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Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

reuters.com

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Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#51

Post by beaconstudios »

tomc1985 wrote: post #23
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #5

I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. It was kept in check by an authoritarian military dictatorship and then bubbled up in the transition to more democracy, which really shouldn't have been unexpected. Facebook was just there at the wrong time, and happened to be the way people were communicating at that time; Aung San Suu Kyi has also g…

Facebook is riding in on its royal horses trying to connect (read: own the primary means of communication) the world like all the classically imperialist westerners before them. The first thing they teach you in international business and/or marketing is that cultural considerations will destroy you if you do not devote effort to addressing them. If, in building a hyperlocal product (like facebook), you do not take t…

I mean, they do some pretty distasteful stuff but saying that providing an international communications platform is imperialist is just beyond silly.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#52

Post by aleksei »

imgabe wrote: post #48
ardy42 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. I think it's because they were given ample, clear warnings that their platform was being used to incite ethnic hatred and genocide, but chose to do nothing for years . I don't think they would be getting so nearly so much blame if they hadn't been so utterly negligent about the problem. They didn't…

If the lynch mobs were being organized over the telephone, would it be the telephone company's responsibility to intercept the communications and stop it? If not, what makes Facebook different? Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications?

> Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications?

Facebook is a private entity that can do as they please. It most certainly is not a neutral carrier for communications, and to treat it as such is foolish.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#53

Post by madengr »

aleksei wrote: post #52
imgabe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the lynch mobs were being organized over the telephone, would it be the telephone company's responsibility to intercept the communications and stop it? If not, what makes Facebook different? Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications?

> Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications? Facebook is a private entity that can do as they please. It most certainly is not a neutral carrier for communications, and to treat it as such is foolish.

Why can’t it be neutral? The data is flowing over the same public right-of-ways and spectrum as voice communication? The phone companies are also private.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#54

Post by Nasrudith »

beaconstudios wrote: post #51
tomc1985 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is riding in on its royal horses trying to connect (read: own the primary means of communication) the world like all the classically imperialist westerners before them. The first thing they teach you in international business and/or marketing is that cultural considerations will destroy you if you do not devote effort to addressing them. If, in building a hyperlocal product (like facebook), you do not take t…

I mean, they do some pretty distasteful stuff but saying that providing an international communications platform is imperialist is just beyond silly.

Sounds like the communist usage of imperialism where anything not part of the nation, them, or their fellow travelers is imperialist even if it is better for the people and noncoerceive because they disrupt the native one. Even if it is say actual honest nongouging medicinal care displacing hedge practitioners who were themselves exploitative. While outsiders looking to make money have a long unfortunate history of doing bad things it is absurd to call them all imperialist or even all bad.

Brings to mind a related observation that the USSR and most 20th century nominal communisms were fascism in communism's skin in practice but that is highly contentious from at least the two extreme sentiment ends on the subject.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#55

Post by Nasrudith »

_vertigo wrote: post #30
tomc1985 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is riding in on its royal horses trying to connect (read: own the primary means of communication) the world like all the classically imperialist westerners before them. The first thing they teach you in international business and/or marketing is that cultural considerations will destroy you if you do not devote effort to addressing them. If, in building a hyperlocal product (like facebook), you do not take t…

Wonder how it would have gone over if Facebook had just said from the outset, “We’re not entering Asian markets yet because they’re too culturally different than us.” Bet people would have really liked that.

That does amusingly sound very stereotypically Japanese corporation and the annoyingly common practice of ignoring viable overseas markets and demands out of a misguided sense of exceptionalism.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#56

Post by Nasrudith »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #40
mirko22 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Facebook that leads to genocide, and you don't need Internet to commit ethnic cleansing... Otherwise Balkans would never happen.

Sure, But being informed in 2013 that your platform is a conduit for mass killings and not doing much about it for five years unless it becomes a PR issue makes you culpable to the atrocity. EDIT : Clarified duration of inactivity

I don't think Facebook could win that one. If they purged all instances of it they would be accused of concealing evidence of the genocide after the message got out - which it certainly would have. Like Syrian attrocity footage being taken down for policy violations. If they shut down during the time period they would be guilty of concealing and stopping pleas for help. Large scale moderation is a mug's game that ends only in being Kafkatrapped when it gets remotely political.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#57

Post by beaconstudios »

Nasrudith wrote: post #54
beaconstudios wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they do some pretty distasteful stuff but saying that providing an international communications platform is imperialist is just beyond silly.

Sounds like the communist usage of imperialism where anything not part of the nation, them, or their fellow travelers is imperialist even if it is better for the people and noncoerceive because they disrupt the native one. Even if it is say actual honest nongouging medicinal care displacing hedge practitioners who were themselves exploitative. While outsiders looking to make money have a long unfortunate history of d…

> Brings to mind a related observation that the USSR and most 20th century nominal communisms were fascism in communism's skin in practice

They were totalitarian, a property shared with fascism. Also, China and the Soviet Union both claimed to be socialist revolutions on the way to communism, not actual communists, and along the way the dictatorship of the proletariat/vanguard party became "corrupted". Real communism (which is inconsistently defined between different theories anyway) does not and never has existed, and seems like it won't be possible before we reach post-scarcity anyway.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#58

Post by Nasrudith »

repsilat wrote: post #19
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually an interesting question, from a legal standpoint anyways. I don't think Myanmar has a safe harbor exemption like the US does, they actually have some pretty heavy handed censorship laws on the books. However, Facebook doesn't even have an office in Myanmar, they aren't officially there, and without a GFW Myanmar can't really block Facebook (nor would the people be ok with that, as Facebook has alread…

Linking this explicitly to safe harbour like you've done is important -- the knee-jerk response online is often to condemn Facebook for not policing content but to defend content hosters for not being able to filter out all instances of copyright violations. Maybe those positions are held by different people, and maybe there's some good-faith "make an effort" middleground, and maybe the standards should be different…

Not to mention that the impossible remains so even in if it is for a good cause.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#59

Post by jakelazaroff »

imgabe wrote: post #48
ardy42 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. I think it's because they were given ample, clear warnings that their platform was being used to incite ethnic hatred and genocide, but chose to do nothing for years . I don't think they would be getting so nearly so much blame if they hadn't been so utterly negligent about the problem. They didn't…

If the lynch mobs were being organized over the telephone, would it be the telephone company's responsibility to intercept the communications and stop it? If not, what makes Facebook different? Do we want Facebook to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to say to each other, or do we want them to be a neutral carrier for communications?

> what makes Facebook different?

The content in question isn't private messages, it's public (and shareable!) posts. We would absolutely expect, for example, the New York Times to disallow classified ads organizing lynch mobs.

Re: Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar

#60

Post by dankotron »

magnetic wrote: post #46
charlesism wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a trivial problem to be able to > identify what is hate speech in a regional > dialect automatically This sentiment, which I read repeatedly, really irritates me. Most of us program here. It's not that hard a problem! When social media execs claim it is, what they really mean is "it's a hard problem to solve for us , because we are unwilling to risk losing any percentage of account sign-ups ever , under an…

> This sentiment, which I read repeatedly, really irritates me. Most of us program here. It's not that hard a problem! What solution do you think would work?

Node REST API with MongoDB and React. Duh.
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