As one example of how to slow a story: back when Wikileaks was first really trending, Facebook would sometimes just take a really long time to submit a post, or simply error out, if you tried to post a URL from Wikileaks.
Note that the link is to an article on HN, not flagged, and the comments pretty clearly debunk the article's claims. TLDR, author wrote some clickbait headlines and used gpt3 to fill in the articles, with an unspecified amount of editing, then some of them got onto the front page of HN and he wrote an article about that.
I assumed it was worthy of discussion given the whole censorship debate and concepts of censorship like AI moderation or misinformation or disinformation.
There are occasions when submissions are entirely removed and don't even retain the title or URL. I know this because I use hckrnews.com as my HN front page
Maybe the Streisand effect is imaginary. Ie you don't know how many stories are successfully suppressed. Just bc barbara streisand bungled concealing something, doesn't mean something as sophisticated as fb, decades later, is as inept. Of course I'd like to think the Streisand effect is real, but I don't think we have any data.
> Is it possible that Facebook is a big enough share of the internet that they can block the Streisand Effect? My money is on "no".
The co-ordinated efforts of a small number of corporate actors probably is. We live in a gov-valley-sov-corp media ecology with fairly sophisticated mechanisms of message control. Maybe the old netheads were wrong about streisand effect - maybe that was a temporary material condition.
On Facebook, you now can't post the link to this New York Post article... FB will also prevent you from posting the Newsweek article which describes how the platform is blocking the New York Post article."
And amazingly, there are Facebook employees on HN all the time who can't understand why people hate Facebook.
I recently spent time with a couple of relatives who only get news from Facebook. I suspect there are millions of other people who do the same. (Because it's free and if it's on the internet, it must be true!)
This illustrates that they only know about the things that Facebook wants them to know.
But that isn't the reason for most of the Facebook hate, is it? I thought it was more "I just want my cousin's baby pictures, and you're spamming my feed with outrage porn." The people who actually want to use Facebook for news at all know the dumpster-fire they're going to get.
This is completely outrageous. It's clearly illegal in my country per Norwegian Constitution §100, and I suspect it's illegal in quite a few other European countries too, wherever they have a working defence for freedom of speech, and not least presumably private conversations. (Because it's not so private anymore once third parties interfere in what you're allowed to share among grown ups.)
Of all the ways Facebook restricts speech on its platform this one is pretty low on the list in my opinion. Seems like that particular article has some content that violates their doxxing policy (whatever that is). Other articles about the same topic can be shared including from Fox.
Liberal News Media can post anything they like. NYPost is on Facebook's scan-list after the Hunter Biden reveals and any critical news will be introspected and blocked.
We had BLM protests in my city. I’m all for the message behind it, but they smashed up mine and my husbands car windows. Should have taken advantage of the lax work from home policy and should have stayed home I guess? I’m no fan of the actual “organization” or the people behind it though, and it’s sad FB is actively censuring information.
Hi Winston, I want to know something: when cops murder somebody do you make a comment about it on hn or social media or anywhere, or do you only make comments when car windows get smashed?
I am completely against BLM and I am also completely against public police - and comment on both issues.
I'm against public police because they do a terrible job (in a lot of ways, from racing to just being incompetent, to persecuting victimless crimes) and I wish we had private police.
The only positive thing that could have come out of BLM was a discussion on this topic, instead they completely lacked the philosophical and political skills to do something about this.
Defunding the police without having an alternative was obviously a terrible idea and it wrecked havoc wherever it was implemented.
I'm against BLM because they damaged and stole people's property for no reason, without condemning the actions of their violent members.
> Hopefully this caused you to do more research on the message.
Well, they've gone underground with many of their goals due to public outcry. You'll have to use archive.org to see their true goals for our society. They've pulled most of them off their website.
What research do I need to do? We paid to fix one of the vehicles out of pocket but had to file an insurance claim on the other, and our premiums went up because every window was smashed, including one of the mirrors.
This is a bad faith response, and I’m going to assume you’re a troll and not engage any further. Good luck!
All the righteousness of "self defense" goes out the window when you start casually throwing around things like "make a colander out of worthless idiot".
Self-defense is important, and I'm so sick and tired of seeing people only bring it up when their own internal bloodlust flares up.
If you sick and tired, go talk to a doctor and take a rest.
You either can protect yourself or not. Legal ability of citizens to protect themselves against worthless idiots is important part of keeping our streets and cities clean.
I wish same right will be given to business owners.
Then all these self-righteous corrupted criminal movements of "almost peaceful protesters" will cease to exist.
If you are in a car and are attack you have the same self defense rights as if you were at your house. Something similar happened at a BLM protest in texas with predictable results.
So you could conveniently drive around in a bubble of ‘right to self defense’
This guy you’re referencing here had a violent past and it’s possible that he was looking for confrontation. Believe what you may but a young man is no longer with us. I don’t buy this self defense blanket
>So you could conveniently drive around in a bubble of ‘right to self defense’
Yes that is how self defense works.
The driver was an Uber driver who made a wrong turn and was mobbed by people, one of who pulled an ak-47 and pointed at him.
In most states you are allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to yourself or another.
Situations like this are exactly what these laws are written for.
Doesn't matter how many priors you have. Even here in Norway - where you're barely allowed to look at a gun - if some random person points an AK47 at you, then you're allowed to defend yourself with a "reasonable response". Tell me, what do you consider a "reasonable response" to being threatened with an AK47? Yeah, that's what I thought!
Hell, it doesn't even matter if you're in a car or not. Or would you be ok with someone randomly pointing an AK47 at you? Would you refrain from using deadly force against someone like that, just because you had priors?
There is no evidence pointing the victim pointed the gun at the suspect. At the moment you choose to take their word which indicates your bias. I lean on the victim’s side though I respect your right to believe what you want.
> At the moment you choose to take their word which indicates your bias.
No, not really. I'm talking about principles.
If a guy acts threatening towards you, then you're allowed to defend yourself.
If a guy holds a gun, and throws aggressive slurs at you while approaching, do you agree that it's a really threatening thing to do? Would you wait for the obviously threatening guy to raise his gun, or just shoot him before he ever gets to that point?
> There is no evidence pointing the victim pointed the gun at the suspect.
Is there evidence that he didn't?
Honestly, does it even matter? When some guy starts acting threatening while holding a gun, are you going to wait until he points it at you before defending yourself? Cuz you won't get a second chance, mate. You either make him a "victim" of your right to self defene, or you die. I'd rather survive to spend some time in jail, or die because of poorly thought out ideas about victimhood.
If you reasonably believe it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to yourself or another.
Killing some random grandma for showing you middle finger does not really qualify.
However killing threatening idiot armed with something and facing you is totally different. To note - if idiot hits you and then runs away - sending bullet to catch him is not a good idea and not going to work (unfortunately).
On a final note - in a state with good CCW laws people typically are more polite and well behaving.
Flipping a bird to random asshole might backfire and it won't matter to you whether he knows the laws or not.
Laws vary between areas but the general approach is that you can only respond to force with equal force. It's obviously more complex than that but that's what most laws are based on.
Nobody disagree with the message: of course, all lives matter.
Everyone is also fine with the peaceful protesting (I mean actual peaceful protesting, not CNN's meaning of peaceful, which already became a meme).
Whoever seek to loot, destroy and coerce people into stupid acts needs to be condemned. BLM leaders didn't condemn the violence, which make the BLM movement just a bunch of terrorists, same as Antifa.
It doesn't matter how cute or righteous the name of your organisation, actions speak louder.
Many disagree with the message - it’s an explicitly Marxist organisation, and they want more “alternative families” which will obviously be single mothers with multiple baby daddies in the real world, rather than families of a man and woman living in monogamy raising the children who are the product of their love. Being raised without both the masculine and feminine creates inner incompleteness. The result of BLM is anti white and anti family, which means I am their enemy.
That's just a politicisation of the message to create further division among people who are not racist. Same thing as calling people nazi (so you can feel entitled to punch them).
I think that philosophically most people agree that all lives matter and behave accordingly. Who doesn't is definitely a problem, albeit they're a minority.
> Nobody disagree with the message: of course, all lives matter.
People do, in fact, disagree with the message, both on the level of the slogan, and on the level of the substance (which is not merely “Black lives matter at all”, but “Black lives matter much more than thet are treated as mattering by status-quo systems, necessitating urgent and immediate reform.”) Both the “All Lives Matter” as a dismissive generic, and the “Blue Lives Matter” inversion of the argument on who is undervalued, at least in the police vs. Black context which is the most common focal event of BLM protests, reflect.
I mean, some Republicans in Congress just founded a fairly overtly White nationalist caucus, which they wouldn’t do if they weren’t secure in the idea that White nationalism was a winning position with their base and donors. White racism is deeply ingrained in American society and institutions, and plenty of peple see that as a feature not a bug, and plenty more see it as a non-urgent concern that doesn’t touch their interest even though it is abstractly suboptimal.
> they smashed up mine and my husbands car windows
Who are "they"? I'm serious in this question.
Do you have the idea that these demonstrations are somehow carefully organized and that BLM upper management gave the instructions to break your windows specifically?
It is not the case.
The police kill some Black American in some particularly awful or gratuitous way.
It enrages a lot of people, as you would expect.
Many angry people take to the streets. They are not organized, for the most part. The vast majority are completely peaceful. Some of them aren't as is always the case.
Some of them hold signs saying, "Black Lives Matter".
Someone broke your window during these demonstrations. If I had to bet, it would be some young, angry person. Black Lives Matter did not make this happen, and if they didn't exist, people would still take to the streets when one of their own is murdered publicly by the authorities.
---
There is no "they" there. I recommend a broader and more nuanced view of the situation.
“They” is BLM. These people held BLM signs. And I never heard or saw any BLM leader come out and condemn these terrorists. You know it’s really interesting that you post these mental gymnastics to shift the blame away from the criminals, trying to tell me, the victim, that I’m in the wrong.
>A Facebook spokesperson told Newsweek, "This content was removed for violating our privacy and personal information policy." The policy forbids articles that share details that could identify a person's financial and residential information, thus violating their privacy rights.
That seems like a pretty flimsy excuse given that I see stories about individuals of public interest buying expensive property on Facebook all the time. Just one example, Thiel buying property in Miami.
The identity of house buyers is a matter of public record. Not only is it searchable in multiple state databases (tax, real estate plats) but sale information including buyer and seller is typically published in the newspaper: https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/sc-cons-0903-hous...
> The information about your home purchase and the terms and conditions of your mortgage loan are recorded among the land records in the jurisdiction where the property is located. These documents are public. In most states, you do not even have to go down to the local recorder of deeds office. You can search online from your living room and get all of the information that is published in your newspaper.
Yeah, generally you have what’s called an Illinois Land Trust. I think every state but Louisiana now allows them.
The public record will say that the owner is “Trust #541341324132 with XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office”
If you want to know the real owner (“beneficiary”), you go to court and present the reasoning for wanting to know. If it’s a valid reason, the court will issue an order that you take over to XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office and they’ll give you that information.
Is sharing unusual real estate transactions without the actual address doxxing? I wouldn’t think so. This allows the dissemination of information without triggering Facebook’s inconsistent application of their own rules, and the public can refer directly to the canonical real estate ownership ledger (county records).
No, doxxing is the release of private information. That's the universally understood meaning of the term, and the only useful one. If you want to redefine the term to pertain to public information, then the term is no longer useful. It's just "displaying public information" at that point.
> canonical dox is posting someone’s name and address
Posting a pseudonymous person’s name and address divulges private information: the real person behind the pseudonym. Posting a public official’s name and address isn’t doxxing.
In exactly what way is information available in public government databases considered private. Please be specific.
Regardless of your definition of public, the word doxxing has never covered it. We have plenty of other language to refer to the sharing of publicly available information. The word doxxing was coined to give a name to a type of invasion of privacy that came to prominence with the rise of the Internet. If you want doxxing to just mean gossip, then your word no longer has a useful and distinct meaning.
Your consent is irrelevant here. The information is still publicly available to anyone who wants to look.
You can make the case that this data should be private, and I might agree, but that doesn't change the fact that it is currently public, hence there is nothing to be "revealed" or "doxxed". The information is already out there, in public, easy to find.
‘While doxers sometimes use hacking or deception to uncover personal details about their targets, contrary to popular belief “most of the info is public,” according to one researcher who has spent years studying and participating in the practice of doxing.’ — https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dox-doxing-protection-how-to/
The vast majority of doxxing does not require unauthorized access, social engineering or betrayal by an affiliated person. Instead, it’s almost always connecting dots between openly available bits of information and then packaging that information so as to direct and simplify harassment.
I think there are multiple social media sites that consider giving addresses and personal information to be ‘doxxing’ regardless of whether or not the info was found in public databases. Twitter, Wikipedia and Reddit being examples.
"Doxxing is where a user publishes private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent." [1]
Twitter's:
"Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules." [2]
And Wikipedia's:
"Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually through the Internet" [3]
No, those aren't the same thing at all, and this is made obvious by the examples they give on that page.
"Identifying information" refers to revealing the true identity of a pseudonymous user on the site (e.g., violentacrez), or a person who has no previous association with the site (e.g., Sunil Tripathi). In these cases the perpetrators used information that was known only to them, or that the "public" had no easy access to, or that the "public" didn't even know existed until the perpetrators brought it to their attention.
> The identity of house buyers is a matter of public record.
That…has no bearing on whether sharing it violates Facebook policy on “privacy and personal information”. What would have a bearing would be citing the language of the policy and showing how the action was inconsistent with it, and I suspect that is not happening because the action is, in fact, consistent with the policy.
It's difficult to see this as anything other than a selectively enforced policy, which seems to be applied in a very lop-sided politically-motivated way.
Whether it's a policy of Facebook's or not is completely irrelevant. If they do not enforce this policy consistently, it opens them to accusations of political bias... which is what we have here.
> It's difficult to see this as anything other than a selectively enforced policy
I have seen no presentation of acts similarly situated with respect to the policy which have been treated differently. What is the basis for the claim of selectivity?
Yes, facebook is known for its strong stances regarding "privacy and personal information"
What's glaring is that there's not even a veneer of consistency in this decision.
Will they now be going back and censoring all articles that could lead to someone's residence? All future articles?
Of course they won't. They're content to be self-evidently biased on this point. As a liberal this troubles me.
"The policy forbids articles that share details that could identifiy a person's financial and residential information."
Meanwhile selling access to Facebook users whose personal information matches certain financial, geolocation and other personal criteria, is how Facebook makes money.
Facebook is allowed to identify a person's residential and financial information, and it is allowed to use this information to sell access to users to other organisations, but it's a violation of Facebook policy for users to share this information.
> Facebook is allowed to identify a person’s residential and financial information, and it is allowed to use this information to sell access to users to other organisations, but it’s a violation of Facebook policy for users to share this information.
Uh, so? “You can’t use our platform to compete with the means by which we monetize the platform” isn’t an uncommon, or hard to understand, policy for private, for-profit platforms. It’s not the overt basis for the policy in question, but even if it was the covert interest, it wouldn’t be unusual.
My guess is a slew of "closely monitored" Facebook groups eagerly shared the article the moment it was posted and some machine intelligence auto-moderator immediately added it to a blacklist without any human oversight.
The article itself is pretty even-keeled (although has that typical New York Post editorialized spin). The article mentions other, unaffiliated BLM groups have already demanded transparency to where Cullors' income came from, and the amount spent isn't completely absurd for a best-selling writer, culture advisor, and public figure.
Blocking the article and spreading buzz about the abbreviated version of the article is definitely bad news. Someone needs to tell the product owners at Facebook that if they want to auto-moderate media across the United States, they should read the wikipedia article about the Streisand effect.
It's a reasonable decision to make if ya think about it.
First, Facebook has been under massive scrutiny recently for not exerting more control over combating fake news, fake accounts, posts that depict or could incite violence, etc...
Second, because she's leader of the BLM movement, I think everyone would agree that she is at a greater than average risk for being targeted with violence. If your position at a company requires you to identify such conditions and attempt to reduce this risk if possible, you'd likely feel a sense of responsibility to block the article.
Finally, given their recent string of negative media attention, finding themselves in the spotlight with accusations that they contributed to her harm were she to be attacked, is something they're likely keen on avoiding.
They can expect to be fined millions of Euros by a great many European countries if they illegally censor private conversations through their platform, due to European law on the matter. Many countries over here have free speech laws that aren't as gimped as the American Constitution (i.e. that it's limited to state institutions and not muh private company).
Well, I'm not an expert on European law, so I can only speak for my own country of Norway, who do indeed seem to have stronger legal support for free speech compared to the USA in this narrow instance, since our law also encompasses private organizations and companies. Well, at least in theory, since enforcement is of course another topic entirely. But then Norway does not have monopolistic communications companies like Facebook domestically. On the other hand Norwegian law is still applicable to Facebook so long as they serve Norwegians. This means that if someone with enough resources feel that his toes have been stepped on, then you can expect a law suit that Facebook may very well lose. Moreover strong organizations might take class action if they feel their customer or member base is being treated unfairly, especially if they think Facebook is somehow skewing Norwegian elections in their disfavour. Again, due to our strong law on freedom of speech (Norwegian Constitution § 100), Facebook might very well lose such a law suit if it were to happen.
But the real reason there is outrage about this story is because BLM organizations received hundreds of millions of Dollars in donations in 2020, and it seems highly improbable that a long-time activist has somehow saved up enough to afford multiple millions in real estate purchases. Several BLM chapters rejected the foundation's offers last year and instead issued a public call for increased transparency, claiming they had received almost no funding over the years from the parent organization (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-23/ap-exc...). All this suggests there is corruption or grifting happening.
Isn't part of the problem here that a lot of the BLM donation money has gone to fund stuff like buying their big property? There have also been other scandals regarding misuse of the donation money and it has made many regional BLM groups call to question where the money is going. There is very little accountability and transparency yet we have large companies like Amazon feeding them money via donations.
Why are people implying this money must have come from BLM donations? She wrote a book that was on the NYT bestseller list, and presumably has other income streams beyond her work for BLM. I have no idea whether BLM is allocating their money properly or not, but it seems quite plausible that she has earned all the money in question through legitimate means.
I'm not sure people are. They're implying it could have, and that they'd like to hear more about it. (In response to the controversy, Cullors gave an interview saying she's never taken a salary, and BLMGNF issued a statement saying she's gotten a total of $120,000 from them since the beginning in 2013, although both statements were followed by weird rants about how dangerous it is that anyone would ask.)
> Our article features some pictures of the properties she bought, but includes no addresses, in fact doesn’t even say the city in some cases. Our reporter compiled the information from public records.
It's incredible that they don't allow this information but were completely fine with people discussing Trump's private tax returns, which were illegally obtained. The reality is that big tech companies and social media are not helping ideas live or die by their merit, but rather hiding good ideas from reaching recipients who can decide what they want to do with that information themselves.
Trump was the president of the United States, under 24/7 protection then and for the rest of his life. Most people, even fairly notable ones, don't have that luxury.
Tabloids publish potentially harmful information with reasonable frequency and FB refusing to republish a tabloid piece is not a meaningful impediment to the dissemination of ideas.
You're using speculation and a one-sided determination about publicly available information being harmful to justify censorship. It is completely unreasonable for an organization as large, influential, and powerful as Facebook (or Twitter) to censor ideas from one half of the country due to the biases of their employees and leaders. And yes, it is a meaningful impediment to dissemination of ideas since virtually all our society's conversations today take place on platforms owned by big tech companies. Our fundamental rights to free speech have been eroded by outsourcing the public town square to these companies that act in discriminatory ways. It's time to break them up, treat them as utilities, and regulate them heavily to uphold principles of free speech
I guess I am further out of the loop than I thought (and imagine I'll get reemed for this comment), but I thought BLM was a movement (with dubious Russian propagandic origins designed to fuel divisiveness, but turned mostly noble), not an organization. How did this org even come to be? I'd love to read an actual timeline or history of this all.
Slightly unrelated but for people that don't know, the "Black Futures Lab" which is an organization directly tied to BLM, is being funded by the "Chinese Progressive Association." I don't know what this entails but it's nice to see that the Chinese are interested in progressivism here in America.
> Slightly unrelated but for people that don't know, the "Black Futures Lab" which is an organization directly tied to BLM, is being funded by the "Chinese Progressive Association." I don't know what this entails but it's nice to see that the Chinese are interested in progressivism here in America.
“the Chinese” at issue are people of Chinese ethnicity in (and, largely, citizens of) the US, so, aside from appeal to straight-up anti-Asian racism, why is this so interesting?
“Founded in 1972, the Chinese Progressive Association educates, organizes and empowers the low income and working class immigrant Chinese community in San Francisco to build collective power with other oppressed communities to demand better living and working conditions and justice for all people.”
I first learned this story because it was front-page news on Breitbart and quickly becoming a flashpoint for commentary and erm, "thoughtful analysis"
Maybe it got flagged because of factor such as who was sharing it and how it was being commented on? I have no idea how or what any of their moderation tools work, but if one of the flags is "popular with extremist disinformation sites," perhaps that was the trigger?
I’m sure the 535 million people who recently had their personal information leaked by Facebook - the ones Facebook didn’t even bother to notify - will be glad to hear about Facebook’s strong stance against the sharing of personally identifying information.
Apples to oranges. You're referencing an incident that involves someone stealing the information from Facebook as opposed to Facebook intentionally releasing the information. One has no bearing on the other.
Never been much of a fan of Facebook, but at this point it's basically turned into the McDonald's ball pit:
A pile of colorful, air-filled items (mostly ads) that lures certain people into coming back because they have nothing better to do than dive into some filth. Adults aren't allowed (no conversations, content, or political views that management doesn't agree with - "it's safe because look, everything around you is squishy and we don't allow things with sharp edges"), and if you spend time there, you're probably going to leave smelling like excrement.
The post links to a neutral news story by Newsweek, which is a very reputable source. So what could be problematic about that article?
I fear that Hacker News might have a bias which makes them censor posts, exactly like Facebook does in this specific case. I don't want this to be true, but I can't think of any other reasons.
Users, especially those able to flag (meaning somewhat "senior" users, not sure about the exact karma threshold), are often annoyed, because the nature of the discussions some topics provoke are foreseeable and mostly questionable.
"Great, this will lead to half the comments discussing BLM in a questionable and highly politicized manner on hacker(!) news ; this will surely be productive ... /s"
Political and sociological stuff is sometimes here on HN (and technology often overlaps, so they might be relevant of course), but especially those topics that have little chance of inviting meaningful discussion are questionable and might get flagged.
I consider "flagging" part of how this site works, and a meaningful feature. Right to free speech is not the "right to be listened to or read by others." HN also isn't Facebook, or Instagram (size, societal influence, scope in topics which are discussed) and you can still read it, upvote it, and comment on it even though it's been flagged. So I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. Posts about the banning practices of Social Media (be it Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or other platforms) are regularly featured on HN.
This is completely outrageous! I tried sharing the link in question in a private message on Facebook Messenger, but the recipient was unable to see it, and instead got a censorship warning.
In my country such censorship is illegal, per Norwegian Constitution §100, fourth sentence: “Pre-censorship and other preventive measures cannot be used unless it is needed to protect children and young people from the harmful effects of live images (we're both grown ups). Censorship of letters (messages on Facebook?) cannot be implemented, unless performed by a caretaking institution (jails, mental hospitals, etc).”
Who would think that an American company would resort to such invasive, blatant and not least illegal censorship!
American corporations—once they reach a certain size—do not act with respect to anything resembling supposedly American values. they often seem to exist entirely outside of government overwatch.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadFB will also prevent you from posting the Newsweek article which describes how the platform is blocking the New York Post article. Same link as in the title: https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...
Is it possible that Facebook is a big enough share of the internet that they can block the Streisand Effect? My money is on "no".
Well... contentious stories get removed from here, too. This is a topic that gets contentious.
Note that the link is to an article on HN, not flagged, and the comments pretty clearly debunk the article's claims. TLDR, author wrote some clickbait headlines and used gpt3 to fill in the articles, with an unspecified amount of editing, then some of them got onto the front page of HN and he wrote an article about that.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-s...
I assumed it was worthy of discussion given the whole censorship debate and concepts of censorship like AI moderation or misinformation or disinformation.
I assume you don't mean flagging, since those are not removed, just frozen.
The co-ordinated efforts of a small number of corporate actors probably is. We live in a gov-valley-sov-corp media ecology with fairly sophisticated mechanisms of message control. Maybe the old netheads were wrong about streisand effect - maybe that was a temporary material condition.
And amazingly, there are Facebook employees on HN all the time who can't understand why people hate Facebook.
I recently spent time with a couple of relatives who only get news from Facebook. I suspect there are millions of other people who do the same. (Because it's free and if it's on the internet, it must be true!)
This illustrates that they only know about the things that Facebook wants them to know.
- 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects.
- 3.5 times more likely ... for sexual assaults.
7x & 3.5x are lowballs since I expect only a relatively small % can actually afford to prove their innocence.
Conclusion: Good luck getting accurate crime stats from some of the most historically racist institutions in the USA.
Exoneration Stats https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race...
I'm against public police because they do a terrible job (in a lot of ways, from racing to just being incompetent, to persecuting victimless crimes) and I wish we had private police.
The only positive thing that could have come out of BLM was a discussion on this topic, instead they completely lacked the philosophical and political skills to do something about this. Defunding the police without having an alternative was obviously a terrible idea and it wrecked havoc wherever it was implemented.
I'm against BLM because they damaged and stole people's property for no reason, without condemning the actions of their violent members.
Violence is not protesting.
No, these two things are actually not the same at all.
I would fight to the death rather than be killed. But I'd give up my wallet and not worry about it.
Human lives are more important than property. Human lives are more important than property. Why this is constantly up for debate baffles me.
> they smashed up mine and my husbands car windows
Hopefully this caused you to do more research on the message.
Well, they tried, but FB kept removing relevant links…
Well, they've gone underground with many of their goals due to public outcry. You'll have to use archive.org to see their true goals for our society. They've pulled most of them off their website.
This is a bad faith response, and I’m going to assume you’re a troll and not engage any further. Good luck!
Which means make a colander out of worthless idiot.
Self-defense is important, and I'm so sick and tired of seeing people only bring it up when their own internal bloodlust flares up.
You either can protect yourself or not. Legal ability of citizens to protect themselves against worthless idiots is important part of keeping our streets and cities clean.
I wish same right will be given to business owners.
Then all these self-righteous corrupted criminal movements of "almost peaceful protesters" will cease to exist.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12239517/garrett-foster-black-...
This guy you’re referencing here had a violent past and it’s possible that he was looking for confrontation. Believe what you may but a young man is no longer with us. I don’t buy this self defense blanket
Yes that is how self defense works.
The driver was an Uber driver who made a wrong turn and was mobbed by people, one of who pulled an ak-47 and pointed at him.
In most states you are allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to yourself or another.
Situations like this are exactly what these laws are written for.
Hell, it doesn't even matter if you're in a car or not. Or would you be ok with someone randomly pointing an AK47 at you? Would you refrain from using deadly force against someone like that, just because you had priors?
No, not really. I'm talking about principles.
If a guy acts threatening towards you, then you're allowed to defend yourself.
If a guy holds a gun, and throws aggressive slurs at you while approaching, do you agree that it's a really threatening thing to do? Would you wait for the obviously threatening guy to raise his gun, or just shoot him before he ever gets to that point?
> There is no evidence pointing the victim pointed the gun at the suspect.
Is there evidence that he didn't?
Honestly, does it even matter? When some guy starts acting threatening while holding a gun, are you going to wait until he points it at you before defending yourself? Cuz you won't get a second chance, mate. You either make him a "victim" of your right to self defene, or you die. I'd rather survive to spend some time in jail, or die because of poorly thought out ideas about victimhood.
Killing some random grandma for showing you middle finger does not really qualify.
However killing threatening idiot armed with something and facing you is totally different. To note - if idiot hits you and then runs away - sending bullet to catch him is not a good idea and not going to work (unfortunately).
On a final note - in a state with good CCW laws people typically are more polite and well behaving. Flipping a bird to random asshole might backfire and it won't matter to you whether he knows the laws or not.
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whoever seek to loot, destroy and coerce people into stupid acts needs to be condemned. BLM leaders didn't condemn the violence, which make the BLM movement just a bunch of terrorists, same as Antifa.
It doesn't matter how cute or righteous the name of your organisation, actions speak louder.
Many disagree with the message - it’s an explicitly Marxist organisation, and they want more “alternative families” which will obviously be single mothers with multiple baby daddies in the real world, rather than families of a man and woman living in monogamy raising the children who are the product of their love. Being raised without both the masculine and feminine creates inner incompleteness. The result of BLM is anti white and anti family, which means I am their enemy.
Mises institute words it better than me https://mises.org/wire/why-marxist-organizations-blm-seek-di...
You may be surprised, but quite a few people do disagree with what you've just said: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12136140/black-all-lives-matte...
I think that philosophically most people agree that all lives matter and behave accordingly. Who doesn't is definitely a problem, albeit they're a minority.
People do, in fact, disagree with the message, both on the level of the slogan, and on the level of the substance (which is not merely “Black lives matter at all”, but “Black lives matter much more than thet are treated as mattering by status-quo systems, necessitating urgent and immediate reform.”) Both the “All Lives Matter” as a dismissive generic, and the “Blue Lives Matter” inversion of the argument on who is undervalued, at least in the police vs. Black context which is the most common focal event of BLM protests, reflect.
I mean, some Republicans in Congress just founded a fairly overtly White nationalist caucus, which they wouldn’t do if they weren’t secure in the idea that White nationalism was a winning position with their base and donors. White racism is deeply ingrained in American society and institutions, and plenty of peple see that as a feature not a bug, and plenty more see it as a non-urgent concern that doesn’t touch their interest even though it is abstractly suboptimal.
Who are "they"? I'm serious in this question.
Do you have the idea that these demonstrations are somehow carefully organized and that BLM upper management gave the instructions to break your windows specifically?
It is not the case.
The police kill some Black American in some particularly awful or gratuitous way.
It enrages a lot of people, as you would expect.
Many angry people take to the streets. They are not organized, for the most part. The vast majority are completely peaceful. Some of them aren't as is always the case.
Some of them hold signs saying, "Black Lives Matter".
Someone broke your window during these demonstrations. If I had to bet, it would be some young, angry person. Black Lives Matter did not make this happen, and if they didn't exist, people would still take to the streets when one of their own is murdered publicly by the authorities.
---
There is no "they" there. I recommend a broader and more nuanced view of the situation.
Please go troll somewhere else.
That seems like a pretty flimsy excuse given that I see stories about individuals of public interest buying expensive property on Facebook all the time. Just one example, Thiel buying property in Miami.
> The information about your home purchase and the terms and conditions of your mortgage loan are recorded among the land records in the jurisdiction where the property is located. These documents are public. In most states, you do not even have to go down to the local recorder of deeds office. You can search online from your living room and get all of the information that is published in your newspaper.
The public record will say that the owner is “Trust #541341324132 with XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office”
If you want to know the real owner (“beneficiary”), you go to court and present the reasoning for wanting to know. If it’s a valid reason, the court will issue an order that you take over to XYZ Bank/Title Co/Law Office and they’ll give you that information.
Also, doxxing isn’t illegal, although harassment is.
It is against Facebook's rules.
Posting a pseudonymous person’s name and address divulges private information: the real person behind the pseudonym. Posting a public official’s name and address isn’t doxxing.
Regardless of your definition of public, the word doxxing has never covered it. We have plenty of other language to refer to the sharing of publicly available information. The word doxxing was coined to give a name to a type of invasion of privacy that came to prominence with the rise of the Internet. If you want doxxing to just mean gossip, then your word no longer has a useful and distinct meaning.
You can make the case that this data should be private, and I might agree, but that doesn't change the fact that it is currently public, hence there is nothing to be "revealed" or "doxxed". The information is already out there, in public, easy to find.
‘While doxers sometimes use hacking or deception to uncover personal details about their targets, contrary to popular belief “most of the info is public,” according to one researcher who has spent years studying and participating in the practice of doxing.’ — https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dox-doxing-protection-how-to/
The vast majority of doxxing does not require unauthorized access, social engineering or betrayal by an affiliated person. Instead, it’s almost always connecting dots between openly available bits of information and then packaging that information so as to direct and simplify harassment.
https://helgesverre.com/blog/how-to-dox/
Here's Reddit's definition:
"Doxxing is where a user publishes private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent." [1]
Twitter's:
"Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules." [2]
And Wikipedia's:
"Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually through the Internet" [3]
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/e6nl5o/doxxing/
2 - https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
> publishes private or identifying information
"Identifying information" refers to revealing the true identity of a pseudonymous user on the site (e.g., violentacrez), or a person who has no previous association with the site (e.g., Sunil Tripathi). In these cases the perpetrators used information that was known only to them, or that the "public" had no easy access to, or that the "public" didn't even know existed until the perpetrators brought it to their attention.
That…has no bearing on whether sharing it violates Facebook policy on “privacy and personal information”. What would have a bearing would be citing the language of the policy and showing how the action was inconsistent with it, and I suspect that is not happening because the action is, in fact, consistent with the policy.
Whether it's a policy of Facebook's or not is completely irrelevant. If they do not enforce this policy consistently, it opens them to accusations of political bias... which is what we have here.
I have seen no presentation of acts similarly situated with respect to the policy which have been treated differently. What is the basis for the claim of selectivity?
What's glaring is that there's not even a veneer of consistency in this decision. Will they now be going back and censoring all articles that could lead to someone's residence? All future articles?
Of course they won't. They're content to be self-evidently biased on this point. As a liberal this troubles me.
Meanwhile selling access to Facebook users whose personal information matches certain financial, geolocation and other personal criteria, is how Facebook makes money.
Facebook is allowed to identify a person's residential and financial information, and it is allowed to use this information to sell access to users to other organisations, but it's a violation of Facebook policy for users to share this information.
Uh, so? “You can’t use our platform to compete with the means by which we monetize the platform” isn’t an uncommon, or hard to understand, policy for private, for-profit platforms. It’s not the overt basis for the policy in question, but even if it was the covert interest, it wouldn’t be unusual.
The article itself is pretty even-keeled (although has that typical New York Post editorialized spin). The article mentions other, unaffiliated BLM groups have already demanded transparency to where Cullors' income came from, and the amount spent isn't completely absurd for a best-selling writer, culture advisor, and public figure.
Blocking the article and spreading buzz about the abbreviated version of the article is definitely bad news. Someone needs to tell the product owners at Facebook that if they want to auto-moderate media across the United States, they should read the wikipedia article about the Streisand effect.
First, Facebook has been under massive scrutiny recently for not exerting more control over combating fake news, fake accounts, posts that depict or could incite violence, etc...
Second, because she's leader of the BLM movement, I think everyone would agree that she is at a greater than average risk for being targeted with violence. If your position at a company requires you to identify such conditions and attempt to reduce this risk if possible, you'd likely feel a sense of responsibility to block the article.
Finally, given their recent string of negative media attention, finding themselves in the spotlight with accusations that they contributed to her harm were she to be attacked, is something they're likely keen on avoiding.
But the real reason there is outrage about this story is because BLM organizations received hundreds of millions of Dollars in donations in 2020, and it seems highly improbable that a long-time activist has somehow saved up enough to afford multiple millions in real estate purchases. Several BLM chapters rejected the foundation's offers last year and instead issued a public call for increased transparency, claiming they had received almost no funding over the years from the parent organization (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-23/ap-exc...). All this suggests there is corruption or grifting happening.
In such cases it is reasonable to have a proper calm discussion, not to ban those asking the question.
> Our article features some pictures of the properties she bought, but includes no addresses, in fact doesn’t even say the city in some cases. Our reporter compiled the information from public records.
It's incredible that they don't allow this information but were completely fine with people discussing Trump's private tax returns, which were illegally obtained. The reality is that big tech companies and social media are not helping ideas live or die by their merit, but rather hiding good ideas from reaching recipients who can decide what they want to do with that information themselves.
I think the most offensive part of this censorship, however, is that Facebook is also censoring this link from private messenger conversations. Abigail Shrier put it well (https://twitter.com/AbigailShrier/status/1382774842986954753):
> So Facebook is now effectively opening your mail and reading the contents for ideologically objectionable material.
> Anyone worried?
Tabloids publish potentially harmful information with reasonable frequency and FB refusing to republish a tabloid piece is not a meaningful impediment to the dissemination of ideas.
Occupy Wall Street tried to do that, but they were so disorganized to accomplish much directly. They did, though, firmly establish "the 1%" meme.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
“the Chinese” at issue are people of Chinese ethnicity in (and, largely, citizens of) the US, so, aside from appeal to straight-up anti-Asian racism, why is this so interesting?
“Founded in 1972, the Chinese Progressive Association educates, organizes and empowers the low income and working class immigrant Chinese community in San Francisco to build collective power with other oppressed communities to demand better living and working conditions and justice for all people.”
https://cpasf.org/about/mission-history/
Maybe it got flagged because of factor such as who was sharing it and how it was being commented on? I have no idea how or what any of their moderation tools work, but if one of the flags is "popular with extremist disinformation sites," perhaps that was the trigger?
A pile of colorful, air-filled items (mostly ads) that lures certain people into coming back because they have nothing better to do than dive into some filth. Adults aren't allowed (no conversations, content, or political views that management doesn't agree with - "it's safe because look, everything around you is squishy and we don't allow things with sharp edges"), and if you spend time there, you're probably going to leave smelling like excrement.
- Even if you posted it “privately” through Facebook messenger, yep, that’s too a first: 30-day ban.
- Veteran FB bans.
This is so crazy I have to ask, you’re serious here? You’ll actually get BANNED for sharing privately over FB messenger?
The post links to a neutral news story by Newsweek, which is a very reputable source. So what could be problematic about that article?
I fear that Hacker News might have a bias which makes them censor posts, exactly like Facebook does in this specific case. I don't want this to be true, but I can't think of any other reasons.
"Great, this will lead to half the comments discussing BLM in a questionable and highly politicized manner on hacker(!) news ; this will surely be productive ... /s"
Political and sociological stuff is sometimes here on HN (and technology often overlaps, so they might be relevant of course), but especially those topics that have little chance of inviting meaningful discussion are questionable and might get flagged.
I consider "flagging" part of how this site works, and a meaningful feature. Right to free speech is not the "right to be listened to or read by others." HN also isn't Facebook, or Instagram (size, societal influence, scope in topics which are discussed) and you can still read it, upvote it, and comment on it even though it's been flagged. So I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. Posts about the banning practices of Social Media (be it Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or other platforms) are regularly featured on HN.
In my country such censorship is illegal, per Norwegian Constitution §100, fourth sentence: “Pre-censorship and other preventive measures cannot be used unless it is needed to protect children and young people from the harmful effects of live images (we're both grown ups). Censorship of letters (messages on Facebook?) cannot be implemented, unless performed by a caretaking institution (jails, mental hospitals, etc).”
Who would think that an American company would resort to such invasive, blatant and not least illegal censorship!
All news that is critical of USDP, its policies or its supporting movements will be banned. All actors that present such news will be blocked.
You WILL be Re-Educated for Your Safety.