7 ms·

Why Facebook Failed Our Censorship Test

247 points by panarky 11y ago

xahrepap 11y ago
Even if they DID report on half this stuff, I would still suspect that there's more happening than they can disclose. At least Facebook has the decency to make it painfully obvious that they're not disclosing things that are happening. EDIT: To be clear. I do think Facebook should be disclosing things. I was making a sarcastic comment about how it's nearly impossible to trust what companies are publishing anyway because of the nasty gag orders and secret courts.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Yeah, I'd say that there is a 100% chance that Facebook, Twitter, reddit, et al have been targeted with National Security Letters which demand insane things while gagging any outcry or mention of the gag. Most of the proles aren't too aware that their feed is heavily manipulated away from certain topics...
danbruc 11y ago
What is the reasoning behind this prisoner takedown? [...] after an inmate in New Mexico was sentenced to 90 days in solitary confinement because his family posted updates and photos to his Facebook account on his behalf. [1] What? Why? What business does the state have in that? And the state messing with your private property in this way without a court order seems plain illegal to me. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmate-account-takedown-process https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmat...
- malandrew 11y ago
  Yeah, that one shocked me too. I can only imagine that social networking could be used to reduce recidivism rates at the end of someone's sentence by giving them a way to connect with people on the outside (friends, family, etc.) that will be their support network as they reintegrate into society. I can understand a parole officer or prison official wanting access to something like messages and friends lists to make sure that they are reconnecting with unsavory characters, but that's about it. Banning Facebook pages outright for inmates seems excessive and counter-productive.
- thebeefytaco 11y ago
  It's messed up, but my guess is simply that they're trying to limit prisoner communication with the outside world and they don't want the general public to see how they're run.
  - themeek 11y ago
    Yup. Let's dive into this a bit. The thing is that when you invoke 'they' you don't mean Facebook. Facebook as a corporation doesn't care about the general public seeing how prisons are run. The government - and where it shares coffers with private prison moguls - cares. The government and the private prison industry are able to project their goals through Facebook.
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
  Reminds me of what they did with Weev. http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/13/hacker-andrew-auernheimer-placed-in-solitary-confinement-for-tweeting-from-prison/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/13/hacker-andrew-auernheimer-p... Comment Signature: http://pastie.org/private/niydodwbuj4ouxutk47fza http://pastie.org/private/niydodwbuj4ouxutk47fza
- glass- 11y ago
  If you follow the link to the article[0], it quotes the rule this was done under: Offenders in the custody or supervision of the Department are not permitted access to the Internet, nor are they permitted to obtain access to the Internet through third parties. It also notes the sentence in this instance was overturned once the EFF and ACLU got involved. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-faces-90-days-solitary-over-facebook-profile https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-face...
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Unfortunately this is pretty small potatoes; the prison-industrial complex basically does what it wants. For clearly illegal conduct, if protests continue long and loud enough (e.g. Ferguson, Baltimore) then policies might be changed or murderers might be charged. For something like this, which is unethical but not obviously against a law, we rely on the ethics of those who manage the different parts of the system. Since very few of them possess any ethical sense whatsoever, correcting this injustice would require years of lobbying, lawmaking, and oversight, rather than a simple request to stop extrajudicial punishments.
  - briandear 11y ago
    Prisoners can only communicate with the outside world through monitored communications to protect the victims of their crimes as well as prevent prisoners from ordering criminal activity from behind bars. When you are a prisoner, you lose the right to private communications. It's prison, not summer camp. What 'right' does a prisoner have to Facebook? None. You might want to learn about why policies are the way they are before blindly complaining about 'injustice.' There have been numerous cases where witness retaliations have been arranged from prison; victim harassment is also common. That's why communications are monitored. Besides, why do we care? Facebook isn't some kind of human right. It's a superfluous luxury. If prisoners want to communicate, they have access to pen and paper. They have access to phone calls. This is far cry from fully-isolated solitary confinement with no communications at all. We're complaining about FACEBOOK for god's sake. What next, complaining that prisoners don't have access to Freshdirect or Uber? What mirderers haven't been charged that you're referring too? Ferguson was a clear case of self defense; you attack a cop, you will get put down. How is that even controversial? Don't attack cops. Common sense. In Baltimore, those cops were charged. As far as murder, do you know what the legal definition of murder is? How about manslaughter? How about intent? You're obviously not a lawyer. I'm interested in if you are outraged that Dorian Johnson hasn't yet been charged for obstruction of justice for lying to the police about brown being shot in the back? How about his claim that Brown was running away? If you want justice, then Dorian needs to be charged. But I don't think you care about actual justice. You just like jumping on the anti-cop, everyone is racists bandwagon. Facts apparently aren't as important as smashing windows and starting riots over imagined injustices. The Baltimore guy had been arrested dozens of times. Why do we care about him and not the 28 people shot in Chicago almost every weekend? Do you even know the name of a single shooting victim from last weekend in Chicago? Where's their justice? Perhaps you should care about justice for the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators of it. But ok, let's worry about Facebook for prisoners; that's totally important.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Prisons in the US are screwed up. Really really screwed up. And most people don't seem to care. Even the ones who know and care for someone in prison still feel that most the rest of the prisoners deserve what they get.
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  > What business does the state have in that? The main reason these sorts of rules seem to exist is as an attempt to prevent gang leaders who are in prison from continuing to effectively run their gang. Now in practice this ends up requiring a fairly draconian crackdown on communications that may well not solve the problem of running gangs anyway. But this is the "why", in a nutshell.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Maybe this should be the exception and not the rule, though.
- guelo 11y ago
  What kind of person wants to dedicate their lives to managing humans trapped in cages? I can only imagine they're deranged sadistic people.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Some may be characterized that way, but my guess is that most believe they are taking the burden from society and sacrificing themselves for the better good. In other words, my guess is that most don't take pleasure in it but rather believe it's a dirty job but someone's got to go it. Also, as it is with many blue collar jobs, its a job that employs them and support their family, or, self. No greater intention, good or bad
  - briandear 11y ago
    Right. Perhaps we should just abolish prisons? What about the sadistic people that chose crime to which to dedicate their lives? How many violent rapists, robbers, thieves and murderers are in those cages? We need cages as long as there are evil people. There is not a country in world that doesn't have cages. Interestingly, American prisons aren't as bad as they are in places like France or the UK or China or South Korea or anywhere in the Middle East. It's fashionable to complain about prisons. That fashion lasts as long as it takes until you or someone you love to have been a victim of a crime. When your wife is raped or your child abused or the family owned shop on the corner is robbed: what should happen to the perpetrator? Should we give them big hugs and a chocolate cookie? No. Those people belong in cages. The rights of the non criminal should always trump the rights of the convicted. It's tough to be in prison, sure however how many truly innocent people are in those cages? Not many. Some, but the vast majority did the crime. When someone steals from me, they still the ability for me to provide for my family. If they steal $100 from me, that's stealing about 1 hour of my time. That's one hour that I now can't spend with my family. That's a hundred bucks that directly goes from my children to some low-life. I have little sympathy for people that would steal things from my kids. I have little sympathy for people that hurt others. If they get their Facebook taken down; tough shit. Don't commit crimes and you can use Facebook all you f'ing want.
  - aw3c2 11y ago
    Not saying that I want to defend bad prison guards but there are also people who dedicate their live to killing other humans.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cgriswald 11y ago
This article is so poorly written it is embarassing. In addition to the silly errors like "races the question" and and apparently being unaware of the word "euphemism", it buries what I hope is its main point--that Facebook should be more transparent--at the bottom of the article. But Facebook is quite transparent about government censorship, even in the United States; see here: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/2014-H2/ https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20... From what I can see it is much more transparent (and much more active) than Twitter, which for some reason the article praises. It seems only to be castigating Facebook for "censoring" inmates--who are not, themselves, even the ones posting to Faceboook--and then for not reporting information about those removals. It then links to articles about an overreaching New Mexican prison which sentenced an inmate to ninety days in solitary confinement for refusing to tell family and friends to remove Facebook photos. It neglects to mention how Facebook is responsible for that and more importantly that the sentence was thrown out by prison officials (probably because its unconstitutional as hell and they know it). That particular example wouldn't even be a particularly good lead-in to an article about correction department overreach. It is much less useful here. It is reasonable for Facebook to have terms of service which disallow third party access to user profiles, to suspend profiles of users which violate the ToS, and to have a reporting page specific to a class of user which is likely to violate an individual term. It is also reasonable for Facebook not to report this data as it is essentially private information about the inmates and their use of Facebook. Facebook has more responsibility to protecting its inmate users than it does to reporting that information to the rest of us.
- droopybuns 11y ago
  Where does even the string "the question" or the word "euphemism" come up in the original article?
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Maybe you were looking at a previous version, but the only appearance of the word "question" in TFA is: The fact that Facebook has not been reporting these takedown requests raises larger questions about what other kinds of censorship Facebook has been hiding. That sentence is perfectly standard idiom. [EDIT: and I commented 5 minutes after you did]
themeek 11y ago
I think the EFF is being generous here. Facebook blocks posts to certain types of political material even if it is posted by an American citizen. They would round out and wax and wane about 'terrorist material' - content such as the ISIL newsletter (which overall is not 'gross', especially compared to some American cinema). But blocked content is broader than that. Facebook is also part of a network of other American Social Media companies that have automated systems to block content posted that match certain patterns and known propaganda efforts by other nations. Recently an anti-TPP website was blocked simultaneously across several communication providers (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_reddit_someone_is_trying_really_hard_to_erase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...). This was a mistake as the website name closely matched the name of a Russian Anti-TPP propaganda campaign. The mere existence of the ability to coordinate content blocking across service providers means that a censorship network exists - the question becomes whether it is 'abused'. It's difficult to ascertain abuse, of course, given the Obama Administrations policy with regard to censorship and propaganda and its weakening of the Smith-Mundt Anti-Propaganda Act. The Administration believes that the US government is not responsible for having its influence operations online spill over to affect American people - it is merely prohibited from actively and specifically targeting Americans. That is, the new policy is that it's okay - even expected - for Americans to be 'collateral damage' in censorship and propaganda campaigns. Thinkers like Cass Sunstein are traded high up in the US Government - Sunstein wrote a book on the 'Problem of Free Speech'. Broadly this influential Washington Legal Scholar believes that speech that is actively harmful or misinformed can and should be 'addressed' by the state - and he recommends ways in which that can happen. The Snowden documents reveal that (so far as we know non-specific American targeting) the mass surveillance networks are intrinsically tied to influence operation capabilities - outside those capabilities at the GCHQ (which legally are not prevented from targeting Americans) - and who engage quite heavily in psychological influence campaigns. I have personally, repeatedly witnessed Facebook selectively block posts of mine linking Wikileaks material, the Snowden documents (when they were first being published), and leaked drafts of the Trans Pacific Partnership and watched as others complained about having their posts trying to organize protests on May Day blocked similarly. It's true also that Facebook has been associated with at least two studies on societal manipulation programs with researchers that are funded by the Department of Defense in the same area. Many people remember the "Emotion Manipulation Study" - fewer the vote influence study. These sorts of programs have been called for in the past 10 years of Defense Document planning and DARPA today, under their SMISC program, study similarly how to shape and track ideas in social media networks like Twitter. I'm honestly glad that the EFF is finally giving this issue some attention.
kbenson 11y ago
There was more discussion of this in the submission about Facebook's overhaul of their account takedown process a couple weeks back[1]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664948
cekanoni 11y ago
no wondering really ...
nullc 11y ago
I thought EFF was finally over the decades of acting as though only government demanded censorship matters? Here it sounds like they're singing the old song. Content I've written was censored when others shared it on Facebook-- e.g. the essay accompanying the release of 30GB of previously paywalled JSTOR documents (https://thepiratebay.gd/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro https://thepiratebay.gd/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...), was silently hidden from the receiver when people tried sharing it on Facebook. I doubt any government asked them to do this-- especially considering how fast it was suppressed. Focusing only on government "requested" censorship likely ignores even the majority of government _induced_ censorship: Consider the censorship executed through soft power like a fear displeasing the powers that be and that resulting in less favorable policy or the loss of lucrative contracts. Not to mention censorship which occurs for merely private economic gains-- which might be tolerable in a true private space; but should not be tolerated in places which serve the social role online of public forums and common carriers. Is it beneficial to the public to mark facebook down for denying inmates access, when presumably this is just belt-and-suspenders on top of physical control of the inmates, while not carefully exploring the other kinds of censorship they and their competitors in the pseudo-public-forum business engage in?
- plaguuuuuu 11y ago
  IMO, corporate censorship is a far more common occurrence and most likely has greater effects on society. I too wish there was more scrutiny. EFF seems to largely deal with legal matters though. Possibly there should be a sister organisation to the EFF, or maybe they should extend their mission. I dunno.
codesushi42 11y ago
Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that a few companies now control a large amount of the information that gets to be seen online. The Internet is becoming a walled garden of sorts because you're forced to operate in these closed platforms if you want any visibility. Otherwise your voice won't be heard because no one will bother to check anything outside of these platforms. These platforms are becoming the primary sources of information on the web for the average person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736304 Then I see this. As I said, I see a growing amount of censorship that is both ideological and business motivated. This news piece confirms my suspicions. We embraced closed platforms like Facebook by ignoring their flippant ToS and privacy policies, and by spreading their adoption with supporting Facebook SSO and writing apps on their platform. We made our bed and now we must lie in it.
jacquesm 11y ago
Any kind of centralized communications medium invites censorship.

247 points by panarky 11y ago

Even if they DID report on half this stuff, I would still suspect that there's more happening than they can disclose. At least Facebook has the decency to make it painfully obvious that they're not disclosing things that are happening. EDIT: To be clear. I do think Facebook should be disclosing things. I was making a sarcastic comment about how it's nearly impossible to trust what companies are publishing anyway because of the nasty gag orders and secret courts.

cryoshon 11y ago
Yeah, I'd say that there is a 100% chance that Facebook, Twitter, reddit, et al have been targeted with National Security Letters which demand insane things while gagging any outcry or mention of the gag. Most of the proles aren't too aware that their feed is heavily manipulated away from certain topics...

danbruc 11y ago

What is the reasoning behind this prisoner takedown? [...] after an inmate in New Mexico was sentenced to 90 days in solitary confinement because his family posted updates and photos to his Facebook account on his behalf. [1] What? Why? What business does the state have in that? And the state messing with your private property in this way without a court order seems plain illegal to me. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmate-account-takedown-process https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmat...

malandrew 11y ago
Yeah, that one shocked me too. I can only imagine that social networking could be used to reduce recidivism rates at the end of someone's sentence by giving them a way to connect with people on the outside (friends, family, etc.) that will be their support network as they reintegrate into society. I can understand a parole officer or prison official wanting access to something like messages and friends lists to make sure that they are reconnecting with unsavory characters, but that's about it. Banning Facebook pages outright for inmates seems excessive and counter-productive.
thebeefytaco 11y ago
It's messed up, but my guess is simply that they're trying to limit prisoner communication with the outside world and they don't want the general public to see how they're run.
- themeek 11y ago
  Yup. Let's dive into this a bit. The thing is that when you invoke 'they' you don't mean Facebook. Facebook as a corporation doesn't care about the general public seeing how prisons are run. The government - and where it shares coffers with private prison moguls - cares. The government and the private prison industry are able to project their goals through Facebook.
DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
Reminds me of what they did with Weev. http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/13/hacker-andrew-auernheimer-placed-in-solitary-confinement-for-tweeting-from-prison/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/13/hacker-andrew-auernheimer-p... Comment Signature: http://pastie.org/private/niydodwbuj4ouxutk47fza http://pastie.org/private/niydodwbuj4ouxutk47fza
glass- 11y ago
If you follow the link to the article[0], it quotes the rule this was done under: Offenders in the custody or supervision of the Department are not permitted access to the Internet, nor are they permitted to obtain access to the Internet through third parties. It also notes the sentence in this instance was overturned once the EFF and ACLU got involved. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-faces-90-days-solitary-over-facebook-profile https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-face...
jessaustin 11y ago
Unfortunately this is pretty small potatoes; the prison-industrial complex basically does what it wants. For clearly illegal conduct, if protests continue long and loud enough (e.g. Ferguson, Baltimore) then policies might be changed or murderers might be charged. For something like this, which is unethical but not obviously against a law, we rely on the ethics of those who manage the different parts of the system. Since very few of them possess any ethical sense whatsoever, correcting this injustice would require years of lobbying, lawmaking, and oversight, rather than a simple request to stop extrajudicial punishments.
- briandear 11y ago
  Prisoners can only communicate with the outside world through monitored communications to protect the victims of their crimes as well as prevent prisoners from ordering criminal activity from behind bars. When you are a prisoner, you lose the right to private communications. It's prison, not summer camp. What 'right' does a prisoner have to Facebook? None. You might want to learn about why policies are the way they are before blindly complaining about 'injustice.' There have been numerous cases where witness retaliations have been arranged from prison; victim harassment is also common. That's why communications are monitored. Besides, why do we care? Facebook isn't some kind of human right. It's a superfluous luxury. If prisoners want to communicate, they have access to pen and paper. They have access to phone calls. This is far cry from fully-isolated solitary confinement with no communications at all. We're complaining about FACEBOOK for god's sake. What next, complaining that prisoners don't have access to Freshdirect or Uber? What mirderers haven't been charged that you're referring too? Ferguson was a clear case of self defense; you attack a cop, you will get put down. How is that even controversial? Don't attack cops. Common sense. In Baltimore, those cops were charged. As far as murder, do you know what the legal definition of murder is? How about manslaughter? How about intent? You're obviously not a lawyer. I'm interested in if you are outraged that Dorian Johnson hasn't yet been charged for obstruction of justice for lying to the police about brown being shot in the back? How about his claim that Brown was running away? If you want justice, then Dorian needs to be charged. But I don't think you care about actual justice. You just like jumping on the anti-cop, everyone is racists bandwagon. Facts apparently aren't as important as smashing windows and starting riots over imagined injustices. The Baltimore guy had been arrested dozens of times. Why do we care about him and not the 28 people shot in Chicago almost every weekend? Do you even know the name of a single shooting victim from last weekend in Chicago? Where's their justice? Perhaps you should care about justice for the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators of it. But ok, let's worry about Facebook for prisoners; that's totally important.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
Prisons in the US are screwed up. Really really screwed up. And most people don't seem to care. Even the ones who know and care for someone in prison still feel that most the rest of the prisoners deserve what they get.
bzbarsky 11y ago
> What business does the state have in that? The main reason these sorts of rules seem to exist is as an attempt to prevent gang leaders who are in prison from continuing to effectively run their gang. Now in practice this ends up requiring a fairly draconian crackdown on communications that may well not solve the problem of running gangs anyway. But this is the "why", in a nutshell.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Maybe this should be the exception and not the rule, though.
guelo 11y ago
What kind of person wants to dedicate their lives to managing humans trapped in cages? I can only imagine they're deranged sadistic people.
- mc32 11y ago
  Some may be characterized that way, but my guess is that most believe they are taking the burden from society and sacrificing themselves for the better good. In other words, my guess is that most don't take pleasure in it but rather believe it's a dirty job but someone's got to go it. Also, as it is with many blue collar jobs, its a job that employs them and support their family, or, self. No greater intention, good or bad
- briandear 11y ago
  Right. Perhaps we should just abolish prisons? What about the sadistic people that chose crime to which to dedicate their lives? How many violent rapists, robbers, thieves and murderers are in those cages? We need cages as long as there are evil people. There is not a country in world that doesn't have cages. Interestingly, American prisons aren't as bad as they are in places like France or the UK or China or South Korea or anywhere in the Middle East. It's fashionable to complain about prisons. That fashion lasts as long as it takes until you or someone you love to have been a victim of a crime. When your wife is raped or your child abused or the family owned shop on the corner is robbed: what should happen to the perpetrator? Should we give them big hugs and a chocolate cookie? No. Those people belong in cages. The rights of the non criminal should always trump the rights of the convicted. It's tough to be in prison, sure however how many truly innocent people are in those cages? Not many. Some, but the vast majority did the crime. When someone steals from me, they still the ability for me to provide for my family. If they steal $100 from me, that's stealing about 1 hour of my time. That's one hour that I now can't spend with my family. That's a hundred bucks that directly goes from my children to some low-life. I have little sympathy for people that would steal things from my kids. I have little sympathy for people that hurt others. If they get their Facebook taken down; tough shit. Don't commit crimes and you can use Facebook all you f'ing want.
- aw3c2 11y ago
  Not saying that I want to defend bad prison guards but there are also people who dedicate their live to killing other humans.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cgriswald 11y ago

This article is so poorly written it is embarassing. In addition to the silly errors like "races the question" and and apparently being unaware of the word "euphemism", it buries what I hope is its main point--that Facebook should be more transparent--at the bottom of the article. But Facebook is quite transparent about government censorship, even in the United States; see here: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/2014-H2/ https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20... From what I can see it is much more transparent (and much more active) than Twitter, which for some reason the article praises. It seems only to be castigating Facebook for "censoring" inmates--who are not, themselves, even the ones posting to Faceboook--and then for not reporting information about those removals. It then links to articles about an overreaching New Mexican prison which sentenced an inmate to ninety days in solitary confinement for refusing to tell family and friends to remove Facebook photos. It neglects to mention how Facebook is responsible for that and more importantly that the sentence was thrown out by prison officials (probably because its unconstitutional as hell and they know it). That particular example wouldn't even be a particularly good lead-in to an article about correction department overreach. It is much less useful here. It is reasonable for Facebook to have terms of service which disallow third party access to user profiles, to suspend profiles of users which violate the ToS, and to have a reporting page specific to a class of user which is likely to violate an individual term. It is also reasonable for Facebook not to report this data as it is essentially private information about the inmates and their use of Facebook. Facebook has more responsibility to protecting its inmate users than it does to reporting that information to the rest of us.

droopybuns 11y ago
Where does even the string "the question" or the word "euphemism" come up in the original article?
jessaustin 11y ago
Maybe you were looking at a previous version, but the only appearance of the word "question" in TFA is: The fact that Facebook has not been reporting these takedown requests raises larger questions about what other kinds of censorship Facebook has been hiding. That sentence is perfectly standard idiom. [EDIT: and I commented 5 minutes after you did]

themeek 11y ago

I think the EFF is being generous here. Facebook blocks posts to certain types of political material even if it is posted by an American citizen. They would round out and wax and wane about 'terrorist material' - content such as the ISIL newsletter (which overall is not 'gross', especially compared to some American cinema). But blocked content is broader than that. Facebook is also part of a network of other American Social Media companies that have automated systems to block content posted that match certain patterns and known propaganda efforts by other nations. Recently an anti-TPP website was blocked simultaneously across several communication providers (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_reddit_someone_is_trying_really_hard_to_erase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...). This was a mistake as the website name closely matched the name of a Russian Anti-TPP propaganda campaign. The mere existence of the ability to coordinate content blocking across service providers means that a censorship network exists - the question becomes whether it is 'abused'. It's difficult to ascertain abuse, of course, given the Obama Administrations policy with regard to censorship and propaganda and its weakening of the Smith-Mundt Anti-Propaganda Act. The Administration believes that the US government is not responsible for having its influence operations online spill over to affect American people - it is merely prohibited from actively and specifically targeting Americans. That is, the new policy is that it's okay - even expected - for Americans to be 'collateral damage' in censorship and propaganda campaigns. Thinkers like Cass Sunstein are traded high up in the US Government - Sunstein wrote a book on the 'Problem of Free Speech'. Broadly this influential Washington Legal Scholar believes that speech that is actively harmful or misinformed can and should be 'addressed' by the state - and he recommends ways in which that can happen. The Snowden documents reveal that (so far as we know non-specific American targeting) the mass surveillance networks are intrinsically tied to influence operation capabilities - outside those capabilities at the GCHQ (which legally are not prevented from targeting Americans) - and who engage quite heavily in psychological influence campaigns. I have personally, repeatedly witnessed Facebook selectively block posts of mine linking Wikileaks material, the Snowden documents (when they were first being published), and leaked drafts of the Trans Pacific Partnership and watched as others complained about having their posts trying to organize protests on May Day blocked similarly. It's true also that Facebook has been associated with at least two studies on societal manipulation programs with researchers that are funded by the Department of Defense in the same area. Many people remember the "Emotion Manipulation Study" - fewer the vote influence study. These sorts of programs have been called for in the past 10 years of Defense Document planning and DARPA today, under their SMISC program, study similarly how to shape and track ideas in social media networks like Twitter. I'm honestly glad that the EFF is finally giving this issue some attention.

kbenson 11y ago

There was more discussion of this in the submission about Facebook's overhaul of their account takedown process a couple weeks back[1]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664948

cekanoni 11y ago

no wondering really ...

nullc 11y ago

I thought EFF was finally over the decades of acting as though only government demanded censorship matters? Here it sounds like they're singing the old song. Content I've written was censored when others shared it on Facebook-- e.g. the essay accompanying the release of 30GB of previously paywalled JSTOR documents (https://thepiratebay.gd/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro https://thepiratebay.gd/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...), was silently hidden from the receiver when people tried sharing it on Facebook. I doubt any government asked them to do this-- especially considering how fast it was suppressed. Focusing only on government "requested" censorship likely ignores even the majority of government _induced_ censorship: Consider the censorship executed through soft power like a fear displeasing the powers that be and that resulting in less favorable policy or the loss of lucrative contracts. Not to mention censorship which occurs for merely private economic gains-- which might be tolerable in a true private space; but should not be tolerated in places which serve the social role online of public forums and common carriers. Is it beneficial to the public to mark facebook down for denying inmates access, when presumably this is just belt-and-suspenders on top of physical control of the inmates, while not carefully exploring the other kinds of censorship they and their competitors in the pseudo-public-forum business engage in?

plaguuuuuu 11y ago
IMO, corporate censorship is a far more common occurrence and most likely has greater effects on society. I too wish there was more scrutiny. EFF seems to largely deal with legal matters though. Possibly there should be a sister organisation to the EFF, or maybe they should extend their mission. I dunno.

codesushi42 11y ago

Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that a few companies now control a large amount of the information that gets to be seen online. The Internet is becoming a walled garden of sorts because you're forced to operate in these closed platforms if you want any visibility. Otherwise your voice won't be heard because no one will bother to check anything outside of these platforms. These platforms are becoming the primary sources of information on the web for the average person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736304 Then I see this. As I said, I see a growing amount of censorship that is both ideological and business motivated. This news piece confirms my suspicions. We embraced closed platforms like Facebook by ignoring their flippant ToS and privacy policies, and by spreading their adoption with supporting Facebook SSO and writing apps on their platform. We made our bed and now we must lie in it.

jacquesm 11y ago

Any kind of centralized communications medium invites censorship.