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It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.
Still in the app stores I see.
I'm sure public support for removing Facebook from app stores wouldn't be too different than Parler. If we are principled people, and FB is failing to moderate, then any reasonable person who supported Parler's removal would support Facebook's. What would be different between the two decisions is the sheer magnitude of money on the line, in the case of Facebook's removal -- in capital markets, in employment, etc.
Is Facebook failing to moderate, or failing at moderation? If the standard is perfect moderation, there is no social media. If the standard is a good faith efforts at moderation, Facebook should be tolerated (if not compelled to do better) and Parler should be punished (unless they make good faith efforts to do better).
If people had called one another to prepare this, would we say that the phone was responsible for the attack? And would we try to ban phones?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like some serious mental gymnastics to me. And also not provable with any specific metrics.
It really doesn't, but ok. Facebook has a huge moderation team. Just because some things get through that cause damage doesn't put it in the same category as a platform specifically built to enable terrorism.
I create a new social network startup. Early on, most of the people it attracts are those banned from Twitter and Facebook - since they don't have a lot of other options. In addition to normal social network things, they post some questionable and inciting content. Since I'm a startup, I have a small moderation team and no fancy AI moderation so most of it slips through the cracks. Is my social network "built to enable terrorism"?
The political situation we find ourselves in, even though it was allowed to fester for years on established social media platforms, seems ideal for securing a monopoly for those same platforms. How could a competitor get a foot in the door without being accused of catering to extremists?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with you. The evidence appears to support that conclusion, so I'm trying to understand why Facebook is given a pass. IMO Facebook has been the single greatest catalyst for abusive online behavior in twenty years, but it's in a protected class. I would like to know why. Is it just money?
In reality, it is because Facebook hosts its own infrastructure and doesn't have to answer to anyone. There were no government edicts behind Parler going down. It was just individual decisions made by other corporations.
It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.
The unequal treatment is the primary issue with the Parler deplatforming. Facebook and Twitter and Google has hosted much more and much worse content, from all sides. Yet, they are protected by the central authorities and mainstream popular media. Facebook, Twitter and Google should all be deplatformed for equal treatment under mob rules.
If people had called one another to prepare this, would we say that the phone was responsible for the attack? And would we try to ban phones?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parler explicitly advertises itself as a place of little or no moderation. Facebook has something like 15,000 professional content moderators whose job is so terrible that they literally get PTSD, but Facebook still fails to catch a lot of it. Being not great at moderation and actively advertising yourself as an unmoderated forum are fairly different lines.
If the negative externalities are the same in both cases, then this isn't an excuse. Just because Facebook has proportionally fewer posts that violate its policies doesn't mean it should get a free pass. The fact that up to 15,000 people have PTSD is the societal cost we pay, even if the vast majority of FB users are using the platform as expected. Facebook gets a free pass because Facebook is an influential organiza…