> Zuckerberg should take note. Yes, it’s crazy for one person to have such massive control over what people say online. But like it or not, our system gives leaders of huge corporations massive power. In his total control of Facebook, he must be the arbiter—of harm. We must demand that he perform that role in the best possible way, minimizing the toxic speech posted by his customers, whether they are peons or presidents. His employees are speaking out. His billions of users should let him know as well. And the government should back off.
And when Zuckerberg steps down as the CEO of facebook and his successor is someone leaning towards a different political ideology - what happens then?
The next CEO of Facebook is not an elected official. Unless you count Wall Street appointed board of directors approving a successor as somehow being representative democracy.
I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech - Facebook engineers have incredible impact in connecting friends and families all over the world. Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted.
> Alex Jones is the new CEO of Twitter. How would we think differently about the real problem here?
That is a useful question to showcase an important aspect that I don’t see discussed.
There is a single government, while there must be multiple competing private corporations.
Twitter vs. Gab, Youtube vs. Liveleak: each corporation is defined by what it refuses, NOT by what it accepts.
So, if Alex Jones becomes CEO of Twitter and puts “Did you know? The Earth is flat.” on all tweets mentioning SpaceX, users will simply move to a greener pasture. Twitter will die when its business model loses viability.
Twitter’s moves are not political, they are economical first and foremost!
The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term.
> [T]he company claimed $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales.
>The same goes with Nike’s Kaepernick ad: greenlit because the corporation estimated that being on the right side of history would bring more value long-term.
This is extremely charitable to Nike, assuming that they internally had some meeting about correcting racial injustices or something and not that they decided to capitalize on a moment in the political zeitgeist. Even if the ad was hated it would have generated enormous free marketing for the company. I tend to agree that these companies will make economic decisions first, most of the time, but over the last couple years we've seen many companies explicitly intertwine the two - where making political statements as marketing is now common. I'd be very very skeptical that they have anything but dollar signs in their eyes.
I would second this, and mark it as maybe one of the strongest indicators of where the zeitgeist is at the moment. It makes the "there are evil fascists at every turn" argument pretty weak, when all the money is being bet on woke advertising.
If what you are saying is true then there is no need to censor. In your scenario people already know what is propaganda. Twitter allowed Oprah getting arrested for sex trafficking to trend to #1. There was no financial hit for that.
I think your misconception is that content has positive value.
Content can definitely have negative value. More is sometimes worse. The extremes are obvious (users gain less value from a website with more bullying), but the principle is true even in the middle ground.
While good advice brings value, bad advice (eg. medical, financial, etc.) causes users to seek value elsewhere, or causes their ruin and subsequent decrease in value to advertisers.
Even when the content does not have negative value, if it floods content with positive value, people no longer get the value they used to.
> Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted.
I'm 100% with you. I actually think Zuck is showing incredible leadership and vision under all these pressure and my respect for him has grown enormously (BTW I've voted Democrat all my life).
My belief is Facebook is a tremendous challenge to the established media and their owners. What Facebook does, it actually democratizes ability of smaller publishers to have the potential to reach the same volume of audience as the corporate media. This is upsetting to the old guards and what I'm seeing is a chorus of pressure on Facebook to basically limit information distribution to the same old guards.
As a reminder, many people believe Trump was elected because of Facebook. This narrative is mostly created and pushed by the mainstream media (the old guards). However, data shows Trump rode on $5 billion of free coverage [0].
We also know that around 8.5 million of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 (about 2-2.5 million 2012 Romney voters vote for Hillary). [1]
The reality is my party, the Democratic Party has been moving economically to the right and socially to the left. That's great for many people in SF or NY, but it has impacted many working class people who were traditionally Democrats. Blaming FB is a very convenient way for the Party to brush off responsibility of failing the people and pointing the fingers at Zuck. Facebook has a lot of reach, don't get me wrong. But as data showed these claims of interferences by foreign powers, which implies we need to control Facebook were overblown as Nate Silver who best predicted the 2016 results summarized the best [2].
I'm of the opinion Obama would have not won without social media nor we would have gone to the disastrous Iraq War if we had Facebook or something as strong as the reach of Facebook back in 2003. There are some of us who remember the yellow stickers of "Support our Troops" campaign in parallel with mainstream narratives[3] that created the mass hysteria and momentum to build consensus to go invade Iraq and in the process killed a lot of innocent people.
The mainstream media not only didn't do much to challenge the Bush 43 administration it ratted out the person who was investigating the infamous yellow cake connection [4].
Years later everyone did a mea culpa, but it was too late. By some account close to 400,000 Iraqis were killed [5] and we're still paying the price of the Iraq War.
So I agree, there is decent chance the person replacing Zuck one day will have a completely different political views. Maybe a hawk (appointed by Wall Street) who will hire a new executive team around himself or herself and help push a narrative that favors the board members who put them into that position.
It is very shortsighted for Silicon Valley to push Zuck to control the narrative anymore than Facebook is already doing. It'll normalize censorship so when the next person takes over they can easily put more control and censorship without much resistance. So please stop. Zuck is right and we should really back him up on this (and no, I don't for FB nor I'm friends or connected with Zuck).
I'd argue that Zuckerberg was elected. People voted by signing up for his website and using it regularly because it was better than the alternatives at the time.
People are free to stop using facebook and move to a different site, as many have. This only requires a few clicks.
I overwhelmingly prefer the option of having many companies to choose from vs. having the government or laws determine what is truth. Switching governments often requires either a revolution or a decade-long immigration process.
In the realm of corporate censorship, I still believe that politics is much less important to companies than profits. My takeaway from censorship on YouTube and other social media is that it's levied at content that could reflect poorly on advertisers. Inconvenient and controversial content more so than any specific political views. Granted, controversial does overlap with politic and especially fringe politics.
Personally I'm much more worried about infrastructure becoming closed off than any specific sites. I don't know whether companies' moderation is effective or not. I trust the market to sort that out. What would be really concerning, though, is if the underlying infrastructure starts conducting censorship of their own.
We've already witnessed this to a degree with 8chan being effectively wiped off the face of the internet for the better part of a year. Square and other payment providers have started refusing to do business with certain people and groups. I'm less concerned of a world where Facebook censors its content, and much more concerned with a world where someone can't even run their own personal website because DNS providers, payment providers, and hosting services have blacklisted them.
I think it's always been this way to a degree. But the mob can't completely exclude companies beyond a certain appeal, only the most extreme fringe. E.g. when they try to "excommunicate" firms over more mainstream views it doesn't work.
Groups also use various forms of harassment to censor individuals which I think is a much harder problem online.
Right, this is the hard part and I don't understand what the law says so far and what may need changed. Imo, if you won't publish my book, I still have free speech, but if no one will sell me paper, then I don't.
It's definitely a hard problem. I definitely don't agree that companies need to host speech. Freedom of speech also means freedom from compelled speech.
I think a good boundary is to define whether an entity is actually hosting speed or providing general communications services. Platforms like facebook are the latter. Comments and photos exist on their servers, and they have a right not to host speech they don't want. But things like DNS providers are more akin to paper produces in your analogy.
And things like banking services are a whole different story. I see no reason why they shouldn't be regarded as utilities like telecoms, mail carriers, etc. I think banks have to honor checks. Maybe there's a startup idea in letting people send paper checks through the mail via an app?
The real problem is that ~40% of America supports/votes for the POTUS, following him on social media, re-shares his memes, etc.
People are looking to generally open communications platforms like Facebook and asking them to censor, but if they carried their logic to its conclusion, the President’s emails, texts, mobile Apps, and press releases should all be censored or blacklisted by communications providers.
If the president sent out content similar to his tweets through a Trump 2020 campaign app on the apple store and android store, should Apple / google remove the app from the store? Should they build in a filter in chrome and Safari to block access to the trump 2020 campaign website?
My point is that the people asking Zuck to censor are asking to censor 40% of the country.
Personally since I disagree with the 40% I do see it as the “real problem” but I don’t think facebook censoring them is the solution. It might be possible to censor away InfoWars or whatever but I don’t think you can censor away the POTUS and 40% of the country...
The real problem is that you refuse to take people you disagree with seriously. You keep fucking lying about them, you keep pushing people towards their side by being an absolute fucking cunt. Just stop. It's not helping.
Could you please stop creating accounts to do flamewar here? It's not in your interest to do that, first because you're contributing to destroying the community that you're participating in, and second because these sorts of attacks just reinforce the people you disagree with.
I am taking it seriously. The logic that demands Facebook censor trump from their open platform doesn’t have any clear limiting factor that means that Trump shouldn’t be censored off other communications service providers.
Not a MAGA type by the way. I’ve voted against trump in 3 elections already and will be voting against him again in the fall.
> People fail to understand that nothing is static. One minute you’re in, the other minute you’re out.
This is why Free Speech is so important. Regardless of how inappropriate someone's speech is, or may seem in the present context, they should be allowed to express it as long as they are not directly inciting violence/hate. Not all countries have this Right so let's take a second to appreciate that.
It may be worrying but it's not surprising. Every common-enough point of view will be well represented in any large-enough population sample, assuming the sample wasn't specifically selected to exclude it.
That's very true, and a point I've made in the past about other opinions (namely, internet trolls). My assumption though, was that HN had a very well educated population, who know the dangers of censorship.
Propaganda: Communication that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. [2] Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies, religious organizations, the media, and individuals can also produce propaganda.
Facebook would look quite interesting if they uniformly censored all governments, activist groups, companies, religious organizations, the media, and individuals attempting to influence an audience and further an agenda.
The only place on the internet that I know has a policy like that is Wikipedia itself, and far from everyone agree that they are effective in enforcing that policy.
No it hasn't. Propaganda and hatred has just become more sophisticated and super-charged by new tools (social media, Internet etc.) in order to maximize it's spread among the community. These new tools also allow bigots to self-organize, privately in ways never before possible.
Bigotry and it's resulting political/social forms have and will evolve, constantly adapting to retain and grow. Hatred is not "increasingly subjective", hatred has become more sophisticated making it harder to detect.
Not sure how you are coming to this conclusion, yes it can become more sophisticated while also be on a sliding scale of what people consider "hatred" from one year to the next. I'm not sure what is not to grok about this conclusion.
But if it has not been increasingly subjective, but harder to detect, then what you are implying, if I do not distord your point of view, is that it is okay to be stricter in policing to catch stop these sophisticated bigots.
But, doesn't being more strict mean that you'll also have more false negatives, that is people that always had "heretic" talk from the point of view of general society, without necessarily being a bigot, but are now being identified as such because the criteria are paint with a broader brush?
And then, wouldn't you agree that this is a restriction of free speech, that people on the other side are arguing to be unacceptable?
> is that it is okay to be stricter in policing to catch stop these sophisticated bigots.
Yes, although of course that depends on your definition of "policing" and by whom (state vs private) Are we still talking about Facebook?
> But, doesn't being more strict mean that you'll also have more false negatives
Yes (in either case above). What you're asking about is the margins, and of course we need oversight to prevent abuse both in the private and public sector.
> And then, wouldn't you agree that this is a restriction of free speech, that people on the other side are arguing to be unacceptable?
Again, not sure if we're still talking FB.
I'm going to bow out now, thank you for the debate.
Hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion. If we forcibly prevent people from expressing their emotions with words and abdicate our responsibility to defuse hatred with dialogue, it will eventually boil over and be expressed with violence.
It's ironic, because mass censorship proponents claim censoring hate prevents violence, when perhaps it actually makes it worse in the long run.
"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
There are multiple reports that all over the country in rural areas people read fake facebook posts and mobilized arms in a bid to protect their area from "antifa". Zuckerberg did not want to get into the vetting business because incidents like this will then fall squarely on them. Now he doesn't have to care and can just count the dollars from all kinds of clicks.
> Off Twitter, viral text messages of screenshots of doctored tweets have circulated throughout the country. Some of the false text messages claim that extremist groups are plotting to move into residential areas this week.
> Bot researchers call this kind of disinformation distribution "hidden viral" text messages, which go undetected on mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter and can spread like wildfire without moderation.
Should SMS/MMS messages also be censored by the phone companies?
The only concession I want from the pro-censorship crowd is that they oppose democracy. If you want unaccountable private social media corporations to be the arbiters of what is allowed to be discussed so be it, but just admit that you hate democracy and that you are a die hard technocrat.
An algorithmically sorted feed separating signal from noise will ALWAYS have to make the choice of what to show. If there are 10k stories, and the average person only scrolls through 1k stories, thats 9k stories it chooses to suppress.
There is a difference between delisting stories completely, and removing stories in private messages, but once you talk about the feed itself, the provider is going to be writing some kind of editorial engine, that prefers stories that have more engagement, while at the same time trying to not uprank trash, spam, clickbait, and other types of bs that float to the top.
Spam has already crossed the line, where near everybody, in universal agreement, is ok with their email provider blanket censoring the bulk of it.
There is nothing wrong with allowing unpleasant posts to be accompanied by a note. The issue is that too many people take hate speech masquerading as "truth" with zero context as reality, and act accordingly. That is what is not acceptable.
If I tell your neighbor that you are molesting his daughter, and he kills you, will your family find that acceptable?
If a politician tells your neighbor that you are molesting his daughter, and he kills you, will your family find that acceptable?
If that word is flagged maybe you'd still be alive because the neighbor would have some doubt as to your guilt.
That's a really extreme example, it doesn't seem to track with hate speech because in that scenario said poster is looking to not get flagged, in you scenario this operation would result in death and subsequent blow back on which is not what the poster would then want if they tried to post hate speech. By this logic the poster wants the flag because that limits any consequence on them not the other way around.
How about this, two people post the same molesting accusation. One of them has a hat that you don't like so you flag his post. The other one doesn't have that hat so they get a pass on the flag. Following what I believe to be a more clear assessment of the situation, the non-flagged other flavor of hate speech survives to do damage, the hate speech of the hat guy doesn't. This bends the narrative away from the guy with the hat and warps it around to the guy you like. Why isn't this a problem?
No one is asking for anyone or any single piece of information to be suppressed so it doesn't meet the legal standard or definition in the US to be considered censorship especially since FB is a private entity and the 1st Amendment protects you from the government. It's also why we are not seeing civil rights lawsuits against these companies and people that try fail miserably and can't even make it to trial. Read your TOS.
If you come to my website to post and I delete it, thats just me taking out the trash as I see fit. You're not being censored. No one suppressed your speech or expression. In fact you said or wrote it and faced zero repercussions and ramifications. Me saying you can can't come on my property or giving you a time out isn't your rights being infringed on.
Not allowing me to delete your post would be the literal definition of censoring MY speech and expression and the SCOTUS has already ruled on this. You can't have it both ways bud.
> "If you come to my website to post and I delete it, thats just me taking out the trash as I see fit."
Zuckerberg is taking the trash out (or not, as the case may be) as he sees fit and therefore those that have advocated this argument should logically be supporting his right to make his own choices. One wonders why they aren't?
Yeah, I really don't care what Zuckerburg does on his platform, I don't use it anyways. If he chooses to tag posts or not that's his business. I'm just saying if he does, that's not censorship by any definition.
Nobody wants them "to be the arbiters of what is allowed to be discussed". People want platforms to take responsibility for how they are used to spread misinformation. They want leaders held to the same standards as everyday users.
If pg came onto this site and started trolling people, throwing around insults, and spreading lies, what would it do to this community? And if dang responded by doing nothing?
It's so bizarre to me how common the "pro free speech" argument is on this site of all places. There is valuable and interesting discussion here precisely because it's heavily moderated. Facebook and Twitter are moderated too, the problem is they do it inconsistently. And despite Zuck's commitment to "allowing all voices to be heard", Facebook will remain moderated, or else it will turn into voat or 4chan.
> "People want platforms to take responsibility for how they are used to spread misinformation"
Define misinformation. One side thinks its opponents are spreading misinformation but they fail to see that their opponents just as fervently believe they are the ones spreading misinformation.
What will happen to your ideological group if the other side gets a majority and it's your beliefs that are declared misinformation?
These networks have all sorts of arbitrary rules. If you wanted to share your favorite porn video with your friends, that would be taken down (not fact checked, thankfully). There are also other guidelines mainly to prevent harm in the real world.
You can argue that you don’t like these rules and that everybody should be free to share their favorite videos, that people should be free to post anti vax information. There are plenty of platforms besides Facebook that you can go to (I recommend 4chan for the true freedom of speech experience). Those platforms might not be where the users are though.
What you are arguing, however, is that some people on Facebook should be exempt to the general rules of the platform and that applying rules to them in the same way it’s applied to others is censorship.
perhaps you could argue that the "pro-censorship crowd" is being irrational, selfish and/or myopic, but no, they don't hate democracy. you're trying (badly) to conflate two separate concepts.
Today's world is vastly more complex than it was in our ancestral environment, and that makes assessing truth very hard. It's not possible for anyone to directly access all primary sources, so we have no choice but to set up some kind of division of labor in the assessment of truth. Scientific peer review is one example of such a division of labor. We trust peer reviewed publications not because peer review is flawless, but because we have to do something to triage the myriad firehoses of information that exist in today's world, and peer review is the best we've been able to come up with so far.
Handing over the arbitration of truth to unaccountable private corporations is, like peer review, far from optimal. But we have to do something or those who are out to deliberately deceive to advance their political agendas will win. It is always easier to destroy than to create, and it is easier to promulgate a well-crafted lie than the truth. Those are the facts on the ground that we as a society have to grapple with. It's a hard problem and none of the solutions that have been proposed are optimal. But that's no excuse not to try to do something. If we don't, society will descend into chaos and authoritarianism. Fact checking by social media platforms is far from optimal, but it's a hell of a lot more likely to advance democracy than survival of the fittest con man.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. It's better to train society and individuals to take what is out there and teach them how to process it than to institutionalize them to trust "experts". Even today, before you take medical decisions, you have to trust your own instincts on what is the best for you. Yeah, those so called experts, won't make the right decisions.
Handing over arbitration of truth is an extremely foolish idea. We might as well have dictatorship and let "elders" decide for us and give up on democracy. Doing _something_ is not a virtue by itself, it has to be meaningful and many times you just have to pause and do _nothing_.
You did not really show that "doing something" is better than inaction (see politician's fallacy). For example for a long time reddit was very hands-off at the global level and left moderation to the indiviual subreddits and in my opinion that worked fine for most. Sure, there were some very disagreeable ones, but you still had to deliberately enter them to see their content.
Division of labor does not necessarily mean total centralization.
Maybe it doesn't mean you hate democracy per say, but what you are advocating means removing the control of a vast amount of information out of people's hands and moving it to a small relatively homogeneous group with their own political will.
Which in turns looks very much authoritarian and undemocratic.
For one HN allows you to see most "deleted" content and engage with it if you choose to, unlike many other platforms. Secondly, the mods don't claim to engage in fact-checking. And downvotes are not driven by single entity. Of course that still leaves the issue that minority views could be downvoted to oblivion, but that's not in direct conflict with democracy, even if outcomes still may be suboptimal.
As for self-censoring. Yes, that can be an issue. You picked racial slurs because that makes self-censoring seem morally acceptable, you're biasing the scenario in your favor. What about protesters calling for violence against an oppressive government? That would commonly be considered a violation of "community guidelines" on social networks.
My issue with social networks is that they amplify without providing contrast. Often there's viral, in-the-moment content which is technically truthful but doesn't provide context. Getting the "yes, but ..." replies that add nuance or rebut the framing would be helpful. Distinguishing and filtering by affirmative vs. conterarguments would be helpful in controversial topics.
This doesn't require fact-checking by an arbiter of truth, just a way for people to select which responses they see.
I wonder if people will change their views on Facebook censorship if Zuckerberg and Facebook drift to the right?
People have changed their politics as they have gotten older, before.
All of a sudden, if Zuckerberg comes out wearing a MAGA hat, will people be so excited about him being the “arbiter of truth” or will they suddenly be talking about “free speech”?
I bet that if Facebook and others start fact-checking comments about the dangers of nuclear power or GMOs then people will revise their perspective very quickly.
So commentators who are saying that Facebook should not be responsible for the veracity of posts made by powerful politicians or rich advertisers on Facebook, can you please explain how users of Facebook should differentiate between truth, falsehoods or purposeful twisting of facts? Genuine question.
That's the current law. Because Facebook doesn't post those peoples information. They are a host, not a publisher.
If they start editing and fact checking then that's their content and they'd be legally responsible for that. Which you would want because if Zuck was far right you'd want to sue him for his fact check errors.
They should also not prevent third party fact checkers from posting on their platform. I'd also love to see them allow for third party plugins of fact checkers which allow people to directly post snopes or something on a comment with the click of a button.
This would serve to keep Facebook as close to pure content host as possible, and still offer fact checking solutions.
The fact that there is even bias in fact checking tools shows how twisted this can be. Many fact checkers argue over semantics but still it's incredible that we think there is one view of the facts out there. It would be easier to have a falsehood finder than a fact checker. I digress. Anyway, I like the idea of third party plugs which directly push to these services.
I'd even be ok with facebook/twitter creating a special area for this and ratings for fact checks etc. But they still need it to be user driven content or they're at risk of being liable.
Even if I were to condone censorship, I do think that in any case announcements by the government are special. Trump's form may be off, it might not look official, but absent other more formal press releases etc., this is as official as it gets.
And such announcements do need to reach the citizens of the affected nation/state/area, because they do directly influence people's lives, health, the society and the state. Any company censoring those better be damn sure that that censorship won't have any adverse effects on anyone...
On the other hand, if the announcement were too provocative/evil/illegal, there are ways in a democracy to hold the wrongdoer responsible. This is not Facebook's or any company's task.
Do you know what gerrymandering is? It has almost no effect at all on the presidential election. Only two small states, Nebraska and Maine, allocate their electoral votes based on congressional district winners.
The electoral college doesn’t stop voters removing an unpopular POTUS. See Jimmy Carter, 1980, and George HW Bush in 1992.
And that would be fine, new outlets will spring up and maybe Facebook will lose it's market dominance and strangle hold over many people's online interactions.
2012: Facebook (via an open, neutral platform) helped Obama win the election. They are wonderful. E.g. “Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election” (The Guardian, February 2012)
Free speech of corporate-owned property is not new. In London, there's a huge amount of public spaces that are privately owned, but companies can't control their speech. Facebook may be similar.
"We must demand that he perform that role in the best possible way, minimizing the toxic speech posted by his customers."
No, we don't. I disagree. An ueber capitalist is not better in judging what is good or bad then a random bum. Perhaps he is even worse in doing so. You don't become billionaire by being such a nice and good guy.
And when Zuckerberg steps down as the CEO of facebook and his successor is someone leaning towards a different political ideology - what happens then?
The next CEO of Facebook is not an elected official. Unless you count Wall Street appointed board of directors approving a successor as somehow being representative democracy.
I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech - Facebook engineers have incredible impact in connecting friends and families all over the world. Changing company policy to be aligned with the Bay Area’s political inclinations seems to me to be very short sighted.