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

Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

444.hu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#41

Post by tomp »

megous wrote: post #17

"When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority." What about forced displacement? There are 10s of milions of forcibly displaced people around the world. It's not a small group compared to some other mentioned protected groups. If the basic idea is tha…

Almost noone in Europe is “forced displaced” as they would need to cross many fairly safe countries to get to the EU. So that’s their choice (a logical one, of course, as they’re pursuing a better standard of living, but a choice nevertheless).

The quote by Facebook is a big fat lie anyways. Protection of religion is a generally supported concept, even though it’s very much a choice, not fixed from birth.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#42

Post by JacobJans »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #38
macintux wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is not to trust anything you see on Facebook or to leave the platform entirely. Unfortunately neither does much good individually, because the real harm comes from the widespread acceptance of the lies.

Who gets to decide what are lies? Makes me think of this saying: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

> "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

And yet, there are so many instances where their is no ambiguity about the lies. They are simply bald-faced lies, and there is no doubt that they are indeed lies. And Facebook is quite aware that they are lies. And those lies get very widespread distribution on their platform. And those lies have real political consequences.

In the land of the deceived, Facebook is king. (And those who are good at spreading lies on their platform.)

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#43

Post by ryandrake »

megous wrote: post #17

"When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority." What about forced displacement? There are 10s of milions of forcibly displaced people around the world. It's not a small group compared to some other mentioned protected groups. If the basic idea is tha…

> “When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority."

Oddly, to illustrate this, the article compared the words “Muslim” with “Migrant” noting one word is protected and one not. How is someone’s religious choice considered an immutable and “born with” trait?

EDIT

This is the trouble when you start to try to “moderate” content according to some moral, as opposed to legal, standard: you inevitably end up creating this huge, complicated tree of rules that are often inconsistent and conflict with themselves, need to be interpreted and argued about, and frequently require escalation to more senior people when there is disagreement.

I’d love to see the financial justification for all this expensive moderation.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#44

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

danijelb wrote: post #28
dexen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would Facebook have any content moderation obligations towards any government? This argument, if applied strictly, would allow any government to meddle in the affairs (say, influencing elections) of any other government simply by establishing ostensibly private companies that'd perform to their wishes, whether overtly or secretly. That being anti-democratic, there's clear need for limiting actions of private com…

>For me the line is clear - illegal content must be removed, legal content must be left undisturbed, and if Facebook considers law of some country to run counter to their conscience, do not operate in that market. The only problem is, since the internet is free and open, whether Facebook operates as a legal entity in a particular country or not, doesn't prevent internet users from that country to access the services.…

But the banking system isn't free and open, and facebook is in it to make money, not to have users.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#45

Post by DanielGee »

Eochei5h wrote: post #4

The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing. Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other. Filtering should be a tool available to individuals and delegatable to groups that are aligned with their own standards…

> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.

This is a classic case of the race to the lowest common denominator. When the "community" is so large and diverse and often in opposition to each other, there can be no good standard other than free speech. This is why we had such strange issues of white supremacist content along with gay rights and atheist content being censored. If you censor one group because some people are offended by it what are these tech companies going to do when pressured by china, saudi arabia, israel, europe, etc to ban content they find offensive. They would ultimately have no choice but to simply ban everything that everyone finds offensive or lose market share.

Sadly, I think this is just the beginning of the censorship wars. Tech companies have set precedent the past few years which is going to cause them a lot of problems in the future. Usually the young "liberal" people lead the way in tech but they are usually followed by the much larger religious and conservative groups. The tech companies might agree with the censorship requests of today, but I doubt they'll like the censorship requetss of tomorrow. An organized conservative/religious censorship movement that mimics the recent liberal censorship movement can't be that far off.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#46

Post by nhanq »

21 wrote: post #15
tomp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have any obligation, but then again neither has the government any obligation to permit/not penalize the business. If Facebook wants to operate in the EU, it will have to follow EU rules.

I agree. And in muslim countries, if someone posts LGBT or atheist positive posts, they should immediately be moderated and the poster reported to authorities. Facebook should also prevent users from these countries seeing such content posted from more liberal places.

I know you're being ironic, but I think that's the way it should work. The customs and culture of a country should be respected and followed; the same we ask immigrants coming to first world countries to adapt to our customs, our businesses should adapt to theirs if they want to sell there.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#47

Post by roenxi »

JacobJans wrote: post #42
Someguywhatever wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide what are lies? Makes me think of this saying: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

> "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." And yet, there are so many instances where their is no ambiguity about the lies. They are simply bald-faced lies, and there is no doubt that they are indeed lies. And Facebook is quite aware that they are lies. And those lies get very widespread distribution on their platform. And those lies have real political consequences. In the land of the deceived, Facebook…

> And yet, there are so many instances where their is no ambiguity about the lies.

I suspect everyone can agree there are instances where there is no ambiguity about what is a lie and what is truth. But it seems unlikely that there is any consensus on which instances these are, or what the truth is. If there is consensus, then almost by definition censorship is not needed, because all the though leaders can identify the lie easily.

The argument in favour of moderation is to build a specific type of community, not to establish truth. The hope is that people will vote with their feet and move to communities that favour the truth.

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#48

Post by corerius »

asimpletune wrote: post #14
r3bl wrote: post #6

The Facebook video in question is linked in the very first sentence, but the yellow highlighting doesn't distinguish the link from the rest of the text. So here's the link for the curious (in Hungarian of course): https://www.facebook.com/lazarjanosfidesz/videos/19566176783...

I don’t speak Hungarians and so I have no idea why this video would be offensive. Can you try to explain?

I watched it with subtitles and I'm mystified why it would be offensive enough to censor. Anyone with the opposite POV, that mass immigration from the Third World is desirable for the First World, could make their own video (and do, no doubt).

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#49

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

macintux wrote: post #35
ashelmire wrote: post #34

The trouble lies in two places: "When there is false information but the the poster is not trying to mislead anyone, that's just someone on the internet being wrong, and there is no Facebook policy against it." In and of itself, being wrong is not a problem. You can be thwarted by debate and evidence. However, it's much easier to spread a lie than to effectively repute one, so this gets out of hand very quickly. "Thi…

> The solution is not to trust anything you see on Facebook or to leave the platform entirely. Unfortunately neither does much good individually, because the real harm comes from the widespread acceptance of the lies.

Herd immunity?

Re: Instructions from Facebook not to touch the posts of the cabinet minister

#50

Post by 1996 »

ryandrake wrote: post #43
megous wrote: post #17

"When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority." What about forced displacement? There are 10s of milions of forcibly displaced people around the world. It's not a small group compared to some other mentioned protected groups. If the basic idea is tha…

> “When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority." Oddly, to illustrate this, the article compared the words “Muslim” with “Migrant” noting one word is protected and one not. How is someone’s religious choice considered an immutable and “born with” tr…

Good catch! Beliefs are mutable.

Financial justification: people who believe in $deity are probably over 80% of the facebook userbase.

Can't make money with angry users, so they consider beliefs immutable.

Post reply on HN