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Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

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Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#181

Post by mihaifm »

Tade0 wrote: post #142
oblio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Romanian government I'd be careful... Romania has a well developed IT sector (especially for a developing country) and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. I'm also willing to bet that these people as a vast majority weren't voters for the party currently in power. And the Romanian government is far from having NSA's IT prowess (yes, I know that they botched up quite…

> and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code. Interesting, would you like share some more information on that?

It's a new fiscal code that aims to change the way social contributions are payed, but has the side effect of lowering the salaries in the IT sector by about 6%. Many companies are rising salaries to make up for this, but the measure already annoyed a lot of people.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#182

Post by andrepd »

freedomben wrote: post #13

This is exactly why I think it's dangerous to have a company like Facebook censor people, even in the name of "fake news." It's within their right to do so on their platform, but I don't think they should. You'll never get it 100% right, and real/legitimate people will end up silenced because of it. I wouldn't want that on my conscience.

>It's within their right to do so on their platform

I will add that I think it isn't even in their right. "Private enterprise" or not, you still need to abide by rules, and just as a newspaper has to follow certain laws of press (and being a private company does not excuse them nor give them the right to do as they please), so does facebook, as the controller of a great deal of information, have to follow laws of neutrality and anti-censorship.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#183

Post by goldesel »

petre wrote: post #111
rdtsc wrote: post #5

I was joking before and said that it is inevitable that Facebook, Google and Twitter will eventually sell SaaS (Silencing as a Service). But maybe it wasn't a joke after all... It is simply too tempting to not do it. They have information which the Stasis and KGBs of the past would kill for. One thing Romanian government should be careful with is not listening to protesters. That is at least one country where they ha…

> Please don't encourage violence. The 2017 protests were peaceful. The ones in 1989 were violent all over Eastern Europe with the exception of Czech Republic. The killing of Romania's late dictator and the mock trial was the doing of former secret police, who's corrupt offspring and relatives are the politicians in power today. They only took advantage of the protests to picture themselves as heroes and sieze power…

> The ones in 1989 were violent all over Eastern Europe with the exception of Czech Republic.

This is BLATANTLY false, please get your facts straight! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#185

Post by CaptSpify »

foobaw wrote: post #175
flexie wrote: post #26

I chose to believe that this is a side-effect of facebook trying to combat fake news with some lame algorithms and an understaffed department of reviewers, not facebook actively trying to please the Romanian authorities. But even so, this shows how utterly unprepared facebook is for its role as a de facto news business. A bunch of engineers thinking they are smarter than they actually are unwillingly facilitate the e…

This is valid but what can Facebook do? What steps should the company take to ensure this doesn't happen? Do they have the capability to fix the status quo? Is there an algorithm that can prevent this from happening? We don't know if this is an issue stemmed from lacking reviewers.

They could quite easily just stop filtering news and give the users the tools to filter things for themselves.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#187

Post by mkempe »

bad_user wrote: post #64

I'm a Romanian and I can confirm that posts and accounts have been blocked, probably because of being reported by the other side. On the other hand, folks, this is a little reminder that censorship is a doubly edged knife ;-) So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it. A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informin…

For now you may think facebook merely facilitates regression. Eventually we'll see them enable repression. The gap is narrow, when one decides to manipulate people by manipulating the news feed they see as well as selling screen space in that "news feed".

Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box.

When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#188

Post by chimen »

rdtsc wrote: post #5

I was joking before and said that it is inevitable that Facebook, Google and Twitter will eventually sell SaaS (Silencing as a Service). But maybe it wasn't a joke after all... It is simply too tempting to not do it. They have information which the Stasis and KGBs of the past would kill for. One thing Romanian government should be careful with is not listening to protesters. That is at least one country where they ha…

> That is at least one country where they have learned to not piss off the people. In 1989 they rose up, caught and killed their corrupt dictator. All in the matter of days.

Sorry buddy but Ceausescu was not killed by the people. His trial was a disgrace, was rushed, staged and was brutal by any democratic standard. Ceausescu was killed by those that were already working under his direct command at that time (here's the main actor sitting next to Ceausescu which also became president a few weeks later: http://static3.evz.ro/image-original-605-388/cache/2016-10/c...).

The whole thing was merely a shift in power by cutting the head of the beast and re-growing a new one from the same body. During those days, all the "revolutionaries" that we saw on TV killing Ceausescu and torturing his children LIVE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpca3Mh7as), formed a "mafia" group that would rule the country for the next decade; a period in which every industry was sold by these people.

> People came out to protest and within days decision was reversed.

That's more than a month of protests (18 Jan - 26 Feb). We eventually won but we left those protests knowing that this government will try to do its own ways sometimes later. What we are fighting here is the same party that was formed after the revolution in 1989.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#189

Post by voltagex_ »

Raphmedia wrote: post #170
JepZ wrote: post #108

I think what many people don't know or understand, is that facebook is not the internet. So when you write something at facebook you ask a company to host your story under their domain. And as the company is held responsible for what they host, they have to review everything before publishing it. When we wrote forum posts back in the day, it was no different. If the forum operator didn't like what you wrote, he just…

> I think what many people don't know or understand, is that facebook is not the internet. Once, I had a debate online with someone. I linked them an external (non-facebook) link. Their reply was "sorry, my data-plan only covers Facebook". That to me is very scary. This means that a lot of people like that individual are getting their online content from Facebook's trending news and nothing else.

I wonder what plan that was - wasn't there a "free" Internet thing planned that'd only allow access to Facebook? Time to start tunnelling data.

Re: Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed

#190

Post by robterrell »

CaptSpify wrote: post #185
foobaw wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is valid but what can Facebook do? What steps should the company take to ensure this doesn't happen? Do they have the capability to fix the status quo? Is there an algorithm that can prevent this from happening? We don't know if this is an issue stemmed from lacking reviewers.

They could quite easily just stop filtering news and give the users the tools to filter things for themselves.

Interesting idea. I'd love to be able to twist the dials of the algorithm for what I see... But I can't imagine FB would. That would defeat post-boosting.
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