30 ms·

Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy

167 points by lxm 5y ago

throwaway4good 5y ago
[flagged]
- thumbellina 5y ago
  The question is, if media centralization continues, what evidence/perspectives could have been removed from the public sphere, and what impact could that have on impartiality? Tech has the potential to decentralize power. Alas...
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    My point was: This is not really censorship. They appear to censor, appease their advertisers, but actually they are amplifying. That is in their (Facebook) economic interest. If you decentralize you will end up with a media for each particular group, and you will have less engagement as you are only discussing with people you agree with.
    - thumbellina 5y ago
      It's a clear case of censorship. In censorsing they might have amplified the story, but this amplification only occurred after the matter/case was decided. That is too late. > If you decentralize you will end up with a media for each particular group, and you will have less engagement as you are only discussing with people you agree with. This already happens with centralization, as the OP raised. Multiple groups at least offers the choice.
      - throwaway4good 5y ago
        I actually think FB knows what they are doing. Their censorship provokes and manipulates people to engage more with their platform.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  He is definitely a hero to the alt-right. It just goes to show you how much brain power they lack.
rayiner 5y ago
> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said. To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation. The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-rittenhouse-shooting-video-analysis.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.
- uncoder0 5y ago
  Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society and this is just further evidence of it all. If Facebook employed an even remotely accurate sample of the population based on political leanings and backgrounds for their content policy team this would have never happened. I think the amount of blame the left and media placed on Facebook for the 2016 election of President Trump are to majorly to blame for the whole situation.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    > Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society If you had left it at that, you’d have had a lot of agreement.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    So are tiktok, twitter, instagram, reddit, fox news, and a host of lesser knowns. Are you going to make social media/"news services" illegal?
- Benjammer 5y ago
idontwantthis 5y ago
I praise all censorship and all inconsistency by Facebook. Poison discourse to the point that it stops happening. Facebook is a platform for manipulation not for communication.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  That would make sense if people weren’t easily fooled by Facebook.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Fail-fast attitude can be attractive until you realize that the failing is not happening in the way you imagined. What if Facebook censors very inconsistently, AND people end up being indifferent toward it? Then Facebook will be a successful platform for manipulation, the polar opposite of what the fail-fast fantasy would project.
qqtt 5y ago
Definitely gives me pause to hear things like Facebook disallowing support of an individual embroiled in a hostile media environment and dubious criminal charges. Where would figures like Amanda Knox be if a similar wave of thought-crime style censorship were deployed at scale? Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  To me, we're going through a monopoly age like the industrial revolution but for tech. So during the late 1800's, people just dealt with railroad and oil monopolies because they had to. It's not going to stop until someone gets in office that actually follows through with breaking them up, regardless of them being monopolies. If anything, it doesn't feel like we have constitutional rights anymore when a corporation can just deny them when they literally are main means of voicing an opinion. It's like a company having the knowledge of building sidewalks, everybody uses them because they're so useful, but you can't practice your right as a citizen on them because the company owns it. 6 of 1 half dozen of the other it's no different than the CCP telling you whats what except here we just have corporate overlords that do it instead. What good is having a bill of rights if I have to be rich enough to actually enforce it? An inalienable right is something you shouldn't have to go to court over, yet here we are...
- esyir 5y ago
  I think the big question that we have to ask ourselves is, in the contest between the right of speech of the individual and that of private corporations; Where, if ever, do we draw the line when the latter erodes that of the former.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Meta will have a new young owner before this is done.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  No one is safe in meta: https://youtu.be/-XWedbTIcV4 https://youtu.be/-XWedbTIcV4
MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
I hadn’t heard of this policy. It makes sense to me how people were so uninformed about what happened that night if Facebook was banning videos supporting Kyle and most of the media wasn’t being impartial. Anyone who spent time watching the videos wouldn’t be surprised by the verdict.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Considering Kyle killed people, at a very contentious and politically sensitive time, its understandable that the story was banned. I've heard some very bad hot takes that basically amount to "he should have killed those people". Advocating for killing people is way less controversial than whatever "nuance" people want to assign to the case regarding legal standing of guns and various self defense laws. Its not crazy to imagine someone thinking to just ban that whole discourse from a platform, even if takes some "genuine" and not-murderous conversations with it - simply to avoid people advocating death.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Individual right don't disappear because some groups have created a very contentious and politically sensitive time.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    The story wasn't banned. His name was banned from searches, as one does for mass murderers. And statements of support for Rittenhouse were banned, as one does for mass murderers - but anything you wanted to say about "the events in Kenosha" which was against Rittenhouse were allowed.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Mass murderers aren’t banned in search, and he is not a mass murderer, being attacked by several people and defending himself does not make him a murderer.
      - 5y ago
ctdonath 5y ago
The whole self-appointed "fact checker empowered to cancel" movement has to stop. Far too much fair disagreement, and objective truths, have been maliciously "cancelled" for not adhering to a given narrative on public forums. I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.
- thumbellina 5y ago
  Fact checking, or more importantly which claims get fact checked, is a signal for political leanings, if nothing else.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content. No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “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.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    You omit the qualifications for that exemption, which speak heavily toward good faith and minimal impact, which FB/T/etc are going way beyond and will likely have to defend in court with difficulty.
koolba 5y ago
Between Facebook banning any support, President Biden labeling him a white supremacist, and the Democrat head of the judiciary committee Rep. Jerry Nadler suggesting a unanimous jury verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” which needs to be investigated, Rittenhouse is going to a busy man.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  These past couple years have made me realize the US "democracy" is a complete joke.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Most likely not. As was pointed out by a lot of lawyers who followed the case (that I watched on YouTube), defamation lawsuits after a criminal prosecution are very hard to pursue. Also public officials enjoy anti-diffamation protections generally, especially the president and member of congress and members of the senate.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    At the very least, Biden was not an elected official when he made his first remark, merely running for office I think. Several highly public figures have also made comments after the trial, continuing to call him a murderer (and white supremacist) even though he was found not guilty. I am fairly certain that he isn't considered a public figure, aside from the trial itself, so the bar for libel and slander is much lower than if he were a celebrity. Nick Sandmann got absolutely massive settlements; I am curious as to the extent that the situations are similar or different.
    - TeeMassive 5y ago
      Fair point about Biden not being a president at the time. Although good luck having a judge willing to be the one putting a president on trial. Also, being accused of a criminal offense and making the news is pretty much the definition of being a public figure. > Nick Sandmann got absolutely massive settlements Nick Sandmann had no public presence before.
thumbellina 5y ago
I fully accept that FB is free to run itself how it pleases. That said, it's clear they are not in a position to act as a neutral platform for civic discourse. I try to support technologies and platforms that provide a voice to all. Decentralized over centralized. I try to curate my own list of sources, rather than rely on third-party curation. How else can I ensure a healthy and diverse information perspective?
- chii 5y ago
  The problem isn't you, but others who do not try to curate their own diverse sources. When time comes to make democratic decisions, if those who are influenced outnumbered people like you, there'd be no way for you to make your case and convince the others of your correctness.
  - esyir 5y ago
    Is it really a healthy democracy if the flows of information are controlled from the top down? If I provide you with a tuned set of information in which everything says what I cant, I can get you to believe whatever I want. This is just changing the source of said influence, not removing it.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Has it ever been different?
    - chii 5y ago
      > controlled from the top down? but the facebook/social media isn't "controlled from the top down" - it's people deliberately choosing to _only_ consume them (thus giving those media companies defacto control over people's tuned set of information sources). I'm saying that most people don't care enough to look for separate sources and do their own critical thinking.
      - esyir 5y ago
        I'm not sure if we're talking past each other here. Going to clarify my opinion on this a bit. - Facebook is generally considered in colloquial terms, a "platform". - Expectations by the users are thus that Facebook (the entity) does not dictate opinion, but instead provides an avenue for hosting and discovery of individual opinion. - Thus, to the userbase, Facebook is not a Single source, but is instead a aggregation of multiple sources of "information" (or opinion; Scare quotes were intentional) - One-sided enforcement of opinions on topics breaks the above assumption, converting it from "platform", to "publisher". - This represents far more centralization of information control than the previous "platform" state. I think "centralization" captures my intention here more than the previous "top down" descriptor. One of the assumptions of a free democracy is that people, as individuals, are permitted to discover their own opinion from available information. It's imperfect, but it's pretty important. If we severely restrict the pool of available information to just the slice amenable to whoever is in power, that's in effect the same as forcing their opinion. After all, you can't form the opposing opinion on something if everything you can find supports it. Addendum: On the gotcha of "Facebook's right to free speech". I'm of the opinion that this must be taken in light of scale and the subsequent threats to the individual right to free speech. Here, I declare (unilaterally, agreement may vary) that the individual right to free speech should be held above that of the corporate right, especially when scale is considered. I very much consider the largest digital spaces the closest analogue to the modern public square (some would disagree here) due to their scale and ubiquity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Orgs like Facebook who use "Independent Fact Checkers" need to reveal their sources otherwise there's no reason to believe the "Independent Fact Checkers" aren't Facebook employees making arbitrary or even ideological rulings on what is true and what is false.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Don't think they are facebook employees but fact checking orgs are pretty much all political activists.
slibhb 5y ago
The funny thing about social media companies censoring is how they keep making the case for free speech over and over again without realizing it. Mill: > First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. The last point is the least obvious. Pro-Rittenhouse views were "held in the manner of a prejudice" by those who had them because they were censored. When those views aren't censored and there's a healthy back-and-forth, moderacy tends to prevail.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Facebook can choose to host whatever opinions they like as they own the platform. Obviously as long as those "opinions" are legal and not such things as terroristic threats, etc. That also is free speech and the right to with your property as you like.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    Everyone is well aware that the first amendment does not apply to Facebook. The question is whether Facebook should censor not whether they legally can. The passage I quoted from Mill is an argument for free speech in general, not only with respect to the government.
hasdf 5y ago
Gofundme did the same thing. They killed the gofundme for Kyle's legal defense and then after it didn't matter anymore they "reversed the decision". this article talks about a post the family of a recent school shooter made praising/defending him on facebook - so obviously facebook is applying this rule very selectively. I think it would help their credibility if they had examples of other times they apply these rules - but it seems more like they make up the rules on the spot and apply them based on their internal politics. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article254842662.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article25...
NoRelToEmber 5y ago
The BBC does not mention it, but Rittenhouse's ability to raise funds for a legal defense was also hindered on many levels, including blocks by Twitter, GoFundMe, and the Discover payment processor: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-rittenhouse-campaign/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-ri... Perhaps if their blocks were successful in preventing his legal defense, they could now claim to be justified by a guilty verdict..
- native_samples 5y ago
  Yes. The tech industry has made itself look exceptionally bad here. Facebook did something deeply unethical and now it's blown up in their faces. They will not admit that's what they did, but it was. They have directly contributed to the erosion of the principles of justice for no better reason than to appease radical employees.
anshumankmr 5y ago
Might be downvoted but there was a fact checker website that denied at the time President Trump’s claim that Kyle had acted in self defense. This was a year ago and I saw it for myself as still being up a few weeks ago. I am not an American and I really see both sides here. The jury system worked as per the law defined in the US (and I am not a pro 2A person ) but I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-trump/trump-paints-false-picture-kyle-rittenhouse-shooti/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru... It is still up.
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  It is still up as of now. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-trump/trump-paints-false-picture-kyle-rittenhouse-shooti/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  > I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one. If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police. If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).
stareblinkstare 5y ago
[flagged]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
HumanReadable 5y ago
I really don't think Facebook should be in charge of making speech moderation at this level of specificity. Social media platforms have become the public squares of the 21st century, and as such we need to treat the right for free speech on those platforms as important. That doesn't mean we can't change these platforms to favour desirable engagement. If our physical public square were very small, everyone might be reduced to yelling to hear each other. So we make our physical public squares large and open! Maybe if we put a tree in the middle, it will calm us down and help us engage with each other. But we will never appoint a public square moderator who arbitrarily decides what can and cannot be said. Neither should Facebook.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Something that blew my mind. https://www.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-says-andrew-yang-103954644.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-says-andrew-yang... Rittenhouse stayed out of the politics for the trial(very smart) and later he revealed that he was in the "Yang Gang" "I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but I was a pretty big Andrew Yang supporter before all this," He was far left and the left wing are who attacked him as white supremacist and all that. Just goes to show how the media is just completely full of shit.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  He also supports BLM.

167 points by lxm 5y ago

throwaway4good 5y ago

[flagged]

thumbellina 5y ago
The question is, if media centralization continues, what evidence/perspectives could have been removed from the public sphere, and what impact could that have on impartiality? Tech has the potential to decentralize power. Alas...
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  My point was: This is not really censorship. They appear to censor, appease their advertisers, but actually they are amplifying. That is in their (Facebook) economic interest. If you decentralize you will end up with a media for each particular group, and you will have less engagement as you are only discussing with people you agree with.
  - thumbellina 5y ago
    It's a clear case of censorship. In censorsing they might have amplified the story, but this amplification only occurred after the matter/case was decided. That is too late. > If you decentralize you will end up with a media for each particular group, and you will have less engagement as you are only discussing with people you agree with. This already happens with centralization, as the OP raised. Multiple groups at least offers the choice.
    - throwaway4good 5y ago
      I actually think FB knows what they are doing. Their censorship provokes and manipulates people to engage more with their platform.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
He is definitely a hero to the alt-right. It just goes to show you how much brain power they lack.

rayiner 5y ago

> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said. To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation. The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-rittenhouse-shooting-video-analysis.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.

uncoder0 5y ago
Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society and this is just further evidence of it all. If Facebook employed an even remotely accurate sample of the population based on political leanings and backgrounds for their content policy team this would have never happened. I think the amount of blame the left and media placed on Facebook for the 2016 election of President Trump are to majorly to blame for the whole situation.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society If you had left it at that, you’d have had a lot of agreement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  So are tiktok, twitter, instagram, reddit, fox news, and a host of lesser knowns. Are you going to make social media/"news services" illegal?
Benjammer 5y ago

idontwantthis 5y ago

I praise all censorship and all inconsistency by Facebook. Poison discourse to the point that it stops happening. Facebook is a platform for manipulation not for communication.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
That would make sense if people weren’t easily fooled by Facebook.
npteljes 5y ago
Fail-fast attitude can be attractive until you realize that the failing is not happening in the way you imagined. What if Facebook censors very inconsistently, AND people end up being indifferent toward it? Then Facebook will be a successful platform for manipulation, the polar opposite of what the fail-fast fantasy would project.

qqtt 5y ago

Definitely gives me pause to hear things like Facebook disallowing support of an individual embroiled in a hostile media environment and dubious criminal charges. Where would figures like Amanda Knox be if a similar wave of thought-crime style censorship were deployed at scale? Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
To me, we're going through a monopoly age like the industrial revolution but for tech. So during the late 1800's, people just dealt with railroad and oil monopolies because they had to. It's not going to stop until someone gets in office that actually follows through with breaking them up, regardless of them being monopolies. If anything, it doesn't feel like we have constitutional rights anymore when a corporation can just deny them when they literally are main means of voicing an opinion. It's like a company having the knowledge of building sidewalks, everybody uses them because they're so useful, but you can't practice your right as a citizen on them because the company owns it. 6 of 1 half dozen of the other it's no different than the CCP telling you whats what except here we just have corporate overlords that do it instead. What good is having a bill of rights if I have to be rich enough to actually enforce it? An inalienable right is something you shouldn't have to go to court over, yet here we are...
esyir 5y ago
I think the big question that we have to ask ourselves is, in the contest between the right of speech of the individual and that of private corporations; Where, if ever, do we draw the line when the latter erodes that of the former.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Meta will have a new young owner before this is done.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
No one is safe in meta: https://youtu.be/-XWedbTIcV4 https://youtu.be/-XWedbTIcV4

MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago

I hadn’t heard of this policy. It makes sense to me how people were so uninformed about what happened that night if Facebook was banning videos supporting Kyle and most of the media wasn’t being impartial. Anyone who spent time watching the videos wouldn’t be surprised by the verdict.

vineyardmike 5y ago
Considering Kyle killed people, at a very contentious and politically sensitive time, its understandable that the story was banned. I've heard some very bad hot takes that basically amount to "he should have killed those people". Advocating for killing people is way less controversial than whatever "nuance" people want to assign to the case regarding legal standing of guns and various self defense laws. Its not crazy to imagine someone thinking to just ban that whole discourse from a platform, even if takes some "genuine" and not-murderous conversations with it - simply to avoid people advocating death.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Individual right don't disappear because some groups have created a very contentious and politically sensitive time.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  The story wasn't banned. His name was banned from searches, as one does for mass murderers. And statements of support for Rittenhouse were banned, as one does for mass murderers - but anything you wanted to say about "the events in Kenosha" which was against Rittenhouse were allowed.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Mass murderers aren’t banned in search, and he is not a mass murderer, being attacked by several people and defending himself does not make him a murderer.
    - 5y ago

ctdonath 5y ago

The whole self-appointed "fact checker empowered to cancel" movement has to stop. Far too much fair disagreement, and objective truths, have been maliciously "cancelled" for not adhering to a given narrative on public forums. I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.

thumbellina 5y ago
Fact checking, or more importantly which claims get fact checked, is a signal for political leanings, if nothing else.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content. No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “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.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  You omit the qualifications for that exemption, which speak heavily toward good faith and minimal impact, which FB/T/etc are going way beyond and will likely have to defend in court with difficulty.

koolba 5y ago

Between Facebook banning any support, President Biden labeling him a white supremacist, and the Democrat head of the judiciary committee Rep. Jerry Nadler suggesting a unanimous jury verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” which needs to be investigated, Rittenhouse is going to a busy man.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
These past couple years have made me realize the US "democracy" is a complete joke.
TeeMassive 5y ago
Most likely not. As was pointed out by a lot of lawyers who followed the case (that I watched on YouTube), defamation lawsuits after a criminal prosecution are very hard to pursue. Also public officials enjoy anti-diffamation protections generally, especially the president and member of congress and members of the senate.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  At the very least, Biden was not an elected official when he made his first remark, merely running for office I think. Several highly public figures have also made comments after the trial, continuing to call him a murderer (and white supremacist) even though he was found not guilty. I am fairly certain that he isn't considered a public figure, aside from the trial itself, so the bar for libel and slander is much lower than if he were a celebrity. Nick Sandmann got absolutely massive settlements; I am curious as to the extent that the situations are similar or different.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    Fair point about Biden not being a president at the time. Although good luck having a judge willing to be the one putting a president on trial. Also, being accused of a criminal offense and making the news is pretty much the definition of being a public figure. > Nick Sandmann got absolutely massive settlements Nick Sandmann had no public presence before.

thumbellina 5y ago

I fully accept that FB is free to run itself how it pleases. That said, it's clear they are not in a position to act as a neutral platform for civic discourse. I try to support technologies and platforms that provide a voice to all. Decentralized over centralized. I try to curate my own list of sources, rather than rely on third-party curation. How else can I ensure a healthy and diverse information perspective?

chii 5y ago
The problem isn't you, but others who do not try to curate their own diverse sources. When time comes to make democratic decisions, if those who are influenced outnumbered people like you, there'd be no way for you to make your case and convince the others of your correctness.
- esyir 5y ago
  Is it really a healthy democracy if the flows of information are controlled from the top down? If I provide you with a tuned set of information in which everything says what I cant, I can get you to believe whatever I want. This is just changing the source of said influence, not removing it.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Has it ever been different?
  - chii 5y ago
    > controlled from the top down? but the facebook/social media isn't "controlled from the top down" - it's people deliberately choosing to _only_ consume them (thus giving those media companies defacto control over people's tuned set of information sources). I'm saying that most people don't care enough to look for separate sources and do their own critical thinking.
    - esyir 5y ago
      I'm not sure if we're talking past each other here. Going to clarify my opinion on this a bit. - Facebook is generally considered in colloquial terms, a "platform". - Expectations by the users are thus that Facebook (the entity) does not dictate opinion, but instead provides an avenue for hosting and discovery of individual opinion. - Thus, to the userbase, Facebook is not a Single source, but is instead a aggregation of multiple sources of "information" (or opinion; Scare quotes were intentional) - One-sided enforcement of opinions on topics breaks the above assumption, converting it from "platform", to "publisher". - This represents far more centralization of information control than the previous "platform" state. I think "centralization" captures my intention here more than the previous "top down" descriptor. One of the assumptions of a free democracy is that people, as individuals, are permitted to discover their own opinion from available information. It's imperfect, but it's pretty important. If we severely restrict the pool of available information to just the slice amenable to whoever is in power, that's in effect the same as forcing their opinion. After all, you can't form the opposing opinion on something if everything you can find supports it. Addendum: On the gotcha of "Facebook's right to free speech". I'm of the opinion that this must be taken in light of scale and the subsequent threats to the individual right to free speech. Here, I declare (unilaterally, agreement may vary) that the individual right to free speech should be held above that of the corporate right, especially when scale is considered. I very much consider the largest digital spaces the closest analogue to the modern public square (some would disagree here) due to their scale and ubiquity.

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Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Orgs like Facebook who use "Independent Fact Checkers" need to reveal their sources otherwise there's no reason to believe the "Independent Fact Checkers" aren't Facebook employees making arbitrary or even ideological rulings on what is true and what is false.

cm2187 5y ago
Don't think they are facebook employees but fact checking orgs are pretty much all political activists.

slibhb 5y ago

The funny thing about social media companies censoring is how they keep making the case for free speech over and over again without realizing it. Mill: > First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. The last point is the least obvious. Pro-Rittenhouse views were "held in the manner of a prejudice" by those who had them because they were censored. When those views aren't censored and there's a healthy back-and-forth, moderacy tends to prevail.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Facebook can choose to host whatever opinions they like as they own the platform. Obviously as long as those "opinions" are legal and not such things as terroristic threats, etc. That also is free speech and the right to with your property as you like.
- slibhb 5y ago
  Everyone is well aware that the first amendment does not apply to Facebook. The question is whether Facebook should censor not whether they legally can. The passage I quoted from Mill is an argument for free speech in general, not only with respect to the government.

hasdf 5y ago

Gofundme did the same thing. They killed the gofundme for Kyle's legal defense and then after it didn't matter anymore they "reversed the decision". this article talks about a post the family of a recent school shooter made praising/defending him on facebook - so obviously facebook is applying this rule very selectively. I think it would help their credibility if they had examples of other times they apply these rules - but it seems more like they make up the rules on the spot and apply them based on their internal politics. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article254842662.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article25...

NoRelToEmber 5y ago

The BBC does not mention it, but Rittenhouse's ability to raise funds for a legal defense was also hindered on many levels, including blocks by Twitter, GoFundMe, and the Discover payment processor: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-rittenhouse-campaign/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-ri... Perhaps if their blocks were successful in preventing his legal defense, they could now claim to be justified by a guilty verdict..

native_samples 5y ago
Yes. The tech industry has made itself look exceptionally bad here. Facebook did something deeply unethical and now it's blown up in their faces. They will not admit that's what they did, but it was. They have directly contributed to the erosion of the principles of justice for no better reason than to appease radical employees.

anshumankmr 5y ago

Might be downvoted but there was a fact checker website that denied at the time President Trump’s claim that Kyle had acted in self defense. This was a year ago and I saw it for myself as still being up a few weeks ago. I am not an American and I really see both sides here. The jury system worked as per the law defined in the US (and I am not a pro 2A person ) but I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-trump/trump-paints-false-picture-kyle-rittenhouse-shooti/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru... It is still up.

anshumankmr 5y ago
It is still up as of now. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-trump/trump-paints-false-picture-kyle-rittenhouse-shooti/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru...
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hagbard_c 5y ago
> I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one. If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police. If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).

stareblinkstare 5y ago

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HumanReadable 5y ago

I really don't think Facebook should be in charge of making speech moderation at this level of specificity. Social media platforms have become the public squares of the 21st century, and as such we need to treat the right for free speech on those platforms as important. That doesn't mean we can't change these platforms to favour desirable engagement. If our physical public square were very small, everyone might be reduced to yelling to hear each other. So we make our physical public squares large and open! Maybe if we put a tree in the middle, it will calm us down and help us engage with each other. But we will never appoint a public square moderator who arbitrarily decides what can and cannot be said. Neither should Facebook.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Something that blew my mind. https://www.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-says-andrew-yang-103954644.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-says-andrew-yang... Rittenhouse stayed out of the politics for the trial(very smart) and later he revealed that he was in the "Yang Gang" "I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but I was a pretty big Andrew Yang supporter before all this," He was far left and the left wing are who attacked him as white supremacist and all that. Just goes to show how the media is just completely full of shit.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
He also supports BLM.