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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

#301

Post by CamperBob2 »

loceng wrote: post #293
threatofrain wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should create a brightline, even if approximate and requiring later adjustment, to determine which companies are too big and must be governed by a different set of rules. Normally we would consider it unremarkable if a restaurant quits a customer, or if a law firm refused a client altogether. On the other hand we consider it disaster if Amazon quits you as a vendor, or if your only local hospital refuses you. Perh…

I strongly disagree. Government control should be as minimal as possible, otherwise it helps a pitfall of potential tyranny. The people need to "vote" by using platforms that they respect the governance of. If they don't like how/who the leadership of Facebook is moderating, they should go to another platform; there does need to be better data and network portability laws/policy, so users are mobile and can leave any…

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#302

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #276
mancerayder wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it de-politicizes censorship, and folks on one side of the spectrum cheering for the other side begin to realize that censorship is always a scope creep iss…

I'm a little worried in a few years it will only be safe to put up recipes and tell people happy birthday on social media, everything else will be too controversial

Reminds me of the idea that discussing salary didn’t used to be an issue; but now is considered rude and taboo. We don’t talk about salary because it isn’t “safe”.

On the otherhand, I agree with other people here that maybe feeling like it isn’t “safe” to discuss things will lead to more open and free places to communicate.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#303

Post by golemiprague »

ssakamoto wrote: post #291
kypro wrote: post #287

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…

Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.

They can do whatever they are allowed by law, nobody argue about the legality but rather about the existing legislation. It seems like we need to change our laws if we don't want SV companies, which we don't vote for, to control our lives and govern what we can or can't do.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#304

Post by NumberCruncher »

ssakamoto wrote: post #291
kypro wrote: post #287

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…

Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.

Sounds good, until the next bail out comes and private companies and their investors has to be saved.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#305

Post by roenxi »

ssakamoto wrote: post #291
kypro wrote: post #287

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…

Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.

That statement is neither true, wise nor a rebuttal.

(1) They have to obey a whole bunch of laws. Including laws on political interference.

(2) If there is a corporate exception to foreign interference, foreigners will found corporations to interfere. If founding an LLC lets someone interfere without hinderance then the world would soon be contending with the NSA, LLC and GRU Pty. Ltd. and Guoanbu Inc.

(3) Any US billionaire, Zuckerberg included, is a potential presidential candidate. They are all politically connected. Facebook will also cooperate with US intelligence which has a long proud history of overthrowing or suppressing various leftist movements.

Facebook is absolutely a source of foreign political interference.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#306

Post by SllX »

herostratus101 wrote: post #300
ssakamoto wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.

Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a conservative who opposes basically everything the Socialist Workers Party stands for, but who is more threatened by autocratic tech censorship than by opposing ideas.

There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices.

20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessage groups, whatever the 3 Google messengers of the day are, XMPP clients and servers, IRC (which is admittedly more than 20 years old), countless dating sites, Reddit, and countless other “social networks”. When the bars re-open, we’ll have those too, and that is an ancient institution.

And for what it’s worth, there’s also the comments section of NRO and The Dispatch. Oh, and the forum we’re talking on.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#307

Post by garbagetime »

pmlnr wrote: post #142

> They are demanding to be reinstated immediately. LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc. The current "social" media + clo…

>If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site?

Of course you could. Whether you would have a good case is another question.

If you're implying an equivalence between the two situations I think what you're missing is that Facebook and the SWP's websites are very different kinds of website. Facebook is a social media website[1] that hosts various kinds of communities, whereas the SWP's website is a website specific to the SWP.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_service

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#308

Post by hakfoo »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #283
threeseed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Somehow, the big players have managed to convince us to suck up the damage.

Correctly moderating Facebook, blocking recalled/bogus/questionable goods on Amazon, or keeping Google's search index pruned of scams and misinformation, are fundamentally problems that requires armies of trained humans, well-thought-out and transparent process, and potentially independent or state oversight to keep it all on the rails.

It's much cheaper for them to buy racks of servers, and occasionally shrug their shoulders and blame algorithms. I'm amazed that legislatures throughout the world have been willing to accept that behaviour for so long. It's not like the problems can be explained away with "it's an insignificant business with no political or commercial influence", or "it's a 6-month-old startup firm that made beginner mistakes because they couldn't afford to do things properly".

Break them all up. Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#309

Post by friedman23 »

kypro wrote: post #287

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…

wait, we don't like corporate censorship now?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#310

Post by throwaway45349 »

SllX wrote: post #306
herostratus101 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a conservative who opposes basically everything the Socialist Workers Party stands for, but who is more threatened by autocratic tech censorship than by opposing ideas.

There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessa…

I mean, that's fine, but I take issue with one party having this massive megaphone to the world, with the other side having theirs completely snuffed.

Either ban them all, or ban none of them.

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