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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

#321

Post by lerpa »

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.

The actual problem is not Facebook censoring content. It's actually people trusting them not to, and relying on that. "Oh then it has to be regulated", yeah sure lets trust government to not censor what they don't like, what can go wrong.

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

#322

Post by lerpa »

b0rsuk wrote: post #258

If Facebook was really like a society, it would splinter into a number of communities based on common interests. It doesn't, because it's a farm controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Farm animals rebel only in books. Facebook controls how and when users interact. Users have no power to cause any change in Facebook. A society of slaves that can't govern itself. Let me know when Facebook has elections.

Nah, let's go back to arguing like Facebook owes us some fundamental rights and so on.

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

#323

Post by ggdG »

freeflight wrote: post #266
simonh wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Capitalism we wouldn’t have anything like Facebook or Twitter. These services don’t control ‘the’ flow of information, they are entirely additive to what we had before. Arguing that we have worse options for communication now is bizarre. So what is the non capitalist alternative? State controlled social media services? Really? That would be a better option in Romania right now? Facebook is far from perfect, I…

> These services don’t control ‘the’ flow of information, they are entirely additive to what we had before. They very much do control the flow by "personalizing" the content people see and don't see based on how likely somebody is to click something for ad-revenue. That's the direct result of the "capitalist nature" of these platforms; If they can't monetize it, it's of no interest to them, so they try to capitalize…

> Surfacing news about how refugees are not raping everything in sight won't do much for a user who has a very clear anti-refugee bias, such a user won't be very likely to click such news as such they won't be surfaced to the user. But if you surface news about how Germany is supposedly on the brink of collapse because refugees are roaming free as raping herds, to that very same user, then you will most likely just have generated ad-revenue.

It's strange how you - out of all possible kinds of stories that might go viral on social media - choose to evoke a charicature of the mass influx of "refugees" into Germany and its consequences on public order and on the safety of women in public places. This is strange because your view seems to be that a benevolent govenment can protect hapless citizens from fake news stories by censoring social media. However, in the aftermath of New Year's Eve 2015-2016 exactly the opposite happened.

When more than 1200 women got sexually assaulted during one night, on one city square in Cologne [1], not a single newpaper or TV channel dared to break the news in the following 4 days. It was only very reluctantly - when the outrage on social media became too big to ignore - that they started covering it.

Thanks to this coverage it became gradually clear that similar incidents had happened all over Germany that night, and also in other European countries.

It also became clear that the Cologne police was understaffed at that time as many officers were diverted to Bavaria [2] to help manage the influx of a million [3] largely undocumented foreigners into the country. This created a de facto lawlessness in the streets of Cologne that allowed groups of muslim males on New Year's Eve to subject Western women to the same Quran/Hadith-inspired misogyny and violence [4] [5] [6] as women in Muslim countries [7].

Without the unregulated social media (and in spite of its many well-known flaws) the German general public would never have been made aware of these events and of the initial cover-up by the government. On June 30 2017, slyly planned on the same day as the gay marriage bill (which got all the attention that day) [8], the German parliament approved a bill to censor "hate speech" and "fake news" on the internet. [9]

So today it is very well possible that news about another "Cologne-scale" event would never bubble up into public knowledge because now social media are censored just as thoroughly as regular media.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/tensions-rise-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/04...

[4] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/women-worth-l...

[5] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/rape-adultery...

[6] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/muhammad/rape.aspx

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt

[8] http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/06/world/germany-sam...

[9] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/30/germany-approv...

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

ggdG wrote: post #323
freeflight wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These services don’t control ‘the’ flow of information, they are entirely additive to what we had before. They very much do control the flow by "personalizing" the content people see and don't see based on how likely somebody is to click something for ad-revenue. That's the direct result of the "capitalist nature" of these platforms; If they can't monetize it, it's of no interest to them, so they try to capitalize…

> Surfacing news about how refugees are not raping everything in sight won't do much for a user who has a very clear anti-refugee bias, such a user won't be very likely to click such news as such they won't be surfaced to the user. But if you surface news about how Germany is supposedly on the brink of collapse because refugees are roaming free as raping herds, to that very same user, then you will most likely just h…

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by nickpp »

maxxxxx wrote: post #311
nickpp wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of state-run or government friendly companies making money does not make it a capitalist regime.

Why? There were property rights and people invested their capital to make money. What else do you need for capitalism?

Working Markets. In which you are free to enter, free to sell your products and services, free to set your prices, free to purchase or to refuse to.

The more regulated and less free a market, the less capitalist and more socialist it is.

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

#326

Post by germanier »

nickpp wrote: post #307
mcmurtry wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be hard pressed to find a historian, economist or political scientist who would call any of the 20th century's right-wing dictatorships 'socialist', regardless as to the extent of state intervention into the economy. Also, free movement of capital and 'Freedom' are not at all the same thing, and don't always exist in the same places at the same time. Capitalism can totally exist where there isn't a democracy. C…

You mean like “National Socialist German Workers' Party”?! I always found it funny they call it far right .

I still find it funny that people dare to call the Democratic People's Republic of Korea a dictatorship. Names are sound and smoke, as Goethe said.

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

#327

Post by [deleted] »

lostctown wrote: post #239

If you still use facebook on a daily basis, you are in part responsible for what is happening to the free web. Sorry. I said it. I'm getting bummed at the frequency I hear the excuse, "But I don't have a choice, network effects..blah blah blah." Doing the right thing isn't fucking easy. So stop the excuses.

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by TheNewLab »

mariushn wrote: post #286
worldsayshi wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use facebook for keeping track of events. If someone would just make a good replacement for that (that people would use) I wouldn't attribute much utility to facebook.

Do something about it. Every little thing matters. I just submitted an issue to Mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/5843

Haven't heard about Mastodon yet, thanks!

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

#329

Post by imran3740 »

simonh wrote: post #300
salvar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what is the non capitalist alternative? State controlled social media services? Really? That would be a better option in Romania right now? Right here you ask for an alternative, then suggest it is one particular alternative, then argue against that as if it's the only answer. Do you think that's an honest way of debating?

Still no actual suggestion of an alternative.

Here's one: Mastodon [0]. It's decentralized, you can deploy your own instance, and doesn't (necessarily) rely on advertising.

[0]: https://joinmastodon.org/

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

#330

Post by lakechfoma »

simonh wrote: post #302
tomcooks wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what is the non capitalist alternative? State controlled social media services? Come on. More like decentralized, optionally self hosted istances of open source social networks. Given the amount of politics meddling that Facebook,Twitter Google and Amazon do especially out of the US, i would consider THEM the actual state-controlled service.

Ok, fair enough. Systems like that do exist, but practically nobody uses them. We need an alternative that actually addresses people's need in a way they access. But even in the system you describe, what is to stop biased operators from infiltrating the system and biasing the distribution of messages to filter out opposing views, or generating fake content? How does a system like that maintain integrity? Until you ha…

You're right but at least that pie in the sky is something WE lowly mortals can have a say in. FB/Twitter/Google are black boxes and we have no idea what their real interests are, how they implement/enforce/change the processes that skew the media we consume. Would it actually be any better? Who knows but something has gotta give cause what we got now is definitely broke and not going to be fixed
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