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Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

bbc.com

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Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#71

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

controversy wrote: post #61
fuvkthisguy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think this just doesn't work out this way in reality. First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas. Secondly, and I think this is the more salient point, encountering racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever speech as a person who is the target of such rhetoric is immediately harmful and othering, especially when these views aren't active…

My response is that everyone should carry. If the Klan goes nuts, the Klan gets shot. Eventually the system will react an equilibrium. I agree with your freedom of association. My only note would be that removing people from the means of financial transactions is the same as limiting speech.

Carrying doesn't prevent anyone from getting shot. And there were plenty of instances in the US where the Klan attacked blacks with few repercussions.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#72

Post by refurb »

puranjay wrote: post #57
htk wrote: post #2

Censorship is so repugnant, yet so complicated. What should be prohibited to be said, if anything? Who draws the line?

So much of the strife we're seeing in the world right now stems from information now, maybe for the first time ever, being truly free. All the gatekeepers of information are no longer relevant. This means that the truly delusional can spread their conspiracy theories and get people to believe them. But it also means that people caught within exploitative power structures can spread their stories - see MeToo as an exa…

So much of the strife we're seeing in the world right now stems from information now, maybe for the first time ever, being truly free

What strife in particular? From a US point of view, we've had several instance of race riots in the past. And those were far worse than what we see now.

And in terms of conspiracies, those have always existed. Maybe they move faster, but think of the conspiracies around JFK's assassination. Those were broadly known long before the internet arrived.

Plus, we see a lot more thanks to the internet. A good example is holocaust denial. Those people were always around. And I haven't seen any data to suggest holocaust denial is any more prevalent than in the past, despite people having more exposure to it.

I'm not sure much has changed.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#73

Post by heavyset_go »

ve55 wrote: post #9

Very glad I'm not Facebook. No matter what choices you make, millions (or billions) will hate you. Is decentralization the only solution, if it even is one?

You aren't going to find a technical solution to court orders.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#74

Post by controversy »

labster wrote: post #70
controversy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My response is that everyone should carry. If the Klan goes nuts, the Klan gets shot. Eventually the system will react an equilibrium. I agree with your freedom of association. My only note would be that removing people from the means of financial transactions is the same as limiting speech.

I tend to prefer solutions to social problems where no one gets shot.

As do I. The fact of the matter is that the cops average 11 minutes to respond in good areas. They take longer in high crime areas. Further, we've seen that the cops are generally bad people. So leave policing to the average person.

If the Klan attacks people, they can freely be shot. If the Klan parades around in their sheets, meh.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#75

Post by refurb »

fuvkthisguy wrote: post #47
controversy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't prohibit speech. That's it. Repugnance is part of life. If you suppress speech, you only push it underground. Light is the best disinfectant. Daryl Davis, a black musician, attends Klan rallies ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw ). By knowing who to speak with, he's helped people out of that racist pit. I extend speech so far to include calls to violence. Then you know who to watch and who to protect…

Honestly I think this just doesn't work out this way in reality. First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas. Secondly, and I think this is the more salient point, encountering racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever speech as a person who is the target of such rhetoric is immediately harmful and othering, especially when these views aren't active…

First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas.

How do we know that? Has a study been done? Are there surveys that track it over time?

Racists beliefs have decreased over the past 50 years. I haven't seen any evidence it's spiked since the advent of the internet.

More visible? Sure. But more visible doesn't mean more people hold those beliefs.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#76

Post by joshuamorton »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #65
lifeformed wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about spam? Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information? There's always an exception. Some amount of moderation is always necessary, and naturally there will always be gray area cases.

> What about spam? Spam filtering isn't censorship because the recipient doesn't want to receive it. Censorship is removing access to material the recipient would otherwise choose to view. > Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information? All of these things have illegal non-speech components (fraud, child abuse), so you c…

But do you leave up the porn?

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#77

Post by deanCommie »

refurb wrote: post #66
ve55 wrote: post #9

Very glad I'm not Facebook. No matter what choices you make, millions (or billions) will hate you. Is decentralization the only solution, if it even is one?

I agree. You may not agree with Zuckerberg's position of not censoring content (beyond the obscene), but it's probably the smartest position for the business. As soon as you start saying "well, we'll censor stuff that isn't accurate", you've opened a Pandora's box of every single interest group hammering you on every single decision and in the end everyone thinks you're screwing them over.

Facebook has access to the biggest and most ubiquitous information delivery platform IN THE WORLD today.

To let them off the hook for the role they had in helping letting the idea of ABSOLUTE TRUTH degrade, as well as the role they COULD have in helping fix it, is not thinking big enough.

Facebook could choose to be an active participant in the quest to reinforce the value of reality-orientated information exchange. They choose not to because it doesn't help their metrics. That doesn't make them evil, that makes them a logical participant in capitalism. The onus is on the rest of us to make them.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#78

Post by roenxi »

gazzini wrote: post #58
ashishb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to think federation here. Some websites have more racist content. Some have more porn. We can choose to visit a website which sorry suits our sensibilities. That's not the case with a social network. They have to apply one set of policies to all. The problem though is that there is no business model that supports federated social networks.

This is a really interesting argument, and I’d like to understand it more clearly. For the sake of honing in on this: Many subreddits have different sets of rules & restrictions. If these options were significantly expanded, could that ever meet the requirements? Another interesting niche example is stackexchange.com, which isn’t a social network in the traditional sense (yet), but it has many different communities w…

I don't think those would work because the data is centralised and only has value while 'live'. Look at, say, movie torrents. Data which has had the most focused attempts made to knock it off the internet.

If a specific corporate site was coordinating the effort it would be shut down (eg, I think the Pirate Bay was knocked out of commission a few times, and blocked depending on the country). But it doesn't help because the actual data is highly distributed in a redundant fashion. Any piece of infrastructure to share torrents (DNS, websites, trackers, client software, information about where to look) can and has been targeted but it is too cheap to replace.

The key is the actual data - ie, the movie being torrented - is redundant and distributed. That property isn't present if one corporation controls all the data as is the case with Reddit, Facebook or StackExchange. It isn't technically prohibited from mirroring it all, but with bittorrent the peers provide the storage (which is the part that doesn't scale) and there is a nice cheap unit to work with - one movie is an irrelevant amount of data and static. Social data is a bit more dynamic - the attention of the speaker is important - and doesn't seem to work quite the same way.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#79

Post by ben_w »

controversy wrote: post #61
fuvkthisguy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think this just doesn't work out this way in reality. First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas. Secondly, and I think this is the more salient point, encountering racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever speech as a person who is the target of such rhetoric is immediately harmful and othering, especially when these views aren't active…

My response is that everyone should carry. If the Klan goes nuts, the Klan gets shot. Eventually the system will react an equilibrium. I agree with your freedom of association. My only note would be that removing people from the means of financial transactions is the same as limiting speech.

Vengeance doesn’t bring back the dead.

The prisoner’s dilemma has the equilibrium of defect-defect.

If racists regularly shoot ethnic minorities, that means members of those minorities have good reason to shoot first in preemptive self-defence; there will inevitably be errors, and then the ethnic group the racists belong to will do the same, and suddenly you have a literal race war.

Likewise for any other distinction that people fight over besides race.

Re: Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

#80

Post by jasonlingx »

oscargrouch wrote: post #37
jasonlingx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brazilian Supreme Court is asking Facebook to block accounts globally, not only in Brazil.

The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory. It doesnt matter where the original account is stored. Those accounts are part of a large network of fake news spreading, with a lot of cash apparently originating from the country government itself.. The individuals themselves keep all the free speech rights.. they can go to newspapers, social media…

> The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory.

If you read the article it’s saying the court is asking Facebook to block delivery of certain content globally, not only within Brazil. And they are threatening a local Facebook employee with criminal liability, which is the reason Facebook says it has complied with the order while appealing it.

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