4 ms·

Facebook to allow calls for violence against Putin

7 points by basisword 5y ago

nonrandomstring 5y ago
Obviously the problem here is not whether speech promoting violence is allowed or not. Good arguments could be made either way. The problem is that unelected college dropouts get to decide. This time they may deign to allow the unwashed masses a voice. Next time maybe not.
- Ambolia 5y ago
  I think the most blatant the censorship and editorialization get, the better for everybody. It is a shame that at this point of the internet we are still depending on 3-4 companies through which most of the content that gets generated passes. The technology for content distribution in a distributed fashion has existed for decades, the only thing that is missing is a clever way to build network effects over that technology. We have a couple dozen available technologies to communicate with people without depending on those companies. But while most of them make it very easy to communicate 1-to-1, or 1-to-few, it is very difficult to grow those networks much bigger than that.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    If only we had some interconnection between those networks, a kind of "internet" of sorts :) I am being only a little facetious - probably the way to displace centralised social networks is not to wait for one alternative federated/distributed successor, but to evolve at the protocol level with a social network interface format (SNIFF?) Some kind of standard for serialising, transporting, filtering and requesting whole subgraphs of posts, threads, etc that can propagate in an NNTP fashion - that would go a good way towards solving the problem that we _want_ dissemination actors to remain small but many.
    - Ambolia 5y ago
      Nostr [1] seems interesting. I don't trust the idea of "relays" on the long term but it seems like it should be possible to develop alternative ways to distribute the content, and it can be a way to bootstrap the network in the short term. Though at this moment it seems a bit too bare-bones, and it would need some interesting application built on top of it to make it usable. [1] https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr
- vixen99 5y ago
  You forgot to include a failed British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    > You forgot to include a failed British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions. Did you mean to say "You forgot to include a British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions."
detaro 5y ago
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632695
spupe 5y ago
This is absolutely bonkers. We urgently have to regulate these companies. They cannot act as curators just when they decide to.
- Ambolia 5y ago
  They are already "regulated" in a covert way. If Facebook decided tomorrow to promote pro-Putin content and hide pro-Ukraine content, Zuckerberg would end up in front of congress in less than a week, and the antitrust laws would obliterate Facebook soon after if he didn't course correct. There's a lot of coupling between the government and big corporations, much more than what is stated explicitly, at this point Google could as well be called the "Ministry of Espionage", it's just more convenient to pretend they are a private company so that they aren't under democratic scrutiny.
- christophilus 5y ago
  I want to agree, but I have low expectations for a good outcome. The regulators would be the same folks in Washington who are running the nation’s propaganda machines. At present, they all seem 100% aligned behind overseeing Putin’s downfall. My guess is they’d approve of this FB policy.

7 points by basisword 5y ago

Obviously the problem here is not whether speech promoting violence is allowed or not. Good arguments could be made either way. The problem is that unelected college dropouts get to decide. This time they may deign to allow the unwashed masses a voice. Next time maybe not.

Ambolia 5y ago
I think the most blatant the censorship and editorialization get, the better for everybody. It is a shame that at this point of the internet we are still depending on 3-4 companies through which most of the content that gets generated passes. The technology for content distribution in a distributed fashion has existed for decades, the only thing that is missing is a clever way to build network effects over that technology. We have a couple dozen available technologies to communicate with people without depending on those companies. But while most of them make it very easy to communicate 1-to-1, or 1-to-few, it is very difficult to grow those networks much bigger than that.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  If only we had some interconnection between those networks, a kind of "internet" of sorts :) I am being only a little facetious - probably the way to displace centralised social networks is not to wait for one alternative federated/distributed successor, but to evolve at the protocol level with a social network interface format (SNIFF?) Some kind of standard for serialising, transporting, filtering and requesting whole subgraphs of posts, threads, etc that can propagate in an NNTP fashion - that would go a good way towards solving the problem that we _want_ dissemination actors to remain small but many.
  - Ambolia 5y ago
    Nostr [1] seems interesting. I don't trust the idea of "relays" on the long term but it seems like it should be possible to develop alternative ways to distribute the content, and it can be a way to bootstrap the network in the short term. Though at this moment it seems a bit too bare-bones, and it would need some interesting application built on top of it to make it usable. [1] https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr
vixen99 5y ago
You forgot to include a failed British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > You forgot to include a failed British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions. Did you mean to say "You forgot to include a British politician as the arbiter-in-chief of those decisions."

detaro 5y ago

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632695

spupe 5y ago

This is absolutely bonkers. We urgently have to regulate these companies. They cannot act as curators just when they decide to.

Ambolia 5y ago
They are already "regulated" in a covert way. If Facebook decided tomorrow to promote pro-Putin content and hide pro-Ukraine content, Zuckerberg would end up in front of congress in less than a week, and the antitrust laws would obliterate Facebook soon after if he didn't course correct. There's a lot of coupling between the government and big corporations, much more than what is stated explicitly, at this point Google could as well be called the "Ministry of Espionage", it's just more convenient to pretend they are a private company so that they aren't under democratic scrutiny.
christophilus 5y ago
I want to agree, but I have low expectations for a good outcome. The regulators would be the same folks in Washington who are running the nation’s propaganda machines. At present, they all seem 100% aligned behind overseeing Putin’s downfall. My guess is they’d approve of this FB policy.