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Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

independent.co.uk

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Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#91

Post by syrrim »

snakeanus wrote: post #66
tdb7893 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a classic catch 22. If they go completely free speech people will complain about all the propaganda on Facebook and some countries will just block it. On the other hand if they do moderation people complain about censorship. There is no actual way for them to win here

Which is why federated solutions like GNUSocial, NNTP or email win here as moderation can be applied per-node.

Facebook could do the same thing if they wanted. Have the default be heavily censored, have option to disable aspects of it as the user desires. I presume they don't because they don't consider it a catch 22. Having people cry censorship doesn't matter to them, whereas they think hordes would leave or be forced off by governments if they didn't moderate sufficiently.

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#92

Post by krapp »

askdufuga wrote: post #50
nkoren wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watched for a few minutes. "Muslims are like African Carp. They breed rapidly [... yadda yadda yadda ...] Our entire race has been suffering under the burden of this minority..." That's grade-A genocidal rhetoric he's deploying. Good for observing that evil can wear any kind of face. Not good for much else.

People are not evil simply for disliking aspects of other cultures or populations. For example, Americans enslaved Africans for hundreds of years. That is a claim of fact. I believe it is true. I believe slavery is bad, it should be stopped in all its forms (including as punishment for a crime), and I'm glad that the 13th Amendment was passed. Hating what white people did to Africans does not make me evil, in fact it…

>People are not evil simply for disliking aspects of other cultures or populations.

Describing Muslims as being akin to a destructive foreign species that "breeds rapidly" (which is a trait one typically ascribes to vermin, not human beings) is not "simply disliking" another culture.

>Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can just to affect future demographics?

We're not talking about "large groups of people," we're talking about Muslims, exclusively. And yes, I would be okay with it, because I don't see the existence of Muslims or of their children as a "problem" requiring a solution.

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#93

Post by [deleted] »

nkoren wrote: post #14
sergiotapia wrote: post #3

Interesting, here's a first-hand account of what's happening: https://streamable.com/zota1

Watched for a few minutes. "Muslims are like African Carp. They breed rapidly [... yadda yadda yadda ...] Our entire race has been suffering under the burden of this minority..." That's grade-A genocidal rhetoric he's deploying. Good for observing that evil can wear any kind of face. Not good for much else.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#94

Post by ralmidani »

askdufuga wrote: post #88
ralmidani wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can just to affect future demographics? You are defending the rhetoric of a genocide perpetrator. It's like saying "what if Hitler was right about the Jews? I don't agree with his tactics, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem."

I think you'll agree that I am not advocating genocide, I'm just curious about the facts. I like to learn. I want to vet everyones' claims. What I don't understand is why are you arguing your position? What do you propose I do with respect to the acquisition and spread of knowledge?

You are not advocating genocide, but you are saying the genocidaire's "justification" is worth considering.

Even if Muslims have higher fertility rates than Buddhists, the observation is meaningless.

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#95

Post by Veelox »

askdufuga wrote: post #82
Veelox wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hating what white people did to Africans does not make me evil, in fact it's a morally superior position. Interesting, specifically, the "morally superior position" part. Are you willing to explain how hating what white people did is a morally superior position? Also, morally superior position to what, not hating it?

Yeah, thinking that slavery is bad is better than enslaving people. Omg.. are we really debating this?

I would agree that thinking slavery is bad is better than enslaving people but I think that statement is not very useful because it is like saying x > -(Graham's Number) and is not a very useful statement.

What I am wondering where you stand on a more exact statement. Is "Hating what white people did to Africans" morally superior to "thinking what what people did to Africans immoral"? Why or why not?

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#96

Post by skybrian »

macrael wrote: post #89

Metafilter remains one of my favorite places on the web and it has strong and serious moderation. I'm not sure how that would translate to Facebook, since I am not sure Metafilter's voice needs to be the same voice everywhere, but moderated discussions seem pretty strictly better than the alternative. For me this always goes back to the observation that corporations are fairly dictatorial constructions, and that espe…

A big social network is not a single community like a blog or forum. It's a collection of communities that do some of their own moderation (blocking people and deleting off-topic posts), with some moderation outsourced to the larger network.

This is good; each community can have its own standards, to some extent. When there is good local moderation, there's no reason to bring the legal system into it most of the time.

The problem is at the next level where you decide which communities are okay to host at all. And what do you do when people in one community attack another? Then it the dispute gets bumped up to Facebook or Reddit, to employees who don't have much context.

In some ways "share nothing" is a good standard. Each blog or forum is an island with its own membership. (Or its own bubble, you might say.)

But that's not where we are, with overlapping friends lists and follower lists, subreddits with absentee moderators, and lots of resharing. People want to cross the streams. They also want good moderation.

I wonder if there should be an intermediate level between local communities (tens or hundreds of people) versus the social network (hundreds of millions). Maybe it needs to be more hierarchical?

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#97

Post by Boothroid »

shallot_router wrote: post #37
cholantesh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of a monk on the vanguard of the ideological attacks on Muslims, just to be clear.

I never thought I'd see the day where a Buddhist monk in robes is calling for the genocide of "Muslim vermin". (I don't think he literally said "vermin", but that's basically the analogies he's using.)

I guess it must take a lot of wrongdoing to provoke a Buddhist monk?

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#98

Post by otakucode »

pjc50 wrote: post #33
otakucode wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it you are alive? I mean, it would be trivially easy for anyone to kill you. You have to work to keep yourself alive. Some random person walking up to you on the street and pushing a little blade into your neck is all it would take to end you. Or start your house on fire while you're asleep. Or a million other things. But... you're alive. Laws don't stop crime, they can only punish it afterwards. Deterrence do…

The force multiplier arithmetic of the internet changes this. Almost all people are fine, but some are not. It was only last week that we had some idiots put another bomb on a tube train, for example. On the internet, if you can attack once you can attack everywhere. If you could put a bomb on every train at once with ctrl-c ctrl-v, we'd probably all be dead. America has a mass shooting every week. If the real world…

Don't use the word 'force' when no force is involved. On the Internet, if you "attack", you send words or pictures. You send ideas. A bomb blows people apart. You do not have to, either intentionally or accidentally, train yourself to respond negatively to a bomb. A bomb blows you apart no matter who you are. An idea does not. Only you can control how you react to any given idea.

And I don't think it's likely that if everyone could cause indiscriminant destruction it would be likely to occur because that is already the case and has been for a very long while. Killing people is NOT hard. Just look at what people do with a car when they want. How many cars are there? How many angry, desperate people with access to them? And how common is it for them to drive it into a crowd and kill and injure people? Run the numbers. You're more likely to die from being hit by a meteor, so concern yourself with that instead.

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#99

Post by otakucode »

ch4s3 wrote: post #27
otakucode wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a problem if it wasn't trivially easy to block them. Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. That's the only way their opinion can get to you. Of course, that training doesn't have to be conscious and a great many people have inadvertently trained themselves to be sensitive to the opinions…

>Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. I don't buy this. If an internet forum like FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever allows increasingly toxic behavior it eventually spills into the real world. For example, unmoderated forums facilitate doxing and incitement. What happens when an online harasser p…

Are we talking about online comments, or real-world harrassment? They are two different topics.

Re: Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

#100

Post by otakucode »

wmf wrote: post #24
otakucode wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a problem if it wasn't trivially easy to block them. Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. That's the only way their opinion can get to you. Of course, that training doesn't have to be conscious and a great many people have inadvertently trained themselves to be sensitive to the opinions…

If you get hit by thousands of trolls at once it's not trivial to block them. Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.

That is a technology problem. We could easily solve it and probably should.
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