Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#511

Post by colordrops » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #505

colordrops wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they said about cryptocurrency before Satoshi came along. "You can't stop people from forging the coins in a ledger on their own servers".

And? What's your point? How does cryptocurrency prevent people from deleting content from servers they own?

My point was in my original comment. Let me rephrase it to help you understand. Before cryptocurrency, all ledgers were stored in a central database where the admin of that DB could modify or delete anyone's currency. I assume you understand how cryptocurrency works, but to reiterate, the DB is distributed, and if anyone deletes a particular transaction on their server, they will be out of sync with the rest, and their copy rejected as invalid.

Some sort of distributed validation mechanism could conceivably be created which avoids any single point of control for a piece of content. And in fact you could use the BTC blockchain as a proof of concept - post a message with your transaction that gets encoded in the blockchain. It now becomes impossible to delete or modify. It is essentially uncensorable. You could delete it from your copy of the blockchain, but the real blockchain is the consensus of all nodes, not your particular copy.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#512

Post by jariel » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:06 PM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #366

jariel wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not an attempt to interfere in politics and they are assuredly not being banned due to their political views. Facebook bans groups and people all the time, it does not imply that it's political. It seems FB has no given their reasoning for the ban, which is rather odd given the significance, I suggest we'll either hear from them forthcoming with evidence of 'violence' or they'll walk back their mistake.…

It's political interference if it was intentional or not. It's not the intent but the outcome that's the problem here..

That's irrelevant if the group is breaking the rules.

If they are causing violence (though I doubt this) then they are going to get banned and that's that.

It's very well within reason.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#513

Post by overscore » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #509

overscore wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More directly, Thatcher was also responsible for a litany of crimes, including murder and torture, and human rights abuses against her own citizens in Northern Ireland. Although Thatcher is hated by swaths of UK society (which turns out to exist after all), there is in Great Britain in general an ignorance or blindness to crimes committed by the State against their own citizenry.

I think the UK population, as in most countries and maybe all of them, have a higher tolerance for such things when their own fellow citizens are being murdered and blown up.

I think this misses the point, which is that many (maybe most) of the citizens of Great Britain don't consider nationalists in Northern Ireland as citizens at all, even while they are murdering them.

After all, while the majority of the deaths during the Troubles were caused by Republicans, most of those killed by Republicans were members of the British Armed Forces.

Most of the civilians killed by any party were killed by the British Armed Forces or Unionist paramilitaries supported by them.

You, like many in Great Britain, have decided that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland aren't really UK citizens, while simultaneously they were being slaughtered to try to force them to accept being UK citizens.

You are a perfect (possibly non-GB) example of the ignorance or maybe wilful blindness that surrounds Northern Ireland, and the crimes of the British government against its own citizens.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#514

Post by belorn » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #510

quickthrowman wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, ideology doesn’t matter to (some) extremists, they’ll follow whoever uses the tools of fear and hate most effectively. See the “Bernie Bros” who flipped into full Trumpists a few short months later in 2016. I’m sure if you look back at the Spanish Civil War and other divisive historical time periods you’ll find plenty of turncoats that flip from one extreme to another.

> See the “Bernie Bros” who flipped into full Trumpists a few short months later in 2016. I’m sure if you look back at the Spanish Civil War and other divisive historical time periods you’ll find plenty of turncoats that flip from one extreme to another. This seems like a bit of a myopic, low-dimensional view of the political landscape. Bernie and trump (esp candidate trump) weren't "opposite extremes" when it came t…

Bernie and Trump were also both anti-war during the preliminaries, each for different reasons. I prefer Bernie's reason of defunding the military in order to put the money into more social benefiting areas, but Trump goal on focus more on internal US interests could have some of the same effects.

The outcome naturally has a lot to desire.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#515

Post by tikiman163 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #368

For any non-Brits, the SWP is the main left of Labour party in Britain. As a student in the 80s I remember them as an earnest, way too serious bunch of ideological zombies ranting into microphones at the Student's Union about the latest crimes against humanity perpetrated by 'Thatcher'. They're the kind of people that come up to you in the street with leaflets about some atrocity in Africa and shout "Would you murder…

Antifa isn't a real organization, it's just a bunch of disconnected groups that have recently been getting labeled as Antifa. Most don't even claim to be part of Antifa. Antifa is basically the boogeyman that Republicans made up to distract from the fact that a bunch of far right wing people were literally organizing armed pseudo-militias with the intent of overthrowing the US government. They knew these idiots stood no chance so they downplayed them and made up conspiracies about left wingers doing the same shit, and pretending like there was a serious threat from the left instead of the right.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#516

Post by aquadrop » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

phs318u wrote: post #338

adventured wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even as our nation spent years outraged over Russian interference Only a minority of the country was (supposedly) outraged about the mostly non-existent Russian interference. Most of the US knew it was bullshit the entire time, the Russians had near zero impact on the prior election (amazing how they didn't somehow swing this latest election, given their apparent god-like powers, despite how close it was). Trump's…

> mostly non-existent Russian interference This is not true. The Republican-led, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found, over the course of their 3.5 year investigation, that there was in fact Russian interference. You can find the actual report (all 5 volumes) here [0]. Alternatively, a TL;DR summary can be found here [1]. > amazing how they didn't somehow swing this latest election Let's for a moment, assum…

Yeah, intelligence service of both(and more) countries probably do that kinda of stuff on a regular basis, that's why they exist, but I don't think that had hardly any effect. "Russians, Russians", "Trump is a puppet of Putin" etc was a convenient scapegoat for losing the election. But problem of democrats was not Russians, but the fact that half of the country was ok with voting for Trump. And split was there long before and just growing with time, but Americans are doing great job splitting up themselves. Like with anti-sanders higher up demparty struggle. Both sides are now so politicized they are ready to bend reality and view everything through hate to the opponent.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#517

Post by sipos » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

hakfoo wrote: post #308

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law and the rest of society does not have to accomodate unpredictable and buggy ML models -in fact its the other way round. We are bot obligated to suffer damage just because FB relies on ML.

Somehow, the big players have managed to convince us to suck up the damage. Correctly moderating Facebook, blocking recalled/bogus/questionable goods on Amazon, or keeping Google's search index pruned of scams and misinformation, are fundamentally problems that requires armies of trained humans, well-thought-out and transparent process, and potentially independent or state oversight to keep it all on the rails. It's…

> Somehow, the big players have managed to convince us to suck up the damage.

Not always. The GDPR has some decent provisions against overuse of machine learning, for example (it is just a shame it is basically unenforceable against global megacorps, and otherwise so shit as a set of law). We should not accept it, and I don;t think this is a fight that is lost. It is fine to use ML, as long as you are prepared to suffer the consequences of the mistakes of your models that you do not check. This is an important principle.

> Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.

Damn right. These are important. I'm concerned this statement isn't entirely serious. While I hope not to have to resort to similar to that, I will if I have to. Cat videos are important damn it.

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#518

Post by sipos » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #157

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 wi…

> 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.

True, but nothing particularly good seems to exist yet. It has to solve the problem of end-to-end encryption in a way that users can manage to not lose their keys too easily, which is a hard problem. It only has to solve this, when email did not (at least in an easily usable way for most people) because it already exists in messaging, but that doesn't stop it not being well solved holding back the situation.

Anything that uses an open source client is a meaningful step better than WhatsApp, because it is easier to make and maintain a bridge from something better, like Matrix, IMHO. At least recently, I did not think Matrix was easy enough to use and stable enough to recomend to people, but them moving to something with an open source client, is better than nothing IMHO.

I'm not convinced Signal is better than Telegram, as an alternative, since Telegram is so much easier to use if you don't care about end-to-end encryption (most users don't sadly), and basically as easy to use (but much less trustworthy) if you do. I'm not sure which is better TBH, but I expect more people will stay off WhatsApp if they try Telegram than if they only try Signal, which is an advantage of recomending that (though I'm not sure it out-weighs the advantage of there being less end-to-end encryption).

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#519

Post by sipos » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

chroem- wrote: post #13

mhh__ wrote: post #9

I assume this is a mistake, although I think they're mad I don't think the SWP are malicious a la some political sects

Facebook is a private platform: they're free to block any content they want, malicious or not.

Not if it discriminates on protected characteristics, in UK law. This isn't, but you can easily imagine many of the countries it operates in hjaving multiple laws that restrict its freedom to block whatever it likes. Some protect registered political parties (like the SWP) freedom of speech I think even (but not thre UK AFAIK).

Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain

#520

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #434

CamperBob2 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

Citations needed. Strong statement with zero points argued to back it up. Edit to add: downvotes don't count as argument points.

No, they don't, but that's what you get around here. If there's a bigger hive of intellectual douchebaggery in this sector of the galaxy, I haven't found it yet. Still, the good usually outweighs the bad by far.

To be fair to my downvoters, it would be more accurate to say, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a monarchy." With the US government, at least, you have the right to vote, along with some constitutional protections including various avenues of appeal. When Google terminates your account for no good reason, on the other hand, there are fewer options. There's not much you can do but post a cri de coeur on Twitter and hope HN or some other intercessory spirit notices it and calls the King's attention to your plight.