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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

#381

Post by optforfon »

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…

I don't want to see those things either. I don't go on Facebook for some historical reality check, or to be reminded of the horrors that are happening around the world. Every news media organization sensors itself and doesn't show the full extent of the horrors it reports on b/c it counterproductive. It's upsetting and it ultimately just desensitizes you. I think that this photo has already been overused and turns into something like an art piece. If you had a similar new photo of a traumatized naked girl after, for instance, a recent school shooting in the US people could feel a lot more shocked than when they see this photo for the Nth time - and people wouldn't object to it being removed.

You have to draw a line somewhere. No naked children or gore seems reasonable.

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

#382

Post by aidenn0 »

lotyrin wrote: post #332
norea-armozel wrote: post #318

This is what you get out from centralizing your communications medium. Sure, we all can easily talk to each other but now you have to assume the host will find something you do or say a liability thus remove it as quickly as you post it. To say that Facebook shouldn't do this comes into conflict in protecting share holder value (which means also avoiding illegal content per local laws). So, you can't have it both way…

Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users. I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as pr…

> Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users.

With the possible exception of "surveillance" everything you just said is also true of newspapers.

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

#383

Post by dredmorbius »

wonder_er wrote: post #305
curried_haskell wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>And society should absolutely start to dictate to Facebook what it can and cannot do to prevent it from abusing its power. We have no good mechanism to prevent the government from abusing its power. Those here defending FB are not arguing that FB can do no wrong, they are arguing that fixing a problem _with another broken system_ is not an improvement, and is, in fact, a step backwards. I can opt out of FB, and I ha…

The problems of power abuse and effective communications are ancient ones. There's nothing that prevents private individuals or corporations from abusing power either, and there's a very long history of them having done just that.

Government, for better or worse, is a vehicle for channeling and aggregating power, in a way that at best benefits society as a whole, expresses the preferences of the majority, and respects the rights of the minority. It's far from perfect. But it's better than most alternatives.

Facebook is granted rights by governments, ultimately also to benefit the public at large. Facebook is not itself a government, though it transacts the online communications of a population larger than all but the very largest countries.

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

#384

Post by norea-armozel »

drusepth wrote: post #354
norea-armozel wrote: post #318

This is what you get out from centralizing your communications medium. Sure, we all can easily talk to each other but now you have to assume the host will find something you do or say a liability thus remove it as quickly as you post it. To say that Facebook shouldn't do this comes into conflict in protecting share holder value (which means also avoiding illegal content per local laws). So, you can't have it both way…

>I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content Does this mean people need to start moderating their own content, also? I don't want to have to decide on rules of what to keep/delete, and I don't want to just let anything go, either. If I wanted to manage my own site, I'd build one -- I almost always just want to use a service that someone else maintains…

The way I look at is this, self-hosting should be the norm and not the exception today. We have plenty of hardware solutions for this but the consumer end of the problem is largely due to ISPs not wanting to be what they are: utilities. If we could politically fix that problem (regulate Comcast and company properly) then I think the rest should be obvious for people. The rest comes down to making hardware solutions as simple as pressing a button and go from home.

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

#385

Post by dredmorbius »

wyager wrote: post #266
curried_haskell wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Any organization, when it becomes sufficiently large, essentially becomes a government. Remind me when Facebook used violence to enforce laws or take taxes?

Any given API change, content promotion or censorship, freebooting support (or restrictions), represents a taking of usefruct or allocation amongst various parties. With little or no recourse to them.

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

#386

Post by tromp »

Facebook has reversed its stance and is reinstating posts featuring 1972's "The Terror of War" picture, according to

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12865670/facebook-censorshi...

"Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed"

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

#387

Post by dredmorbius »

wyager wrote: post #265
Daishiman wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You become a medium of public discourse with network effects. That seems perfectly fine to regulate.

I disagree that anything on Facebook is "public" in the sense of "public ownership". Facebook is a private platform. Just because things are (maybe) publicly visible doesn't mean they're public property. Should the government be able to force people to put up or take down posters in public-facing Windows?

Governments do in fact regulate posting of notices, including both commercial and political speech, routinely. This includes both forbidding specific types of notices in some instances, and compelling them in others.

As only one of literally millions of examples: http://ij.org/case/gilliland-et-al-v-city-of-dallas/

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

#388

Post by norea-armozel »

forgetsusername wrote: post #352
norea-armozel wrote: post #318

This is what you get out from centralizing your communications medium. Sure, we all can easily talk to each other but now you have to assume the host will find something you do or say a liability thus remove it as quickly as you post it. To say that Facebook shouldn't do this comes into conflict in protecting share holder value (which means also avoiding illegal content per local laws). So, you can't have it both way…

> I just wish people would realize that corporations aren't our friends, they're here to make a profit. I wish people would stop saying that corporations are some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people with a defined purpose, like our friends and family members. People just like you in other words. Corporations don't have a mind of their own, nor do they pursue profit regardless of ethics.

Corporations are institutions and like all institutions there are legal and social norms which regulate them. In terms of private corporations (for profit) they have only one norm that trumps all others: profit motive. As this is their primary function, with all else being secondary, you should expect them to act in terms of that. All the appeals to Zuckerberg and the board of director's own consciences is not going to work every time. In fact, it's the sloppiest way to deal with this problem. Let's say tomorrow Mark and the BOD agree 100% with the anti-censorship thesis for Facebook, what then? How are they able to override the other shareholders? What happens the shareholders sue Mark and the BOD? Forcing them into court with an injunction to maintain the status quo at Facebook? See where this goes now? Basically, it goes right back to what we have and that's that. You can't just say "Oh screw the shareholders" when our own laws protect them. It's one of the biggest jobs of the SEC which is to suppose to protect shareholders which include you and me who have retirement accounts. Again, institutions are affected by NORMS not individual consciences. I wish it were the case that appealing to the better nature of billionaires would and could change the world but it doesn't because billionaires don't make the final decision it's institutions like governments, courts, AND corporations that do. Don't like how this works? Too bad, it's the real world. We don't live in loose tribes like we did 100k+ years ago. Thus your individualistic expectations don't fit the actual world. Sorry for coming at you with this rant but it annoys me to no end when I see people naively thinking you can overturn a complex system like what we have in institutions by default. You have to work with what things are and not with what we want things to be.

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

#389

Post by dredmorbius »

awinder wrote: post #88
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.

Why is Facebook a media outlet as opposed to, say, a private gathering place like a mall or movie theatre?

How might a government or society have an interest in, say, the content carried by a private radio station? What possible interest might there be?

http://rwandanstories.org/genocide/hate_radio.html

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

#390

Post by bsder »

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.

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

Your statement is "a priori" false.

We place limits on private businesses all the time over issues relating to discrimination, employment benefits, etc.

An entity that has that much influence over public discourse almost certainly does needed to be overseen.

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