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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#331

Post by tharne »

caminocorner wrote: post #323
mumblemumble wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can Facebook violate any TOS and not get kicked off because of antitrust? They could justify it to a court, because "Facebook incubated the insurrection" or "Facebook broke our rules" not because "we don't like enabling our competitors".

That's true. At least in the U.S. anti-trust laws require you to show that the company engaged in certain actions with the _intent_ of creating a monopoly.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#332

Post by IgorPartola »

tristor wrote: post #227
brewdad wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were so close...Try thinking about why guns, tobacco, liquor, etc. are regulated by the government while kitchen knives aren't. You'll get there.

It essentially doesn't matter /why/ guns, tobacco, liquor, etc. are regulated by the government. That reasoning has no bearing on why Amazon doesn't sell them. Amazon is not a moral agent, it's one of the largest corporations in the world with a profit imperative to expand into as many product categories as possible in its goal to dominate e-commerce. Those government regulations make those product types conflict wit…

Substitute Amazon for local pharmacy, grocery store, or gas station.

Look, the point isn’t to talk about gun rights. The point is that Parler was the toxic runoff from 4chan, Facebook, and the parts of Reddit it deemed too toxic to keep. Facebook is 99.9% reposting of random memes. It’s 0.1% is doing a lot of harm, but by and large it isn’t obviously designed to be a white supremacy platform, it just happens to be used that way by a decent number of people. And that’s my point: guns are designed to kill things, not to cut salad. Knives are designed to be tools that are more often than not used for peaceful cooking, and sometimes misused to cause harm. Trying to turn this into a “guns don’t kill people” debate is pointless. It’s outside the scope of the analogy of why Parler was seen as a harmful thing while Facebook wasn’t.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#333

Post by jsjohnst »

asxd wrote: post #193
bcrosby95 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal. Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law. For example, when it comes to USA laws, Trump almost definitely did not incite violence. But lots of people would disagree with the statement that he didn't incite violence.

Sure, it's up to interpretation, but I think we're fooling ourselves a bit to say he didn't incite violence. People raided the capitol on his behalf. His rhetoric must have had something to do with that.

“Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law, that said person incited violence. As another commented, it’s actually really difficult to do because you must prove intent and state of mind. It’s part of why I’m surprised that’s the only charge on the impeachment, despite there being a potentially more clear cut issue, legal wise, that happened the weekend before (call with Georgia election officials).

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#334

Post by AnimalMuppet »

makomk wrote: post #76
krona wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hysterical commentary is contributing to the radicalisation on both sides.

Not just hysterical, but unbelievably, cynically partisan. Three and a half years ago, someone radicalised by Facebook shot a group of members of Congress after asking them about their party affiliation. One of them, Steve Scalise, was hospitalized for a couple of months fighting for his life, and my understanding is that if some of the bullets had been just a couple of inches across he'd be dead right now for sure.…

To my way of thinking, building a gallows outside the Capitol, with apparent intent to use it on the Vice President, is in at least the same category as filling a Congressman full of lead.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#335

Post by sonthonax »

I experienced the inverse of this. When I was in the Army Reserve (in the UK) and still had Instagram, I was purchasing a lot of tactical kit and this caused Instagram to promote far-right groups to me.

I couldn't be further from the kind of person who would involve themselves with such grimy associations (and it's one of the reasons I deleted Instagram). I'm fairly left wing; in fact my entire unit was pretty centrist. And it was aggravating having right wing propaganda pushed down my throat, solely because Facebook's crude advertising algorithms could not distinguish between a soldier who needed some webbing for a deployment, and a far-right militiaman who had delusions of protecting their constitutional rights.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#336

Post by chillacy »

mc32 wrote: post #297
sneak wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't. You can still speak and publish outside of Facebook.

Yeah that’s as good as saying that since you can use Tor in China, it’s really not censorship because you DO have alternatives.

I think there is an important distinction between censorship done by the government and done by companies, at least in the US. Companies (usually) have competition, but you can't really switch your federal government as easily as you can change email providers.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#337

Post by TeMPOraL »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #279
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the free market at work. It is not. The “free market argument” does not account for entrenched monopolies who buy up - or shut down -competitors long before they can become threats. Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism.

>...Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism. That's the first time I've ever heard that. Generally, libertarians will state that the existence of monopolies is an outcome of government intervention.

That only works if companies are perfectly spherical cows, and the market is frictionless vacuum at 0K. In real world, monopolies are an attractor in the free market system.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#338

Post by IgorPartola »

neartheplain wrote: post #144
IgorPartola wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn’t a gun debate. If you want, I’ll rephrase: guns are mostly used to kill living beings, or to target practice so that one may get better at killing living beings. They don’t have a domestic function like knives do: you can’t cook or clean with them.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#339

Post by laurent92 »

Bakary wrote: post #216
mrweasel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually think this is a good sign. I'd rather live in a world where social norms relax to take into account the loss of privacy and anonymity. The ideal world would be one with those two things still intact, but I guess that ship has long sailed... The unexpected Trump era served to speed this up, which is probably one of the few silver linings it has. Remember the debates about whether future politicians could be…

It is a bit like saying ex-nazis could still have economic leadership after the war, saying “tsallright, everyone did it”. For all we know, social rules didn’t relax around their usage after the war, “collabo” were chased all around the world.

Although you are correct that a lot of people with a shaddy past succeeded to have it forgotten, thanks to a lot of pardons after the war.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#340

Post by yrimaxi »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #296
3princip wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news and propaganda. Yet they call for the censorship of others for deeds that pale in comparison.

Sorry, but this comment betrays a lack of understanding about the very functioning of North American media. There is no real world scenario in which they can be lumped as one group. Even individual outlets carry such a variety of voices that you cannot pin one on any given outlet. The organizations that are lumped into the "MSM" branding opponents to a free press like to throw around are just large organizations. Rem…

This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...?

Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested. And they’re not crackpot theories.

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