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Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

reuters.com

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Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#71

Post by mancerayder »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #63
mancerayder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think principles went out the window when both the new generation and journalists decided: "You can't stay still on a moving train." I.e., everything is biased, no one is objective, and no platform can be objective because everything has an implicit position (even no position is a position). In other words, a very postmodern "no objective truth can be obtained" take. So yes, the rational, logical next step is loose…

I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway.

I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#72

Post by chupasaurus »

kurthr wrote: post #37
lalaland1125 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we keep posting Russian proganda on Twitter? Also yes. Well, that propaganda is for foreign audiences. This is 100% consistent. You can believe the game is rigged, but still be forced to play.

Note, this is exactly as true of Chinese media/propaganda (CGTN etc). They are all over Tiktok, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc... but if you see someone posting from there, you can assume that it is likely state sponsored. It is illegal for a national to use a VPN to access those sites, and dangerous to do so if it upsets anyone in power.

Well Russia doesn't penalize for use of VPNs yet

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#73

Post by runarberg »

philliphaydon wrote: post #65
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news? Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hour…

And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#74

Post by concinds »

vogre wrote: post #54
concinds wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. "We won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," says Meta. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/11/facebook-... They define credible as: having two "indicators of credibility", such as location or method. That is a considerably higher bar than for any other group. And that's referring to civilians, not soldiers. In a separate, internal memo, they explicitly say that…

> violent speech against Russian civilians is allowed "if the context is the Russian invasion" So it's possible to say "Russia is invading Ukraine, so every Russian must die"? Also >Emails also showed that Meta would allow praise of the Ukrainian far-right Azov battalion, which is normally prohibited. You can praise nazis when they are on your side?

> So it's possible to say "Russia is invading Ukraine, so every Russian must die"?

Certainly not, but people on social media are never this precise. Bigotry will be implied, or unclear; but the effects are the same.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#75

Post by ProAm »

djbusby wrote: post #66
ProAm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is Facebook has never had principles beyond market share and ads, we can be honest about that one.

And that's not something the "new generation" came up with.

What do you mean new generation? It was Zuckerberg who said “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” [1]

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-sili...

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#76

Post by runarberg »

mancerayder wrote: post #71
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magi…

Individual journalists indeed tried (and still do), however editors and upper management have always tried to steer their staff in the direction which mostly benefits their shareholders or their biggest advertisers. If journalists still persist and write stories exposing the wrong people, those journalists do loose their jobs and their stories do get canned or watered down (e.g. with equal presentation of “the other side”).

Editors aren’t always evil and do this on purpose, however as humans we all have implicit biases. And our biases increase if we feel like we owe somebody a favor (this is why doctors are not allowed to accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies in many countries). If upper management tells a senior editor that company A is their biggest advertiser, and a journalist tells a story unfavorable to company A, then the senior editor might feel like company A doesn’t deserve this treatment and orders a counter story which exonerates the company to be presented on the same page.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#77

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

ProAm wrote: post #64
gambler wrote: post #40

If you need to change your platform's rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rules and your platform. There is tremendous value in having actual principles. So many people either forgotten it or never understood that to begin with.

The problem is Facebook has never had principles beyond market share and ads, we can be honest about that one.

> Facebook has never had principles

"Never" doesn't feel right to me.

I remember being in Sixth Form and then an undergrad while Facebook was in their "web-scale" days: there wasn't (yet) anything untoward being reported (besides the "dumb fucks" quote) - so I like to think that Facebook's principles, then, were more "let's see where this goes" - which isn't much of a principle, I agree - but we were all re-projecting Google's and Apple's story onto Facebook: something along the lines of "they'll make billions of dollars from giving people what they want, how can that possibly be a bad thing?".

So I'd summarize Facebook's then-"principles" as believing in their own naïve optimism about the power of connecting people, but we were all naïve with them - so while it's easy to criticize Facebook now, almost a decade after the corruption started, which of us can point to our own Slashdot or Digg.com comments made prior to ~2012 that predicted this?

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#78

Post by MisterBastahrd »

mancerayder wrote: post #71
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magi…

No, they didn't. That's my point. One of the most famous scenes in US TV News history was when Walter Kronkite, America's news daddy, finally had enough regarding the bullshit peddled by national television networks regarding the Vietnam war. It was NEVER unbiased. People love to believe that the news USED to be unbiased because the news produced at the time reconciles with their memory of the events they want to believe to be true. But we keep clippings of literally everything, and the one thing that is crystal clear is that what is being reported has always been focused through the lens of the mind of the person doing that reporting.

Go look at this link, which is a collection at Kent State University of articles written about the massacre at the school from the time of the shootings:

https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archive...

Tell me how all of these articles are simultaneously unbiased from the headlines.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#79

Post by jaywalk »

Chris2048 wrote: post #47
jaywalk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may use Meta's platforms to call for the death of this specific list of approved people/groups only. Any other calls for death are not allowed, although the approved list may change at Meta's sole discretion at any time.

> specific list of approved people/groups Should we tolerate the intolerant, or in this case, refuse to use violence against the violent?

Absolutely not. Ukrainians have every right to defend their country. I just find the fact that a corporation has essentially put out a list of entities that they want to see (or are at least ok with seeing) killed pretty dystopian. It's basically the "two minutes of hate" from 1984.

Re: Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

#80

Post by vogre »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #52
danielktdoranie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Russia took responsibility for the hospital but my understanding is Russia claims their intelligence was 1.) it was no longer a functioning hospital and 2.) used as a base of operations for the fascist Azov Battalion... not that it didn't happen.

Interesting observation. . . When Crimea was annexed, there were many articles on Azov Battalion and the implications that it was the best thing (capable fighters who will defend the country) and the worst thing (they're Fascists) and how that would play out if Russia invaded. Since the invasion, I haven't seen any articles on the topic and the US media have gone suddenly silent on their involvement. I find it kind o…

Latvia (also NATO country, and in the Meta list) still has this https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-latvia-hundreds-march-in-ho...
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