371–380 of 381 posts
Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.
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I think that's an incredibly dangerous slippery slope. If you effectively control what is monetised, you effectively control what is said en masse. It's a distinction without a difference.
I have no problem with deplatforming American, Russian, Chinese and Israeli intelligence assets. Sadly we are finding out that our way of life is under threat 24/7 by nefarious barbarians.
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Business is not bound to any sort of freedom of speech. There is no such thing, it does not exist. The first amendment covers government actions only. If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies. Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minde…
I think you may be misunderstanding the post. He is not saying that Meta is prohibited from censorship by the First Amendment. He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make t…
Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.
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I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.
I think that's an incredibly dangerous slippery slope. If you effectively control what is monetised, you effectively control what is said en masse. It's a distinction without a difference.
I wonder how it would look like as a new antitrust vertical slice to enforce against.
Plus you can always self host content and set up your own monetizing partners.
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It is definitely a valid argument. "Facebook should allow all content" is a consistent position if ultimately a stupid one. But once they decide to intervene all of the downstream choices are valid to question.
They were always valid to question regardless but that doesn't mean intervention is inherently good (nor bad). We actively work to prevent anyone with a suspended license from using the road, so does it follow that failing to do the same for convicted rapists is a bad thing? I don't think "Facebook should allow all content that is within the bounds of the law of the local jurisdiction" is stupid at all. Ideally that'…
That revised standard isn't obviously stupid, just vacuous, in two ways.
One, Facebook is nothing like neutral content infrastructure.
Two, laws come from somewhere. They are rooted in morality, and are always a snapshot of the historic violations bad enough to drive laws. Anybody who bases their behavior purely on the law has no morals, just fear of consequences. And when it's something new in the world, that stance guarantees ongoing harm until the law catches up.
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It isn’t just you, but it also isn’t everybody. Dissent is always present, and the 1st amendment ensures that people have the right to speak their mind. Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even if the government attempts to launder that pressure through a maze of domestic and foreign NGOs.
I'm not from the U.S so I'll only say that the 1st amendment doesn't apply here, the government is not going to arrest people for sharing false information. The government has a responsibility to its citizens and so should act in the interests of their safety. > Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even as a non US,…
Absent government pressure, of course it’s not a free speech issue, but a violation of rights happened here.
The government can’t just evade the first amendment by cleverly outsourcing censorship, especially if they have people sitting in Slack channels and the like passing on names! And even more so if they are simultaneously applying pressure and vague threats through Congressional hearings.
It’s unfortunate that the government has not yet learned its lesson on this, because this kind of pressure is still ongoing with speech related to ICE and Israel/Palestine. Hopefully someone wins a big lawsuit soon.
In the US we are citizens with rights, not subjects.
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> What if you are a cook or a plumber or a janitor at Meta who has no idea One, do better. Two, the vitriol is obviously aimed at Meta’s white-collar employees. (Anecdotally, it’s getting harder for them to date.)
I wonder how much of this is the reputation, and how much is the same thing over all society in recent years.
(Alternative narrative: everyone else is fine and the news stories about this are all driven by people at Meta having above-average influence on the news reporting and/or who is going to participate in the surveys).
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“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” — “I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.” — Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt. It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. man…
Would this mean holding the content creators liable for their speech? You’d need to abolish the first amendment to do this.
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I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
Instagram on Android was caught bypassing OS security requirements by opening a port on localhost, which webpages with Facebook tracking scripts would connect to to get your identity.
That said, I see your point. I wouldn't use Instagram if I couldn't do these things. If Google cracks down on user choice to a degree that even adb can't work around, then I'm out. Motorola's Graphene OS phone can't come soon enough.