Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech

Facebook does exactly this. The second report was published a little over a month ago: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/enforcing-our-community...

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, on Integrity, so this is near and dear to my heart.

> Who was this random guy? Who told you this story, or where do you have it from? How did this claim go viral, that one random guy on Rwanda ranted on the radio, and it ended in genocide?

I picked this up from a documentary I saw years ago.. It was probably made in the late 90s or early 2000s. I don't remember what it was called, although I think I saw it on PBS.

The following article gives a very good overview of the origins of the myth I perpetuated in my above comment (starting on the bottom of page 3 is a section Common Claims about Media Effects in Rwanda—and a Critique):

https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...

And a quote from that section:

> Pulitzer-Prize winner Samantha Power claims, “Killers in Rwanda often carried a machete in one hand and a radio transistor in the other.” (The implication being radio delivered instructions, and then men attacked with machetes.) Such conceptualizations suggest a strong causal link between radio broadcasts and genocidal violence.

The radio station was called RTLM, and actually had a handful of broadcasters (2 or 3?), but was quite small. To me, they are still just random guys in the same way that Sean Hannity is just a random guy, or Alex Jones. Although now I read that they had direct connections with the organizers of the genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

I didn't mean to imply that the radio broadcasts solely caused the genocide, but more-so that they played a critical role in exacerbating civilian participation in it, that enabling that participation it in a triggering way. I would also argue that the radio broadcasts played a role in galvanizing and normalizing hatred and motivation in the more organized militia and military participants.

Here is a popular empirical study which attempts to "quantify" the effect of RTLM:

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/...

But I actually like this article the best:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698249.2018.15...

From the conclusion:

> The findings herein do not, of course, mean that the RTLM broadcasts had no effect on the genocide. Indeed, there is good reason to think that they had some effect on specific instances of killing, given that there is evidence that the broadcasts were used explicitly to coordinate the actions of some of the genocidaires (Kirschke 1996, Des Forges 1999). In addition, because, as Straus (2015) notes, elites do not need large-scale popular participation for genocide to take place but rather only need ‘popular compliance – they need citizens not to mobilise to resist violence’ (66), it is certainly plausible that exposure to anti-Tutsi propaganda might have made implementation of the genocide easier, such as by reminding listeners of the founding, exclusionary ideology of the country (Straus 2015), by causing civilians to internalise norms that legitimised the killing (Smeulers and Hoex 2010), or by spurring the adoption of oppositional identities (Fearon and Laitin 2000, Mamdani 2001, Kalyvas and Kocher 2007; Balcells and Steele 2016).

My fear still stands, that mob "hashtag" violence could pop up any time now, that it could spill out in a way that would be hard to contain. Arguably, it already has and does. I don't blame media as a cause, but it certainly is a conduit.

The trauma of this incident still haunts me:

https://kstp.com/news/four-men-charged-minneapolis-fourth-pr...

People very dear to me were at that protest, and I was out of town. I heard about it on Twitter and was very afraid that someone close to me could have been shot.

> If anything, it's people on the ground, in real life, living together, that would innoculate them against people on the radio or on the web telling them how other people are and what they will do if not attacked first. FWIW, the internet seems less diverse in spirit than it was, we used to be small groups of totally random people who had to get along and get to know each other, because we couldn't just block everyone or drive them off.

I absolutely agree with you in all of this, especially the part about people living together in real life. Self-segregation is a dangerous condition, especially when it is driven by inequality, fear, misunderstanding and hate. Too many of us passively accept, even foster, segregated lives without realizing the powder kegs we unwittingly charge.

And what I meant by "relatively diverse" is that the internet's public forums are way more dynamic than a small number of radio stations and newspapers, which were the primary media channels in Rwanda. Of course it cannot and must not be taken for granted that the internet will always be this way.

For example: I help run a large art group on facebook. (Large = 76,975 members). While the breakdown of our group shows the largest percentage of folks in the group are from the US (20k), lots of folks are from India (15k).. and the rest are from elsewhere in the world. We list ourselves as global. The unpaid admins and moderators are from different countries and times zones. We use Translate functions at times.

What localisation do we have? Do we have a choice? If one admin is in Norway, can we use a Norwegian model of nudity censorship instead of the more restrictive American or Indian or Facebook models of "acceptable" nudity? Can you list locally with one admin even if your demographics do not fit? Do large countries always have the advantage? If demographics change, does the censorship style?

These are all issues with "local" or national level censorship, and I dont' think there is an easy answer.

> I didn't mean to imply that the radio broadcasts solely caused the genocide, but more-so that they played a critical role in exacerbating civilian participation in it

But you can see how you put it, with that "It went viral." on its own line even, read as implying that random guy single-handedly caused it all, right?

I was kicked from Facebook after 9 years of using it, with many RL friends and classmates, always under my real name, with photos, with photos I was tagged in; after a time during which I corrected hardliners in both Palestine and Israel, and for my troubles got called a supporter of the other side by each, (though I had FB friendship extended to me by two awesome people, a Jewish author and an Israeli journalist, for bitching so much in comments on Haaretz articles), I suddenly had my acount suspended and was asked to provide ID.

Mind you, not one of my posts ever had violated any guidelines. No posts or comments were reported, but simply me as a person. And of course, I did not get to face my accusers, either. Those "user report" mechanisms also enable mobs, and shutting someone up may not be violence, but it is the objective of violence, the end to which violence is just one of several means. Achieving it without violence doesn't make it okay, at all. I have no illusions that FB has any info that would be in my ID anyway, it's not a privacy thing, it's just a matter of principle to me. I won't play along with that, so "I got kicked off Facebook", and I'm naturally wary of whoever might get banned under the guise of "hate speech getting banned".

That is, I don't just accept that at face value, not in a world where there is STILL ElsaGate content on YouTube, 1 year after YouTube claimed it's gonna fix that ASAP, which in turn was after years of being begged to do anything. In a world where I run the risk to get mocked with "think of the children!" for mentioning that, while it's considered normal to think of adults who seek out words they don't like and get offended.

So I'd want every single case of someone getting banned for hate speech or whatever to be documented and verifiable, that would be a start. I'm not going to take the word of the people in charge, nor the word of the people who think everything must be in order, because they themselves haven't been on the wrong end of it yet. And I got lucky to get kicked over 2 years ago and not sometime in the future, because already I see people saying about the Patreon stuff, "oh, some might be innocent, but most are really nasty". To me, that is in spirit more aligned with radio broadcasts villifying people, than useful a tool against it. It's a weapon, not a tool at all.

This dehumanizing, this "throw them out, I don't care where they end up, just out of sight, out of mind", also spills over into physical violence. How could it not? Some examples here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbqqefsfC14

They're not fighting evil. They're being evil. They're using evil that others did, to do the evil they want to do. The actions matter, not the words. Even more, in part it's what people don't do, not just what they do. Everybody can get angry sometimes, but not everybody can laugh at themselves, or feel compassion with others.

Either we support "due process" (I put it in quotes because I'm not thinking of a specific process as much as one that applies to all), or our grievances lose their foundation. That is, if we don't think the same principles and rules should apply to all, on what basis could we possibly criticize someone for saying a certain race shouldn't vote, or anything like that?

I'm from Germany, and usually my part in discussions about free speech is being an asshole for thinking it's perfectly fine that we can't walk around glorifying Nazism. Facebook had so many horrid groups and comments spouting lies to incite hate and violence even 2.5 years ago, I don't even want to know how bad it's gotten since. So while I'm for, uhhh, "Facebook being allowed" to ban people or groups, I'm concerned with intransparent processes and double standards, and the normalization of treating speech like a luxury, that is granted or withdrawn by an unnaccountable group.