Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

swp.org.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 550 posts

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#381

Post by CodeGlitch »

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…

It's Facebook's platform, they can remove anyone they want without explanation or transparency. The sooner people realise this, the sooner people will stop using Facebook - which in my opinion is a good thing.

The SWP could instead have their own website (which they do) and the ability to subscribe to their newsletters via email (they may have this already). Further to this they could setup their own forum on their own website, again they may already have this). This involves far fewer third parties to shut them down.

Why anyone would rely on Facebook when there are so many other options is just a sign of laziness or ignorance.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#382

Post by pmlnr »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #380
pmlnr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, Signal is not the ideal solution either. When I started with the internet, there were countless free/non free email providers, and now nearly everything is gmail, outlook, yahoo, qq, and a few more big ones. We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email. I was talking wi…

What are the intermediate steps to get there? For me, an intermediate step to a lot of worlds I like better than this one, is for a diverse ecosystem of messengers to compete on security, openness, and guarantees of not surveilling/monetizing users. In the last weeks I've had all my WhatsApp groups of "normal people" start discussing alternative messengers on exactly these terms. They've looked into Viber, Telegram,…

Matrix.org - built on matrix, a federated, but somewhat fat protocol -, or one of conversations.im, quicksy.im, blabber.im, www.jabber.de, etc, all built on xmpp.

EDIT the point with these is tricky, because they are not all-in-one solutions. People these days tend to think that an app/program == the service, but this is so not the case. I've tried telling people they could use other programs to access gmail, but it was like talking to a wall, and this is serious issue in this - the instant messenger - case as well. I have no idea how to tell people that it's possible to use _something else_ as an interface. Somehow most of them understand that there are different browsers to access the internet, but they don't apply this thinking to other protocols and services. Hence recommendations for services who provide their "own" apps, conversations being the root, quicksy and blabber being derivatives.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#383

Post by CodeGlitch »

fergie wrote: post #333

Theres a lot of talk of cancel culture these days, but the UK has a long an shameful history of shutting down the hard left. You can argue about whether or not you agree with people like Arthur Scargill, Gerry Adams, Tommy Sheridan, George Galloway or Jeremy Corbyn, but what cant be disputed is that they represent the interests of a large proportion of the electorate, yet they have been treated atrociously by the med…

Do you have examples of where they have been shut down? - not disputing the claim, just unaware of this.

In recent years it does feel like conservative voices have been shut down from universities - think Jorden Peterson and Cambridge university. This is alarming is it not? No matter if it is left or right.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#384

Post by simonh »

roenxi wrote: post #375
simonh wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was American and there was clear proof that Russia had interfered in elections, I don’t care how ineffective it was. I’d want it investigated and stopped. I’d also rain fire and fury on anyone who interfered with or obstructed those investigations. But that’s me. I suppose caring about free and fair elections in the US is now a partisan issue over there. For a British conservative that grew up under Reagan/Thatc…

> ... I don’t care how ineffective it was. I’d want it investigated and stopped. The level of interference to the election was so trivial I doubt you can back that attitude up. At some level of ineffectiveness, having an investigation and stopping the activity is more costly than just ignoring it. Investigations take time, money and it turns out have collateral damage: Looking at the charges out of the Mueller invest…

How on earth are you going to find out how effective interference was, or the extent of it, if you don't investigate it?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#385

Post by blippage »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #316
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…

>How is this not foreign political interference? America doesn't "interfere" in elections, it gently persuades people to follow the true democratic path. Truthfully, it is nothing more than American exceptionalism. Even as our nation spent years outraged over Russian interference, we continued both private and public interference in elections worldwide.

I hear that their use of Full Metal Democracy helps avoid surgical complications. More importantly, it prevents their democracies from jamming during particularly intense diplomatic negotiations.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#386

Post by Emma_Goldman »

simonh wrote: post #368

For any non-Brits, the SWP is the main left of Labour party in Britain. As a student in the 80s I remember them as an earnest, way too serious bunch of ideological zombies ranting into microphones at the Student's Union about the latest crimes against humanity perpetrated by 'Thatcher'. They're the kind of people that come up to you in the street with leaflets about some atrocity in Africa and shout "Would you murder…

You are over-stating the significance of the SWP. Maybe what you say is true of the 80s, but it isn't today.

They are not the main party to the left of Labour, the greens are. The greens have 50,000 members and received 850,000 votes in the 2019 election, the SWP has a few thousand members and does not even field candidates.

In my experience they have little influence on the Labour grassroots. The SWP's standing among young, idealistic socialists exploded after it emerged that its central committee covered up a series of rape cases in the party. That was in 2013. I have not met anyone who takes them seriously since. After Corbyn was elected many who would have joined the SWP in the past joined Momentum instead.

I am shocked that Facebook have banned the SWP. Their faults are something more like a religion - centralised, deluded, outdated. They have no criminal or terroristic aspirations. What kind of precedent does this set?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#387

Post by RGamma »

hakfoo wrote: post #308
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the same old story. Private companies in their all too often myopic view of wealth creation (falsely equating it with "making money", optimizing KPIs) push forward and extract gains from society and society gets to pick up the pieces if shit goes wrong as there must be myriads of examples for by now. It's not always obvious like with oil spills, or water pollution for instance.

Thinking of Amazon for instance, they pretty much destroyed small local vendors who did much more than just sell goods. They were also access points to local community and culture and raised diversity.

Similar story with Google and Facebook and online news outlets.

It's a question of balance of power. The interplay of society and corporations is not a one way street. Corps offer services to society while they also rely on it for resources and infrastructure and to give it legitimacy and protect its assets.

Among Big Tech firms I believe Microsoft was one of the first to understand and incorporate this and so they self-corrected. Facebook is really late to the party in this regard and I hope in a couple of years we will be able to see the situation with more sober eyes.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#388

Post by pbhjpbhj »

redisman wrote: post #343
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 somewhat sure the end result will be banning all political content- which honestly sounds pretty good

I understand that the likes of Facebook are making a lot of money from political advertising. They're not going to stop it on their own without a severe change of heart. Those in power that have manipulates voters through social media certainly aren't going to push for it.

In your opinion, how is it going to happen?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#389

Post by cm2187 »

simonh wrote: post #368

For any non-Brits, the SWP is the main left of Labour party in Britain. As a student in the 80s I remember them as an earnest, way too serious bunch of ideological zombies ranting into microphones at the Student's Union about the latest crimes against humanity perpetrated by 'Thatcher'. They're the kind of people that come up to you in the street with leaflets about some atrocity in Africa and shout "Would you murder…

Antifa isn’t exactly a peaceful movement, I am not sure it is the best comparison.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#390

Post by cm2187 »

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…

Ha ha. Time to regurgitate all the “private suppression of information isn’t censorship”, “facebook is a private company free of kicking anyone out of their platform”, “facebook shouldn’t be compelled to carry speech it dislikes”, etc.
Post reply on HN