These headline dichotomies have a tendency to be utterly false.
Even after a successful antitrust action and forced division, Facebook would likely stay Facebook, only minus Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other current appendages.
We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
11–20 of 520 posts
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#12How can freedom of speech be the downfall of democracy? Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves? I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
Facebook isn't "Free Speech" in the traditional sense, it is a massive AI system designed to funnel people towards controversy and lies (because it turns out controversy and lies get the highest engagement).
Twitter is even worse because of the format. At least with facebook people can have their own private spaces with only the people they trully know. Twitter is a just a machine to get people outraged and pissed off and yell at each other.
Yet I see very little pieces written against Twitter, probably because Twitter bought the media with the blue check system, creating an 'elite' class within Twitter.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#13The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable than it does right now. Every online platform that has tried to market itself as a “bastion of free speech” has become overrun with the absolute worst of society and as of 2020 is directly implicated in multiple real life terrorist attacks including most recently in the Nez Zealand government’s post-mortem on the Christchurch shootings here https:…
I feel like we are at the point where it is now defensible to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, because ‘it is my constitutional right.’
A slight exaggeration.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#14It's troubling to me that censorship is being set up as the narrative savior of a free society, when in fact just the opposite is true.
Any measure for success, when used as a target, becomes a bad measure.
Freedom of speech is a measure of a free society, if you make freedom of speech the target and insist on maximising it without limit, then boring complicated truths are overwhelmed by simplistic emotionally engaging lies.
I don’t know where to aim, exactly, only that the real target is whatever freedom of speech is for — call it X because I’m not confident I know what X is.
To the extent freedom of speech and X are aligned, aiming for whatever X is will also enable as much free speech as possible.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#15I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core. Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
I'm sure it's a comfort to the victims of the Rohingya genocide that your mother has a platform to share photos of her grandkids.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#16I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core. Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
It is "bad" only because the right people cannot control it as easily, it was "good" 8-9 years ago when the good people (or the countries that they controlled/lead at the time) were using Facebook against "bad" people (i.e. Arab Spring).
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#17It's troubling to me that censorship is being set up as the narrative savior of a free society, when in fact just the opposite is true.
Any measure for success, when used as a target, becomes a bad measure. Freedom of speech is a measure of a free society, if you make freedom of speech the target and insist on maximising it without limit, then boring complicated truths are overwhelmed by simplistic emotionally engaging lies. I don’t know where to aim, exactly, only that the real target is whatever freedom of speech is for — call it X because I’m not…
This sounds to me like mental gymnastics to justify censorship on the grounds that lies are more popular than the truth, as if this is some new development that Facebook just recently made possible.
Lies have always been more popular than the truth. Observe that billions of people are entirely convinced that there is an invisible and omniscient wizard residing in the sky, watching them.
The majority of people believing false things is dangerous, to be sure. Appointing censors is a naive and harmful approach to solving that problem, counterintuitively.
Uncensored communications tools are how we fix that issue, despite the fact that fearful people will look at some of the short term effects and foolishly conclude that it's making things worse, focusing on antivaxxers and the like while ignoring the rise in global literacy and scientific progress and achievement.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#18How can freedom of speech be the downfall of democracy? Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves? I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
The central point of the article is that Facebook is not free. Yes you can have free speech and democracy but free speech becomes rather more difficult when its biggest medium is a privately controlled monopoly. Fake-news and the like aren't mentioned in the article.
Was TV and radio ever free in that sense then?
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#19The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable than it does right now. Every online platform that has tried to market itself as a “bastion of free speech” has become overrun with the absolute worst of society and as of 2020 is directly implicated in multiple real life terrorist attacks including most recently in the Nez Zealand government’s post-mortem on the Christchurch shootings here https:…
Free speech is fine provided the multiplier everyone is given is exactly 1.
Imagine Facebook with no comments, everyone just has exactly the one status they can update (and somehow their are no fake accounts).
But that's not what any of these platforms are, so really it's speech for whoever has the fastest script.
Re: We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
#20The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable than it does right now. Every online platform that has tried to market itself as a “bastion of free speech” has become overrun with the absolute worst of society and as of 2020 is directly implicated in multiple real life terrorist attacks including most recently in the Nez Zealand government’s post-mortem on the Christchurch shootings here https:…
> The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable
I do not see free speech absolutism, I see a hidden agenda. Facebook is a platform used as a hate spreading megaphone. That is the reality that is being defended, free speech is, sadly, a red herring for many people. Let defend whistleblowers, let defend the free press, and stop pretending that Facebook represent freedom of speech values, because it does not. Defending absolute freedom of speech but then telling a platform what it should say it's at best native at worst willingly damaging.