you about what happens in The Mandalorian. Censorship would be if someone was actively trying to stop everyone from talking about Star Wars, which is not what is happening. I would advise against using that word without clear proof of it, as it's misused quite often. Also I don't understand why you were previously encouraging spam filtering but now seem to be against any kind of filtering? >trying to decide what's true for any possible statement Any possible statement that happens on their platform, yes. That's generally how it works when you have a company and I don't see how Facebook is doing anything out of the ordinary here -- any company can fire employees/customers for lying. If they know there are lies being posted on their site, it's perfectly reasonable to delete them. In fact I wish they would take more effort to delete more lies and falsehoods, the website is unusable when everybody is caught up in discussing a lie and doesn't want to hear the truth. >To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale. I really can't agree. In general, we know what's true for politics: it's what the elections and the courts decide, at least in the US anyway. By design those are the authoritative sources. There is no authoritative source for science but with that you can verify the accuracy of any statement by testing it yourself and reproducing (or not reproducing) the results, that's the whole point. I don't see why it would be arrogant of a company to do this, as it's what a company is supposed to be doing in order for the system to work.

lavabiopsy 5y ago

I don't understand what you mean, that's not censorship. To use an analogy, when you tell everyone you don't like Star Wars, your friends will likely decide to only talk to you about Westworld and not talk to you about what happens in The Mandalorian. Censorship would be if someone was actively trying to stop everyone from talking about Star Wars, which is not what is happening. I would advise against using that word without clear proof of it, as it's misused quite often. Also I don't understand why you were previously encouraging spam filtering but now seem to be against any kind of filtering? >trying to decide what's true for any possible statement Any possible statement that happens on their platform, yes. That's generally how it works when you have a company and I don't see how Facebook is doing anything out of the ordinary here -- any company can fire employees/customers for lying. If they know there are lies being posted on their site, it's perfectly reasonable to delete them. In fact I wish they would take more effort to delete more lies and falsehoods, the website is unusable when everybody is caught up in discussing a lie and doesn't want to hear the truth. >To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale. I really can't agree. In general, we know what's true for politics: it's what the elections and the courts decide, at least in the US anyway. By design those are the authoritative sources. There is no authoritative source for science but with that you can verify the accuracy of any statement by testing it yourself and reproducing (or not reproducing) the results, that's the whole point. I don't see why it would be arrogant of a company to do this, as it's what a company is supposed to be doing in order for the system to work.