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Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

swp.org.uk

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Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#251

Post by root_axis »

WalterBright wrote: post #223
root_axis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decentralized web is the world wide web, and the decentralized tech you're referring to is just a shrunken facsimile of the real thing. Facebook is just the most popular "node" on the decentralized web, if the masses switched over to some ActivityPub social network history would just repeat itself whenever the most popular node bans someone popular.

What about NNTP? Isn't that a fully decentralized social network? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol Note that the D language forums are on NNTP. For those that might dismiss NNTP as obsolete, may I present: https://forum.dlang.org/

My point is that further decentralization doesn't yield anything useful with respect to content moderation, news servers are no exception.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#252

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

alexeldeib wrote: post #248
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #235

> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale. As it…

Sadly par for the course. Games do this to avoid bots improving against detection. Dating apps do it for safety. This is certainly more egregious because it’s about basic speech but by no means is the lack of disclosure new.

And it makes sense. It's like SEO. It's an adversarial environment without a perfect answer, so keeping the reasons hidden truly does help most everyone. It just sucks that it leaves the false positives hanging out to dry with no explanation and no recourse. And this has all gotten to a scale where those false positives are a huge number of people, even if it's a minuscule fraction.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#253

Post by danielheath »

tqi wrote: post #241
hirundo wrote: post #80

It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform…

People dont want distributed moderation, they just want the other side to be moderated.

Moderation isn't censorship.

I might entertain an emotional desire for the other side to be censored sometimes. But a good moderator? I want them for me and mine.

I care about 'my side' making strong, principled arguments with actionable policy outcomes, and not advancing weaker ones.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#254

Post by csense »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #235

> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale. As it…

One of the problems with this is opening up to criticism, liability, and further argumentation.

If you say "We removed them because of their political views," then you get criticized for being openly partisan.

If you say "We removed them because their comments were inciting violence," you'll get arguments about how their comments didn't actually tell people to do violent things (for example, in the US I'm sure for the near future, a lot of people will be arguing very loudly whether the specific phrases "fight like hell" and "trial by combat" are metaphorical rhetorical devices or literal instructions to take violent actions.)

People will start finding and pointing out situations where you made different decisions in near-identical circumstances, and criticize you for that too.

It's better for users if the platform's transparent.

But the platform has no incentive to do so. Less than 1% of the time will users say "Okay you told us why this person was banned, we now see the ban's fair, and we'll shut up and go home." Instead, 99% of the time they'll turn your explanation into another reason to be enraged at you, or argue you need to reconsider, or even sue you because that line of reasoning makes you liable.

From the platform's point of view, it's usually better to let the reasoning behind a ban be a question mark.

> "a big neural network said so"

This is part of it too. With ML-driven bans or other actions, it's possible that nobody understands what criteria it uses to make decisions.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#255

Post by hollerith »

IndySun wrote: post #70

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…

>As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control.

How did the US government take back any control from newspaper barons? I honestly cannot think of anything.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#256

Post by a1369209993 »

csense wrote: post #254
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #235

> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale. As it…

One of the problems with this is opening up to criticism, liability, and further argumentation. If you say "We removed them because of their political views," then you get criticized for being openly partisan. If you say "We removed them because their comments were inciting violence," you'll get arguments about how their comments didn't actually tell people to do violent things (for example, in the US I'm sure for th…

> One of the problems with this is opening up to criticism, liability, and further argumentation.

That's not a problem; it's the point.

> It's better for users if the platform's transparent.

Exactly.

> or even sue you because that line of reasoning makes you liable.

Also the point. Corporations are not people, and their reasoning should be assumed liability-worthy unless shown otherwise.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#257

Post by teh_klev »

chrisseaton wrote: post #250
teh_klev wrote: post #242

I wonder if this is the handiwork of the Center for Countering Digital Hate crowd backed by the right wing of UK Labour. They've already pretty much killed The Canary through their lobbying, the SWP would be a natural next target. Though gawd knows why, they're fairly harmless if a wee bit stuck in early 20th century Marxist/Leninist dogma. I've been to a few of their online meetings and I can safely say they're hard…

> I can safely say they're hardly anywhere close to being revolutionaries https://swp.org.uk/who-we-are/ > The Socialist Workers Party is a revolutionary socialist party ... We want to see a revolution ...

I'm well aware of that. My point is that these guys are armchair revolutionaries. Revolutions don't always need to be violent. They can be cerebral.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#259

Post by sudosysgen »

hirundo wrote: post #80

It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform…

This is true. There are already a few decentralized platforms being worked on, and some mainly by socialists!

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#260

Post by userbinator »

nexthash wrote: post #93
IndySun wrote: post #70

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…

What makes you think the future will be so dystopian? In Western countries such as the United States citizens have a high level of political participation and awareness of various issues. If the government attempts to unilaterally throttle the Internet there will be such a large uproar that our political leaders will be overturned on the next election. Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of ad…

Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of advocating for the freedom of the web.

Biden is pro-MPAA/RIAA.

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