Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#61

Post by king_magic » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #57

king_magic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a President yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater, we should all sit and sing kumbaya just because he’s the President? No. The President isn’t above the law, and he shouldn’t be above the rules of social networking sites as well. There are plenty of ways to archive and memorialize offensive/racist/vile posts from a President. The news media will do a fine job of that. No exceptions, no mercy: if a President o…

Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual. Closing our eyes and ears to the presidents actions and statement doesn't make them go away, or meaningfully disincentivize him. If the president were to announce a racist policy or glorifies a violent military action, we should know.

> Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual.

I don't buy that a single bit. Any sort of "censorship" on social media of a sitting US President (heck, even a former President) is going to be a major international news event.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#62

Post by chrischen » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

saeranv wrote: post #49

bluedevil2k wrote: post #3

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad things sometimes, promotes violence, posts racist comments. But...he's the President. He's not like all the other users of Facebook/Twitter, and different rules should apply to him. Essentially the people who want his posts removed are forcing their own opinion of r…

To a certain degree I agree with you, although I think it should be practiced in conjunction with Twitter's strategy of flagging/hiding tweets. It seems like a good way to ensure the racist/violent/fake content can be moderated in some fashion. I think it's actually very useful, and informative for people to know what their president is thinking, and frankly, how idiotic he is. The world would be in a much worse posi…

His posts are polarizing though, which means a good half of the population may just accept and agree with it as much as one half shakes their heads.

Actually Trump knows this and is saying and doing what his base wants to hear. Believe it or not prior to politics he was quoted to support gay rights and abortion. He panders to the religious right and is trying to play left and right against each other by dividing, because that cements his right wing base. So such action taken by the left allow his supporters to dig in. It gives him publicity and he doesn’t care that it’s negative in the eyes of the left because he obviously isn’t pandering to the left in any way.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#63

Post by king_magic » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

bluedevil2k wrote: post #59

king_magic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a President yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater, we should all sit and sing kumbaya just because he’s the President? No. The President isn’t above the law, and he shouldn’t be above the rules of social networking sites as well. There are plenty of ways to archive and memorialize offensive/racist/vile posts from a President. The news media will do a fine job of that. No exceptions, no mercy: if a President o…

The President can announce he's going to bomb a country with cruise missles, should Twitter remove those posts? On the surface that's 1000x worse than yelling "fire" in a crowd or inciting violence like he has the past few days.

We can go back and forth with hypothetical situations all day long, but I think we all know there is a world of difference between a legitimate military operation and racist/xenophobic/hate speech.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#64

Post by aceman22 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

You know what's hillaroius about all of this; the tweet was literally correct. Whether you interpretted as a threat or a warning or whatever, looters have been shot and killed by store owners protecting their shops.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#65

Post by amscanne » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

stingrae wrote: post #58

amscanne wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pro-life viewpoint considers pro-choice views to be advocating violence in the most direct way possible ("murdering babies"). That's the fundamental problem: there is a huge subjective grey area.

ok... you can chose to not take a stance on grey areas and act on clear cut cases.

I am pretty sure that's the _intended_ Facebook stance, and the disagreement comes over what's a "grey area" and what's clear cut -- which is what makes it a grey area to begin with.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#66

Post by entropyneur » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

avancemos wrote: post #8

Free speech is overrated. Speech can be dangerous and therefore we need to regulate it on every level. Not just Facebook either; we need to ban speech and public commentary whenever it’s problematic. Books need to be screened too. Hopefully we’ll be able to monitor and correct people’s thoughts as well when the technology becomes available. When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.

I didn't realize this was sarcasm until I read the replies. In fact I'm still having slight doubts.

Someone will probably comment soon to explain how your proposition is not at all absurd. A theater will be mentioned.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#67

Post by chrischen » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #29

bluedevil2k wrote: post #3

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad things sometimes, promotes violence, posts racist comments. But...he's the President. He's not like all the other users of Facebook/Twitter, and different rules should apply to him. Essentially the people who want his posts removed are forcing their own opinion of r…

Tweets were not deleted, you are using a strawman. Tweets were marked up with warning messages. It is perfectly sensible to mark as "factually wrong" a message that says "the sky is green" and as "inciting violence, but has to be kept for historic reasons" when the message is quoting a known oppressor and making threats.

To play devil’s advocate, one could use propaganda by only telling truths. This is done by selective truth telling. Can’t twitter’s selective truth telling be considered propaganda, even if the facts it present are not strictly incorrect?

For example if Twitter decided to annotate people’s tweets about coronavirus with a “fact” about it originating from China, it wouldn’t be untrue, but it would appear such notices would serve some public opinion shifting effects no? How they select what facts and what tweets to even annotate could be used to pushed an agenda through careful selective information control.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#68

Post by nocturnial » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

bluedevil2k wrote: post #3

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad things sometimes, promotes violence, posts racist comments. But...he's the President. He's not like all the other users of Facebook/Twitter, and different rules should apply to him. Essentially the people who want his posts removed are forcing their own opinion of r…

> but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place.

When you said the president, did you mean _the_ president?

I'm sure you know facebook is active in other countries. So when you say they should make an exception for the president, I think you actually meant _your_ president. I'm hammering on this distinction you've made because you could've as easily made the case that anyone could post what he does.

You didn't.

You made an exception for president X of whatever nation and that's fine. It's also fine that you mention the _national_ importance.

The problem is that you probably won't apply that rule equally when you consider that facebook operates in several countries. Some with presidents, some without. Some with a working democracy and a rule of law, and some not.

If you think he gets a free pass because he's _your_ president, that's fine. But don't expect people in other countries to follow your reasoning because we didn't elect him, we don't even want him and he's not special to us to deserve a free pass.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#69

Post by stingrae » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

amscanne wrote: post #65

stingrae wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok... you can chose to not take a stance on grey areas and act on clear cut cases.

I am pretty sure that's the _intended_ Facebook stance, and the disagreement comes over what's a "grey area" and what's clear cut -- which is what makes it a grey area to begin with.

I don't see how the tweets twitter added an annotation to could be seen as grey area.

Re: Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

#70

Post by bluedevil2k » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

nocturnial wrote: post #68

bluedevil2k wrote: post #3

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad things sometimes, promotes violence, posts racist comments. But...he's the President. He's not like all the other users of Facebook/Twitter, and different rules should apply to him. Essentially the people who want his posts removed are forcing their own opinion of r…

> but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. When you said the president, did you mean _the_ president? I'm sure you know facebook is active in other countries. So when you say they should make an exception for the president, I think you actually meant _your_ president. I'm hammering on this distinction you've made because you could've as easily made the case that anyone could p…

Calm down man, you're reading way too much into my use of the word "President" and trying to twist the words into some anti-Trump rant. The article was about Trump, my comment was on the article linked to here.