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Facebook to ban white nationalist content

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Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#161

Post by drak0n1c »

wildmusings wrote: post #85
function_seven wrote: post #31

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent…

I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.

A popular argument for Net Neutrality posited that allowing non-government monopolies to exercise free-reign over what they've built will result in free speech being infringed. Here is an article and call-to-action from the EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#162

Post by ceejayoz »

40dslf wrote: post #129
ceejayoz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be disappointed here. They are specifically targeting white nationalism/separatism. They specifically exclude other types in the article. > We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identi…

So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites? So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool. Guess the same about the two halves of Italy. I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.

> So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites?

I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#163

Post by commandlinefan »

bilbo0s wrote: post #87
function_seven wrote: post #31

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent…

> But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything... This! A thousand times THIS ! People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part,…

You're misunderstanding (or deliberately misrepresenting) what free-speech absolutists are saying. Nobody is saying that Facebook should be "forced" to host any particular content, any more than anybody is saying that homedepot.com should be forced to host any particular content. What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship - and it's open season to point out that everything that they _don't_ censor (e.g. calls for violence against politically unprotected groups) is something that they explicitly condone.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#164

Post by gowld »

It's OK to say you believe that you are pro free-speech only in cases of government/military/police censorship. It's not OK to redefine free speech to mean "government censorship", especially not to call your position "very nearly absolutist".

You believe that private companies have the moral right to censor and filter user-generated content. That's your opinion/morality. But it's not "free speech absolutism" in the common English language.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#165

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #164

It's OK to say you believe that you are pro free-speech only in cases of government/military/police censorship. It's not OK to redefine free speech to mean "government censorship", especially not to call your position "very nearly absolutist". You believe that private companies have the moral right to censor and filter user-generated content. That's your opinion/morality. But it's not "free speech absolutism" in the…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#166

Post by walrus01 »

function_seven wrote: post #31

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent…

I am in agreement with you on this point. FB isn't obligated to give anyone a publishing platform.

People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.

Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#167

Post by falcrist »

Inu wrote: post #116
function_seven wrote: post #31

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent…

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

Good old Chomsky. I really like his views on this topic. However the question leads down a rabbithole.

Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.

So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.

What about network neutrality?

Etc etc...

It's not so easy to answer this question.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#168

Post by djsumdog »

bilbo0s wrote: post #153
gatherhunterer wrote: post #21

There is merit to maintaining an open environment. Censorship makes the censored content seem lucratively dangerous; it looks like the powers that be are afraid of what some people are saying. I think it is best to let bad arguments fail on their own merit. The problem is that most people are unable to recognize a bad argument.

I should preface this by saying that I'm kind of a "strict Constitutionalist" so to speak. In my view all these arguments people are making about "open environments", or "bad faith actors", or extremism or what have you are completely irrelevant. A privately owned, NON -governmental, environment is allowed to be as "open" or as "closed" as they please. If a "bad faith actor" wants to act in "bad faith", (whatever tha…

The trouble is that today, these companies have a monopoly on distribution. People who are banned go to other sites that capture extremists views (Gab/Voat/4chan).

At some point, platforms need to realize there is a moral value in allowing different view points so that they can discuss and be seen. Otherwise, people leave for more "open" platforms that breed exclusive extremism. It then further divides the split.

The other issue is that these platforms are so big that they literally dictate narrative in many cases, or at least to their audiences.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#170

Post by insickness »

Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."

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