Zuckerberg Defends Hands-Off Approach To Trump's Posts (nytimes.com) 128
In a call with Facebook employees, who have protested the inaction on Mr. Trump's messages, Mr. Zuckerberg said his decision was "pretty thorough." From a report: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, on Tuesday stood firmly behind his decision to not do anything about President Trump's inflammatory posts on the social network, saying that he had made a "tough decision" but that it "was pretty thorough." In a question-and-answer session with employees conducted over video chat software, Mr. Zuckerberg sought to justify his position on Mr. Trump's messages, which has led to fierce internal dissent. The meeting, which had been scheduled for Thursday, was moved up to Tuesday after hundreds of employees protested the inaction by staging a virtual "walkout" of sorts on Monday. Facebook's principles and policies around free speech "show that the right action where we are right now is to leave this up," Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call, the audio of which was heard by The New York Times. He added that though he knew many people would be upset with the company, a review of its policies backed up his decision. "I knew that I would have to separate out my personal opinion," he said. "Knowing that when we made this decision we made, it was going to lead to a lot of people upset inside the company, and the media criticism we were going to get."
It probably was easy for him, not tough... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since when is it the "tough thing" to not stand up to the POTUS? Much tougher to stand up to him.
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Since there are millions of radicals in the country who don't give a damn about the bill of rights and other protections and freedoms of our democracy who are far more vocal. I know heckling Trump is fun and all but personally I'm fond of having democracy and democracy isn't what you have when governments and mass communication monopolies and oligarchies control the flow of information that shapes the basis for your votes. How the importance of this can be lost of people under effective quantine baffles me.
Re:For once, Zuckerberg is right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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We've used the soap box, we've used the ballot box.
Yeah, I'm willing to bet very few of those protesting have ever bothered to try voting in a sheriff that will clean up their local police force.
Try using the ballot box. The system actually works, albeit slowly.
These protests without concrete demands are just going to end up with the worst possible solution politicians can come up with forced onto you.
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American schools definitely do not teach that this country was founded by lefty liberals... at least they didn't used to. But now people are being taught all sorts of nonsense.
Some of these messages are extremely dangerous in my opinion. People are being taught a concept with no basis "Emotional Intelligence" which is essentially counter to everything we learned in the last hundred years and what the educated have known for thousands. They are then being fed fuel inciting fear, uncertainty, and doubt on man
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That is exactly the opposite of what has historically made the difference. Black people standing up with solidarity and setting an example with peaceful protests and civil disobedience is what has brought rights. Violence has brought set backs and division.
The civil war wasn't black violence, many of the northerners who fought that fight were inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass who can in large part be credited. Also to be credited is Eli Whitney and Lincoln's own desire for power.
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Oh please. This isn't about racism. That's the dumbest, oldest play in the book for your dopey burning America to the ground agenda. Police kill white people too [wikipedia.org]. The police are tasked with working against people who are lawless. You'd have them stand by doing nothing to stop bad people from doing bad things, because "someone might die." SMH. You aren't fighting against racism, you're fighting FOR chaos and anarchy.
So exactly how is kneeling on someones neck "working against people who are lawless"? They don't have to "stand by doing nothing to stop bad people from doing bad things" but they also don't have to keep kneeling on someone that is already on the ground. Police have these things called handcuffs. Once the person is on the ground toss some cuffs on them and I don't think you need to keep them pinned to the ground by kneeling on their neck.
On a long enough time line, everybody dies. These days, you could die just from getting breathed on by the wrong person. Deal with it.
So it is alright to go on a killing spree then since "on a long enough
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You do realize that Kathy Griffin got WAY more blow-back from that than the president has gotten from the Republicans for anything he has done. The left is always ready to sacrifice their own side (Al Franken is another example). The right just brushes off the presidents gaffs and moves on.
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I think he secretly is a Biden supporter. The more he lets Rump babble the more voters will leave.
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That is the rub, I don't think voters will leave. I think they will buy into his narrative and thus it just gets more people thinking his way.
It is outrageous (Score:2)
That Facebook publishes anything that I disagree with.
It should all be carefully censored.
Let's wait to see after HIS ox gets gored, eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... If I ever had a mod point...
Yes, following the money is easy, but I'm still predicting he'll change his tune when people start goring his oxen badly enough. Yes, he has a peculiar psychology, but he's still human and I'm betting the trolls will get to him one way or another.
And I still think the best solution approach is the dual-icon thing with self-proclaimed icon versus public-reputation icon (and even though I see many ways that approach can be abused and gamed, too). The fundamental principle sh
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Yes, following the money is easy, ...
Perhaps when Zuckerberg has saved up some money from all his endeavors he'll ease up -- oh, wait... I know he has a fiduciary responsibility to the company and its shareholders, but when is enough money enough? Perhaps that's a dumb or naive question, but, seriously, after a certain point, more money doesn't necessarily make things better.
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That's why I call the insane love of profit a fake problem. There is no amount of profit that can "solve" the "problem" of insufficient money to love. The corporate cancers can only pursue more money, no matter how much they made last week. Facebook is one of the worst of them (though I still think Twitter is the greatest lie and brain fart propagation machine ever created).
I should note that I also think it is insane to allow the stock markets to be open at all. Especially as regards Covid-19 but also now
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I forgot one point I should have included. However this is getting into the area of psychological speculation. I think a normal person would dislike being called a sociopath or psychopath. But I think Zuckerberg doesn't care at all, whatever that means about him. Must mean something? I am not at all convinced that his behaviors are driven by an insane love of money, however. Whatever oxen he's protecting, I don't think that Facebook's stock price is one of them (though I could be wrong there).
However I'm st
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Most of the GOT used to be GOP.
I always thought there was something suspicious about Game of Thrones. :-)
Trump is on facebook??? (Score:1)
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In other words, Trump gets special privileges and is exempt from Facebook Terms of Services.
Re: It probably was easy for him, not tough... (Score:2)
No, he had to explain to a bunch of whiney kids that free speech is a thing.
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Except that Facebook has censored content that is critical of Trump.
https://lincolnproject.us/news... [lincolnproject.us]
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And it makes no nevermind to you that he's right? He wants to protect their status as having common carrier protections. News and information should not be censored by technology companies anymore than the government and for many similar reasons. There is a reason the government is blocked from this kind of behavior in amendment ONE. The same reasons apply to organizations which serve as choke points for communications to huge swaths of the population.
The thing about truth is there is this great myth that i
It makes sense... (Score:1, Interesting)
Facebook is also taking a hands-off approach to the many, many Facebook posts I see advocating for the violent riots that have been sweeping the nation. They don't appear to care to remove the posts that call for "protests" at a specific place (which happens to be an area with a lot of box stores) at a specific time (that happens to be after dark). If those posts don't warrant action by Facebook, it seems perfectly logical that nothing Trump posts can possibly warrant action.
Then again, I can pretty much gu
Re:It makes sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does seem to be right - Facebook has decided that it must be a platform after all, and not an editorial publisher. Hence, only dealing with things that are actually illegal (ehich, in FB's twisted world view, means stuff that calls for violence against Trump and supporters is 'hands off' free speech, and the opposite is totally banned)
This will annoy the FB employees who thought that they coudl join this "progressive" platform in order to spread their world view and only allow their world view to exist. Now they have to accept other people have different opinions, they're upset. Pathetic children really.
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Yes, it really annoys the "freedom for me, but not for thee" crowd and is very telling of the twisted logic of the morons bitching about it!
They never understand that the tools created to silence the people they want silenced, will be used to silence them later. I always laugh when they get their comeuppance.
Re:It makes sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hence, only dealing with things that are actually illegal (ehich, in FB's twisted world view, means stuff that calls for violence against Trump and supporters is 'hands off' free speech, and the opposite is totally banned)
Curiously, I've heard the exact opposite claim from people on the left that FB is only going after left-wing speech while ignoring right-wing calls for violence. What is most likely happening is that everyone sees bias as primarily against their own preferred group. There's some interesting studies concerning this sort of thing. For example, given the same articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, partisans of both groups considered the articles biased against their side. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791301?seq=1 [jstor.org]. My guess is that the same sort of thing is happening here.
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Thats the problem, everyone is compelled to pick sides. Critical thinking says we should evaluate all sources critically... especially criticism of our own bias.
People tend to respond to statements to that effect with 'everyone has a bias and they are impossible to defeat.' The a preposterous reason to stop being critical of oneself and ones bias. How else would one grow?
Re:It makes sense... (Score:4, Informative)
Zuckerberg, in October 2019, answering a question from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez during a congressional hearing:
“If anyone, including a politician, is saying things that can cause, that is calling for violence or could risk imminent physical harm—or voter or census suppression, when we roll out the census suppression policy—we will take that content down.”
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Got it. Pictures of breastfeeding mothers need to be censored, but misinformation and threats of violence are A-OK.
Left out the import part. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I knew that I would have to separate out my personal opinion," he said. "Knowing that when we made this decision we made, it was going to lead to a lot of people upset inside the company, and the media criticism we were going to get."
He clearly left out the important part, "but we knew this was the more profitable avenue and that's why we took it."
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"I knew that I would have to separate out my personal opinion," he said. "Knowing that when we made this decision we made, it was going to lead to a lot of people upset inside the company, and the media criticism we were going to get."
He clearly left out the important part, "but we knew this was the more profitable avenue and that's why we took it."
I doubt that. I don't think Facebook's decision is any more profitable than Twitter's decision. It's not likely that Trump fans are actually going to abandon either platform just because the platform fact-checks and adds a link to more information, or even if they click-wrap posts that violate the platform's rules. And that sort of action is likely to make advertisers feel more comfortable with the platform.
It's tempting to believe that every decision made by every corporation is a careful part of a sop
Re:Left out the import part. (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt that. I don't think Facebook's decision is any more profitable than Twitter's decision.
Did you not see the article about how Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions [slashdot.org]? The reason they want the division is because it "increases engagement" which ultimately results in more advertising and thus higher profits.
This is not super complicated, not labeling lies will only further divide people and cause people to have to post fact-checking and argue the truth on their own. This results in higher levels of "user engagement" so again they get higher profits.
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Oy oy oy, the boy gottta make a living already.
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Re:He should just stop apologizing (Score:5, Interesting)
He should own his decision to be a lot more balanced and mature (though still problematic on free speech) than Twitter and others.
I disagree completely. Twitter still lets you see "latest tweets" and doesn't filter what you see. Facebook, on the other hand, completely curates what you're allowed to see. Facebook constantly makes decisions on what you're allowed to see on their platform. It's just that the majority of those decisions aren't driven by humans, they're decided by algorithms.
For example, I "follow" the local National Weather Service office on Facebook. (I think the official Facebook term is adding yourself as a "fan" of that page, but I don't remember what they call it.) That means their posts can show up on my timeline.
They don't.
Facebook has decided that people don't engage enough with their posts, so their posts are essentially censored. Strictly speaking, they aren't: you can still view them if you go directly to their page, but doing so involves essentially searching for them by name. By doing that, I can see that they post things like weather forecasts and general seasonal trends and sometimes notifications about weather education classes they offer, but none of those posts have made it onto my timeline.
Occasionally, their posts will get enough "engagement" that they'll make it through the Facebook filter. These tend to be things like severe weather alerts or hurricane tracks - except they only show up days after they're relevant, because only then do they have enough "engagement" for Facebook to consider them worth showing. (No, I don't rely on Facebook to get warnings about severe weather.)
So, sure, Facebook may claim that they're being "neutral," but they are not. They constantly make decisions on who sees what. Those decisions may not be made based on political ideology, they may be entirely driven by algorithms, but they're still decisions on what speech is effectively "allowed" to be published on their platform. And they know that, because you can pay to "promote" a post and increase the chances of the algorithm showing it to people.
And as someone pointed out when I made this point last time, I'm ignoring the fact that they absolutely do censor posts. There are Facebook "community standards" and if you violate those, your post will be removed and your account may be banned. But even if we were to ignore the fact that they do moderate (some) content, Facebook isn't a free speech platform. They actively pick and choose what they show to people. Something like half the content on my Facebook timeline aren't posts by friends or pages I follow, they're "promoted" or "recommended" posts Facebook's algorithms have picked. Facebook is in no ways a neutral platform. They may argue they support free speech, but their platform constantly picks and chooses what speech people are allowed to see.
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I disagree completely. Twitter still lets you see "latest tweets" and doesn't filter what you see. Facebook, on the other hand, completely curates what you're allowed to see. Facebook constantly makes decisions on what you're allowed to see on their platform. It's just that the majority of those decisions aren't driven by humans, they're decided by algorithms.
These are not the same.
Facebook is using algorithms to identify and present to you the content you are most likely to want to see based on your past behaviour. Something has to go to the top of your feed, and Facebook is trying to present the stuff you are interested in. They are not censoring nor are they preventing you from finding what you are looking for. It's the same thing retailers do when suggesting products to you based on your past purchases. Twitter in contrast is censoring content. And that ce
Facebook is simply horrible (Score:2)
That narrow UI, constantly pushing crap at you, difficult to search.
I am amazed it has survived so long.
An independently written Facebook Viewer might help, but they would ban it instantly.
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That's a great observance. What's the difference between "moderating content" and "curating content"? I suspect none. Twitter is pretty transparent in this regard.
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They'd change their tune if red-staters could code (Score:5, Insightful)
He should own his decision to be a lot more balanced and mature (though still problematic on free speech) than Twitter and others. He should call Facebook a safe harbor for free speech where only asshole behavior is punished. Then if people want to virtue-signal, they can fuck right off the employment rolls and Facebook can diversify to other parts of the country where people trend toward "I disagree with what you're saying, but I'll defend your right to say it."
You accidentally stumbled on the point. Silicon Valley CEOs, like most CEOs, are sociopaths. They don't care about politics, just money. Zuckerberg has no principles. I would bet Tim Cook, Pinchai, Nadella, etc...don't give 2 shits how many black people die from lethal force or the state of the nation or Trump's tweets.
Why the liberal "virtue signaling?" (your trite term, not mine) It's quite simple. They are dependent on having raw talent coming in droves. If the red states produced conservative intelligent tech leaders or good coders, every CEO would be as "conservative" as they need to be. Every Google campus would have a shooting range on site if Red State "conservatives" could actually code. They'd have rustic mountain offices. They'd have well-funded gun clubs and coding sessions on fishing boats....they'd cater to your every conservative/red-state whim and set up as many offices as they could build in your area...if you guys actually had talent or offered them something of value.
Silicon Valley leadership is neither red nor blue...they only care about the green
Here's a message to you conservatives...think tech has a liberal bias? Become great coders. Zuckerberg is not from CA. He set up shop their to get Silicon Valley talent and VC investment. Almost no one WANTS to be in Silicon Valley...it's expensive AF and your top talent is constantly getting poached...and good workers have a huge sense of entitlement because....well, the market says they deserve it. I think they'd all be much happier somewhere else with less traffic, lower taxes, wages, and cheaper land. Google doesn't want to give free meals and crazy perks. They just believe making their campus more like a fraternity and less like a place of work will retain the talent they depend on and keep them from going over to Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, etc. Develop some actual skill and they will bend to your whim as well.
Keeping the talent you depend on happy is mission critical when it's very trivial for them to switch jobs elsewhere, typically for higher pay. Unfortunately for you folks with anti-liberal views, about 90% of useful technical employees I've met either had an overt liberal persuasion or an anti-Republican one, even in red states....even if you think I am wrong, this is the prevalent view in tech leadership. I am confident my CEO only cares about success, but boy will he trumpet diversity and inclusion as loud as he can...why? because it's important to his employees and his employees are the ones that enable his success. Find a way to enable his success and he'll do whatever it takes to make you happy.
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If you're a muslim, then your speech regularly gets censored as extremist even if on the relatively tame end of the scale.
Being relatively tame about trying to wipe out the infedels through subversion is only relatively tame in appearance and only when contrasted with trying to blow them up.
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antifa is far left. Good job trying to deflect there.
If you're not outraged, you aren't paying attentio (Score:2, Insightful)
Zuckerberg, for all his efforts to appear objective and unbiased, is part of the problem. Police are killing black people, and Trump is encouraging it. This is WRONG, people, and there's no way to claim it isn't. Emboldened by Trump's Twitter rants, the police now appear to have turned on journalists and peaceful protesters, assured that their violations of the law will go unpunished.
We have a problem here, people. Mr Zuckerberg? Are you paying attention? Or are you too busy counting the profits?
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I think this post by _xeno_ [slashdot.org] said it best.
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He said when looting starts shooting starts.
Yeah quoting a segregationist with a record of police brutality towards black people. No Trump isn't encouraging anything at all.
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Do you think Trump was using it in the vein?
I'm hoping Trump is shooting bleach in his vein.
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Oh yes I forgot you're a partisan nutcase.
Anything that happens you start bleating about the Democrats or something as if that somehow makes or ok? Or maybe it's because you think that because I can clearly see Trump is an idiot and his supporters are fools I must therefore be a supporter of the Democrat party?
I have no idea what you think, frankly because you're completely irrational and I really don't understand the mindset that leads to blind partisanship.
I have no idea what vein you are referring to. It
14th rule of the Internet? (Score:1)
Proof everyone hates the 1st (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me get this right?
If you don't sensor someone the way you want them censored then you are guilty of what they are saying as well? I guess all the history books are just more tools spreading racism, hate, and bigotry then. So are movies about these subjects.
When you seek to control any portion of the message you are human trash yourself. I keep telling everyone that they hate the constitution and the idea's that create it... but they always deny it... however your actions are proof of what you are.
Speech that you hate is protected by the 1st. Any attempt to control speech leads to a fate WORSE than the problems caused by letting people talk! The best solution to bad speech is more speech in response.
If you want to silence people... silence yourself first!
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If you don't sensor someone the way you want them censored then
Also censer and senser. These words are making me tents.
the perfect echo chamber. (Score:1)
You can accomplish free speech and also provide a disclaimer to ensure people are informed of other opinions.
The only thing it messes up is your echo chamber that is FB.
Side note:
He donated $10m to racial injustice (his net worth is $38b). That's like an engineer who makes $100k and drops a $1(IOU) to the tip jar when ordering a $4 coffee. IOU since I'm sure it will take time for him to provision what's to be done with it and maybe in the form of FB stock etc.
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Oh no, he didn't give away all of his money to a cause! Oh dear!
He shouldn't have given jack and shit.
Give me a Break (Score:2)
If you post anything about Eric CIA* on Facebook, the post will auto-disappear.
They've even extended that to private messages.
Good investment, In-Q-Tel.
Let's remember this: (Score:2)
That Zuckerberg is essentially Peter Thiel's puppet. [yahoo.com]
I hate to defend this jerk, but we should do so (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't "inaction" - this sounds like he is standing up against censorship. Hating him for his stance on privacy should not mean we admonish him for doing the right thing on this issue. Twitter has learned the hard way that social media cannot be the arbiter of truth - nobody can be. If you try, you we either be hated by the left, or hated by the right. Facebook will have the same problem if they try. So don't.
Social media is not an editorial platform. I'm okay with web sites auto-filtering links to goatse, ascii-art, SQL injection attempts, child pornography, and duplicate stories. But as soon as you make editorial decisions you will alternately hated by the left then hated by the right. The population of planet earth needs to realize that they can't have it both ways! If you wanted edited content, subscribe to a newspaper or web site that has your leanings. But Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and bobspersonalwebsite,com/myviews.html reflect the raw ugly unfiltered reality. We need that.
Funny story: 6 months ago one of my Republican relatives told me that twitter or Facebook or whatever needed to censor something that a Muslim activist said. They said it can't be okay to just post anything. They pointed out that ancient anecdote that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowed theater. (Actually you can.) Then a few days ago they went rabid about how Twitter should not censor Trump. Then today it's censorship again. Goldfish have better memories than people who partake in partisan politics.
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I think the court of public opinion is what tends to matter most to people in the end (rightfully or not).
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Yea, but that is why speech needs to be open and uncensored... because the "Court of Public Opinion" likes to mass murder people. It did not care about blacks during slavery, it did not care about Jews during the Holocaust, it does not care about the Uighers in China right now.
Fuck'em all and let whoever is in charge sort it, is the usual response by most and why it is very important for speech to remain uncensored.
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Like in rap music or videos? I mean we could censor them, or ban their music altogether, but does that seem right? Haven't they been through a lot lately?
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You just made up some shit. It wasn't even an argument.
I can't believe you are such a racist.
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Hating him for his stance on privacy should not mean we admonish him for doing the right thing on this issue.
This really says it best. Actions need to be judged on the action and not the person, otherwise you confuse the issue in minds of idiots, and idiots make up 90%+ of the voting population.
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This isn't "inaction" - this sounds like he is standing up against censorship.
I think it can be both things :) I think he, and social networks, are in a tough spot in general.
Blocking Trump on a platform seems like an impossible task. If he posts a story about shooting looters and a network decides to delete it, do they then have to delete all the news stories reporting on what he said? Are we thinking they're going to maintain a blocklist of millions of URLs each time he opens his mouth?
All they can do is block his account and stop letting him use it as an official mouthpiece. I am
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These platforms all have terms of service specifying what isn't allowed, illegal stuff, hate speech, etc. Some have a wide grey area making it difficult to moderate but factual statements that are easily disproved can be moderated with no loss of free speech. Like when Trump tweeted that Michigan mailed ballots to everyone, this was false (it was ballot applications). The reality is that human bias usually wins over provable facts.
They should do what Twitter Does (Score:1)
Zuck who? (Score:4, Funny)
You mean Mark Zuckerberg, the child molester? [twitter.com]
ACLU and Nazis (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever such an event like this happens, I remind myself of the time ACLU defended actual Nazis:
https://www.aclu.org/issues/fr... [aclu.org]
Vile that it is, Nazi's right to free speech was important. What is more ironic is that it was defended by a Jewish lawyer. Even though we might not agree 1 bit on their ideas, if they cannot express them today, ours could also be limited in the future.
This should be a very simple concept.
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The problem is we have newer generations which feel that censorship of their values is a must. They can't handle the concept of free speech. The left has been at constant war with the very same concept.
Too many people believe it is a good thing to ban things they dislike.
It will be a huge shock when they disagree with the censorship. Too bad safe spaces wont help at that point.
Re:ACLU and Nazis (Score:4, Insightful)
Except Twitter and Facebook are not the commons, and the president of the United States has plenty other ways of communicating with the public, including major outlets that function as the media wing of his party. It's not like it is possible to muzzle him in the way you can muzzle a handful nutcases doing Nazi cosplay.
That raises the question: what is it about social media that makes them so important to *this* particular politician? I think it is their emotional immediacy -- or put another way, the power Twitter and Facebook have to get people to react without thinking.
This is not about some kind of high-minded debate about controversial questions of policy: it is about channeling anger and hatred, the favored tools of despots for making willing slaves of the populace. There has never been a despotic regime that could survive its own incompetency and indifference to the public welfare without the power to inflame the emotions of the masses against some scapegoat.
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Many online outlets have enjoyed protections because were they considered a voice of the commons.
While they enjoyed the protections of a platform; they themselves did not honor the right to be a platform.
Now those protections are going to be stripped away from organizations that pretend to a voice of the commons.
You can absolutely choose to display whatever bias you want as long you want to pay the lawyers.
Huge difference (Score:1)
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Facebook and others would have never reached their market share, if not for the liability protection afforded by the government.
Why don't you educate yourself about 230:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
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I agree completely.
If people like you get their way, the the future will become a dystopian hell hole.
Oh, noes! Companies will determine what's on their own servers! What a nightmare that will be! How horrible! You mean people will have to PAY for web hosting, or learn how to host a web page? The horror. The horror.
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If the real DogDude is out there, you're account was hijacked. Maybe you can reset your password via email or something to get it back.
No fact check means undisputed truth (Score:1)
Now that Twitter is deciding which tweets are false, every tweet that Twitter didn't label can be presumed to be indisputably true. Unless... Unless Twitter is using double standards and singling out specific people for punishment based on the bias and prejudice of Twitter's staff.
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"every tweet that Twitter didn't label can be presumed to be indisputably true"
How about every tweet where the account has 10M+ followers gets fact checked? It's a bit much to ask them to perfectly fact check every single tweet, but for those few souls who have the loudest voices it would seem prudent to be sure they aren't misleading the world. That's basically how the press works. Someone's blog with 8 readers is not going to get the same level of scrutiny for accuracy as the London Times or New York Pos
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"every tweet that Twitter didn't label can be presumed to be indisputably true"
How about every tweet where the account has 10M+ followers gets fact checked?
So make up the standards on the spot and change them whenever. Just because. But don't accuse them of having double standards or bias.
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Aren't all standards made up by someone and changed as needed?
If someone has a disproportionate amount of power, it generally needs to be checked. The founding fathers knew that and thought having an individual like a king was a bad idea. Having 80 million followers gives an individual a loud voice. And if they did it to accounts with 10M+ followers then they'd also be fact checking Shakira, Justin Timberlake, and CNN's Twitter feed.
And sometimes it's a good thing to single out "specific people for punishme
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Aren't all standards made up by someone and changed as needed?
Twitter is accountable to no one. If they want to demonstrate unmistakable enmity toward 40+% of Americans, they should keep it up.
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I'll admit, I had to look up the definition of enmity. It was described as, "the state or feeling of being actively opposed or hostile to someone or something."
I'm guessing that 40% of Americans you reference are the ~40+% who approve of Trump. Are you implying that Twitter's fact checking link for that single individual is an act of hostility towards any and everyone who approves of him?
And I'd argue that Twitter is accountable to its shareholders. Honestly, I don't understand the appeal for the app or how
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Are you implying that Twitter's fact checking link for that single individual is an act of hostility towards any and everyone who approves of him?
Not implying. Stating it directly. If they only "fact check" one side or use double standards when they do it, it's a demonstration that they view that side as the enemy. Making enemies when there's nothing to gain from it is stupid.
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They appear to be fact checking for more than "one side", unless you believe Trump also believes the coronavirus originated in the US.
Twitter fact-checks Chinese official's claims that coronavirus originated in U.S. : https://www.axios.com/twitter-... [axios.com]
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And the police hurt white people too sometimes. Would you say their black victims don't have a valid complaint?
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How about every tweet where the account has 10M+ followers gets fact checked?
Twitter is mostly a marketing and advertising platform. The last thing advertisers want is to be fact checked.
Facebook sells ads and user data. Period. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me spell this out for anyone still unclear on the concept: Companies exist to make a profit. Facebook profits from selling ads. They aren't going to do anything that gets in the way of that. Trump's freak show draws a LOT of eyeballs, and this sells a LOT of ads. Do not expect these companies to muzzle Trump in any way at all. As long as he's president, his posts make them a lot of serious bank. Complaining to Zuckerberg about giving Trump a pass on Facebook is like lecturing the man in an ice-cream-truck about how bad sugar is. Spectacularly bad choice of audience, my friend.
Want to shut this guy down? For now, there's nothing we can do. We voted him in, and elections have consequences. We'll get another chance in November. It's up to the voters, plain and simple. It always was. Vote him out of office and a big chunk of the country will quickly write him off as a sorry, embarrassing 4-year society-wide tantrum. At that point, people will stop paying attention to him. His posts will sell far fewer ads and he'll mostly drop off the charts. Problem solved.
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I sure hope so. All the peeps that protested Hilary and the DNC shenanigans in 2016 by voting 3rd party or abstaining aren't going to make the same mistake. Trump's actions this year aren't helping him either.
Hands off of everything (Score:2)
except the money!
Eat the Zuckerbergs!
Stand your ground, Zuck (Score:1)
Those challenging you are a small minority, they should find employment elsewhere. You are fundamentally right: engaging in censorship of legal speech is detrimental to Facebook's mission.
Facebook is right (Score:3)
Think about it. How are you going to filter trillions of messages? Is it even possible to use technology to do a good job? I'm not sure its even possible and I'm pretty good at machine learning to understand the challenge.
Humans cannot read it all. If you single people out, e.g. the President of the US, you will be branded as being unfair so that's out.
And then there is the law. If they start censoring posts, they are no longer just the pipe - they take responsibility for content. And that invokes lots of legal issues that in the end would be a disaster. Twitter actually made the mistake and they aren't just a pipe, they are a publisher of editorial content and assume responsibility for what is said on their platform.
Freedom of speech is not easy, but its worth protecting. We are better off teaching people to not believe everything they read.
I say we get off Facebook's back. In this case they aren't really the bad guy here.
I read somebody's tag line here: "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it to the death".
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Does he think we have freedom of speech in the US? (Score:2)
What a damn traitor to the party! Only far left, and radical Islam, can post what they want.
Why doesn't Trump drop Twitter for FB? (Score:2)
They've said they're not going to tell everyone what to believe.
The media would cover his stuff off a different platform. They wouldn't take a hit to their sources and clicks / circulation.
Twitter is only still alive because POTUS is using it.
Opportunity! (Score:2)