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Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

politico.com

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Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#101

Post by EasyMark »

mandmandam wrote: post #63
greenthrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the number of posts matter? I don't care if it was 200 or 200 billion. Nothing in my original comment changes. Same for number of users. These are private platforms, not public spaces. They are not open. They are not free. They use the lie that they have anything to do with free speech as a marketing tool. Stop falling for it.

> Why would the number of posts matter? Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this. Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information? "We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position. By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years , pa…

Scale does not matter. Where in the constitution does it say “scale”?You have freedom to censor your small online forum as you see fit, you are welcome to censor your mega-super Facebook platform as you see fit. There is no distinction here. Those people who get kicked off a platform are free to set up their own forums (or go to telegram or whatever)and yell into the cloud about the wrongs done to them and set up their propaganda bot; no law says you have to host them.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#102

Post by firesteelrain »

Etheryte wrote: post #43
firesteelrain wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes…

How is this different from Reddit, besides the moderation logs being public? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds exactly the same.

Reddit is heavily centralized in the hands of a small number of mods. This would decentralize things

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#103

Post by lesuorac »

mypastself wrote: post #69
toofy wrote: post #60

here we go again. another election cycle where some of the loudest voices with some of the largest platforms ever in history will be declaring they’re not being allowed to speak. the reality is, they’re loud, they have easier and larger access to more people than anyone ever in history. the reality is also that they’re just mad people speak back to them. people talking back to them is what they’re really upset about.…

Did Zuckerberg himself support conspiracy theories? Or does he regret succumbing to government requests for censoring that type of content? Sounds to me like he wants to allow certain kinds of speech on his platform, regardless of whether or not he personally agrees with them.

Which he was free to do and did.

Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove posts: "[USG] “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.".

It would be much better if the article actually posted the contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1] and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in violation of it.

[1]: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/m...

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#104

Post by firesteelrain »

dwallin wrote: post #76
firesteelrain wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes…

I think a better example of this type of moderation would be Wikipedia.

I have used Wikipedia as an editor and the moderation can be atrocious and again in the handful of a few.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#105

Post by firesteelrain »

lupusreal wrote: post #84
chasd00 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was even here in HN a community of pretty normal people. Remember the discussions of Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? Any mention of it and you were shouted down and blood was surely going to run in the streets of Sweden by dawn the next day. I lost a lot of faith in the HN community then. The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people wi…

HN, to it's credit, at least permitted dissent without systematic bans for going against whatever was the officially blessed narrative of the day.

It does however downvotes start to gray out comments and HN is still prone to brigading.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#108

Post by throw_m239339 »

greenthrow wrote: post #96
throw_m239339 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech issue. When it's at the demand from the white house, it becomes a free speech issue because it's the executive branch that essentially controls what these big bulletin boards are allowed to publish. Furthermore, nothing is for free, so what perks did these big bulletin boards got in return? maybe that administration decided not to proceed with an anti…

I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true. If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms which already d…

> I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true. If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms which already do all kinds of other moderation.

"the narrative", who's narrative? Of course it IS a free speech issue when the boss of the country club is the chief of executive branch and being part of the country club is a quid pro quo. Zuck and Dorsey's lackeys back then, they weren't censoring informations unfavorable to democrats or Biden's family for free.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#109

Post by andy_ppp »

I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#110

Post by woooooo »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #59
chasd00 wrote: post #46

When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are. Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship cur…

Fighting spam and porn are a different category from censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.
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