81–90 of 969 posts
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.
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?
Phones don't pretend to be a moderated public platform. Also, the government has the legal right to monitor phones just as much as they do Facebook via the correct warrants.
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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.
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?
That's a moot point, because an attack like this can't realistically be organized via one-to-one communication. It needs a broadcast medium, which the phone network isn't.
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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…
No, Facebook devotes significant resources to moderation and makes good faith attempts to uphold their policies. Parler did not. That is the difference.
"If the negative externalities are the same in both cases, then this isn't an excuse."
No one is trying to rid the world of all negative externalities, only to make reasonable efforts to mitigate them. There may never be a perfectly moderated social media platform, just as there may never be a perfectly safe highway, and that is fine.
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.
It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea the difference in my mind is that the phone company does not moderate content or exercise editorial control over what gets sent over its lines, but Facebook does. So if Facebook decided that this kind of user generated content was acceptable to publish, they should be liable for the resulting problems.
Phones don't allow complete strangers to discover each other and work themselves into a frenzy over their shared angst.
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.
It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.
It was planned for months, openly on Facebook in plain view of everybody. Remember that when politicians call for more intrusive surveillance in response.