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Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

reuters.com

101–110 of 540 posts

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's a private company, they can do what they want!"

Just build your own website bro Just build your own host bro Just build your own financial banking system bro just build your own social media platform bro just build your own payment processing platform bro just build your own internet infrastructure bro

And when you do those things, they will be shutdown. Bye bye Parlor.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#102
post #3

It was fun when Trump was banned from Twitter, but now I’m mad about WSB!!

I implore everyone to go re-read all the HN articles about Trump and far-right deplatforming where numerous --highly downvoted-- comments quite correctly predicted what was coming. Trump was "only a test."

The whole thing is quite funny. The best part is that we have only just begun this process and by the time we get to the end of it the people who "learned their lesson" about pushing for this won't remember who warned them about it in the first place.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#104

I can see why shutting down far right wing extremist groups can be justified (or for that matter, far left wing extremists as well). But some folks meme'ing about stocks? Come on. Edit: If you're spewing hatred on me for some kind of retribution, shame on you. This isn't a place for that.

I mean, you can totally "meme about stocks" in a way that's blatantly a violation of the law. There are laws about what you can and can't say when you've got a financial stake in it/something to gain. (As an example, Elon Musk's SEC troubles from his Twitter use)

I'm not suggesting the average poster/average discussion has necessarily broken the law, but there's likely more than a few who have.

And if Facebook went "What's happening in here may be illegal and is too much of a business/legal risk to us to continue to condone, so we've shut it down. We've also updated the rules for all groups in the future to reflect this." - That'd seem to be kind of reasonable.

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Banning it with an arbitrary, inaccurate reason and seemingly no clear guidance as to what the lines of acceptable/not are going forward? That's what I take more issue with.

I think platforms have to be able to moderate content to function, but that the rules surrounding it should be as transparent and consistent as possible.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#105
The position of essentially every platform is that you can shut down however you wish to draw a circle (a person, a subforum, a website, a business, a demographic) as long as you can prove someone inside of it said nigger, or whatever your "content violation" du jour is. The natural effect of this is Soviet/Chinese style effective bans on more than a certain number of people congregating in one place unless they are explicitly approved.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put too much comparative value on keeping the boot on Bad People's necks, you'll help close off methods to shift influence away from e.g. Facebook. If a lot of people move to e.g. the fediverse facebook equivalent, that shifts power away from facebook and makes it harder to deplatform people. So your two listed goals are in competition. That's why I'm saying you reap what you sow: you wanted a world where peop…

> So your two listed goals are in competition. That's why I'm saying you reap what you sow: you wanted a world where people can be deplatformed, and you got it. I don't "want a world where people can be deplatformed". I am 100% in favour of better censorship resistance, open messaging, etc and I 100% think whatever "bad" comes out of a system like that would be far outweighed by the good it brings. But that doesn't m…

You don't want a world where people can be deplatformed, but you want facebook to deplatform people?

If I built an uncensorable distributed/federated FLOSS Facebook equivalent (fedbook?) with distributed moderation (personalized so it censors out the things that would offend you/spam from your feed, or whatever you set it to) and it became popular, would you be for that?

Do you think it that Hateful Ideas wouldn't be compelling on such a market?

Would you deny facebook to everyone if you could, because the shape of facebook-like sites is corrosive to the mind in and of itself, in a way that private chatrooms aren't? I could respect wanting to deplatform absolutely everyone, in a unabomber way. But somehow I doubt that's your position.

I just don't see how whatever advantages you claim facebook has given to 'assholes', it hasn't given to e.g. BLM twice over- with feeds tuned to engagement and rage etc. and also the Official Blessing.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#108
post #49
post #2

> The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on “adult sexual exploitation.” That's some bullshit right there. Spin the wheel, come up with a random charge, and ban the entire community with zero recourse and no way to appeal.

Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a…

>why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community

I saw a news item that said Discord is, and was, and the server is back up with improved moderation.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#109
post #49
post #2

> The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on “adult sexual exploitation.” That's some bullshit right there. Spin the wheel, come up with a random charge, and ban the entire community with zero recourse and no way to appeal.

Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a…

If there is any adult content (in the form of swear words) it is moderated and marked NSFW on wsb.

If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.

Re: Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy

#110
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a…

Agreed on WSB culture but.... The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content. Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.

It might be fishy but there is also a lot new interest in WSB and everything related. So much interest that /r/WSB voluntarily shut themselves down for a while because they couldn't handle the moderation situation.

So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.

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