Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
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Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#2> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said.
To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation.
The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#3> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said. To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about…
Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society and this is just further evidence of it all. If Facebook employed an even remotely accurate sample of the population based on political leanings and backgrounds for their content policy team this would have never happened. I think the amount of blame the left and media placed on Facebook for the 2016 election of President Trump are to majorly to blame for the whole situation.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#4I praise all censorship and all inconsistency by Facebook. Poison discourse to the point that it stops happening. Facebook is a platform for manipulation not for communication.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#5Definitely gives me pause to hear things like Facebook disallowing support of an individual embroiled in a hostile media environment and dubious criminal charges. Where would figures like Amanda Knox be if a similar wave of thought-crime style censorship were deployed at scale?
Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#6Meta will have a new young owner before this is done.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#7> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said. To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about…
Somehow I watched 1 or 2 videos on twitter right at the time, and got a good sense of what happened, that ended up being consistent with the jury ruling. These weren't even political posts, just some OSINT people I follow. I was not aware of any "misleading media narrative," since I don't consume any mainstream media outside of occasional twitter posts. Once the trial started I was actually very surprised how many people had zero clue what really happened, yet had strong opinions one way or the other.
This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#8> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said. To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about…
I had followed the case since the beginning. Having watched the videos, it was plainly obvious that in each case, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense. (Intriguingly, many pro-Rittenhouse voices were arguing that he was guilty of the gun charge, though some were a bit more eagle-eyed and read the statute the way the judge ultimately did when he dismissed it.)
The interesting thing about Rittenhouse is that even despite the NYT telling the truth through their video analysis, the rest of the press and tech monopolies ratcheted the story in one direction: that Rittenhouse was a "mass shooter" who was carrying out a white supremacist terrorist attack.
During the trial, my overlapping bubbles either had seen the videos and/or watched the trial and believed him innocent, or had only read the media reports, and believed him guilty.
Given the weird nature of this case, and how only one viewpoint about it was allowed on social media, I wonder if that constitutes defamation on the part of the social media companies, since they were in practice making an editorial decision that he was bad.
That said, I doubt any courts would ever actually find that section 230 does not shield tech monopolies when they do this, but I am curious.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
#9I hadn’t heard of this policy. It makes sense to me how people were so uninformed about what happened that night if Facebook was banning videos supporting Kyle and most of the media wasn’t being impartial. Anyone who spent time watching the videos wouldn’t be surprised by the verdict.
Re: Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy
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