Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#291

Post by Veserv » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #258

Veserv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are presupposing that for some reason Facebook must do this. If they can not moderate then their service is defective. The fact that they want to make huge gobs of money does not “force” them to offer a defective service, they can just not offer it. If a construction company said: “The only projects we can make a profit on are skyscrapers, but we do not know how to make a skyscraper without having it fall down an…

> If they can not moderate then their service is defective Well wait a minute, couldn't you say the same about the ISPs that host websites in the first place? Isn't the standard pro-big-tech-censorship position "if you don't like it, make your own website"? If Facebook has to moderate content (according to any standard) in order to exists, why don't hosting providers also have to moderate? (FWIW I'm anti-censorship)

I am responding to the article and the poster’s response in context.

The article asserts that Facebook’s moderation is defective. The person I was responding to presented a standard generic argument that is of the form: “Yes, it is defective, but the problem is too hard for anybody to produce a non-defective solution. Therefore, the provider has no choice but to provide a defective service.” I am arguing that is untrue. If a service is defective, it can and should just not be offered.

Note this is entirely contingent on the service being defective according to your value system. I have made no claim as to whether or not I agree with the specifics here, just that the generic conditional argument presented is flawed.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#292

Post by rat87 » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #278

jquery wrote: post #197

Quoted post unavailable.

What's "Terf"? A name?

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

Trans exclusionary radical feminist

Although sometimes directed at people ho are just transphobes, it's aimed at some feminist who don't consider trans women women or trans men men and have a very negative anti trans views. See JK Rowling controversy

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#293

Post by etchalon » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #275

etchalon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crime sure is hard to stop." "Well, just make everything legal."

Allow legal things. Block illegal things. It seems crazy that it's impossible to find a major platform that has this policy.

Pornography is legal.

If Facebook allowed pornography, it would quickly overwhelm the platform due to engagement metrics.

It would make the platform unusable.

Vile hate speech? Completely legal.

But its mere presence would turn away huge numbers of users.

It would make the platform unattractive and hurt the business.

It is in the platform's best interest to block otherwise legal things.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#294

Post by troon-lover » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #268

logicalmonster wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was reading quite a lot recently about war in Angola and still I have doubts which side was "good" and which was "bad", besides that people who lived there were hurt in the history like almost no other nation. Norm MacDonald (I didn't even know he was sick) is said to have made the following quote, which is an interesting filter to look at all you know about history through. "It says here in this history book tha…

> It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. Is that really true? The conquest of the Americas is near-universally seen as "evil" defeating at least "innocent" if not "good". Leaving aside the people who say "The Aztecs had it coming". The Roman empire did some pretty shitty things, that most people would recognize as evil (slavery, Celtic genocide) but is still regarde…

No post body was provided.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#295

Post by root_axis » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #280

root_axis wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are enough token anecdotes of companies doing background checks on social media, and will actively flag individuals for having zero presence. I'm sure it happens, but I don't believe that to be a real issue since using the presence of a social media account as a filtering tool for hiring is obviously ridiculous, and as someone who has done a lot of hiring, it's completely absurd to imagine we'd ever turn away…

I'm not sure why you circle back to peer pressure when we agree it isn't an issue. Are you reading past the comments? >it's completely absurd to imagine we'd ever turn away a good candidate because their name didn't hit on a social media search, Understand for a moment many of these people are not developers with well-established CVs. These are normal people working the bottom of the ladder where there are plenty of…

> I'm not sure why you circle back to peer pressure when we agree it isn't an issue.

You're the one bringing it up. You've mentioned peer pressure in all of your replies.

> Understand for a moment many of these people are not developers with well-established CVs

It doesn't matter the industry or the CV, the idea that the absence of a social media account factors into hiring decisions in any real way doesn't make sense.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#296

Post by RajT88 » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

illuminerdy wrote: post #286

RajT88 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war". When I was in college, I was looking around an FTP server and found a holocaust denier book. So I read it. Well, more moderately skimmed (not lightly). It was exactly like this -…

> "...it purported to be a sober view of history, well cited and no name calling. Literally none of the references were to anything real; it was all fabricated bullshit trying to push the reader to a particular conclusion (Jews are bad)." But the problem is that censorship assumes that you are too stupid to come to that conclusion yourself and must be protected from the "misinformation". It also robs the marketplace…

Companies have the right to handle this issue however they wish. Generations of politicians have ensured it, at least in the US. That's just how it is.

With regards to:

> But the problem is that censorship assumes that you are too stupid to come to that conclusion yourself and must be protected from the "misinformation".

> It also robs the marketplace of the ability to hear the legitimate criticisms and the opportunities to expose said bullshit.

Do you think the public on the first count, and the marketplace on the second count are doing a particularly admirable job here? Because, I don't. And that failure comes in no small part because of other vested interests who prop up said bullshit, because they see an opportunity to profit and gain more influence from it. How do you propose we address that?

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#297

Post by triceratops » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #276

triceratops wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. Is that really true? The conquest of the Americas is near-universally seen as "evil" defeating at least "innocent" if not "good". Leaving aside the people who say "The Aztecs had it coming". The Roman empire did some pretty shitty things, that most people would recognize as evil (slavery, Celtic genocide) but is still regarde…

> Is that really true? That's sort of the joke. It's another way of saying "the victors write the history books"

I understand the joke and I know the victors write the history books, by virtue of being alive. But they don't always make themselves look like the good guys in those history books.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#298

Post by feoren » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

20amxn20 wrote: post #224

mjburgess wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if your country has just perpetrated a genocide, one might have unusual moral responsibilities.

[flagged]

The part that's always missing from this kind of argument is: then you're wrong. You are incorrect. It's mind-boggling to me that the actual fact of what actually happened never seems to matter in this argument. Look, I understand the practical problems with a law like "It's illegal to lie on the news" -- of course that's problematic: who decides what a lie is? But if you could guarantee unambiguous, 100% accurate, oracle-level determination of lies, then that law would be fantastic for society. That's of course not possible in general, but that doesn't mean there aren't very special cases where we can get close to that. There are some things that we know for 100% certain definitely happened, and also that certain awful people have certain horrifying motivations to lie about. I'm totally fine with those being illegal to lie about. If you disagree with me about it, it simply means you are an awful piece of shit. Again, that's not true in general, about any opinion or controversial issue: of course it's not! But it's true about the Holocaust, and that matters.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#299

Post by fallingknife » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 8:03 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #248

godelski wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the inverse Blackstone Ratio! But I think we must also look why they end up this way. My thoughts are that a small portion of the public reacts so strongly and loudly to any minor mistake that it turns into national conversations. Ironically through their very platforms and algorithms that optimize for engagement (fighting). So we then paint these small populations as representative populations and make mountai…

A small portion of the public will react to almost anything in any way. The censorship regime here must surely have been created by more complex factors, like maybe: - Dependence on advertising, exposure to advertisers who feel like their brands appearing next to anything controversial or upsetting will negative-halo upon their brand. - Ideological uniformity amongst journalists, who highlight certain kinds of outrag…

The advertising point is a red herring. Adtech companies have gotten very good at targeting exactly what content their adds will an will not appear on. When they censor it is because they do not want you to see it.

Re: Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

#300

Post by Spivak » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

matrix_overload wrote: post #230

BrainVirus wrote: post #189

This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "d…

The platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage. So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms). And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have o…

> The platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage.

I find this funny because I initially assumed you were talking about the seemingly infinite number of people posting the "straddle the line like it's a Hitachi wand" flamebait that typically gets axed. There's no way to make everyone happy, but I think there's a chance we can broadly agree that there's very little harm done by being overzealous when it comes to using the banhammer on outrage porn. I mean HN basically does the same thing but on a smaller scale.