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Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

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141–150 of 969 posts

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#141

Still in the app stores I see.

1. Refusal to moderate. 2. By far smaller user base, with that base overwhelmingly participating in fear mongering fake news. There are people I know convinced of entirely fabricated stories that contributed to the violence at the capitol. 3. It's clear the admins of parler explicitly allowed content that encouraged the riots and violence therein. Facebook does admin all of these things. They're also significantly la…

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Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Off topic but I'm having increasingly more difficulty with the term Terrorist. How'd you call American intrusions in sovereign states? Just somewhat recently the drone strike of the General Soleimani on sovereign grounds were an act of terrorism if perceived through the eyes of most Iranians, and possibly Iraqis as the strike was on their ground. Terrorist is a term that is stretched and applied beyond meaning.

I would define terrorism as forced coercion of an outside group (or group perceived to be "outside") through violent actions. Controlling through fear. So yes, any assassination, and especially that one, would be terrorism. However, terrorism committed by independent actors makes them terrorists, but terrorism committed by the state is more appropriately classified as military aggression, or acts of war.

The whole point of the military doing anything short of all out war is to scare an "enemy" into compliance through threat of violence. So it's not classified as terrorism for the same reason as lethal action by police is not murder. The blessing of the state changes its definition.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#143

I recently found out that on May 30th, there were numerous Secret Service members injured in a BLM/antifa attack (oh, scratch that, "peaceful protest") on the White House. I briefly wondered why I hadn't heard about that, then I chuckled at my own naivete. Of course, one might ask how that was coordinated, but then it was a peaceful protest, so who cares?

Can you provide a source please?

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Facebook gets a free pass..." 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 mod…

We can look to China at what effective moderation looks like and then learn that FB would need 2-3 orders more moderators to make it ‘safe’

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#145
post #45

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.

I agree with your use of “chilling” but more in the traditional sense when it comes to expression: that any censorship/bans/etc will likely have a chilling effect on this type of speech. In this case I think “this type of speech” comes down to people expressing their violent fantasies or plans, and I don’t think it’s bad if we have less of that particular kind of speech. As the classic argument goes, however, you can’t have it both ways with both total freedom of speech and some kind of moderating censorship.

All that said, if we can make our way past the obvious consequences of limiting speech we might get to a more interesting place. In particular I’m more interested in how social media moderation might change our opinions and laws about speech itself. Does everyone’s speech deserve to be treated the same way by the algorithms that decide what gets traction and what doesn’t? Should the algorithms or platforms themselves be restricted in their “speech” in some way? How do we square our desire to allow corporations to develop algorithms to increase commerce when those same algorithms also necessarily foment rage and violence?

I don’t think it’s worth arguing whether free speech is worth protecting (it is, despite the evils you also have to protect) but I do think it’s worth considering how we think about what constitutes speech when commerce, social media platforms, and algorithms come into play.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#146
post #121

>The Capitol Attack Where was this rhetoric when Antifa and BLM burned and looted for months with the blessings of all corporations and the mainstream media? Surely the Capitol Hill has an insurance policy? Or does that moronic point only apply to the common folk? Susan Rosenberg literally bombed the Capitol in 1983 and now serves as vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a " non-profit foundation…

idk how to tell you this in a way you'll listen to but doing things for good reasons is good and doing them for bad reasons is bad.

You do realize that everyone has their own opinion on what is good and bad right? I cant believe how naive this statement is.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#147
post #48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent distinction to make is Facebook on the face of it tries to moderate they're just bad at it and make decisions a lot of people aren't happy with where Parler's moderation system was almost entirely pro forma relying largely on showing reports to a panel of random users.

So democracy or trial by your peers fails?

In site moderation it's basically a guarantee that you'll wind up with an extreme echo chamber, people self select in or out the site based on the content of that site. Unless your user group is extremely broad based and siloing is good enough that people aren't driven off the site by extremists then the group of moderators you select from is inherently pretty ok with the content of the site. It has a chance to work in the real world where the same self selection effect is moderated by other factors.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#148

>The Capitol Attack Where was this rhetoric when Antifa and BLM burned and looted for months with the blessings of all corporations and the mainstream media? Surely the Capitol Hill has an insurance policy? Or does that moronic point only apply to the common folk? Susan Rosenberg literally bombed the Capitol in 1983 and now serves as vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a " non-profit foundation…

- The BLM movement is, while poorly framed and easily co-opted by other people, about genuine problems with policing in the United States. Problems that are backed up with verifiable facts rather than scummy used car salesmen and the Inventor of Email™. - The BLM movement, while the source of many large large scale protests (several of which turned into riots and outstayed their welcome) never, at any point, even pre…

What are the verifiable facts again? Do you have alternative statistics because they're actually on the FBI website and contradict everything you're saying. The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters. I hate to be stone cold but that's my understanding of what unfolded. We witnessed something similar in 2015.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#149
post #79
post #21

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 broadcast. A small group of agitators could have used a pirate radio station to call for an attack on the capitol 50 years ago and reach millions of people, which is exactly why pirate radio stations are illegal.

Pirate Radio stations & new LPFM are primarily illegal because Clear Channel/iHeartRadio cannot profit & control the flow of information as well as they do when they have competition. The things Clear Channel hosts, especially on AM, are not even very much different from calling for an attack on the Capitol, having listened to 20+ years (unfortunately) of Rush Limbaugh my grandfather was listening to. You can contact a lot of people on Amateur Radio or CB radio, but it's not illegal because it doesn't compete with big business.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#150
post #124
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk how to tell you this in a way you'll listen to but doing things for good reasons is good and doing them for bad reasons is bad.

You can't use "good intentions" to justify horrific actions.

The idea that you can do so is pretty fundamental in politics. It's how the federal government justified the US Civil War, for example, and how the Founding Fathers justified a lot of things that tend to get glossed over in grade school history books.

The debate ultimately hinges on sympathies. For someone who wholeheartedly supports BLM, the riots might be regarded as something that was regrettable, but also understandable. In the words of Martin Luther King, "A riot is the language of the unheard." The observation also works in the direction of the Capitol insurrection. The rioters were there because they believed that their opinion on the election was not being heard.

Deciding which group had more grounds to be angry is left as an exercise for the reader.

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