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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#231
post #166
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence says "please don't spread false information." Later you say: "My intel may be false"

It is false that parler doesn't moderate its content. The details of their deplatforming are coming to light and subject to change. My intel may be false about those details so as a courtesy to you I called that out. What's the confusion?

I'm not confused.

It's just curious to tell people to not spread false information and then admit you may be spreading false information.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. I only have a few friends, and a few months ago before the election, I made a post recommending they stock up on food, water, and emergency medications just in case. I don't have many friends and it was probably only seen by a handful of people, yet the post was removed. It's hard to say exactly what they moderate or how.

A couple of teenagers where driving mopeds in other peoples yards this morning. Someone on Facebook suggested dealing with the problem by hitting them with a baseball bat. That hasn’t been taken down and it won’t. If you write in a less spoken language Facebook struggle to moderate you. Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.

> Unless you’re trying to sell animals, because they spot that in seconds.

Facebook is happy to let bad content stay and profit off it unless said content carries a risk of bringing bad PR; I'm assuming this is the case with the "selling animals" thing because some animal rights groups escalated the issue to the media, and it is now the case with anything Trump- or election-related (not that I'm defending said content, but pointing out that its removal is for PR reasons as opposed to Facebook actually caring about democracy or discouraging violence).

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#233

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…

Parler doesn't moderate their content. Facebook has the worlds most advanced content moderation systems and team. I mean you can dislike Facebook, but they clearly try to moderate their platform.

Parler did moderate their content though.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#234

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…

Parler doesn't moderate their content. Facebook has the worlds most advanced content moderation systems and team. I mean you can dislike Facebook, but they clearly try to moderate their platform.

Facebook does some moderation, but really it's curation that drives engagement.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#235

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…

There's a lot of rationales you can give, but the real answer is that banning Facebook would cause Google to miss their quarterly earnings. Many people are willing to take a stand for their beliefs, many fewer are willing to nuke their RSUs.

I suspect the real real answer is that Google would summon an enormous shitstorm of antitrust action down on their heads if they even thought about kicking their biggest domestic competitor in the ad space out of the app store.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#236

All Facebook really did is show blue city liberals how their fellow countrymen actually are. Yes, they have been like this the whole time, you just either didn’t care or were insulated from it your entire life. If any of this is news to you, you should probably think twice before blaming it on Facebook, alone.

This is revisionism. There have always been cranks in the Republican faithful, but never have they been as detached from reality in as large of numbers as with Q Anon. Consider all the stories of people "losing" their relatives to increasingly deranged Q-adjacent conspiracy nonsense. These aren't just the cranks that were always there, they're fresh converts.

They lost their relatives due to a declining living standard in the US. Qanon is a thing not because of Facebook, but because it gave people hope that the horrors and apparent wrongness of the globalism that has wiped out their communities, would be addressed.

Things like Qanon and BLM are a result of that declining living standard. No one would care if the country hadn’t been sold out. It absolutely is the slow death of the middle class and working class has led to all of this civil unrest and jumping at shadows. In a heathy, growing society, you just wouldn’t see things like this.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#237
post #90
post #5

Somebody from Facebook recently told me they developed the best system to flag radical/violent content in the world, I pointed out they first developed the best system to spread it.

Not trying to defend Facebook, but they did not do it on purpose. They developed a really addicting social network where you do as many interactions as possible. When Facebook started it was a different world: Almost no data privacy laws, internet security in its infancy (e.g. in 2008 HTTPS was a rare new thing, not cross-origin security etc.) and people were spamming Farmville notifications to each other. It just tu…

That's not true: the EU had lots of national privacy laws under the privacy directive (GDPR was partially intended to unify/simplify that), and the US had sectoral laws such as COPPA and HIPAA, the former of which very much applies to Facebook.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#238
post #5

Somebody from Facebook recently told me they developed the best system to flag radical/violent content in the world, I pointed out they first developed the best system to spread it.

What makes Facebook worse, in my mind, is that people don't seem to care that it's their real name associated with terrible radical, violent and angry comment. At least on something like 4Chan you'd be anonymous, but nope, people will write the most grotesque comments, while everyone can see their real name, where they live and who they work for. Some people don't seem to care, and that's pretty scary.

From newspapers’ biographical sketches of the people who were arrested for the Capitol siege, some of them were on the dole and so they didn't have an employer they could shock, why the others came from parts of the US where their small-business employers may well have sympathized with “Stop the Steal” rhetoric.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#239
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>This was fine with iOS & play store & AWS until they all simultaneously and independently (wink wink) realized it violated their terms of use.

The timing seems more likely due to a major public event than a backroom coordination.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#240
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term Orwellian should be used carefully not because of a strategy to censor people but because it tends to accompany and be a symptom of sloppy, armchair thinking that leads to fruitless fights on social media. (similar to Godwin's law)

"because it tends to accompany and be a symptom of sloppy, armchair thinking that leads to fruitless fights on social media" Exactly we need an elite social group to determine what is Orwellian.

That's not the point I'm making. I'm saying that as an individual it's a probably a good idea to avoid constructing arguments out of prepackaged notions. Whatever "elites" do isn't the factor I am considering here, especially not NY Times pundits or their equivalent. YMMV
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