Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#281

Post by a1369209993 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #270

edmundsauto wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also leads bad actors to game the system.

"bad people might behave better to we can't ban them easily" is a pretty poor argument. Zuckerberg has $50,000,000,000; he can afford to hire some people to do the job.

To be scrupulously fair, I think the concern is more "bad people might behave just as bad, but in ways that technically don't fit whatever criteria we banned the last group for". Or, less directly, "bad people might find good people who behave in ways that technically do fit those criteria, and try to get them banned".

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#282

Post by Proven » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #113

Next, bookstores purging UK bookstores of old Left Book Club books? This is the trouble with censorship. Where do you stop?

What's wrong with that? Most bookstores never sold those, they've censored them forever.

Public libraries can exercise censorship. Private libraries and bookstores excercise right to property.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

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Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:22 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #65

RobLach wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. Computing systems are do not act on their own. That the system did this was because it was allowed to, or more accurately, told to.

Often these are machine learning models which are not explicitly programmed and do act on their own. It could easily be a model that takes in features such as "has an admin banned this page" or "has an overwhelming number of users reported this page" and then based on that it identifies problematic keywords that it uses to ban pages. And then it relies on humans to manually interject when the model fails as it someti…

The law and the rest of society does not have to accomodate unpredictable and buggy ML models -in fact its the other way round. We are bot obligated to suffer damage just because FB relies on ML.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#284

Post by vulcan01 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #102

mcbuilder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I actually align with this opinion My politics are certainly by US standards left wing. I supported the recent right wing purge on social media because I thought it was their right to do so, and I support the right of FB to ban whoever they want. The one thing that must not be censored is the internet itself. If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to s…

> If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand. That rings hollow. Your datacenter, ISP, CDN or registrar will boot you.

Hypothetical: If I want to print a neo-Nazi newspaper:

- Printing services can refuse to print my newspaper. - Shipping companies can refuse to deliver my newspaper. - Heck, my landlord could boot me out of my home for being a neo-Nazi.

Is the internet any different? Datacenters and CDNs = Printing services, ISPs = shipping companies.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#285

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #46

mhh__ wrote: post #9

I assume this is a mistake, although I think they're mad I don't think the SWP are malicious a la some political sects

> I assume this is a mistake... This isn't their first 'mistake' to shut them down. Unless of course Facebook believes that this group has broken their rules which resulted them on getting shut down. Regardless, Facebook is a private platform and can shut down whoever they want. Mistake or not.

Newspapers are peivate, but they have to follow some rules. And pay taxes

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#286

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

chroem- wrote: post #26

mhh__ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also mainly motivated by money, which allows us to make at least educated guesses as to what happened in matters like these

That's irrelevant, because a private company can't be compelled to support someone else's speech against their will. If you don't like it, then take political action. Edit: For those unaware, this is the devil's advocate take. HN has been remarkably pro-corporate censorship lately, and only a matter of weeks later its coming back to bite pro-censorship advocates.

Newspapers, journals, radio and other publishers have to maintain some basic decency, even if they are public.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#287

Post by kypro » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:30 AM UTC

How is this not foreign political interference?

The UK media has been preaching to us about dangers of Russian election interference for years at this point, but simultaneously they seem completely unconcerned that a handful of wealthy Americans how the power to censor popular media outlets, entire political movements and political activists at a whim.

The SWP is massive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they had millions of followers on Facebook. This isn't some fringe, extremist group by any sane interpretation of those terms.

It seems we're now quickly moving on from just censoring those with extremist political views to simply censoring anyone who who dares express a non-establishment political view online.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#288

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #55

chroem- wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant, because a private company can't be compelled to support someone else's speech against their will. If you don't like it, then take political action. Edit: For those unaware, this is the devil's advocate take. HN has been remarkably pro-corporate censorship lately, and only a matter of weeks later its coming back to bite pro-censorship advocates.

You're assuming, rather uncharitably, that people in favor of "private entities cannot be compelled to host the speech of others" only support that point of view because it serves other political stances they hold, rather than as a general principle. A site is free to ban all left-wing groups, all right-wing groups, all centrist groups, all groups with an 'e' in their names, all hate groups, or all of the above. Othe…

So if executives of Google, FB and twitter all make a deal with oil companies to ban anyone advocating clinate action, thats fine?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#289

Post by konjin » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #280

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the article does make a distinction, saying the other parts weren't part of the holocaust, necessitating a different name for everything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Definition It doesn't deny that other stuff happens, it just defines the holocaust as not including them. Personally, I never knew the scale of the non-holocaust parts of the holocaust era until reading this today, and I…

Roma have their own term for it IIRC

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Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#290

Post by loceng » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:57 AM UTC

PoignardAzur wrote: post #228

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…

That's optimistic. What I'm seeing is a lot of "we should regulate things so that facebook isn't allowed to censor things I like but is obligated to censor things I don't like". If people reacted to censorship in a principled way, we wouldn't be where we are today.

And then you posting your counter narrative - even if it's truth and reason - will result in you being ban/blocked from their threads. We're going to start to have big in-person forums where a person's truth and reason can't be quickly silenced so the potential mob will be smaller than otherwise.