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Facebook Will Ban Protests That Defy Government 'Guidance' On Distancing (vice.com) 289

Posted by BeauHD from the following-the-law-of-the-land dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A Facebook spokesperson told Motherboard over the weekend that the social network would allow protest events as long as they do not fall afoul of government guidance on social distancing, but will ban ones that do. "Unless the government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "For this same reason, events that defy government's guidance on social distance aren't allowed on Facebook. "

According to a Facebook statement to the Washington Post, the company has removed protest events both in New Jersey and California. Facebook typically follows the law in whatever jurisdiction it happens to be operating within, which has led to numerous problems with moderating a global platform, but this has always been subject to change based on the social network's whims and priorities. For example, when the company was found to have violated the law in Canada, it simply said that it did not agree, and nothing happened. Now that Facebook appears to be deferring to government "guidance" during an unparalleled crisis with many fractured viewpoints, coronavirus is becoming yet another quagmire for the company.
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Facebook Will Ban Protests That Defy Government 'Guidance' On Distancing More

Facebook Will Ban Protests That Defy Government 'Guidance' On Distancing

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  • Look at both sides (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:00PM (#59969924)
    The country is nearly unanimous in recognizing social distancing should be in effect to fight the spread. However, I can understand why people who now have no job, no money, and potentially no place to live, are beginning to protest the shutdown. It's hard to recognize the real impact for those that aren't as affected, but to many people they would rather risk getting or transferring the virus than have to live under a bridge or lose everything they have worked. For many the bar is set much lower than living under a bridge maybe they just are sick of watching their career and entire savings get wiped out.
    • types of protesters. Admittedly the media is going to focus on the asshats like the guy who couldn't get law care products or the women mad because her gray roots are coming in. But Fox News has been pushing the narrative heavily that we need to reopen for the kinds of folk you're mentioning and, well, I'm not seeing any interviews with them there.

      One thing that does worry me is that the president keeps fighting with the governor of Michigan. I couldn't figure out why (I mean, why attack the governor of

      • Then: Stupid kids don't have any respect for authority figures!
        Now: Ain't no one going to tell me what I can't do!
        Maybe it's because the hippy anti-establishment kids then have become the aging libertarian adults now?

    • Re:Look at both sides (Score:4, Informative)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:07PM (#59969956)

      Welcome to the wonderful world of dog eat dog and zero social security. Saves you lots on taxes as long as things are good, but you're fucked if they ain't.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Solandri ( 704621 )
        Those won't/wouldn't make a difference. This is a problem which transcends economic system. The problem is the entire spinning wheel of the economy is slowing down, losing inertia. As long as it was spinning at speed, people who fell off (lost their jobs) could be picked up and carried along via social programs (paid for by sapping off a little of the inertia of the wheel). But as the wheel slows, the drag each additional person who falls represents becomes a grater fraction of the total remaining inertia

        • We do not have a problem producing more stuff. That's the fun bit, that's where capitalism and communism differ. In communism, the problem was that there was a lot of money on the demand side but nothing to buy with it because nothing could be produced. In capitalism, we have the opposite problem. We could produce near infinitely, we do have the raw materials, the production means, the manpower and the investment capital required (quite seriously, it's never been easier to find VCs to throw money at you...

    • Re:Look at both sides (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MooseTick ( 895855 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:07PM (#59969964) Homepage

      Nearly 40k dead in a month with all these extreme efforts. 99.99% of the population are losing money on this. Some feel the pain more than others, but there are VERY few who wouldn't give a couple month's salary to keep their grandma/grandpa/mom/dad/sibling/child around a little longer. The worst scenario is ending the shutdown too early and it still spreading to nearly everyone and killing 2-3% of the population.

      Honestly, there are no good plays here. Everyone is making a best guess. Let's all hope that whatever route we take is the least painful.

      • Not even the numbers if every person contracted the virus at exactly the same time were 2% to 3% mortality.

        • Re:Look at both sides (Score:5, Insightful)

          by psycho12345 ( 1134609 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @09:05PM (#59970744)
          Correct, it would be more like 5-10%. Because we know 10-20% require hospitalization. Of those that do get it, there's a wide range on survival depending on age and preexisting conditions. What we also know is that if you don't get hospitalization in those cases, it is a death sentence. So if 80% of the population all got it at the same time, 8 to 16% of the population would need hospitalization, and we can only handle maybe 2-3% of the population all at once, so 5-10% would die for sure.

          • Plus, the overworked nurses and doctors would get it (at a higher rate than they're getting now) further reducing our ability to treat patients. We'd need to start making some horrible decisions like "should we treat that 70 year old with COVID-19 or let him die so we can treat the 40 year old with it." Also, other causes of death would rise because hospitals that normally would save the lives of those other people wouldn't be able to handle them. Imagine if you got cancer, but couldn't get treatment becaus

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by infuriatedweasel ( 1326439 )

            You're confusing Case Fatality Rate (CFR) with Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). It's a common mistake and for good reason. IFR is harder to pin down because it's hard to know how many people have been infected, among other factors. Multiple studies in Korea, Iceland, Germany, and California are all showing that the IFR is about an order of magnitude or two smaller than your "5-10% would die for sure". The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford has a very good and up to date analysis and concludes tha

      • Re:Look at both sides (Score:5, Insightful)

        by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:29PM (#59970096)

        but there are VERY few who wouldn't give a couple month's salary to keep their grandma/grandpa/mom/dad/sibling/child around a little longer.

        But that's just it. For many, it isn't just a couple month's salary. Many small businesses are permanently closing and letting all their employees go. And finding another job after all this is over will be darn near impossible when close to half the population is unemployed. I'm not saying that social distancing isn't the right thing to do, but lets be real about the consequences of doing that long term. They will be far more devastating than many realize and the damage will not grow linearly with time. We'll start to see a domino effect when people can't pay their rent and debts and that will affect those to whom they owe money (who contrary to popular belief are not all rich) and then it spreads like a tsunami through the economy. We're not there yet, but if restrictions go on for several more months, we will be.

        • plus a federal small business loan program that isn't overseen by crooks ( a large amount of the first $350 billion earmarked for small business went to rich folk who had friends at the bank, like Larry Kudlow's wife).

          There are solutions to these problems, but we have to be willing to use them.
        • I think that some people are doing the math: The vast majority of people won't suffer long term medical consequences from COVID-19. They will suffer long term consequences from joblessness. For some people, that means they're more afraid of the economic consequences than the disease.

          There's also a geographic/political problem here in that it tends to be the left leaning enclaves that are embracing the shut downs (New York, California) while the right leaning enclaves (Texas, South Carolina) want to ope

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        You can look at it that way, more people have died since from other causes. COVID-19 has thus far had a global cost of $1M per patient and it looks like this is just the beginning, the majority of those recover just fine or have had no symptoms. Is that worth it? That's a question that people will ask for decades to come.

        • You can look at it that way, more people have died since from other causes. COVID-19 has thus far had a global cost of $1M per patient

          This isn't the right metric though, you need to account for how many lives were saved because we did something.

        • And yet, we have overloaded mortuaries, trailers being used as temporary morgues, and in some countries the body bags are just piled up. This is not just another cause of death statistic that can get lost when you look at the larger picture. Instead it's overloading the health system.

          Compare to 9/11. Not very many dead if you spread it out over the full year, but it all happened at once. We don't have an annual remembrance of those who died from heart disease. There were probably people at the time who foc

        • Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. There is an interesting anti-correlation between deaths and apparent costs, based on the actions taken.

          If we just "ignore" the virus, then we can expect between 100 and 200 million US citizens to catch it, and somewhere between 1% and 4% will die, as hospitals are overwhelmed. The economy keeps ticking, but with millions of deaths, it looks like we do not value American lives at all compared to the mighty dollar
          "Oh, noes! Wouldn't it have been worth spending a few

          • That's a false dichotomy though. It was never a choice between "ignore it" and "go the whole hog". We know that we can significantly reduce infection rates through some basic precautions which don't end up wrecking our entire economy and putting tens of millions out of work.

            • I certainly agree that it is not either or. I am just pointing out that many possible "solutions" are open to easy criticism -- this is a you can't please everyone moment. And we do not know we will achieve the benefits of either extreme. It is plausible to get all the economic damage and all the deaths, both.

              As for basic precautions being good enough, that is plausible if we had easily available testing. Which we do not. Yet.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:04PM (#59970254)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        Nearly 40k dead in a month with all these extreme efforts.

        About 230,000 American die monthly from non-Covid causes.

        Some feel the pain more than others

        Low-income people are far less likely to be able to work from home. This is hitting the poor much harder than the better-off.

        I am working from home at full salary. My bi-weekly cleaning lady has seen her income drop to zero.

        but there are VERY few who wouldn't give a couple month's salary to keep their grandma/grandpa/mom/dad/sibling/child around a little longer.

        This is a misstatement of the trade-off. Grandma is likely to get sick sooner or later anyway, and with a mortality rate of ~2% C19 is far from a death sentence.

        Most low-income people don't have "a couple month's salary" to spar

        • Grandma doesn't have to get sick (Score:4, Insightful)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:57PM (#59970408)
          since we can delay until a vaccine. Also we want to delay while working on effective treatments. As Dr Fauci pointed out we have those for HIV, we don't for COVID -19.

          Regarding the rest of your points:

          1. We can just put your cleaning lady on unemployment. No, I don't care if she's an illegal immigrant. But you wouldn't hire one, would you? And if you did because you support granting her citizen ship you are of course OK with paying her unemployment benefits, right?

          2. We did 40k+ with massive amounts of controls. Reopening early will more than likely tripple that. In the short term. In the long term our hospitals get overwhelmed and we see millions dead.

          Of course long before that the Baby Boomers (who will suffer the brunt of this) will demand action. That'll end well I'm sure. Millions of panicked, elderly voters demanding swift, decisive action from a government as incompetent as ours? Yeah, that's not a recipe for disaster and dictatorship.

      • but there are VERY few who wouldn't give a couple month's salary to keep their grandma/grandpa/mom/dad/sibling/child around a little longer.

        But it won't be 'a couple months'. The earliest a vaccine will be ready is a year, IF everything goes right. And that would easily be the fastest vaccine ever developed. After a couple months, what do you propose to do?

        The worst scenario is ending the shutdown too early and it still spreading to nearly everyone and killing 2-3% of the population.

        Uh, no. We're already finding that the 2-3% is way wrong, because so many more people have gotten COVID-19 and didn't show symptoms. Remember, the percentage is based on COVID deaths (fairly easy to determine) divided by COVID cases (not nearly enough testing to determine an accurate num

    • Re:Look at both sides (Score:5, Insightful)

      by riley ( 36484 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:12PM (#59969988)

      This all comes down as a cascading failure of responsibility and empathy.

      Our federal government is mostly non-functional. Homeland Security is literally hijacking shipments of protective equipment that states have ordered. Trump alternates between grandiose proclamations and shirking responsibility. Money that is meant to find it's way to those most in need is not getting there, and what does make it is late, too little, or hijacked in some way to go to those who are not in as much need.

      So, our federal government is not providing comfort to its citizens and passing the responsibility off to the state governments, which cannot run their budgets at a deficit by law and therefore borrow (as the federal government does) to provide the citizens with what they need, but still has the responsibility to do their best to provide a safe environment for those citizen -- this means lockdowns and distancing so that hospitals and what resources they have are not overwhelmed.

      Citizens, receiving little help, worry about themselves first and say stupid things like "if I get sick, it's my problem" when, in fact, getting sick from a contagious disease that infects 5.7 more people is everybody's problem. So, they, having received no empathy have no empathy.

      We (U.S. citizens) live in a failed state that started 40 years ago with the Milton Friedman declaring that it was the moral obligation of corporations to produce profit, and the right wing of the country deciding that such a statement held the weight of religious proclamation.

      • Re:Look at both sides (Score:5, Informative)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:49PM (#59970186)

        It is the obligation of corporations to produce profit. The problem isn't corporations wanting to maximize profits without any regard for anyone else. That's their job.

        The problem is the government letting them. Because the government's job is to ensure that everyone has a chance to partake on the prosperity, and here the US dropped the ball big time.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Don't tar the fed. gov. with the inane antics of the alleged administration. The alleged president's head of testing, Brett Giroir, was removed from a job in at Texas A&M in 2015 developing vaccine projects. The reason, he was more interested in promoting himself than developing vaccine projects.

        Naturally, he was shoo-in for the job in the alleged administration.

        The rest of the fed. gov. cares about clean air and water, safety rules, keeping your grandmother from moving in with you, etc. They are the mi

    • Facebook was never there to sympatise, it was made to make you feel the need to kill yourself. It's a horrible place and its CEO deserves to hang.

    • The country is nearly unanimous in recognizing social distancing should be in effect to fight the spread.

      The problem is everybody has a different definition of 'social distancing'. I would consider a perfectly reasonable and effective 'social distancing' to mean no large gatherings where there is no reasonable way to keep distance from other people (concerts/fairs/amusement parks), reduced capacity in restaurants/theaters/etc. to allow some space, and clean surfaces more often. That's probably going to be nearly as effective as shutting down everything with a fraction of the economic damage. But I'm probabl

  • The world needs a control group that tells us what happens when people are dumb enough to infect each other, where else are we going to find people dumb enough to believe bullshit stories about the virus not being real and that social distancing is just The Man trying to take Muh Libertees?

    • Re:What? You can't do that! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:05PM (#59969948)

      "Give me Liberty, or give me... a 2% chance of death."

    • The world needs a control group that tells us what happens when people are dumb enough to infect each other, where else are we going to find people dumb enough to believe bullshit stories about the virus not being real and that social distancing is just The Man trying to take Muh Libertees?

      I believe that's what Minnesota, Michigan, Florida and Virginia are for.

    • We had a cruise ship that acted as a pretty decent example of locking a bunch of people together. An unintentional laboratory, to be sure, but an instructive one nonetheless.

      • That doesn't cut it, they had way more medical facilities than those few dozen people needed, if you want to have a truly working control group you have to take everything into account.

        That's why Sweden doesn't work. Sure, they also don't give fuck all about social distancing, but they have a medical system worth the name.

    • The Man trying to take Muh Libertees?

      Seen above the bulletin board at the local market: "Postings for illegal items will be removed"

  • Translation: no protesting political conventions (Score:3)

    by Uberbah ( 647458 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:07PM (#59969960)

    Barring some miracle, we aren't going to have a vaccine ready before the GOP or Democratic conventions. How convenient that the populace wont be able to protest either rapist running for the White House.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Well, good news is political conventions filled with old people is a great place to spread some Covid-19 love around.

  • This is not like banning some super-racist statements nor dangerous recommendations to mix to harmful chemicals together with the claim it's safe.

    This is banning disagreements the people have with their government, and it has no business doing so...unless it wants a favorable view by regulators, much like they scurry left and right to censor in just...the...right...way, lest 230 gets removed or government decides to break facebook up

    Boo.

  • so no 1st book? Now Can I post about Mein Kamp or is that banned as well.

  • Like this guy arrested for paddleboarding by himself off the California coast. What is the basis for this? He's on a watercraft, are they arresting all boat owners? It's complete overreach
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Ans Michigan, where that power hungry governor is banning you from buying non-essential items from stores like Walmart that are already open! It's extreme and it's unnecessary.
    https://www.mytotalretail.com/... [mytotalretail.com]

    So yeah, some protest is in order

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CQDX ( 2720013 )

      And issuing citations to people attending a church service, a service in a parking lot with attendees staying in their cars.

      https://www.theblaze.com/news/... [theblaze.com]

      Meanwhile prisoners are being release from jail because of the Covid-19 risks.

    • 'Progressives' (Score:2, Interesting)

      by eaglesrule ( 4607947 )

      "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

  • Facebook, kindly fuck off. No matter how much you want to be you aren't the government, nor are you the police.

  • I understand them covering news articles/stories/posts that are factually incorrect, but now his company is squelching OPINIONS and THOUGHTS.

    Whether you agree with the protesters logic or not, or whether you agree with Facebook's right to do this or not (as a private company), is irrelevant. This act is fundamentally wrong.

    If they pursue this policy, it might as well be called "The Great Facebook Firewall".

  • government directives.

    That is the definition of a first amendment rights violation.

     

  • It sure looks like Bill Gates is behind this whole caper. I'm blowing through the last of my free speech while I still got it.

  • So, now Facebook are on the side of the law and order... Interesting. Maybe, they'll finally kick out the hate-spreading "antifa" [facebook.com] assholes too?

  • So, as long as we do what the government says we are allowed to do, we can do it? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of a protest in the first place?

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