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Facebook to ban white nationalist content

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Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#591

Post by beat »

dqpb wrote: post #586
beat wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am no longer a free speech absolutist. And the reason I am not is the sort of abstract, angels-on-a-pinhead bullshit arguments that fill the responses to the parent post. The more it can be abstracted to "free speech", the less oxygen there is for discussion of the real harm caused by white supremacist thought and white supremacist actions. I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppress…

Who do you propose gets to decide what speech is dangerous?

That's a disingenuous question. Let me come back with some questions about your question.

Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous?

Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech?

Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?

If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#592

Post by simias »

nilkn wrote: post #262
tedivm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case was about a "company town", where there was very much a blending of public and private. > The Court initially noted that it would be an easy case if the town were a more traditional, publicly administered, municipality. Then, there would be a clear violation of the right to free speech for the government to bar the sidewalk distribution of such material. The question became, therefore, whether or not consti…

This is a nuanced topic, but I think the subsequent cases you mentioned all make sense and are consistent with the proposition that certain social media sites actually should obey the "company town" precedent. Malls aren't and have never been the primary space used for public social discourse and commentary. Today, such discourse increasingly happens online, and it's increasingly true that sites like Facebook and Twi…

>it's increasingly true that sites like Facebook and Twitter actually are the primary space for public discourse.

That's probably true, but in my opinion the overall problem is the centralization of the web (and the internet at large), not the policies of these websites.

You won't convince me to play devil's advocate for white nationalist content on Facebook, I would however gladly embrace any effort to help make the web more decentralized.

And it's not like it's an unsolvable problem, bandwidth and hardware have never been cheaper and yet hardly anybody hosts their own content anymore. That's what needs fixing IMO.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#593

Post by sparkling »

CharlesW wrote: post #110
sparkling wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> balkanize traditional institutions of democracy Trump was elected by a free, fair, democratically held vote of the people. You may cry about the outdated electoral system, but well, the rules are the rules. He won fair and square. > and cooperation (USA/NATO/UN). Switzerland isn't a member of the NATO and have only joined the UN in the early 2000s. You don't need to be a member of every overblown bureaucrat club on…

> Trump was elected by a free, fair, democratically held vote of the people. We don't know that, and will never know that. This is a helpful resource for understanding why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

If you belive that russian twitter bots and a $100k Facebook ad campaign can swing a US election with a total budget of $4 billion, you are delusional.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#594

Post by seankimdesign »

basch wrote: post #260
tedivm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case was about a "company town", where there was very much a blending of public and private. > The Court initially noted that it would be an easy case if the town were a more traditional, publicly administered, municipality. Then, there would be a clear violation of the right to free speech for the government to bar the sidewalk distribution of such material. The question became, therefore, whether or not consti…

How about ATT, Verizon, Tmobile/Sprint if they banned certain content from private text messages? On one side, nearly everybody will agree to allow anti spam measures, denying certain unwanted annoying people speech. On the other end, many would object to disallowing private messages based on morality scores of the content.

Is there an established assumption that Facebook will extend their censorship to private messages also? Otherwise this analogy doesn't hold much ground.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#596

Post by harshreality »

ratling wrote: post #504
smsm42 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others. Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes?

> Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes? So impotent that they never walked into a synagogue or mosque and shot up a bunch of people. Oh wait...

A lot more Muslims kill each other (sectarian violence). Should Facebook ban expressions of Muslim superiority or Shia/Sunni superiority? Forget about protecting Westerners. Why not do it just to protect other Muslims? Yet I don't see that happening any time soon. Why the double standard?

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#597

Post by simple_phrases »

tathougies wrote: post #588
anigbrowl wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are white people specifically targeted They're not. Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market. I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and [...] Well, that's something they should be addressing too and I agree it has significant negative effects. At least now you know who to ad…

> Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market. Facebook has 1 billion + users, which means the majority are necessarily not American. Now I don't know where those other users are from, but white nationalism is not the largest source of terrorism related killings worldwide, even if it is a problem in am…

You're consuming American news media about an American company with PR problem in America concerning white nationalist extremist content hitting American eyes.

Hope this helps.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#599

Post by Rapzid »

tedivm wrote: post #206
insickness wrote: post #170

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.…

This case was about a "company town", where there was very much a blending of public and private. > The Court initially noted that it would be an easy case if the town were a more traditional, publicly administered, municipality. Then, there would be a clear violation of the right to free speech for the government to bar the sidewalk distribution of such material. The question became, therefore, whether or not consti…

I'm convinced a lot of people do not understand "free speech" as it applies to the First Amendment and as a fundamental principal of democratic systems of government.

The First Amendment puts limits on congress. It's a check against government oppression, full stop. The Fourteenth Amendment extends that all the way down to local governments.

I feel like many people are then trying to bend its scope past the breaking point to fit their worldview.

Re: Facebook to ban white nationalist content

#600

Post by simias »

justinmchase wrote: post #500
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 if they allow public signups then they should not have the ability to censor anybody, except by court order or to comply with the laws of the users region. Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twi…

By doing that you're effectively turning these websites into 4chan. Can you imagine a website like Hacker News if no moderation was possible, nobody could get banned and nothing could be removed without a court order? You'd just have every thread spammed by bots.

That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?

In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.

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