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Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

swp.org.uk

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Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#151

Post by stretchcat »

Animats wrote: post #115
dave5104 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Isn't this Facebook? Granted I'm sure not every single profile is "verified" with an actual ID, but lack of anonymity doesn't seem to stop as many people as you'd think.

Suppose that you had to have a RealID, or the equivalent for your country, to post on Facebook? Or at least be visible beyond a few close friends. Comments?

Most of the people being toxic on Facebook are using their real names. Requiring them to prove their names are real wouldn't change anything.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#153

Post by root_axis »

IndySun wrote: post #70

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…

The decentralized web is the world wide web, and the decentralized tech you're referring to is just a shrunken facsimile of the real thing. Facebook is just the most popular "node" on the decentralized web, if the masses switched over to some ActivityPub social network history would just repeat itself whenever the most popular node bans someone popular.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#154

Post by konjin »

ralston3 wrote: post #92
IndySun wrote: post #70

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…

> and anonymous use will be illegal. Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight.…

>Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth.

I'm going to guess you're liberal and think the 'storming' of the capital was the political event of the decade on par with 9/11.

Yet it was all organized in the open on facebook using real names.

Curious how using real names did not stop anyone.

People are willing to do things they believe in that are detrimental to themselves. That is after all why the US exists.

Anonymity is a way for people to say that they want to blow up parliament and get feedback on why it's a good or bad idea before doing it.

It is very confusing to me why the US, a country that hasn't had a real genocide since the 1860s, is taking advice on speech regulation from countries whose last genocide was in the 1940s.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#155

Post by monadic3 »

Tokkemon wrote: post #111
IndySun wrote: post #70

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…

I think you need to lay off the apocalyptic movies for a bit.

Do you disagree? Care you finish your thought?

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#156

Post by BoorishBears »

mrec wrote: post #72
BoorishBears wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this actually affect the correctness of their point? Acting like a reaction to a politically charged breach of the capitol building is equivalent to a page sharing views about COVID and workers rights getting removed? It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out...

I was correcting what looked like a significant misapprehension about the subject of the thread, not arguing for a comparison. Although I can't see anything in throwaways885's comment to suggest that they were talking about the post-Capitol-breach purges. If anything, "for a while" suggests the opposite.

The "this gets more favourable media attention." definitely implies they're referring to the flurry of media attention towards alt-right removals we've been seeing

And my point is it's not really a "significant misapprehension" at all, at least not significant to their point.

They could be a party of one guy in his underwear and the point would still stand

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#157

Post by pmlnr »

mantap wrote: post #127

I'd argue this is a good thing. Facebook is not immortal. Every user that Facebook alienates is a win. Already many non-technical people have been moving to Signal after Facebook's new privacy policy. We need better alternatives, not better Facebook.

Sadly, Signal is not the ideal solution either. When I started with the internet, there were countless free/non free email providers, and now nearly everything is gmail, outlook, yahoo, qq, and a few more big ones. We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email.

I was talking with my wife that somehow people are OK with a borrowed (rented?) identity for so many things. xyz@gmail.com, +00-00 on whatsapp, etc, and there as only a few wanting to be mail@this-is-my-home-on-the-internet.me, though this is a very different topic.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#158

Post by throwawaygh »

stretchcat wrote: post #139
throwawaygh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent. But we do distinguish in regulated engineering disciplines. A contractor that intentionally uses shoddy materials in a bridge or tunnel is treated differently from a contractor who simply fails to implement legally required QC is treated diffe…

> 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same. Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would har…

Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action in exactly the same way that some people view "the algorithm" as a passive voice excusing of responsibility.

The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com

If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes the words "social media", ... good fucking luck.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#159

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwawaygh wrote: post #33
RobLach wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. Computing systems are do not act on their own. That the system did this was because it was allowed to, or more accurately, told to.

> It’s always some external thing: “the algorithm”, as if that doesn’t just mean “the way we programmed it”. This is true. > Computing systems are do not act on their own. That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent! How much of your own code have you formally verified? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification…

> That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent!

Sure. Neither do children, nor pets, nor farm animals, nor automated control systems.

The common thread connecting these examples is: people who are responsible for managing children/animals/PID controllers bear responsibility for the action of these systems, whatever the actions are. Same reasoning should apply to algorithms: don't deploy them unless you're prepared to be held accountable for what they end up doing.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#160

Post by bjourne »

These discussions always end in the same way. "But they are a PRIVATE COMPANY they have the right to do that!" Fuck that.

Who is working on decentralized content distribution? We need decentralized free software versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube so that not a single actor has veto power over what content is allowed. Something like torrents, but without torrent sites (which are single points of failure).

There's FreeNet, but it's crap and contains child porn. We need something new that ensures the right of Socialist parties (and Nazi parties too, for that matter) to spread their legal propaganda, but can't be used for pedophiles to distribute child porn. Technically, it can't be impossible to create something like that. People have tons of bandwidth and disk space to spare so that shouldn't be a problem either.

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