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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#141

Post by mc32 »

dahart wrote: post #130
mc32 wrote: post #51

I think Facebook should not have the power they have: to grant or deny speech as _they_ see fit, which may or may not align with the locales they operate in. They are a supranational entity without any local governance. So their policies are left up to them. That’s not good for democracies. They should not force their world view across the world. That said, this is sour grapes from the NYT. They want to pile on becau…

> their policies are left up to them. That’s not good for democracies. I think many economists and many people from all political parties would argue the exact opposite, that companies having enough freedom to set their own policies (as long as they’re legal) is very much one feature of the United States that has been supporting democracy in the last century. Why should a private company not be allowed to establish t…

The issue is that it’s not federated by jurisdiction, so they apply American laws and principles to people in Ghana as well as Mexico and Indonesia, but all these countries have different frameworks for speech and what’s allowed and not. Facebook however does not observe that unless they get pressured (like Turkey).

We may both hold that Turkey has issues with authoritarianism and freedom of speech, but that’s up to them and the international community, not Facebook to set and settle.

They are not accountable to the local population they are serving.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#142

Post by dx87 »

andrewzah wrote: post #105
leetcrew wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That seems like a pretty significant determinant when considering which site had a more direct connection to the events that transpired. does it really? "tries but fails to moderate extremism at massive scale" doesn't seem better than "makes no effort to moderate at much smaller scale". I guess the first leaves some potential for improvement in the future, but I don't expect a whole lot from facebook.

Intent does matter. Why don't you try moderating posts at the scale facebook receives them, and we can compare the results. edit: I am not advocating for or against facebook being so large. What I am saying is there is a clear distinction between facebook and e.g. parler in terms of moderation.

"If nobody knows how to do it safely, then it's fine to cause harm" is a strange way to look at the world. Maybe Facebook should be treated like other companies that sell products that are proven to be dangerous, and they can't operate until they prove it can be done safely.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#143

Post by lesstenseflow »

asxd wrote: post #136
ctrlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false. Please don't spread false information, whatever your politics. Parler had very similar terms of service to other content companies prohibiting illegal, violent, or copyrighted content. They also paid a team of content moderators to adjudicate flagged posts. They worked happily with their reps at Apple, Google, and AWS right up until the Friday Night Massacre. They were a small company experiencing massi…

I won't pretend to be close to the matter, but my understanding was Parler's value proposition to users was that they wouldn't moderate as heavily?

There's a lot of space between "what violates the law" (or explicit ios/play store Terms of Use for that matter) and "what will get you kicked off twitter" and I believe Parler operated in that space. Users could post stuff that would get them booted off twitter, but that was legal speech. This was fine with iOS & play store & AWS until they all simultaneously and independently (wink wink) realized it violated their terms of use. Unless we grant that this had nothing to do with newly discovered terms of use violations, it was crushing Parler in reaction to a change in the political winds (read: this is what happened).

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#144

Post by neartheplain »

IgorPartola wrote: post #78
nhumrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

real people like parlor.

Knives can be used to kill people. But a lot more knives are used in cooking. So we see knives as tools that are relatively rarely used to do bad things and mostly used for good things. Guns are mostly used to kill people. So we see them as tools only useful for that purpose. That’s why you can buy a set of knives on Amazon but not a 10 pack of Glocks. Facebook is seen closer to knives. Parler was mostly guns.

> Guns are mostly used to kill people.

That’s an incorrect statement. Let’s look at the evidence.

More than 50 million Americans engaged in some kind of recreational shooting in 2018 [0]. Compare that to 14,000 gun-related homicides across the country in the same period [1], mostly in certain high-crime communities [2].

The CDC estimates there are between 500,000 and 3 million instances of defensive gun use in the US each year [3]. They also found that cases of self-defense where the victim used a gun resulted in less injury to the victim, on average, than in cases where other self-defense strategies where employed.

There are also obvious downsides to a society with permissive gun ownership, but overstating the case for gun control doesn’t move the discussion in a positive direction.

[0] https://www.nssf.org/research/nsga-participation-reports/

[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2019/01/gun-deaths-2018-america-mas...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/...

[3] http://www.ncdsv.org/images/IOM-NRC_Priorities-for-Research-...

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#145

Post by jf22 »

ctrlp wrote: post #131
shlant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't deny there is probably some favoritism going on, but is Facebooks willingness to moderate their content not at least part of the reason? Parler was completely hands off when it came to any sort of moderation of the content its users were posting (by design) which allowed for threats of violence to go unchecked and flourish within the platform. That seems like a pretty significant determinant when considering…

That's false. Please don't spread false information, whatever your politics. Parler had very similar terms of service to other content companies prohibiting illegal, violent, or copyrighted content. They also paid a team of content moderators to adjudicate flagged posts. They worked happily with their reps at Apple, Google, and AWS right up until the Friday Night Massacre. They were a small company experiencing massi…

Your first sentence says "please don't spread false information."

Later you say: "My intel may be false"

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#147

Post by ransom1538 »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler. I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it…

"I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass"

This is how it always turns out: Orwellian

'At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs start to walk on their hind legs. This is significant because the animals have gone from saying "Four legs good, two legs bad" to the chant "Four legs good, two legs BETTER." Napoleon begins carrying a whip, and soon all the supervisor pigs are carrying whips. Napoleon also is seen with a pipe in his mouth. The pigs literally wear the clothes straight from Mr. Jones's closet'

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#148

Post by jacquesm »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler. I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it…

It's mostly about 'principal use'. Parler's principal use seems to have been to give the extreme right a place to congregate. Facebook does not have that as principal use so it is more of a sideshow.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#149

Post by dastbe »

pjkundert wrote: post #126
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler, unlike Facebook, only existed to foment the kinds of rhetoric and ideologies that lead to the 6th.

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but... I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events. At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. So,…

> At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members.

how do you reconcile this opinion with the reporting that uses gps data from the parler data dump to place parler users at the protest and in the capitol building?

https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#150

Post by jf22 »

pjkundert wrote: post #126
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler, unlike Facebook, only existed to foment the kinds of rhetoric and ideologies that lead to the 6th.

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but... I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events. At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. So,…

Instead of relying on first hand experience, have you considered googling for screen shots of Parler posts advocating for the violent overthrow of government and white supremacy?

They exist and are easy to find.

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