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

Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#41

Post by pessimizer »

hnbad wrote: post #30
zpeti wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A story about hunter biden is not the same as the material itself, which might have been illegal. Just like obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal, but talking about it isn't, and they most certainly weren't wiped from Facebook and Twitter. Which is an extremely easy example of just what double standards there were during the election. Also - how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Ar…

> obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal > how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ PS: If you don't see the difference between yellow press trying to create a moral panic over a candidate'…

> If you don't see the difference between yellow press trying to create a moral panic over a candidate's son engaging in behavior the incumbent has been documented to have engaged in himself, and news sites covering a candidate's tax returns which were leaked after the candidate spent years claiming he wanted to publish them but couldn't for legal reasons, I have nothing to say to you.

You should try. Painting an argument as reprehensible to make while giving the impression that argument is simple to counter by people who are not bad or stupider than you is not a good habit.

Is there some premise that people have to share with you in be worth having a discussion with? Is it too much to ask for you to make that premise explicit? Why would you cite the extensive coverage of Trump's every breath and typo as a reason not to cover Hunter Biden? What does a shrug emoticon add?

I don't understand your argument. Biden has been accused of family-related corruption. What do Trump's ultimately completely un-notable taxes (other than the massive tax refund given to him by the Obama administration after the housing derivative bubble burst) have to do with Biden's son?

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#42

Post by pessimizer »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #39
zpeti wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A story about hunter biden is not the same as the material itself, which might have been illegal. Just like obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal, but talking about it isn't, and they most certainly weren't wiped from Facebook and Twitter. Which is an extremely easy example of just what double standards there were during the election. Also - how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Ar…

The Hunter Biden story violated Twitter's ToS doxxing rules at the time, by including his personal email address which was specifically mentioned in the rules. To my knowledge, Trump's tax returns may seem comparably personal but didn't include any of the identifying information to get them flagged. That was Twitter's justification at least. I think they mishandled the situation terribly, and they somewhat agree by t…

> Trump's tax returns may seem comparably personal but didn't include any of the identifying information to get them flagged.

Sometimes we think that GPS locations tied to a specific android installation is totalitarianism, sometimes we think that someone's tax returns can be checked by the official flaggers and found not to contain any identifying information.

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#43

Post by thoweruo2434 »

qart wrote: post #35

I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter. In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a differ…

Context:

https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?r...

https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-cal...

I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and Christianity.

Worse still the former tend to be simple rabble-rousing, while the latter often have had real consequences. See for instance,

https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-m...

In fact, barring a few indoctrinated people most folk I know are very aware of these biases - many such stories often find uniform coverage in "vernacular" media", and is in fact one of the reasons why, ironically, BJP gets votes.

English speakers of the world, of course, are both pretentious of their own half-baked knowledge, and at the same time, and dangerously, have both the resources and a desperate, almost religious, need to affect change.

No wonder they've destroyed much of the Middle East.

Please don't bother India - you lot have done enough damage already.

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#45

Post by qwytw »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #38
qart wrote: post #35

I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter. In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a differ…

They made this pretty explicit for the former president of the US: anybody "newsworthy" (ie. has enough power to hurt the platform) has near free play around the rules. In contrast my personal opinion is that we should hold people in power to a higher standard.

I don't think content posted by elected officials should be moderated (except maybe in the most extreme cases). The society should have the right too see it and make their own conclusions about it. I bet a quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful and inciteful claims.

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#46

Post by spacemanmatt »

throwaway_s1234 wrote: post #32
r_singh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for correcting me. It was a genuine error and I’m sorry.

It is alright. Happens to the best of us. Apologies for being harsh. Just sick and tired of seeing leftwing propaganda on Hacker News. Especially against India. Hence created a throwaway account just to protect my identity but still voice my counter. Did not expect you to own up to your mistake. Thanks for doing the right thing. A lot of the international audience here don't know Indian political context and gauge wh…

> sick and tired of seeing leftwing propaganda on Hacker News

"Everyone I don't like is a leftist"

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#47

Post by thunderbong »

throwaway_s1234 wrote: post #29
r_singh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, revising previous comment because I misunderstood the said text. He indeed said that they created a WhatsApp account with 32 lakh people in it... Hence the translation above is correct.

> He said that we have created 32 lakh WhatsApp groups (not people). Don't lie man. Not cool at all! He said "Woh isliye hopaya ki hum battis lakh WhatsApp ka EK group banakar khade the". Which translates to "it happened because we created a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in it". You accuse a political party of spreading misinformation and you do that yourself! Did you seriously think you are the only one who kno…

Please read the guidelines -

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#48

Post by screye »

Does Facebook have lower standards towards politicians or BJP politicians ?

I've seen Facebook and esp. Twitter take an active stance on censorship that goes far beyond banning spam. While this is a cut&dry case, the HN discussion is clearly centered around 'special treatment of those in power' at large.

As I see it, fake news is a good 50-50 mix of actual fake news and a political perspective that is inconvenient to your agenda. This is especially true in India, where politics has always been the business of gangsters and liars. At this point, I'd be surprised if an Indian political rally by any party was less than 50% fake news. (In the sense that twitter censors it). Throwing unsubstantiated accusations towards your opponent is a grand political tradition that dates back thousands of years. To selectively silence one of them is to consciously pick sides.

> “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has carved out,”

I'm not sure if I agree. Either a company as a service and it goes full 1st amendment, allowing any content that isn't illegal. Or, treat it as a profit making machine that optimizes for monetary gain.

___________

I personally lie on the 'Monopoly Social Media platforms' should have hard restrictions on what content they are allowed to moderate. Ads about Nigerian princes are banned, but Ponzi schemes and Goop get to keep advertising to billions.

While I strongly lean left (socially), I find the reporting on Modi from top tier US news organizations to be just as biased and colored with agenda as many of the articles on the other side (fawning over him) that people are asking to be banned.

It is quite hypocritical of left-leaning organizations in the west, to ask for 'objective standards of truth for others', but then turn around and say 'not for us, because we never lie'.

Re: Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

#50

Post by commoner »

thoweruo2434 wrote: post #43
qart wrote: post #35

I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter. In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a differ…

Context: https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?r... https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-cal... I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and C…

> OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque.

> OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia

Post reply on HN