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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

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Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#291
post #13

We need to get corporate interests as far away from political speech as possible. It's honestly a disgrace these companies are trying to boycott Facebook for not wanting to censor our speech. We all know the phase "hate speech" is interchangeable with anything that's not deemed advertiser friendly to these corporations. You think these companies want to advertise against a status update critical of the BLM movement?…

Corporations want their customers to buy their stuff. It helps when you don’t offend your customers. Are you proposing that the government force companies not to discriminate where they advertise?

Of course not. They can advertise where they want. Were they fairer in its implementation I'd say YouTube's "not advertisement" friendly model is a good way to handle these problems.

My issue here is their intention is to boycott Facebook into censoring my speech. If they simply suspended advertising then fine, but they're claiming they're doing it as part of a wider protest to force companies to regulate what I can say online.

I don't have a perfect answer, but I do believe more regulation is needed. These "platforms" are the modern equivalent to 20th century communication technologies like the telephone. We should be extremely careful about allowing a service as important as Facebook the legal right to curate our speech so that we're advertiser friendly.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left leaning Social Science departments. If they attempted to fill those slots with centrists then they'd be decryed for not using the "real experts" or something similar. On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and not the traditional definition [1]. Calling a white person a Karen seems to have definite racist qual…

> They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left leaning Social Science departments. It's peak anti-intellectualism to question someone's credentials and an entire grouping of fields of study just because their educated opinions don't coincide with your own. > On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and not the traditional definition [1]. Why are these two…

Why do you think their opinions don't coincide with mine? I support the extreme left party in my nation and I vote. I'm also open minded enough to follow news from the left and the right so I can attempt to understand all viewpoints as I feel democracy relies on having many different views to bring balance. When I look at the right wing news I actually see some of the pain that racial slurs like Karen have on real people.

When you watch the both sides of the news you realise that there is racist, horrible behaviour occuring on both sides. I do see a huge imbalance in social power though. I believe that stacking committees with extreme left views will end up harmful due to few checks and balances.

I know about racial history in my country. Some of my black ancestors were taken from their families as babies to be raised proper by whites, google "Australian Stolen Generation" if you want to read more. That's the power language like N* had. What I don't want is for my children to be attacked because of their white skin due to the power of words in the modern world.

Have a look at the post I made 20 minutes ago if you want to see a link that shows the power of Karen and the pain it can cause people.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until now there hasn't really been laws addressing social media which falls outside of what is considered "Rundfunk" (basically television and radio mainly), but over the last year or two a lot of people have started demanding to apply the existing laws to social media as well. I think at the moment they're only required to label paid political ads. Culturally though it has a greatly diminished role. If I remember…

You’re saying they spent 500k over a few weeks? How is that even possible?

You just have legally enforced spending limits.

Someone running for parliament in the UK, for example, is allowed to spend about $0.26 per voter † in an average constituency (of 72200 voters).

It's certainly not a perfect system, but it does mean if you earn £100k it's very easy to become an MP's largest donor.

† (The rules are more complicated than that, of course - there's separate spending by the national party, one free mailing by the royal mail, rules for tracking the equivalent value of volunteered professional services, and so on...)

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left). I lean quite heavily left, I'…

> You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content So what? There are a lot of controversial political organizations out there, corporations don't have to listen to them unless they feel it is in their best interest as a business. > I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is a…

I stand corrected in that I do not know the current makeup of the state and federal seats in the US. The current media coming out the US implies a huge Democrat power base, at least in the power to influence company policy. I will admit that it can be hard to get an accurate gauge of this, despite browsing both sides, because my own media is very left. I assume it's my own biases that make me disregard some of the rights media.

That being said, some of the media coming from the right seems crazy. If the people that watch that have control then that's crazy news to me. America seems so familiar due to Hollywood but at the same time it's so foreign.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left leaning Social Science departments. It's peak anti-intellectualism to question someone's credentials and an entire grouping of fields of study just because their educated opinions don't coincide with your own. > On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and not the traditional definition [1]. Why are these two…

Why do you think their opinions don't coincide with mine? I support the extreme left party in my nation and I vote. I'm also open minded enough to follow news from the left and the right so I can attempt to understand all viewpoints as I feel democracy relies on having many different views to bring balance. When I look at the right wing news I actually see some of the pain that racial slurs like Karen have on real pe…

> Why do you think their opinions don't coincide with mine?

You used scare quotes, my dude.

Furthermore, you suggested that:

> If they attempted to fill those slots with centrists then they'd be decryed for not using the "real experts" or something similar.

You're suggesting conspiracy.

> What I don't want is for my children to be attacked because of their white skin due to the power of words in the modern world.

They're not attacking Karens because they're white. They're attacking Karens because a lot of people have worked dogshit retail jobs where they've been accosted by people aggrieved over the most inconsequential things imaginable. If that's what you associate with having white skin, then you're harboring racist beliefs.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#297
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to say Karen has the same history as N. I see Karen as a word used to target white female and to shame them into acting exactly how the far left expects a white woman to act. You might have seen the recent video of a guy confronting a woman who cut him off in traffic [1]. Widely shared, she's clearly in emotional trauma because she knows the social consequences of being taped and shared online. Oh and…

I'll be the first to admit I don't have the answers to all your potential questions on hate speech. If only there were experts on the subject that Facebook could add their moderation team to help answer these difficult questions.

I'm also going to admit something, I didn't actually grasp that the far right was a real political view in the US. I see the people waving Confederate flags in the news and I always assumed they were just racist looneys. I've had some discussions here tonight that have made me realise America has a significant minority that actually holds those beliefs.

Where it affects my arguments is that I always believed the far left existed but never really believed the far right existed. I think it's warped my view of US politics to middle Right vs far left, which isn't a far comparison.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#298
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The triggering event, as I understand it, is they did not censor the President of the United States who said something to the effect of riots lead to death. There's two ways to interpret this. One way is that eventually people will get hurt in some way if riots continue. Another way to interpret it was as a death threat to protesters. FB's position was that even if it was a threat, that the protesters needed to know…

Trump did more than you suggest. He used well understood language (“when the looting starts the shooting starts” is a famous quote from a white supremacist) to encourage his supporters to murder/lynch blacks. His campaign eventually started using Nazi imagery suggesting various opposition groups and protestors should be sent to concentration camps. Facebook pulled the ad. Around the same time, he used Twitter to (suc…

> Trump did more than you suggest. He used well understood language (“when the looting starts the shooting starts” is a famous quote from a white supremacist) to encourage his supporters to murder/lynch blacks.

Yet somehow it's hard to find this quote in Google if you select range before the events.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#299

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

It's extremely frustrating being someone left leaning that believes in the principals of free speech. It seems like all of the alternatives to the censored platforms, are naturally majority populated by the right. This polarizing effect squeezes out any productive centrist discussion or debate.

The people asking for more moderation are not leftist. Would you believe Verizon is a left leaning company?

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#300
post #251

I really don't understand this protest at all. If they really care about this, why aren't they pulling from YouTube and Google? Which has very very bad comment sections? I'm not for big corporations calling for people to police speech. Patagonia boycotted Facebook, but they have 13 factories in China...a country with concentration camps for Muslims and political prisoners. A lot of corporate good will falls on deaf e…

The irony, of course, is that FB bans users left and right for the most mundane things. I follow blog of a poet who stopped publishing on Facebook because his poems get suspended all the time when they mention any issues.

Yeah their auto-screening isn't particularly impressive. I'm just learning the platform, but I posted a video ad that was rejected and had to be reviewed (fair); then I made that exact same video a boosted post on my business page and had to go through the process again.

I think we're still in the very eary days of L in ML.

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