Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#41

Post by namlem »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #40
joefkelley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan has moderation. Of course they draw the line in a very different place, but they definitely do moderate.

Yeah, I flubbed the question. Let's try again: Why is it possible for 4chan to have the line far afield of what we'd normally think of as acceptable behavior? It's not only survived, but prospered. A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken. I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.

4chan is a very niche community. There are some who don't care what kinds of shit gets posted, but there's a very good reason their user base is so small compared to other sites like reddit.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#42

Post by pottersbasilisk »

afuchs wrote: post #34
pottersbasilisk wrote: post #28

Do you have any legal citations about the right to be heard?

Are you asking for proof that a speaker has a right to force other people to listen to their argument?

any legal precedent one way or another. Ive heard of free speech but nothing either way about a right to be heard.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#43

Post by pottersbasilisk »

delinka wrote: post #32
pottersbasilisk wrote: post #28

Do you have any legal citations about the right to be heard?

Do you have any legal citations about any party being compelled to listen to another such that the other's right to free speech is preserved?

I havent heard of the right to be heard, but most people know of free speech. So where are you getting the idea of the right to be heard ? Is it a legal idea, your personal idea, a philosophical idea ?

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#44

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
kyledrake wrote: post #8

I hope the take-away that comes out of the leaked documents is this: community moderation is very, very hard . It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "free speech vs censorship" issue. There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content…

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

Do you actually use 4chan? There's more than /b/ and /pol/. Most of the boards have a topic and off-topic posts are removed by janitors.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#45

Post by tptacek »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

> Anyone with more than 100,000 followers on a social media platform is designated as a public figure – which denies them the full protections given to private individuals. 100k followers is a curiously high threshold to be labeled as a public figure. I'd wager many people who are notable enough to have Wikipedia pages would not be able to hit that threshold even on Twitter.

Pedantry: you can keep a Wikipedia page with virtually no followers or following of any kind. The criteria for Wikipedia pages is simply:

(a) That there be some recognizable claim of notability --- this is an extremely low bar.

(b) That the notability claim, and any other material in the article, be backed entirely by reliable secondary sources.

(c) That after the article is stripped down to facts that can be verified in reliable secondary sources, there's still an encyclopedia article's worth of content left. This, too, is a very low bar.

Where pages tend to run afoul of WP's notability requirement is item (b).

But it's easy to see --- and to provide examples of --- people that with no public influence at all still having a Wikipedia page.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#46

Post by skybrian »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
kyledrake wrote: post #8

I hope the take-away that comes out of the leaked documents is this: community moderation is very, very hard . It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "free speech vs censorship" issue. There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content…

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

4chan started some popular memes, but most people don't actually hang out there.

Communities with better moderation are apparently more popular.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#47

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #44
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

Do you actually use 4chan? There's more than /b/ and /pol/. Most of the boards have a topic and off-topic posts are removed by janitors.

Here's a pretty typical /a/ post: http://i.imgur.com/zAoDHlT.png

It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#48

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
kyledrake wrote: post #8

I hope the take-away that comes out of the leaked documents is this: community moderation is very, very hard . It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "free speech vs censorship" issue. There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content…

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

Who says 4chan's lax moderation hasn't hurt it? A toxic community doesn't mean one that doesn't exist.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#49

Post by ue_ »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #48
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?

Who says 4chan's lax moderation hasn't hurt it? A toxic community doesn't mean one that doesn't exist.

Actually I'd say it has hurt it. Perceived excessive moderation on various boards is why people left to go to 8chan, where you can make and moderate your own boards, so long as all the content is legal.

I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bittorrent technology, too.

To reply to astrange (I am unable to reply using the usual method because the HN mods don't like it when I post quickly, so they've stopped me from doing that, ironically in this discussion about moderation):

I wasn't trying to say that 8chan is unmoderated, I recognize that it is moderated, because of the "only legal content" rule, rather I was trying to say that an unmoderated imageboard could exist in theory, but an imageboard which insists on only legal content is of course moderated.

Re: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

#50

Post by skybrian »

wiz21c wrote: post #30
kyledrake wrote: post #8

I hope the take-away that comes out of the leaked documents is this: community moderation is very, very hard . It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "free speech vs censorship" issue. There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content…

Listen. I used the phone since 40 years. With the phone I had conversations with people that could have, well, annoyed others to say the least. I've said super bad things with my phone. Was I moderated ? No. Was it a problem ? No. Moderating is just here to make sure that FaceBook can still operate. That's just a problem for FaceBook to protect its image. Let's imagine that there is no moderation. What will happen ?…

Why do you think getting the police involved all the time would be better? They only have limited capacity; do you think they really want to look at every flagged post?

Moderators do refer the most serious cases to the police. But there's a lot of crap that falls short of that, so milder penalties work better.

Post reply on HN