Who was the Russian that escaped to Canada that talked about this? The intellectual idiots, he called them. The ones who blindly wanted the revolution. They're the first to purge after the revolution is a success.
> In August 2020, Facebook expanded its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy”, aimed at removing the presence of far-right extremists from its website.
He doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, but now he thinks it’s wrong that it’s his views that are censored.
All TV stations have an editorial guide, this defines what can and can't be said. Sure you can push at the boundaries, but stray to far and you'll be pulled off air.
All newspapers have editorial standards as well.
This is why there was such an explosion in 'zine culture in the late 80s early 90s.
censorship by private individuals has always been there, we forget that in the last 10 years we've been able to literally say and do anything we want on the internet with little to no repercussions.
Yes, and we determined TV to be archaic, rigid and top-down. We tried to build something better. Now we are trying to not become as shitty. That is literally the point.
>When you reach full monopoly on a market you have to be regulated.
Facebook doesn't have anything like "full monopoly" on any market. They don't have a monopoly on the internet, they don't have a monopoly on social media. They don't have a monopoly on human communication. They're not even the most popular social media platform among some demographics.
>FB has no right to dictate what can be said publicly.
They're not dictating what can be said publicly, they're dictating what can be said on their platform which, yes, they have the right to do.
They do have the right to dictate what can be said publicly, on their platforms. They can’t dictate who listens to you, but speaking and listening are not the same thing. The old analogy of “you are welcome in my living room until I decide you are not” applies here.
If you are finding it difficult to reach people, the onus is on you to find a way to reach an audience, not on them to provide it for you.
That adage was from a time before a single company's "living room" could swallow the town square and part of the postal service in nearly every town across dozens of countries.
It doesn't matter. Personal liberty, freedom of speech (which implies freedom from compelled speech) and freedom of association (and even, arguably, property rights) are scale invariant. And everyone seems to have forgotten that those rights apply to the owners of sites and platforms as well.
I agree that the argument you’re making is flippant, but it was used by a lot of well-known people to support their argument of Facebook and Twitter censorship. What I find more interesting is that when that same argument is used in other situations, such a small businesses deciding to open during the lockdown, it is routinely down voted and shouted down.
>> It's a private company. They can do that if they want.
> What I find more interesting is that when that same argument is used in other situations, such a small businesses deciding to open during the lockdown, it is routinely down voted and shouted down.
The key concept is that it would be a violation of Facebook's First Amendment rights to forbid them from banning their users (i.e. force them to carry their messages). It would be compelled speech/compelled association.
Your example about businesses defying covid lockdowns is a completely different thing. Being a private company is not a license to do whatever you want: Facebook still has to comply with the law, as do those businesses.
If you're looking for something that looks like a contradiction, the one you're looking for is antidescrimination law: why can Facebook ban users of type X because it's a private company, but it's illegal for a wedding cake maker to refuse customers of type Y? If you're looking at it simply as a legalistic First Amendment thing, the situations look they should be the same. If they're not, it's because it's not a simple First Amendment thing, and other principles and context have to be balanced with First Amendment principles.
> Or maybe governments don't always follow the law. That's a possibility too.
It is, but I think it's way more common for people to be broadly ignorant of the law and legal concepts except a few little bits about some rights that they believe very strongly and rigidly.
It's sort of like software requirements: things usually seem simplest at the beginning, when you know the least. Then you learn more and the requirements get complicated match the actual needs. Then sometimes you get some cowboy who comes in later, makes a flash judgement on little understanding that things should be simpler, and then either breaks everything or re-discovers the lessons you already figured out.
Until the government begins pressuring them to suppress speech (like holding hearings and threatening to make laws). When that happens the First Amendment comes into play.
Some of the examples in the article seem like a completely acceptable reason for a ban. There's never truth nor value in saying "<all members of (gender|race)> exhibit <extremely bad trait>". Saying that sort of thing does nothing but increase divisiveness.
What is social accepted violence and social unacceptable violence depend on who the aggressor is and who the victim is. It is one of the reason why i suspect the far-right and far-left seems to use similar wording and aggressive speech when describing the other side. The more extremely culturally aligned they are to either side, the less they see the violence for what it is. What is worse, I often also see rationalization of that violence by perpetrator that their own violence is justified if it challenge status quo, if it stands up for a principle, if the other side is perceived by them as being more violent, with little regard to if the violence was needed compared to a non violent response.
I don't think anyone should be banned from saying stuff like that, but what they're essentially saying here is "it's okay when we do it". Free speech for me, but not for thee.
Exactly, I don't care if you are left wing or right wing, if you are extreme one or the other then it seems to usually be similar (often objectionable and not inclusive) behaviours with different view points.
A meme I like but never saw until recently, "But what if I told you a bird needs both wings to fly?"
It is interesting that when Facebook and Twitter are confronted over some censorship they will often talk about needing to be more transparent over and over and over and over...
> This is part of a long history of Facebook treating leftwing activists as if they were far-right extremists
When they are on the left, they are 'activists.' When they are on the right, they are 'extremists.'
> An organization which finds it so difficult to distinguish fascists from Black leftwing activists should not be trusted to make such decisions.
While I disagree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, as long as you agree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, I will not shed a tear when Facebook bans you for your political ideology.
It bewilders me that a reasonable, libertarian view like this is getting flagged on here. Some folks must be shills with nothing much better to do than defending the sv corporate echo chamber.
Even 10 years ago most techies were pretty hands off and fair minded.
People are far too quick to look at things through a lens of left/right at times when they really should be looking at them through a lens of institutional/outsider. Of course a successful institution of the status quo is going to take steps to preserve the status quo regardless of whether the outsider tends left, right or batshit insane.
Power is temporary but identity is forever. Those lenses exist simultaneously and as a result you get different forms of radicalism to address the institutional gap, even while these forms use similar means of applying influence.
It is indeed. I'm black and when I first saw people doing that shit I was like... What is this nonsense.
It went from pretty being a meme to being a part of "Black support" which is worthless virtue signalling at best, and devalues actual black support at worse.
You were probably "inciting violence" or engaging in "adult sexual exploitation". /s
I don't think the answer is to legally regulate free speech on social media platforms. I want online platforms to have the power to moderate. However, Facebook in particular has an awful moderation process. Their knee-jerk reactions are a consequence of a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
The rest of this is copy-paste from a previous post I made, explaining why I don't want full freedom of speech on social media:
Take a look at HN. HN mods do a brilliant job of moderating. We don't have 100% free speech here and the platform is better for it. The discussions here tend to be much higher quality than on similar platforms like Reddit. That's probably a big reason why you're here reading this comment thread.
However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.
Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I think the HN moderation strategy makes for a much better platform. I'd rather talk with a respectful person who I disagree with than a jerk with whom I agree.
> I don't think the answer is to legally regulate free speech on social media platforms. I want online platforms to have the power to moderate.
I'm very anti-regulation in general, but I think that regulation is absolutely needed regarding censorship of DMs on platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, and the like. Posts and groups are one thing, but they're also censoring people's private conversations.
There are entire domains that you can't even link your friends to via Messenger. This is a dangerous situation. Much of our society's only contact details for much of their social graph is via these censored platforms that can suspend you on a whim.
Regulation to enforce availability of data and contacts export/takeout after suspension would be good at the very least. Saying something the platform doesn't like shouldn't cut you off from your address book.
This fails spectacularly when the point of disagreement is one’s humanity, for example. I’m a lot less active here than I would be otherwise, and I know that’s the case for a lot of others who belong to groups that HN considers fair game. I largely consider it a hostile place to me and people like me, and because of this moderation attitude, it’s first mover dominance in certain areas is actively harmful. And no, I’m not going to expose myself by revealing by what aspects of my identity are regularly dehumanized on HN.
Social cooling is just as much a phenomena on HN. By its very nature, it’s invisible unless it affects you directly. HN loses plenty of voices it’s never aware of.
I get it. But I also don’t have much of a tolerance any more for dealing with abuse, and it’s not possible to be open about this stuff without also making yourself vulnerable to that abuse. I wish there was a solution to that, not least because I wish I could participate more frequently and more openly, but if there is a solution beyond moderation for this purpose I haven’t figured it out yet.
That's an option... but if the person behind the throwaway account still receives abuse, it doesn't matter that the abuse didn't come down on their main account. It's still abuse aimed at them as a person, and it still hurts just as much.
Be careful about assuming that a throwaway account guarantees anonymity. Based on what HN moderators have said in posts to users misusing throwaway accounts to violate the HN guidelines, they are able to link throwaway accounts to primary accounts. That necessarily implies if HN suffers a severe security breach, all throwaway accounts may be linkable to the main account which would reveal the email address on the main account, if present, and enable researching of the user's identity based on posts on the main account.
>Aren't you able to provide examples that you've seen happening to others in this site?
Because if not nobody knows what you're referring to, and you could just as well haven't made the comment in the first place.
Why the aggressive tone?
You could activate "showdead" in the settings and watch any thread with controversial/political topics yourself.
I wasn't aware of this before, but can fully believe its existence. Even things like Apple, Java, or .Net incite personal or anti-personal reactions--you can probably guess which are which.
Totally understand the desire to not tip off personal details. However, it would be nice to hear what you consider to be blind spots on HN. I have found discussions here to be far more professional, courteous, and productive than most any other forum. Are there examples of better discussion forums? If so, how are they better?
I have never seen anyone on HN questioning another person's humanity. That's pretty messed up if it has happened.
I understand why you wouldn't want to provide any additional details, but it's also hard to take your claims at face value given my own experience. Perhaps you could share examples which do not compromise your own identity?
If you bring up Trump in any positive capacity, you are downvoted, and sometimes your values are called into question, as if there is literally only way way to think about Trump.
One can lead a horse to the water but not make it drink it. After many a 'leading' it can become tiresome and a times pointless to have a discussion where the participants have strongly held incompatible beliefs.
So then it makes sense to disappear comments? Downvoting wouldn’t be bad if comments remained, but only a few downvotes net will bury a comment point. Make it 50 downvoted net at least.
Downvotes are not moderation, a censorship speech, or a statement anout the user's humanity. Votes are just a measure of popularity within a community.
Anyone can click on the timestamp link of a downvoted comment and get taken to a page where the text is fully readable. Yes it's an extra hop, but that's a small price to pay for an immune system.
I don't know. Seeing a greyed out post undeniably biases me against it, regardless of what the content actually is. It takes mental effort to give it fair consideration.
Not sure if you've done this analysis yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if downvoted posts are mostly unpopular opinions, and not necessarily incorrect facts or egregiously bad takes.
I'm not sure I understand, but it seems like you mean greying out fewer comments, i.e. restricting it only to those which are more heavily downvoted? Unless we added some other visual indicator, that would be the same as ignoring the first 1 or more downvotes. I'm not sure that's a good idea because there's a lot of signal in comments being at 0 points, -1, etc., given that they start out at 1.
Two things are true: (1) not all downvoted comments deserve that status; (2) most downvoted comments do deserve that status. #1 sucks, but #2 is really important. The benefit of displaying #2 outweighs the cost of #1, which is not to deny that cost.
Of course it would be vastly better to only have the #2 comments displaying as downvoted, but with a community mechanism like downvoting, there's unfortunately no way to have only the benefit and not the cost. Moderation can help, though (we'll often restore comments that are unfairly downvoted) and maybe there's a place for something like vouching to return a comment to a neutral state.
I'm not sure if -1 points is really a great signal. That could mean only two people disliked your post, and that kind of small buffer greatly disadvantages unpopular opinions. I would think a post that is really problematic would probably amass at least net 10 downvotes.
Do you take volume of total votes into consideration, e.g., do you treat a post with 2 downvotes the same as a post with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes? I would think a post with a sizable number of upvotes would be more likely to be an unpopular opinion rather than a really problematic post. Maybe the threshold for greying could be lowered for posts with a sizable number of upvotes.
Unfortunately I don't think those assumptions hold. It would be easier if they did, but a lot of comments (including bad ones) just don't get that much vote 'coverage'.
I will look at this more closely though, because it would be interesting if there were a noticeable difference: "do you treat a post with 2 downvotes the same as a post with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes". Thanks!
Not the OP you were responding too, but a lot of the threads on immigration will have those types of personal attacks I don't have a specific one but they usually devolves in people against immigration being called sociopaths.
I've seen this argument before and agree that some people do this. But often and sadly I think it's a case of both sides not understanding each other. Often one group has a moral code that excludes the others choices. Taken to an extreme this can be a problem. And if that person is a close relative it can be a problem but at some point you just have to be okay that some strangers in the internet think your political leanings, lifestyle choices, religious beliefs, natural tendencies, etc are wrong. There are probably things they believe that you think are wrong. But if we stop trying to be right all the time we can just find a way to live peacefully and cooperatively.
I'd urge you to reconsider. There are plenty of people here who don't agree with someone being dehumanized, no matter who they are. If it happens here, we want it to stop. We don't see much of that happening. But if it is happening and we're just blind to it, if someone doesn't tell us, then we can't fix it.
Now, we can't totally fix it, the way HN currently works. If I make a point denying your humanity, that post can be downvoted to death, flagged, and I can be banned. But the post is still there, and everyone with showdead on can still see it. So, depending on how sensitive you are to what was said, "fixing" it may not actually be fixing it.
You have your own reasons for deciding what you do. But I'd at least suggest that you give us some kind of hint, so that we can try to make HN better.
"HN" isn't a person or even a coherent group. It can't "consider" anything anything. If you mean that a subset of HN users post things as horrible as you're describing, that's no doubt true, as it is on any large, open internet forum. When the long tail meets the bottom of the barrel, it generates dreck. The vast majority of it gets downvoted and/or flagged and/or moderated and/or autokilled. Some still gets through, and we ask people to tell us about those cases so we can moderate them. We can't see everything that gets posted here.
That subset of users is not representative of the community, or even close to 10% of it. If I'm wrong about that I'm open to changing my mind, but that would require real data. People's generalizations about HN are unreliable. The unreliability is proportional to the passion and confidence of the pronouncement. Typically, someone has seen a few egregious cases (or even just one) and then makes a generalization from them. The pain of running into egregious comments is real and needs to be taken seriously (and I'm sorry that you don't feel that we do—that really sucks). But the generalization is a non sequitur.
It even used to be a sport on Twitter for awhile to find the most egregious HN comments that hadn't been moderated yet and then pass them around as examples of things the HN moderators "agree" with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But of course we don't. Anyone can look through the moderation comments and if they find even one example of us doing anything other than trying to get people to recognize and respect each other's humanity, I'd like to see it. We've written thousands of emails trying to do the same.
The assumption that we see everything that gets posted here is false (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), as is the assumption that there's any way to stop anyone from making an account and posting what they choose. It takes time for moderation mechanisms to kick in. That's the way an open forum is, and if you think about it, it's rather amazing that HN isn't dominated by such shit.
I don’t know if I’m reading this correctly, but it comes across to me at least as defensive, and is probably not going to encourage people who are already feeling vulnerable to come forward with specific evidence. I’m also not sure you’ve fully understood the complaint. I can’t speak for stonecraftwolf of course, so I can’t be sure about that. I suspect my own experience is similar though, because I’m hearing echoes of an experience I have here too.
The issue that I’ve experienced here isn’t, strictly speaking, a failure of moderation. It’s more an occasional failure of culture. For the most part discussions go very well here, and I see the hard work you do to make that happen. In fact if someone were to ask me to name the best and hardest-working moderators on the internet, you would come to mind first. There are, however, some topics where the tone of the whole discussion—not individual posts, but whole discussions—is toxic to the point where I have to take a HN breather. If you’d like, I can send you examples of these as I see them in the future.
It’s difficult to address this in a framework where the unit of moderation is an individual comment. A more significant challenge, and one that I think isn’t talked about nearly enough, is that the kind of toxicity I sometimes see here is of a subtle (but no less poisonous) sort. I suspect, in fact, that recognition of it might be difficult unless you’ve become attuned to it as a survival mechanism after experiencing it over and over throughout one’s life. I’m not necessarily saying “there’s no way for you to see it unless you already know it,” which would be tricky indeed—but I’m not ruling out the possibility either. In any case my point is that there is a holistic view that gets lost when we dive into the weeds of individual comments, and in my experience at least, the hurt happens at that holistic level.
I hope this is helpful, and does not feel accusatory; I have nothing to accuse you of, and I very much appreciate being able to work these issues out in good faith. Thanks again for all the hard work you do.
> As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.
Absolutely, and it’s an excellent principle! Notably, however, HN does restrict what types of stories can be submitted, which has much the same effect of limiting what "ideas can be presented" (particularly when combined with an expectation to stay on topic).
To me, the difference is that HN isn’t trying to be a one-stop destination for all of your communication, whereas Facebook absolutely is.
Which is to say, I agree that complete free speech on any individual website is impossible without it devolving into a hellscape, so the best way to support free speech on a societal level is to have a diversity of social networks, instead of a handful of major platforms.
It's a valid concern, but ultimately, a diversity of online spaces more closely matches the real world. The types of conversations which are acceptable at your workplace, your gym, your favorite bar, and your political party's local action committee will all be different, but there's enough cross-pollination that democracy seems to have always worked.
From where I'm standing, the rise of Facebook et al's recommendation algorithms seems to have been far more effective at creating echo chambers. And importantly, these algorithms only really work if they have a wealth of potential content to recommend—ie, if the social network is absolutely massive!
> As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say.
This is true and I've seen some extremely vile, reprehensible things said, but that went unmoderated because they were said politely (I've actually seen people responding to these vile things get banned because they weren't nearly that polite).
We don't know what's "vile" for you, and I'm sure you've seen people getting super offended over things that you consider essential discussions. Give us some details?
> is the fallacy that the truth is a compromise between two opposing positions.
...
> Vladimir Bukovsky maintained that the middle ground between the big lie of Soviet propaganda and the truth was itself a lie, and one should not be looking for a middle ground between information and disinformation.
You see it a lot on this site. People want to pretend to be reasonable, which is why we get things like you telling me that you don't know what I consider vile, as if I'm just being unreasonable and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Were this 20 years ago, arguing such an authority's point might have been reasonable. However, common values have been questioned to such an extreme extent, admitting that you don't know what someone considers vile isn't entirely unreasonable. There are people nowadays who argue that killing an entire race would have been a great idea, and others who claim that any procreative sexual intercourse is rape, without exception. In the end, you're probably still right, but the past 10 to 15 years have been a bitch for common ground.
While you aren't technically wrong, those opinions are nowhere near the mainstream. The Internet puts a magnifying glass to the most provoking people in the world and makes them seem common.
> we get things like you telling me that you don't know what I consider vile, as if I'm just being unreasonable and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Sorry, but nobody is psychic. You said you had seen some "extremely vile" things, and gave no examples. You were politely asked for some details. Nobody has said they don't believe you at all, in fact the very point that someone has asked you to provide examples rather implies that such things do occur, hence you being given the chance to explain what you, personally, mean by "extremely vile" in this case. Nobody claimed you were being unreasonable, nor was it inferred, AFAICT.
That seems pretty darn reasonable to me. It's certainly not how conversation would likely go on many other social platforms.
Unless examples are given here by yourself, nobody can even arrive at your claimed "truth is somewhere in the middle" point of view — your comment merely becomes throwaway. Which, on this site, generally isn't how things are done — unless of course you are being unreasonable about things (in which case the downvotes will fix things pretty quickly).
Edit: I feel this point from HN's "Guidelines" page (linked at the bottom of every page) is fairly relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." — the poster asking you for examples is doing this, your response: less so.
When people make grand claims about egregious moderation failures like this, they never supply links. That's because, nearly always, the reality of what happened tells quite a different story. I'd like to see what you're talking about, that is so vile and reprehensible, and I bet fair-minded HN readers would like to see that as well, so they can make up their own minds.
I never said it was a moderation failure, as I said it was politely given.
And I'm not providing links because I don't have them, these are things I've noted over the years as a lurker. There's so much back patting about the moderation on this site that I'm often miffed that no one sees the negative consequences. No system or approach is perfect, and the approach you guys take on this site has its share of downsides as well.
I once saw a person on this site argue all safety regulations should be gotten rid of and let the market decide the cost. The theory is that as more accidents happen the insurance will rise and that will self-correct by causing companies to enforce their own internal safety requirements.
The implication being it's ok for Bob to live the rest of his life without a leg because the company was willing to pay the insurance premium. That Bob's quality of life shouldn't factor into the equation.
The problem is that when someone has an opinion like this, they cannot be put down as strongly as they should. "In real life" if someone walks into a public space and announces they believe a 30 year old should be able to enter into a sexual relationship with a 10 year old, not only would there be a reaction, there would be a __very strong reaction__, and the strength of that reaction is a part of the policing we do amongst ourselves as a society.
But because of the values this site has, if someone were to express that opinion on these boards, the people getting banned would be the ones reacting strongly.
And _THAT_ is why I agreed with the other poster that you do, in fact, moderate based upon HOW someone says something while pointing out that it has its downsides.
The things that speaks in favor of HN moderation are several compared to other online platforms.
Actions are usually transparent and with a personal comment by the moderator.
There are no private space in HN.
Comments are focused on the text, while usernames and user identities are de-empathized.
HN moderation is handled consistently by the same persons, and there have been a open discussion with the community that seems to resulted in refocusing on tone rather than content.
> However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.
> Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I don't think there's as much to this observation as it seems. Firstly, HN is a different site than Facebook, which means it has a different userbase with different moderation problems. It's not like people are civilly and respectfully planning insurrections here, and if they were, the moderation would probably shift to stopping those "wrong or 'dangerous'" things. Also, the kinds of dis- and mis-information the the major social networks are fighting hasn't gotten much of a foothold on HN, and is often moderated away when it shows up.
Secondly, to your earlier point: HN has human moderators who can (more or less) keep up. While Facebook has human moderators too, there aren't enough of them to keep up, so it relies heavily on automation and crowdsourcing. They don't have the capacity to pay attention to "how you say it," even if they wanted to.
It's sort of like day care: if you have one teacher and ten students, the teacher is doing a good job if each student gets a lot of high-quality personalized attention; if you have one teacher and fifty students, the teacher is doing a good job if she manages to just barely keep them from hurting themselves.
The moderators do a great job but the users do not. If you post something that disagrees with the hive mind you’ll find it hidden at -4 and flagged really quickly.
I’m sorry to say but if the left is upset about Facebook censoring them, well, you kind of asked for it. I hate censorship and I don’t want them to censor anyone, but once you cheer the censoring of others you should be prepared to be censored yourself.
The thing is, Facebook is banning people who incite violence, share proven false narratives, and espouse extreme racism. If that ends up describing the entirety of "the right", then I don't think the problem is with Facebook.
I don't see anyone being banned for championing small government and lower taxes.
One of the more significant finding when dealing with conflicts between groups is the out-group homogeneity effect. The in-group is perceived as individuals with a diverse range of opinions and believes, while out-groups is generalized and seen as with no/minimal amount of diversity in opinions.
A result of this is that people who incite violence in the in-group is seen as a small minority of extreme voices, while same actions will define the entirety of the out-group. Non-violent behavior, say views about small government and lower taxes, can also be discarded since it does not fit the generalization.
Anything on the extreme of each "side" is by its very definition extreme.
To Americans I am quite left leaning. By Uk standards I'm probably just to the right of centre.
However, it _shouldn't_ matter what "side" you are on, if you're being a shit, you should be punished.
However that doesn't excuse doxxing, pileons, knowingly spreading fake news. We have to accept that we live in information bubbles unless we activly seek the edges. Its perfectly possible to deliberately ignore bad/illegal behaviour if we think it perpetrated by "our" side.
For example in the US, the majority of the "right" are sympathetic with the "insurrection" but don't like the rioting and looting. However they are not going to speak out because the people doing it are "one of our own"
In the same way that those who align more with the BLM movement will not publicly condemn the rioting and looting that happened in the summer, because it happened by "their side".
Rioting and looting is wrong, and more often than not causes more pain to the people the rioters are supposedly trying to stand up for. But, I have empathy for those who are rioting, its fucking fun, thrilling ans intoxicating
This is an op-ed article which has the world "leftwing" as a self-description of the author right in the headline. The author self-description in the article is "leftwing organizer". To speak of "the left" in this context seems fair.
I do agree tho that it's in many many other circumstances not helpful.
I think there's a world of difference between claiming "the left...cheer the censoring of others" and referring to "I, along with a number of other leftwing organizers."
How many people who hold left-wing views have to denounce the censoring of others to invalidate GP's comment? One? Five? In logcal terms, one ought to do it.
Now how many people would it take to invalidate "I, along with a number of other leftwing organizers?" I actually don't think that can be invalidated. It's much more specific than "the left" or "the right."
That's what I meant by an incredibly wide brush.
The article seems thoughtful and goes into quite a bit of detail on why the author claims that "far-left activists" and "far-right activists" are not the same, with examples. One can agree or disagree with the author's conclusions, but they're making a case with evidence, not just slapping a too-wide label out there.
Left and right might as well be called red and blue, banana and cherry, etc. To the common guy (me) there's no real meaning behind it other than "us" and "not us" (= them).
Thinking in these categories and acknowledging their existence is unhelpful to say the least and just highlights how broken the "debate platform" is (and it has crept into journalism as well).
It's a shitfest I stopped trying to comprehend some time ago and a legacy system of times past that overstayed its welcome. Where's the nuance? Where is the meta discussion?
Unfortunately, you will be mocked as an "enlightened centrist" and a "fence-sitter" for taking a non-partisan stance. Both sides will blame you of being an enabler for the opponent.
Did you read the article? Hell, just the headline. The author used the term first, on themselves. Get over it, you're not mad at the term. You're mad that the system you religiously worshipped doesn't actually care about you. Now, you're equal with those you were taught to hate.
Just open a history book to a random page and you'll see that the powers that be will always always always use whatever tools they have available to stay in power. Why did we hand the power to regulate speech over to powerful private monopolies? Were we sure that this time, unlike every other time in history, it would be used responsibly?
It's about time. This was bound to happen sooner or later. This realization that Big Social media is not a place for free thought or discussion.
We will revert back to the internet that was 15 years ago. Where if you wanted information you had to work for it, and if you wanted a good discussion you had to find it.
Facebook, Twitter is now TV. One way media spoon feeding its users.
Sub-cultures will grow stronger and this honeymoon phase with centralized social media is over. I'm glad.
I think there's also valuable side effects here. If you want to start your own community off of corporate sites, you'll have to learn a little about deploying websites, webhosting, maybe a bit of PHP. Maybe you'll learn about organizing and promotion. When you're forced to make your own thing, a lot of good can come from it.
This will certainly not be a mainstream approach, but I compare it to the DIY punk ethos of the 80's, specifically in the skateboarder culture. The for-profit skateparks of the 70's closed, so people had to build their own ramps, organize contests with zines, make their own music. This was all done while promoting others to build their own scene too.
It ended up revitalizing skateboarding, until it became corporate again, and waned. It's a constant cycle. I think in terms of internet communities, we currently find ourselves in the "most centralized and corporate" end; but its starting to turn.
> We will revert back to the internet that was 15 years ago.
How? What will make people—not people like us, who have eschewed Facebook for years, but those who still rely on it not just for connection to their friends and family, but for news and information—abandon Facebook, start questioning its neutrality as a platform, or generally change anything about how they have been behaving?
What you suggest will only happen if we force Facebook to change. And honestly, I'm not sure if there's a way to make Facebook change that would not leave it still massively prone to manipulation, echo chambers, and bubbles, even if the people in charge genuinely want to eliminate those things.
It's already happening. Remember what it was like 15 years ago? Technically minded people hosted message boards for small to medium sized special interest groups.
All that's changed now is we can federate between these "message boards".
>> Where if you wanted information you had to work for it, and if you wanted a good discussion you had to find it.
This is an important statement. One argument can be that most of the population do not have any interest in finding the truth. It is same in the age of social media, and was the same before. Social media just exacerbated the problem.
Facebook is a company. It has a community security/trust team. That team drives the community direction by some rules (manual or learned and automated through data). Banning the leftwing thinkers is wrong, unless they violate the guidelines.
As somebody who protested AGAINST neo-nazis but was constantly put in harm's way because antifa decided their best course of action was open violence against the police (while largely ignoring the actual neo-nazis that were present, curiously enough), and maybe burning some shit, with me in the middle of stone-throwing antifas and police, I welcome antifa going down in flames. To me, who had the displeasure of observing antifa in action again and again, they are immature violent hooligans looking for trouble wherever they can find it and not much else.
I know those thugs very well. Some are antifa, some are football fans, some are neonazis, yet they are all the same, thugs. But please, don't generalize this experience. There's a lot of anti-nazi activism (see, I avoid using the Trump-loaded term "antifa") which has a valid place in our society, maybe nowadays even more than years ago because somehow people are forgetting who were we fighting against 70 years ago.
I know there is a lot of "anti nazi"/"anti fascism"/"anti racsim"/"social justice" activism, I was part of some of it myself, as I said. ;) Besides participating and sometimes helping to organize counter-protests to nazi protests, I was e.g. active in the EXIT project[1], an organization with the aim to help people leave nazi orgs/structures/lifestyle and find back into a life without extremsism.
But the label "antifa" or "antifascist" is forever burned for me. This wasn't just some "bad eggs" or "misguided youth". I've never met a self-declared "antifa" person who wasn't either a violent asshole or supported violent assholery, and I've met quite a few.
They called themselves antifa for years before Trump heard of them. They have facebook groups, websites, stickers, and flags that use the word proudly. I don’t think you are familiar with them.
> But it is also struck at left wing organizations, seeming to accept Trump’s post-Charlottesville “both sides” moral equivalency with little thought.
This take needs to die in a fire.
If you're able to actually listen to what he said without "trump-hate" goggles on, his point was that emotions were running high on both sides, but there were good, well-meaning people on both sides. He even acknowledged that perhaps the statues should come down and that he didn't know what the right answer was.
That's an entirely reasonable thing to say or believe.
As a centrist, watching the left do crap like this is as bad as it was watching the right in the 90's going after gays in the military.
In the words of a single man, can't we all just get along?
I'm not sure that the way you worded it is really any different. Stating that there were good, well-meaning people in a crowd of hateful rascists after a woman was killed by a radical maniac is not a helpful statement, and it provides cover for what was, by most decent people's assessment, a despicable display of bigotry and hatred.
I also do think that commentators are WAY too quick to impart meaning to Trump's words in situations like this. After observing his actions and statements for 4 years, I'm quite confident that he doesn't think much while he speaks. Words just dribble out in stupid ways "stand back and stand by" comes to mind. Trump never learned to speak or think with any discipline. So it's like he follows a Markov chain of words -- I can't say the phrase you've asked me to say ("stand down") because that makes me look weak. However, "back" and "by" follow the word "stand" with high degrees of frequency, so let's just go from "stand" to "back", and then for extra measure (because saying lots of words makes me look smarter), let's try another phrase - "stand by". No real thought of the meaning behind that.
And that's one of the biggest points about this individual. Not only does he have a complete lack of empathy and a complete fixation on himself, he doesn't communicate with enough precision to provide real leadership. No wonder qanon has so much fun searching for hidden meaning in his words; it's effectively just word soup, which can lead to all kinds of interesting crazy conclusions.
> I'm not sure that the way you worded it is really any different. Stating that there were good, well-meaning people in a crowd of hateful rascists after a woman was killed by a radical maniac is not a helpful statement, and it provides cover for what was, by most decent people's assessment, a despicable display of bigotry and hatred.
Do you know what I find most frustrating about the abortion arguments between the left and the right?
If you truly truly believe life begins at conception, of course you believe it's immoral to murder the baby.
if you truly truly believe life does NOT begin at conception, of course you believe it's immoral to force a woman to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.
IOW, there are well-intentioned people on both sides. Does this make it ok for someone to bomb an abortion clinic? No, absolutely not, and the vast majority of pro-life people don't agree with that action, and should not be universally condemned for the actions of a few.
But lets look closer at what you said.
> Stating that there were good, well-meaning people in a group of __assholes who think they should be able to tell women what to do with their body__.
---
It is absolutely __FRUSTRATING__ watching people like you dive headfirst into contributing to the problems this country currently has.
It feels as if I have a super power for being able to converse with people from the left and the right equally. The opinions I see from the left about what the right is thinking, as if they would know when they can't even bring themselves to _SPEAK_ to the right.
What I'm saying here is that YOU are a part of the problem.
I really do not understand why people behave as if FB is an entity which belongs to the public. FB belongs (mostly) to Mark, his top execs, and his early investors. How can you possibly think that someone who owns something will always handle their property the way you wish?
This FB is the best FB there will ever be. If it was in the hands of the government, it is hard to see how it could have been better. If it was in the hands of the people, you cannot be sure it would have been better (see blockchain projects).
What will end up happening to these platforms will be what is happening with TV today: CNN - FOX.
People need to start to think 10,20 years from now, and begin to build new platforms for communication. Or just use group email.
> Carolyn Wysinger, an activist and high school teacher, posted that “White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them”. It was a reasonable response to Neeson’s remarks and the long history of white men murdering random Black men.
Uh, no it wasn't. You could try to pull the privilege + prejudice argument to claim it's not strictly “racist”, but it's still completely unreasonable racial stereotyping even if you accept that argument.
There's a large segment of the population that has been brainwashed to believe it though. Reddit's big change to their speech rules is a good example:
In the section entitled “Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability,” Reddit indicates that protection against harassment only protects “marginalized” groups.
Here is Reddit’s definition of marginalized groups:
“Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.”
It’s the next part that’s alarming:
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
Non-Hispanic Whites became the minority in California in 2001 and Reddit is based in this state. There are more non-Whites globally, making Whites a minority. If a White person was posting from Nigeria, would he be treated as a minority?
The amount of gleeful sarcasm in this thread is indicative of how incredibly divisive identity politics are even in places as relatively thoughtful as HN. It's a blanket accusation of political bias that is, itself, politically biased. The implication is that if somebody criticizes something an apparently left-wing entity does, they couldn't possible criticize something politically reversed, or vice versa, or the inverse: If somebody doesn't criticize something an apparently left-wing entity does, they couldn't possible fail to criticize something politically reversed. Further, in any politically opposite cases where opinions do differ, there is a blanket insistence that the two cases can only be treated identically, even if the other inevitable differences between the two cases make it reasonable to treat them differently.
It's perfectly possible to rationally think it's reasonable to ban Democrat A or Republican A for some infraction, but at the same time that it is unreasonable to ban Democrat B or Republican B for some other infraction. It's also perfectly possible to come to the conclusion that the platform did act with bias across the two cases, without necessitating hypocrisy to show support for one of the cases.
The subject of the discussion could be about the nature of the separate cases, whether each was reasonable, and, completely separately, whether there was evidence of bias handling the two cases. But no - all that seems to matter is that at some point person A was banned and there was any support for it, and at a later point person B of opposite political identity was banned and there was any opposition to it, and, regardless of what those two people even did, that somehow means that everybody is a hypocrite.
Edit: And yes, the article's author is also participating in a similar fallacy.
The same discussion goes for packing the courts, ending the filibuster, using Executive Orders... These things may get you what you want in the short term, but there's nothing that says they can't be employed equally well or better by someone you disagree with.
The Republicans have already used this strategy to great success for 40 years and they're mad because the Democrats (finally) figured it out and are playing the same game. Politics is about attaining and keeping power.
There's an absolute load of "see? now it's happening to you!" in this thread, and yet, even from a leftist point of view, the cases lamented in the article seem reasonable to me (barring cases where the article doesn't give any specifics).
The specific case of “White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them” isn't the greatest cause for a deletion and a ban (albeit temporary). Far worse things are said all the time without a peep. It seems like a case for a warning rather than a block.
I don't expect consistency. There's just too much to do. And for all I know the user already had at least one warning, in which case a (temporary) ban isn't unreasonable. It would shift the burden of proof to say that they're going after that kind of racism and not other kinds.
I'll note that I have said similar things myself. It obviously doesn't apply to every single white male (I am one myself), but I've seen it happen so much that I've said the same hyperbole. And if they wanted to warn me, then worse when I continued, I'd accept that -- as long as I had reason to think that they were also applying at least roughly similar standards to other people.
Maybe if it was "Some white men", but to make a blanket, generic statement like that about a single group defined by sex and race seems pretty clearly to be hate speech to me.
Just imagine another description prefixed by another color and another sex and think how that would go down.
I don't think racial identity is commutive. People seem to think it's commutive where if you swap the values the classification of racism remains the same, and I disagree with that. I don't fully understand it yet, but I think it's because our society on whole (in the United States) is sufficiently racist that it invalidates the premise of the substitution being commutive.
Where commutivity of addition is a + b = b + a.
Commuitivity of racism would be black person called a white person something bad for behavior x which is not equivalent to white person called black person something bad for same behavior x.
In this case "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" in response to Liam Neeson’s confession that he once roamed the streets looking for Black men to harm. Is not equivalent in a sense of the speaker being racist as "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them" in response to (I'm making up a fictional situation to find some equivalent scenario) where let's say Denzel Washington saying a confession that he once roamed the streets looking for White men to harm. Do they have racial overtones? Yes. Are they equivalent? Absolutely not. The world Liam Neeson lives in is a white person's world where the dominant culture is white and a black person has to be searched for. He was caught in his mind demonizing black people and being racist searching for them to harm for it. In this hypothetical Denzel Washington is clearly a minority, not only targeted and put upon by white people but also other minorities. To find a white person, he only has to step outside and walk a block at best.
Even the construction of this sentence seems so ridiculous: "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them". Black people have had to deal with racism and being the odd person out due to their race since they gained social awareness as a child. They've dealt with that BS long since being alive. White people like Liam Neeson "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" makes sense since he's encountered so few black people and he's built up this false belief about Black people from the racist media and his social group and he has to try to find black people to hurt.
A guy living in Japan who is not Japanese is greatly discriminated against, much worse relatively than black people in USA. However if said guy goes around in Japan beating up Japanese people I'd still say he was an insecure racist even though all institutions are against him.
In your example I would say his anger is reasonable even while it is being misdirected. I can empathize with that expression of anger even if it is ultimately misguided, counter productive, and ultimately probably feeding and perpetuating the racist stereo type.
While the Japanese person in Japan being racist against this non-Japanese person and seeking him out to beat him up deserves no such empathy. This person would be the more misguided of the two and is the racist initiator.
The two are simply not equivalent. I'm pointing out that people think it's an equivalence relation based upon commutivity of the races, and that is wrong.
Racists say "see they're being racist too" as if they are equivalent. They aren't.
Thanks, this general idea is inescapably true and constantly ignored in favor of trying to score points in shallow arguments. I just wanted to say that I still think the example is reasonably bannable, despite not being equivalent to a racially inverted example.
Using "some" is a pretty thin fig leaf. It may be technically correct, but it leaves an enormous amount of wiggle room such that the person can say "I meant a few" but people can hear "practically all". It might be sufficient to tip a moderation judgment from "racist" to "just barely not racist enough", but I don't think it substantially alters what was said.
And that's exactly what's being discussed here: what people hear, regardless of the language. That's precisely what "white fragility" is all about: the way some white men jump on every perceived slight. Because there are so many of us and we're so relatively powerful, people hear us when we say it, when less favored groups are dismissed.
So when you say "what if it were some other group", the fact is that we're not some other group. When minorities say "We demand equal rights" and white men say "Well, if you're getting more rights, then so should we", you can understand why people get grumpy.
There isn't an easy general solution. But in going about looking for a better one, it does help to listen to what people rather than just the surface meaning of the words. The surface meaning is often the least important.
Since you seem to have been inappropriately influenced by Robin DiAngelo’s White Guilt scam, I suggest you also get the perspective of a far more qualified black man and check out “White Guilt” by Shelby Steele.
By saying "all" you leave no room for a generically accused group to have members that can feel they are being unfairly assigned a behaviour they may not be conducting. This flames the fires and creates more us and them, because now some (in this case, white men) then might feel, well these are bad people, they don;t deserve xyz, because they continually accuse me in no uncertain terms of doing/being something that is not true. Quickest way to turn someone bad, is tell them they are bad.
Power. Power is in the eye of the beholder, what some people feel is power, the holder may feel is an entrapment or inescapable obligation. Unil recently, even now in many places, if I as a man valued to stay at home with my children and raise them day to day, I may well not have the "power" to enact such an outcome, but it only matters if the power to make that choice is important to you.
This raises the issues about rights. Many "rights" shouldn't be rights for anyone, they should be opportunities. Not a whole lot of things in life are really rights, you have to work for them, taking the opportunity. When these opportunities are denied or deliberately stacked against a section of society, thats when rights are trampled on.
Whic leads to my last point, just because a section of society was treated badly historically, doesn't gie them the right to be treat others as less to make up for it, that is not called equality, it is called revenge. And revenge only perpetuates the cycle by creating inequality, but now the roles are reversed and if thats how it's going to be an undamped isolation will ocur and no resuluinevery achieved.
Straight away he labeeling by salient differences has to sto to stop the grouping, which is the root of much of the problems.
Anyone who makes ridiculous statements like White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them should not be taken seriously by the intellectually honest. It’s an absurd statement and deserves excoriating - as would you, in my opinion, if, as you say, you made such an asinine and racist suggestion, especially as a white male who should know it’s demonstrably false (you haven’t seen it happen by the way, what you saw was a failure in your own understanding and the limits of your capabilities to empathize).
Yet it deserves neither a warning nor a ban. Even more ridiculous than the statement itself is the idea that someone needs to protect our eyes from seeing it, and that FB’s random content moderator contractor knows what is best for us and will be our protector. I am familiar with someone who used to do content moderation working for Cognizant in AZ. He seems plenty likable, but he is certainly not someone who knows what opinions will hurt me. And even if he were, I shouldn’t expect to be protected from hurt feelings when engaging controversial topics. That’s for me to navigate, and if it proves more than I can handle, it’s incredibly easy to block people.
Article’s first example is an outright display of racism. These people aren’t being banned for being left wing and it’s insulting to readers to think readers would believe this.
I’d love to see a content platform where you can only get downvoted if your content contains logical fallacies, or if your tone is hostile or disrespectful. Basically combining the civility of HN, the breadth of content of Medium, and the crowdsourced moderation and badges/point system/gamification of Stack Overflow. Something like the following:
-You can post any content you want.
-It must be civil in tone.
-Other users can tag your logical fallacies.
-If their tags are accurate, your article is downvoted.
-Downvotes only happen if your article contains logical fallacies or violate the civil discussion standards. You can’t downvote someone without tagging a logical fallacy.
-You explicitly cannot downvote or tag someone’s content simply because you disagree with it. You can try of course, but if your tags are found to be consistently inaccurate, you get shadow-banned or something.
I love how things like this are thrown out as if the shear terror of being accused of having proximity to someone with problematic opinions is supposed to make everyone recant immediately and beg for forgiveness.
So you breath air? Even though Hitler breathed air as he was murdering millions? And you're seriously willing to defend that? Monster.
Yes. As a jew with immediate family who died in the holocaust, I'm willing to defend free speech, even the free speech of ethno nationalists or whatever other boogeyman you wanna throw out
Admittedly, one of the platform's weaknesses is that its membership should include a sufficient number of people who are capable of debunking blatant ethnocentrism.
That's what I was getting at, manners and logical fallacies are surface-level problems, to have a successful community you need to actually engage with and (more importantly) moderate the content of people's posts, not just the tone.
Hey guys, we've encouraged Facebook to ban everyone we dislike but now they are banning the people we like and this needs to be framed as problematic, and specifically because of what team I am on.
While the author calls for regulation (which I would support for oligopolistic corporations), his main, repeated complaints throughout the article are about "tendency to see far-left and far-right activists as the same". Support our exalted faith and suppress their primitive superstition!
So they’re mad that Facebook did the right thing and created general rules for acceptable content and applied those rules equally, regardless of political background, race, colour and gender?
Facebook can’t be seen as a right or left media, that’s bad for business. They also can’t have groups and users that overly hostile towards other users, that’s also bad business. They are trying to be the Disney of social media.
In general Facebook isn’t great at moderating their platform, there’s to much content and their automated systems are rubbish, according to the human moderators. The result is that the moderation that do happen can seem extremely random, and some may feel like they are unfairly targetted.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThe party is always right.
Yes. People who attacked Trump thought Biden would reward them. But actually, he can’t risk that they just enjoy attacking any government regardless.
> In August 2020, Facebook expanded its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy”, aimed at removing the presence of far-right extremists from its website.
He doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, but now he thinks it’s wrong that it’s his views that are censored.
Now that you brought it up, it would make for a better discussion if you dialed down sarcasm.
Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Otherwise the conversation devolves into this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25852297
When you reach full monopoly on a market you have to be regulated.
FB has no right to dictate what can be said publicly. This is the role of governments.
I don't mean to be a pedant, but its literally as old as time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
All TV stations have an editorial guide, this defines what can and can't be said. Sure you can push at the boundaries, but stray to far and you'll be pulled off air.
All newspapers have editorial standards as well.
This is why there was such an explosion in 'zine culture in the late 80s early 90s.
censorship by private individuals has always been there, we forget that in the last 10 years we've been able to literally say and do anything we want on the internet with little to no repercussions.
>When you reach full monopoly on a market you have to be regulated.
Facebook doesn't have anything like "full monopoly" on any market. They don't have a monopoly on the internet, they don't have a monopoly on social media. They don't have a monopoly on human communication. They're not even the most popular social media platform among some demographics.
>FB has no right to dictate what can be said publicly.
They're not dictating what can be said publicly, they're dictating what can be said on their platform which, yes, they have the right to do.
If you are finding it difficult to reach people, the onus is on you to find a way to reach an audience, not on them to provide it for you.
> What I find more interesting is that when that same argument is used in other situations, such a small businesses deciding to open during the lockdown, it is routinely down voted and shouted down.
The key concept is that it would be a violation of Facebook's First Amendment rights to forbid them from banning their users (i.e. force them to carry their messages). It would be compelled speech/compelled association.
Your example about businesses defying covid lockdowns is a completely different thing. Being a private company is not a license to do whatever you want: Facebook still has to comply with the law, as do those businesses.
If you're looking for something that looks like a contradiction, the one you're looking for is antidescrimination law: why can Facebook ban users of type X because it's a private company, but it's illegal for a wedding cake maker to refuse customers of type Y? If you're looking at it simply as a legalistic First Amendment thing, the situations look they should be the same. If they're not, it's because it's not a simple First Amendment thing, and other principles and context have to be balanced with First Amendment principles.
Or maybe governments don't always follow the law. That's a possibility too.
It is, but I think it's way more common for people to be broadly ignorant of the law and legal concepts except a few little bits about some rights that they believe very strongly and rigidly.
It's sort of like software requirements: things usually seem simplest at the beginning, when you know the least. Then you learn more and the requirements get complicated match the actual needs. Then sometimes you get some cowboy who comes in later, makes a flash judgement on little understanding that things should be simpler, and then either breaks everything or re-discovers the lessons you already figured out.
A meme I like but never saw until recently, "But what if I told you a bird needs both wings to fly?"
When they are on the left, they are 'activists.' When they are on the right, they are 'extremists.'
> An organization which finds it so difficult to distinguish fascists from Black leftwing activists should not be trusted to make such decisions.
While I disagree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, as long as you agree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, I will not shed a tear when Facebook bans you for your political ideology.
Funny how only certain colors are capitalized.
It went from pretty being a meme to being a part of "Black support" which is worthless virtue signalling at best, and devalues actual black support at worse.
I don't think the answer is to legally regulate free speech on social media platforms. I want online platforms to have the power to moderate. However, Facebook in particular has an awful moderation process. Their knee-jerk reactions are a consequence of a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
The rest of this is copy-paste from a previous post I made, explaining why I don't want full freedom of speech on social media:
Take a look at HN. HN mods do a brilliant job of moderating. We don't have 100% free speech here and the platform is better for it. The discussions here tend to be much higher quality than on similar platforms like Reddit. That's probably a big reason why you're here reading this comment thread.
However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.
Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I think the HN moderation strategy makes for a much better platform. I'd rather talk with a respectful person who I disagree with than a jerk with whom I agree.
I'm very anti-regulation in general, but I think that regulation is absolutely needed regarding censorship of DMs on platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, and the like. Posts and groups are one thing, but they're also censoring people's private conversations.
There are entire domains that you can't even link your friends to via Messenger. This is a dangerous situation. Much of our society's only contact details for much of their social graph is via these censored platforms that can suspend you on a whim.
Regulation to enforce availability of data and contacts export/takeout after suspension would be good at the very least. Saying something the platform doesn't like shouldn't cut you off from your address book.
Social cooling is just as much a phenomena on HN. By its very nature, it’s invisible unless it affects you directly. HN loses plenty of voices it’s never aware of.
Because if not nobody knows what you're referring to, and you could just as well haven't made the comment in the first place.
Why the aggressive tone?
You could activate "showdead" in the settings and watch any thread with controversial/political topics yourself.
I understand why you wouldn't want to provide any additional details, but it's also hard to take your claims at face value given my own experience. Perhaps you could share examples which do not compromise your own identity?
After all, what's more human than having stupid opinions?
A caring human tries to change other people’s minds, instead of signaling that someone else should just go away.
Heathy disagreements and downvotes are hardly equivalent.
Not sure if you've done this analysis yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if downvoted posts are mostly unpopular opinions, and not necessarily incorrect facts or egregiously bad takes.
Two things are true: (1) not all downvoted comments deserve that status; (2) most downvoted comments do deserve that status. #1 sucks, but #2 is really important. The benefit of displaying #2 outweighs the cost of #1, which is not to deny that cost.
Of course it would be vastly better to only have the #2 comments displaying as downvoted, but with a community mechanism like downvoting, there's unfortunately no way to have only the benefit and not the cost. Moderation can help, though (we'll often restore comments that are unfairly downvoted) and maybe there's a place for something like vouching to return a comment to a neutral state.
I'm not sure if -1 points is really a great signal. That could mean only two people disliked your post, and that kind of small buffer greatly disadvantages unpopular opinions. I would think a post that is really problematic would probably amass at least net 10 downvotes.
Do you take volume of total votes into consideration, e.g., do you treat a post with 2 downvotes the same as a post with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes? I would think a post with a sizable number of upvotes would be more likely to be an unpopular opinion rather than a really problematic post. Maybe the threshold for greying could be lowered for posts with a sizable number of upvotes.
I will look at this more closely though, because it would be interesting if there were a noticeable difference: "do you treat a post with 2 downvotes the same as a post with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes". Thanks!
It's subtle and masked by the "politeness", that's the trick.
Now, we can't totally fix it, the way HN currently works. If I make a point denying your humanity, that post can be downvoted to death, flagged, and I can be banned. But the post is still there, and everyone with showdead on can still see it. So, depending on how sensitive you are to what was said, "fixing" it may not actually be fixing it.
You have your own reasons for deciding what you do. But I'd at least suggest that you give us some kind of hint, so that we can try to make HN better.
That subset of users is not representative of the community, or even close to 10% of it. If I'm wrong about that I'm open to changing my mind, but that would require real data. People's generalizations about HN are unreliable. The unreliability is proportional to the passion and confidence of the pronouncement. Typically, someone has seen a few egregious cases (or even just one) and then makes a generalization from them. The pain of running into egregious comments is real and needs to be taken seriously (and I'm sorry that you don't feel that we do—that really sucks). But the generalization is a non sequitur.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It even used to be a sport on Twitter for awhile to find the most egregious HN comments that hadn't been moderated yet and then pass them around as examples of things the HN moderators "agree" with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But of course we don't. Anyone can look through the moderation comments and if they find even one example of us doing anything other than trying to get people to recognize and respect each other's humanity, I'd like to see it. We've written thousands of emails trying to do the same.
The assumption that we see everything that gets posted here is false (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), as is the assumption that there's any way to stop anyone from making an account and posting what they choose. It takes time for moderation mechanisms to kick in. That's the way an open forum is, and if you think about it, it's rather amazing that HN isn't dominated by such shit.
The issue that I’ve experienced here isn’t, strictly speaking, a failure of moderation. It’s more an occasional failure of culture. For the most part discussions go very well here, and I see the hard work you do to make that happen. In fact if someone were to ask me to name the best and hardest-working moderators on the internet, you would come to mind first. There are, however, some topics where the tone of the whole discussion—not individual posts, but whole discussions—is toxic to the point where I have to take a HN breather. If you’d like, I can send you examples of these as I see them in the future.
It’s difficult to address this in a framework where the unit of moderation is an individual comment. A more significant challenge, and one that I think isn’t talked about nearly enough, is that the kind of toxicity I sometimes see here is of a subtle (but no less poisonous) sort. I suspect, in fact, that recognition of it might be difficult unless you’ve become attuned to it as a survival mechanism after experiencing it over and over throughout one’s life. I’m not necessarily saying “there’s no way for you to see it unless you already know it,” which would be tricky indeed—but I’m not ruling out the possibility either. In any case my point is that there is a holistic view that gets lost when we dive into the weeds of individual comments, and in my experience at least, the hurt happens at that holistic level.
I hope this is helpful, and does not feel accusatory; I have nothing to accuse you of, and I very much appreciate being able to work these issues out in good faith. Thanks again for all the hard work you do.
That would be great! And thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Absolutely, and it’s an excellent principle! Notably, however, HN does restrict what types of stories can be submitted, which has much the same effect of limiting what "ideas can be presented" (particularly when combined with an expectation to stay on topic).
To me, the difference is that HN isn’t trying to be a one-stop destination for all of your communication, whereas Facebook absolutely is.
Which is to say, I agree that complete free speech on any individual website is impossible without it devolving into a hellscape, so the best way to support free speech on a societal level is to have a diversity of social networks, instead of a handful of major platforms.
And we're failing at the diversity part.
Not making a case for Facebook, I just don't think we have a good solution to this yet.
From where I'm standing, the rise of Facebook et al's recommendation algorithms seems to have been far more effective at creating echo chambers. And importantly, these algorithms only really work if they have a wealth of potential content to recommend—ie, if the social network is absolutely massive!
This is true and I've seen some extremely vile, reprehensible things said, but that went unmoderated because they were said politely (I've actually seen people responding to these vile things get banned because they weren't nearly that polite).
What you're doing here is called Argument to Moderation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
> is the fallacy that the truth is a compromise between two opposing positions.
...
> Vladimir Bukovsky maintained that the middle ground between the big lie of Soviet propaganda and the truth was itself a lie, and one should not be looking for a middle ground between information and disinformation.
You see it a lot on this site. People want to pretend to be reasonable, which is why we get things like you telling me that you don't know what I consider vile, as if I'm just being unreasonable and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I am doing nothing of the sort.
Sorry, but nobody is psychic. You said you had seen some "extremely vile" things, and gave no examples. You were politely asked for some details. Nobody has said they don't believe you at all, in fact the very point that someone has asked you to provide examples rather implies that such things do occur, hence you being given the chance to explain what you, personally, mean by "extremely vile" in this case. Nobody claimed you were being unreasonable, nor was it inferred, AFAICT.
That seems pretty darn reasonable to me. It's certainly not how conversation would likely go on many other social platforms.
Unless examples are given here by yourself, nobody can even arrive at your claimed "truth is somewhere in the middle" point of view — your comment merely becomes throwaway. Which, on this site, generally isn't how things are done — unless of course you are being unreasonable about things (in which case the downvotes will fix things pretty quickly).
Edit: I feel this point from HN's "Guidelines" page (linked at the bottom of every page) is fairly relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." — the poster asking you for examples is doing this, your response: less so.
And I'm not providing links because I don't have them, these are things I've noted over the years as a lurker. There's so much back patting about the moderation on this site that I'm often miffed that no one sees the negative consequences. No system or approach is perfect, and the approach you guys take on this site has its share of downsides as well.
I once saw a person on this site argue all safety regulations should be gotten rid of and let the market decide the cost. The theory is that as more accidents happen the insurance will rise and that will self-correct by causing companies to enforce their own internal safety requirements.
The implication being it's ok for Bob to live the rest of his life without a leg because the company was willing to pay the insurance premium. That Bob's quality of life shouldn't factor into the equation.
The problem is that when someone has an opinion like this, they cannot be put down as strongly as they should. "In real life" if someone walks into a public space and announces they believe a 30 year old should be able to enter into a sexual relationship with a 10 year old, not only would there be a reaction, there would be a __very strong reaction__, and the strength of that reaction is a part of the policing we do amongst ourselves as a society.
But because of the values this site has, if someone were to express that opinion on these boards, the people getting banned would be the ones reacting strongly.
And _THAT_ is why I agreed with the other poster that you do, in fact, moderate based upon HOW someone says something while pointing out that it has its downsides.
Actions are usually transparent and with a personal comment by the moderator.
There are no private space in HN.
Comments are focused on the text, while usernames and user identities are de-empathized.
HN moderation is handled consistently by the same persons, and there have been a open discussion with the community that seems to resulted in refocusing on tone rather than content.
> Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I don't think there's as much to this observation as it seems. Firstly, HN is a different site than Facebook, which means it has a different userbase with different moderation problems. It's not like people are civilly and respectfully planning insurrections here, and if they were, the moderation would probably shift to stopping those "wrong or 'dangerous'" things. Also, the kinds of dis- and mis-information the the major social networks are fighting hasn't gotten much of a foothold on HN, and is often moderated away when it shows up.
Secondly, to your earlier point: HN has human moderators who can (more or less) keep up. While Facebook has human moderators too, there aren't enough of them to keep up, so it relies heavily on automation and crowdsourcing. They don't have the capacity to pay attention to "how you say it," even if they wanted to.
It's sort of like day care: if you have one teacher and ten students, the teacher is doing a good job if each student gets a lot of high-quality personalized attention; if you have one teacher and fifty students, the teacher is doing a good job if she manages to just barely keep them from hurting themselves.
'Facebook are banning "the right" and thats ok, but more worryingly they are banning people like me'
I don't see anyone being banned for championing small government and lower taxes.
A result of this is that people who incite violence in the in-group is seen as a small minority of extreme voices, while same actions will define the entirety of the out-group. Non-violent behavior, say views about small government and lower taxes, can also be discarded since it does not fit the generalization.
To Americans I am quite left leaning. By Uk standards I'm probably just to the right of centre.
However, it _shouldn't_ matter what "side" you are on, if you're being a shit, you should be punished.
However that doesn't excuse doxxing, pileons, knowingly spreading fake news. We have to accept that we live in information bubbles unless we activly seek the edges. Its perfectly possible to deliberately ignore bad/illegal behaviour if we think it perpetrated by "our" side.
For example in the US, the majority of the "right" are sympathetic with the "insurrection" but don't like the rioting and looting. However they are not going to speak out because the people doing it are "one of our own"
In the same way that those who align more with the BLM movement will not publicly condemn the rioting and looting that happened in the summer, because it happened by "their side".
Rioting and looting is wrong, and more often than not causes more pain to the people the rioters are supposedly trying to stand up for. But, I have empathy for those who are rioting, its fucking fun, thrilling ans intoxicating
The thing is, no, they’re not, and only someone not paying any attention could repeat this false claim.
I do agree tho that it's in many many other circumstances not helpful.
How many people who hold left-wing views have to denounce the censoring of others to invalidate GP's comment? One? Five? In logcal terms, one ought to do it.
Now how many people would it take to invalidate "I, along with a number of other leftwing organizers?" I actually don't think that can be invalidated. It's much more specific than "the left" or "the right."
That's what I meant by an incredibly wide brush.
The article seems thoughtful and goes into quite a bit of detail on why the author claims that "far-left activists" and "far-right activists" are not the same, with examples. One can agree or disagree with the author's conclusions, but they're making a case with evidence, not just slapping a too-wide label out there.
Thinking in these categories and acknowledging their existence is unhelpful to say the least and just highlights how broken the "debate platform" is (and it has crept into journalism as well).
It's a shitfest I stopped trying to comprehend some time ago and a legacy system of times past that overstayed its welcome. Where's the nuance? Where is the meta discussion?
There is no "the left". This is a shibboleth that you have created.
He did use the "the left" in a kind of shibboleth-y way, but I think you actually mean "straw man" here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Then they banned the nazis,
Then they banned the fascists,
Then they banned the free speech advocates,
Then they banned me, and the platform treated me like an unperson,
But I'm privileged enough to embarrass them into unbanning me.
I don't think we did. Social networks seized it by updating terms of use, privacy policies, and community guidelines.
We will revert back to the internet that was 15 years ago. Where if you wanted information you had to work for it, and if you wanted a good discussion you had to find it.
Facebook, Twitter is now TV. One way media spoon feeding its users.
Sub-cultures will grow stronger and this honeymoon phase with centralized social media is over. I'm glad.
This will certainly not be a mainstream approach, but I compare it to the DIY punk ethos of the 80's, specifically in the skateboarder culture. The for-profit skateparks of the 70's closed, so people had to build their own ramps, organize contests with zines, make their own music. This was all done while promoting others to build their own scene too.
It ended up revitalizing skateboarding, until it became corporate again, and waned. It's a constant cycle. I think in terms of internet communities, we currently find ourselves in the "most centralized and corporate" end; but its starting to turn.
How? What will make people—not people like us, who have eschewed Facebook for years, but those who still rely on it not just for connection to their friends and family, but for news and information—abandon Facebook, start questioning its neutrality as a platform, or generally change anything about how they have been behaving?
What you suggest will only happen if we force Facebook to change. And honestly, I'm not sure if there's a way to make Facebook change that would not leave it still massively prone to manipulation, echo chambers, and bubbles, even if the people in charge genuinely want to eliminate those things.
All that's changed now is we can federate between these "message boards".
This is an important statement. One argument can be that most of the population do not have any interest in finding the truth. It is same in the age of social media, and was the same before. Social media just exacerbated the problem.
Facebook is a company. It has a community security/trust team. That team drives the community direction by some rules (manual or learned and automated through data). Banning the leftwing thinkers is wrong, unless they violate the guidelines.
World War 3 seems pretty near with those extreme swifts to the extreme right, and economic downfall of the west.
But the label "antifa" or "antifascist" is forever burned for me. This wasn't just some "bad eggs" or "misguided youth". I've never met a self-declared "antifa" person who wasn't either a violent asshole or supported violent assholery, and I've met quite a few.
[1] https://www.exit-deutschland.de/
>70 years ago
Who were you fighting in 1951? ;)
By the way, the Sturmabteilung (SA) was founded as a reaction to communist street terror (Roter Frontkämpferbund). Will history repeat again?
This take needs to die in a fire.
If you're able to actually listen to what he said without "trump-hate" goggles on, his point was that emotions were running high on both sides, but there were good, well-meaning people on both sides. He even acknowledged that perhaps the statues should come down and that he didn't know what the right answer was.
That's an entirely reasonable thing to say or believe.
As a centrist, watching the left do crap like this is as bad as it was watching the right in the 90's going after gays in the military.
In the words of a single man, can't we all just get along?
I also do think that commentators are WAY too quick to impart meaning to Trump's words in situations like this. After observing his actions and statements for 4 years, I'm quite confident that he doesn't think much while he speaks. Words just dribble out in stupid ways "stand back and stand by" comes to mind. Trump never learned to speak or think with any discipline. So it's like he follows a Markov chain of words -- I can't say the phrase you've asked me to say ("stand down") because that makes me look weak. However, "back" and "by" follow the word "stand" with high degrees of frequency, so let's just go from "stand" to "back", and then for extra measure (because saying lots of words makes me look smarter), let's try another phrase - "stand by". No real thought of the meaning behind that.
And that's one of the biggest points about this individual. Not only does he have a complete lack of empathy and a complete fixation on himself, he doesn't communicate with enough precision to provide real leadership. No wonder qanon has so much fun searching for hidden meaning in his words; it's effectively just word soup, which can lead to all kinds of interesting crazy conclusions.
Do you know what I find most frustrating about the abortion arguments between the left and the right?
If you truly truly believe life begins at conception, of course you believe it's immoral to murder the baby.
if you truly truly believe life does NOT begin at conception, of course you believe it's immoral to force a woman to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.
IOW, there are well-intentioned people on both sides. Does this make it ok for someone to bomb an abortion clinic? No, absolutely not, and the vast majority of pro-life people don't agree with that action, and should not be universally condemned for the actions of a few.
But lets look closer at what you said.
> Stating that there were good, well-meaning people in a group of __assholes who think they should be able to tell women what to do with their body__.
---
It is absolutely __FRUSTRATING__ watching people like you dive headfirst into contributing to the problems this country currently has.
It feels as if I have a super power for being able to converse with people from the left and the right equally. The opinions I see from the left about what the right is thinking, as if they would know when they can't even bring themselves to _SPEAK_ to the right.
What I'm saying here is that YOU are a part of the problem.
This FB is the best FB there will ever be. If it was in the hands of the government, it is hard to see how it could have been better. If it was in the hands of the people, you cannot be sure it would have been better (see blockchain projects).
What will end up happening to these platforms will be what is happening with TV today: CNN - FOX.
People need to start to think 10,20 years from now, and begin to build new platforms for communication. Or just use group email.
Uh, no it wasn't. You could try to pull the privilege + prejudice argument to claim it's not strictly “racist”, but it's still completely unreasonable racial stereotyping even if you accept that argument.
In the section entitled “Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability,” Reddit indicates that protection against harassment only protects “marginalized” groups.
Here is Reddit’s definition of marginalized groups:
“Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.”
It’s the next part that’s alarming:
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
It's perfectly possible to rationally think it's reasonable to ban Democrat A or Republican A for some infraction, but at the same time that it is unreasonable to ban Democrat B or Republican B for some other infraction. It's also perfectly possible to come to the conclusion that the platform did act with bias across the two cases, without necessitating hypocrisy to show support for one of the cases.
The subject of the discussion could be about the nature of the separate cases, whether each was reasonable, and, completely separately, whether there was evidence of bias handling the two cases. But no - all that seems to matter is that at some point person A was banned and there was any support for it, and at a later point person B of opposite political identity was banned and there was any opposition to it, and, regardless of what those two people even did, that somehow means that everybody is a hypocrite.
Edit: And yes, the article's author is also participating in a similar fallacy.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
I don't expect consistency. There's just too much to do. And for all I know the user already had at least one warning, in which case a (temporary) ban isn't unreasonable. It would shift the burden of proof to say that they're going after that kind of racism and not other kinds.
I'll note that I have said similar things myself. It obviously doesn't apply to every single white male (I am one myself), but I've seen it happen so much that I've said the same hyperbole. And if they wanted to warn me, then worse when I continued, I'd accept that -- as long as I had reason to think that they were also applying at least roughly similar standards to other people.
Just imagine another description prefixed by another color and another sex and think how that would go down.
Where commutivity of addition is a + b = b + a.
Commuitivity of racism would be black person called a white person something bad for behavior x which is not equivalent to white person called black person something bad for same behavior x.
In this case "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" in response to Liam Neeson’s confession that he once roamed the streets looking for Black men to harm. Is not equivalent in a sense of the speaker being racist as "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them" in response to (I'm making up a fictional situation to find some equivalent scenario) where let's say Denzel Washington saying a confession that he once roamed the streets looking for White men to harm. Do they have racial overtones? Yes. Are they equivalent? Absolutely not. The world Liam Neeson lives in is a white person's world where the dominant culture is white and a black person has to be searched for. He was caught in his mind demonizing black people and being racist searching for them to harm for it. In this hypothetical Denzel Washington is clearly a minority, not only targeted and put upon by white people but also other minorities. To find a white person, he only has to step outside and walk a block at best.
Even the construction of this sentence seems so ridiculous: "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them". Black people have had to deal with racism and being the odd person out due to their race since they gained social awareness as a child. They've dealt with that BS long since being alive. White people like Liam Neeson "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" makes sense since he's encountered so few black people and he's built up this false belief about Black people from the racist media and his social group and he has to try to find black people to hurt.
:%s/white/mid_white/g :%s/black/white/g :%s/mid_white/black/g
is not valid.
While the Japanese person in Japan being racist against this non-Japanese person and seeking him out to beat him up deserves no such empathy. This person would be the more misguided of the two and is the racist initiator.
The two are simply not equivalent. I'm pointing out that people think it's an equivalence relation based upon commutivity of the races, and that is wrong.
Racists say "see they're being racist too" as if they are equivalent. They aren't.
And that's exactly what's being discussed here: what people hear, regardless of the language. That's precisely what "white fragility" is all about: the way some white men jump on every perceived slight. Because there are so many of us and we're so relatively powerful, people hear us when we say it, when less favored groups are dismissed.
So when you say "what if it were some other group", the fact is that we're not some other group. When minorities say "We demand equal rights" and white men say "Well, if you're getting more rights, then so should we", you can understand why people get grumpy.
There isn't an easy general solution. But in going about looking for a better one, it does help to listen to what people rather than just the surface meaning of the words. The surface meaning is often the least important.
By saying "all" you leave no room for a generically accused group to have members that can feel they are being unfairly assigned a behaviour they may not be conducting. This flames the fires and creates more us and them, because now some (in this case, white men) then might feel, well these are bad people, they don;t deserve xyz, because they continually accuse me in no uncertain terms of doing/being something that is not true. Quickest way to turn someone bad, is tell them they are bad.
Power. Power is in the eye of the beholder, what some people feel is power, the holder may feel is an entrapment or inescapable obligation. Unil recently, even now in many places, if I as a man valued to stay at home with my children and raise them day to day, I may well not have the "power" to enact such an outcome, but it only matters if the power to make that choice is important to you.
This raises the issues about rights. Many "rights" shouldn't be rights for anyone, they should be opportunities. Not a whole lot of things in life are really rights, you have to work for them, taking the opportunity. When these opportunities are denied or deliberately stacked against a section of society, thats when rights are trampled on.
Whic leads to my last point, just because a section of society was treated badly historically, doesn't gie them the right to be treat others as less to make up for it, that is not called equality, it is called revenge. And revenge only perpetuates the cycle by creating inequality, but now the roles are reversed and if thats how it's going to be an undamped isolation will ocur and no resuluinevery achieved.
Straight away he labeeling by salient differences has to sto to stop the grouping, which is the root of much of the problems.
Yet it deserves neither a warning nor a ban. Even more ridiculous than the statement itself is the idea that someone needs to protect our eyes from seeing it, and that FB’s random content moderator contractor knows what is best for us and will be our protector. I am familiar with someone who used to do content moderation working for Cognizant in AZ. He seems plenty likable, but he is certainly not someone who knows what opinions will hurt me. And even if he were, I shouldn’t expect to be protected from hurt feelings when engaging controversial topics. That’s for me to navigate, and if it proves more than I can handle, it’s incredibly easy to block people.
-You can post any content you want.
-It must be civil in tone.
-Other users can tag your logical fallacies.
-If their tags are accurate, your article is downvoted.
-Downvotes only happen if your article contains logical fallacies or violate the civil discussion standards. You can’t downvote someone without tagging a logical fallacy.
-You explicitly cannot downvote or tag someone’s content simply because you disagree with it. You can try of course, but if your tags are found to be consistently inaccurate, you get shadow-banned or something.
So you breath air? Even though Hitler breathed air as he was murdering millions? And you're seriously willing to defend that? Monster.
Yes. As a jew with immediate family who died in the holocaust, I'm willing to defend free speech, even the free speech of ethno nationalists or whatever other boogeyman you wanna throw out
Hey guys, we've encouraged Facebook to ban everyone we dislike but now they are banning the people we like and this needs to be framed as problematic, and specifically because of what team I am on.
its those same people who cried for blanket deplatforming of anybody left of Josef Stalin
and now when that same tool is used against them,its too late
its like the history of authoritariansm repeats itself
Facebook can’t be seen as a right or left media, that’s bad for business. They also can’t have groups and users that overly hostile towards other users, that’s also bad business. They are trying to be the Disney of social media.
In general Facebook isn’t great at moderating their platform, there’s to much content and their automated systems are rubbish, according to the human moderators. The result is that the moderation that do happen can seem extremely random, and some may feel like they are unfairly targetted.