81–90 of 207 posts
We can barely agree on what constitutes hate speech in the U.S.; fb is expecting to define and police hate speech globally?
I dearly wish the NY times would share this trove of Excel sheets and PowerPoints as a torrent. Let people view all of them.
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Yes. Here, Facebook is making a good-faith effort to censor, we can see how difficult a time they are having writing rules for it, and Facebook is being criticized for it. There is no good way to do prior restraint. Read Justice Brandeis' concurring decision in Whitney vs. California. [1] He wrote the classic decision on this subject, and I can't improve on that. "Those who won our independence believed that the fina…
That's excellent. Man, where are such lawyers today???
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If only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were completely full of willing listeners for hate speech, then that might be applicable. Hate groups aren't sending private forum messages to each other, they're broadcasting Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
Words can not be violent. If you think one person being offended means speakers must be silenced, then you're on a dangerous pathway to fascism.
You fight hard for speech because words have an incredible impact on society.
No matter where you fall in regards to Facebook’s right to set standards on their own platform, implying that words are meaningless is silly.
Take for example a law passed earlier this year which required networks to remove posts dealing with child trafficking. The EFF and many free speech advocates went ballistic:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-...
But what if we had open source software that any small community could use to run their own Facebook-like social network?
Look, Wordpress has been around for 15 year and people have figured out how to clean up their own blog spam. Communities like HN or a local village can easily police their own posts. Local communities are also able to know a local language and local customs and laws.
The problem is centralization.
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Well there are localized social networks in countries where Facebook is blocked or just unpopular. WeChat in China, VKontakte in Russia. I'm not sure that's any better? What does localized even mean anymore, and who should decide whether someone is sufficiently "local" to qualify as a moderator?
Devolving moderation on national level (as opposed to centralized global) would be a start, but also self selecting groups. If you choose to be in a Singaporean page, group, forum, etc., you abide by their localization.
How about territories within nations? Should the same moderation standards apply to Mississippi and California?
There are no clear right or wrong standards here. Any changes are as likely to make things worse as better due to unintended consequences. The Facebook employees in Menlo Park have made some bad decisions on occasion but they at least try to do the right thing most of the time within the constraints imposed by their business model. National authorities often have more sinister motives.
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If only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were completely full of willing listeners for hate speech, then that might be applicable. Hate groups aren't sending private forum messages to each other, they're broadcasting Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
Words can not be violent. If you think one person being offended means speakers must be silenced, then you're on a dangerous pathway to fascism.
It went viral.
Low key, I'm basically horrified of the hash tag version of this popping up. There's a poignant black mirror episode about this I believe.
Although... I do believe that the relative diversity of today's public internet forums is a safeguard against this. That spares me a little of my worry.
We can barely agree on what constitutes hate speech in the U.S.; fb is expecting to define and police hate speech globally?
Well, they operate globally and are under media and political pressure globally, so yes, they have no choice but to try to do that.
Having a bunch of likely millenial aged individuals with limited life experience based in Menlo Park to have a say in discourse that crosses so many boundaries? What could possibly go wrong?
A millennial is going to be around 30. They're not children. In fact they likely have children of their own.
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Words can not be violent. If you think one person being offended means speakers must be silenced, then you're on a dangerous pathway to fascism.
If I were to post here linking your legal name and identifying information and residence to this post and issuing a call to have you disemployed and harassed at home; evicted if possible and subjected to a general boycott covering everything from sex to food. You would object strenuously. Yet I would only be engaging in "free speech".
All of the information you state is public record, and for someone like me who always uses my real name, I'm not concerned about people knowing it. You are free to call whomever you like to say I should be "disemployed and harassed at home" but making fraudulent claims and engaging in harassment can be handled like it always has, by me calling my local power brokers (police etc...) to prevent you from breaking the law.
Your implicit point though, that systems of free speech when combined with systems of wide ranging granular information about individuals, can be abused.
If your solution is to get rid of the former, rather than limit access to the latter or create better systems of verification with power structures, then indeed you're (IMO) on the wrong side of a free society.