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Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#251

Post by jpetso »

wyager wrote: post #209
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has become a de-facto political "agora" for the politicians and high-Government officials from my country (I live in Eastern Europe). More exactly, that's where now they first express their views on current political, social and economics affairs affecting my country. Nowadays I would say that most of the important stuff first gets posted on FB, and only then it gets re-published by the local media (whatever…

So once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it? Why? It's not Facebook's fault that politicians started using it.

Because with great power comes great responsibility, and companies like to cherry-pick only one out of two. It's in the interest of society that when something becomes mainstream enough to be considered "infrastructure" - something with so little competition that ignoring or bypassing it is infeasible given the state of the market - that this infrastructure works within frameworks that we've built and refined over centuries.

Rent-seeking is bad, it's facilitated by ownership of too large a share of the market. In return for allowing Facebook to leverage its size and influence for rent-seeking behavior, we as a society, a.k.a. the government representing us, have the right and responsibility to set the ground rules for what we get in return.

That's not about fault or entitlement, it's about how we can continue to uphold the values that are important to us. Free speech and the ability to publicly disagree are a crucial part of that. If your platform gets popular enough that strengthening or suppressing your voice has a material impact, profit and shareholder interests can't be the only thing that decides how things are supposed to work. There's a lot more at stake here.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#252

Post by falcolas »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #230
maxxxxx wrote: post #2

I always find it interesting that no level of violence is deemed inappropriate in the US but nudity has to be avoided at any cost.

Blame it on the Puritans. Their moral baggage has been carried along in tandem with our national ethos, for better or worse, over the centuries.

I've been curious how much impact they have had on our current culture; a people who (to paraphrase Robin Williams) were so uptight they got kicked out of England.

Christian mores definitely still drive our cultural mores, and while there is some easing of the restrictions there, sex is still much less acceptable than violence. As a simple example of this, attempts to reduce the violence in highschool football are as vehemently opposed as attempts to provide more than "abstinence only" sex-ed.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#253

Post by curried_haskell »

wyager wrote: post #209
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has become a de-facto political "agora" for the politicians and high-Government officials from my country (I live in Eastern Europe). More exactly, that's where now they first express their views on current political, social and economics affairs affecting my country. Nowadays I would say that most of the important stuff first gets posted on FB, and only then it gets re-published by the local media (whatever…

So once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it? Why? It's not Facebook's fault that politicians started using it.

Exactly yes. Once your platform becomes this popular, you wield real power over human society. And society should absolutely start to dictate to Facebook what it can and cannot do to prevent it from abusing its power. How many times do we need to go over this?

Any organization, when it becomes sufficiently large, essentially becomes a government.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#254

Post by cabalamat »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #227
red_admiral wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's more effective to lobby your local member of parliament/congress to pass laws restricting what media organisations can or cannot do. Granted, by "more effective" I mean something like 0.1% instead of 0.01%, but it's worth a try.

Absolutely not. Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.

> Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden.

I have some sympathy with this point of view. I would like to see a world where anyone can build whatever website they want, and the amount of attention the website gets is determined by its "worth" as defined by how many people choose to use it.

However...

> The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.

...there's the rub. The usefulness of a social network depends on how many people are already on it. Network effects mean that its very vary hard to build a competitor to Facebook or Twitter.

One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them.

This would make it a lot easier for anyone to piggyback a service on top of Facebook/Twitter/etc and if their censorship or other policies got too cumbersome, there would be much less stickyness preventing people from moving to sa competing service.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#255

Post by FireBeyond »

jlmorton wrote: post #186
jMyles wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can concede that there could be good reasons to pull the photo. Yeah?

Sure. Facebook is not a history book. It's a social network with kids on it. Napalm girl is a powerful photo. So are photos of Aushwitz. So too are photos of trench warfare. Saddam Hussein's hanging is historically important, as are all the images of children killed in Aleppo, or drowned families washing up on shores in Italy. That doesn't mean we need all these things on Facebook. I'm sensitive to censorship, and Fa…

If your friend (on Facebook or in person) is showing you photos, saying things you find offensive, isn't your issue with your friend, not the mechanism by which they chose to do this?

Isn't that the same argument we use for things like BitTorrent?

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#256

Post by dragonwriter »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #227
red_admiral wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's more effective to lobby your local member of parliament/congress to pass laws restricting what media organisations can or cannot do. Granted, by "more effective" I mean something like 0.1% instead of 0.01%, but it's worth a try.

Absolutely not. Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.

> Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden.

If an entity has no say what another entity can do within some domain, then the first entity is not the government with respect to the domain, and (assuming that no other entity has such a say), the latter is the government.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#257

Post by x1798DE »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #236
x1798DE wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if a paper newspaper were told that they had to publish every letter sent to them or no letters at all. They would stop publishing letters entirely. There are a lot of ways to construct laws such that they have the opposite of their nominal effect. It's important to note that the US First Amendment bars the government from passing laws respecting both freedom of speech and freedom of the press (among other re…

Wrong analogy. Newspaper does not offer a service of publishing customer letters. They offer a service of receiving and reading letters on premise that they may choose the letter to be published. It's a different story. If a newspaper published all letters, then government could act on behalf of citizen to protect freedom of speech, by making sure there's no arbitrary censorship of publications.

The relevant detail is that you can indeed censor a publication by adding a rule that says "you can't censor your publication in the following ways". I don't personally use Facebook at least in part because I don't want to use a centralized, censored system, but the fact of the matter is that it's a bad idea (not to mention likely an unconstitutional one) to tell Facebook what they cannot publish and indeed what they must publish.

Although it's irrelevant to the point, I also don't totally understand the nature of your objection. If you are saying that any publication gets to define what it does and does not publish (i.e. Facebook says "I am a company that publishes non-nude photos" or "I am a company that publishes censored material"), then they merely have to re-define their service in order to censor people while complying with whatever scheme you have in mind.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#258

Post by cmurf »

kefka wrote: post #232
Dirlewanger wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.

A private individual, sure. I'll accept that argument. But a corporation should have no such leeway. Companies exist for the mutual benefit of the citizens, and their shareholders. Just because we've lost that sense of ethic doesn't make it not true. Now, the predominant view is "A company can fuck over whomever they want, as long as it lies within the confines of the law", is preposterous. Public corporations are al…

Well it's an interesting idea to consider a corporation more like a derivative of the state, as it comes into existence via state power, and is in effect immortal until its existence is ended via state power; rather than like the derivative of a person. Therefore there may be a compelling argument that as the 14th amendment extends the bill of rights requirements to all of the states to uphold, that a corporate charter extends some narrow portion as well. As in, the corporation can abridge free speech of employees as spokespeople for their company, a consistent message of what the company "says" is important to be kept clear. But abridging the free speech of its customers seems a lot more problematic, to have a broad brush to just censor anyone using the service for any reason.

I doubt such treatment will come to pass anytime soon though. It's Facebooks infrastructure, and the EULA everyone agreed to gives Facebook, contractually, the power to engage in this censorship. If you don't like it, then maybe you shouldn't have agreed to their EULA which basically says all of your contents is not yours it's theirs. And this is something people who actually read these EULAs warned about and most people just gave it a hand wave as if it wouldn't actually ever be an issue.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#259

Post by YuriNiyazov »

Roboprog wrote: post #248
kefka wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A private individual, sure. I'll accept that argument. But a corporation should have no such leeway. Companies exist for the mutual benefit of the citizens, and their shareholders. Just because we've lost that sense of ethic doesn't make it not true. Now, the predominant view is "A company can fuck over whomever they want, as long as it lies within the confines of the law", is preposterous. Public corporations are al…

People seem to lose sight of that: corporations are REQUIRED to be as ruthless as they can legally get away with, or they are literally in violation of the law in terms of making money for their owners. The law is the ONLY thing that curbs their bad behavior, other than publicity so bad that it (temporarily, until forgotten) causes a sales drop. Yeah, I'd like to see more corporate death sentences handed out, as well…

This is false. There is no such law that requires nothing but ruthless profit optimization. I invite you to disprove my claim by pointing to a relevant piece of legislation.

Re: Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates

#260

Post by visarga »

wyager wrote: post #209
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has become a de-facto political "agora" for the politicians and high-Government officials from my country (I live in Eastern Europe). More exactly, that's where now they first express their views on current political, social and economics affairs affecting my country. Nowadays I would say that most of the important stuff first gets posted on FB, and only then it gets re-published by the local media (whatever…

So once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it? Why? It's not Facebook's fault that politicians started using it.

> once your platform gets popular enough, the government can tell you what to do with it

I'd say there is considerable public interest, yes. Facebook without the users is nothing, but the users without Facebook are the same society, just using another software.

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