Former Facebook Engineer Says That the Company Has Enshrined Failure in Its Policies (theverge.com) 204
A Facebook engineer said in a farewell video that the company was "failing" to mitigate harm and has "enshrined that failure in our policies." From a report: Max Wang, a Boston-based former engineer who claimed in the recording obtained and published by BuzzFeed News that he joined Facebook in 2011, said he didn't think CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders were acting in malice. "But that does not mean their actions are not going to harm people," Wang said. He added that he did not believe Facebook was "paying enough attention to the raw human needs of the people who use our platform." The company is "trapped by our ideology of free expression," he said. Of particular concern to Wang was how the platform handled -- or didn't handle -- a controversial post by President Trump where he commented, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," about protesters in Minneapolis. Facebook opted not to take any action and left the post up, despite Twitter adding a label to the tweeted version for "glorifying violence." Wang said Zuckerberg's comments at a company meeting discussing the post felt like "gaslighting."
"trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell did Wang's generation get this way? It sure seems like that whole generation took the "Those that choose security over freedom" quote and replied with "F#*$ your freedom, Fascist. It's hurting our feelings and scaring us".
Honestly, it's like those kids all cry and want to curl up into a fetal ball because someone said mean things!.
Re:"trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse than that. They are abdicating their responsibility, as members of a free society, to debate these issues on which they disagree-- instead looking to simply hide things they don't like.
Removing what someone said doesn't mean their opinion just disappears from existence. It takes hard work to convince people of why they're wrong and improve society as a whole.
Re: "trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's my own parochialism talking, but I'm the son of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union and I grew up and went to school in an immigrant-heavy and heavily Jewish middle class suburb of Philadelphia where most of the people either had first hand experience with what lack of freedom looked like or had it in living memory within their family, and being middle class in the 90s, a lot of them were business owners, lawyers, or doctors who were often the first or second in their family to break out of the poverty of the old country or out of the poverty of the immigrant experience of the first half of the twentieth century. They lived through the pogroms and the McCarthyism and the Civil Rights era and they understood the value of freedom and the necessity of teaching it to the next generation.
And the school curriculum reflected those values. So I learned why it is we have freedom of speech: because speech is a check against abuse of power. I learned why we had cash bail: because cash bail is a check against arbitrary indefinite detention (excessive use of "dangerousness hearings" to be precise). I learned why we have two senators per state, why only a third of the Senate is up for election every two years, why we have an electoral college and a written Constitution with a tedious amendment process and a high threshold for ratification. We have those things to balance the desires of the majority with the rights of the minority and to prevent the adoption of nationwide laws that apply from coast to coast and everything in between without broad popular as well as geographic consensus.
I might be one of the last millennials who was formally taught these things in elementary and high school. And most of that teaching was by people who were open Democrats. Go figure. All sorts of people believed in America back then.
Re: "trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:2)
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It takes hard work to convince people of why they're wrong and improve society as a whole.
Absolutely. But just calling them trolls or labelling them Russian/Chinese bots is so much easier.
Guess which approach most people would take. Hard work, or the easy way. Um...
Re:"trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, he's right. Freedom of speech is not enough. It's essential but insufficient. You can use it to gather like-minded people, keep the society informed, and then - what? Scream your lungs out at the offenders who laugh in your face because they don't care? Write offensive things about it? Make demands? They don't care. Your speech doesn't affect them.
So, in practice - the first amendment comes first. Then, after that, comes the second...
Re: "trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:2, Troll)
You fucking moron. These days prisoners sit on their asses. No one is rented out for road gangs anymore you ignorant price of shit.
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Too easy. [vox.com] i guess the people who don't exist and weren't hired as prison labor didn't strike in 2018 then.
Among other demands, prisoners want to earn more than a few dimes for each hour of work that they do, considering that their work brings in billions of dollars in revenue to state and federal prisons. Most inmates across the country do skilled and unskilled labor typically for less than a dollar per hour. (In some states, it’s entirely unpaid.) The work ranges from building office furniture to answering customer service calls to video production and farm work — sometimes without the guarantee of safe work conditions.
Troll harder next time, pal.
Re: "trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
So what do you do when the Flat Earther (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, when the "Market Place of Ideas" isn't free, because somebody with a lot of money bought it.
Sure, they don't do that with flat earth, but they absolutely do it for Climate Change, environmental regulations, minimum wage laws, etc, etc.
Saying "Good Ideas will always win" is all well and good, but it ignores nearly a millennium of Dark Ages the human race went through. Like most things in life it's just not that simple.
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You're talking about a separate issue of getting the government to implement policies that enact the desires of the people.
The majority of people in the US believe that climate change needs to be addressed, presumably as a result of public discourse on the topic:
https://www.pewresearch.org/sc... [pewresearch.org]
Others can be brought around to the idea by having adult discussions rather than simply dismissing them as uninformed idiots. Now we just need to get the government to do something about it. And hopefully that will b
That's not what I'm talking about (Score:3)
We no longer have an open debate because wealthy members of the ruling class use their wealth and power to shut down that debate. The billionaires are attacking Section 230 of the CDA and Net Neutrality while we fight to make sure White Supremacists have the right to post to Facebook. That's a problem.
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The billionaires are attacking Section 230 of the CDA and Net Neutrality while we fight to make sure White Supremacists have the right to post to Facebook. That's a problem.
They're both/all problems. Unfortunately, most people don't understand why the net neutrality (and similar) issues are important. If you can explain it in a way that they can understand, I think you'd find more support for those issues.
That's actually the fundamental problem with democracy--- it sort of falls apart when you have a lot of people that don't understand critical issues. The only way to fix that is by talking about them more. As for big money dominating the conversation: people love to get behin
No they don't really (Score:2)
And judging from your post people fall for it.
Re: No they don't really (Score:2, Flamebait)
And no...where I'm at, the greenies are very well funded...by those corporate posers as well as by some rich true believers...and they make it so that our infrastructure is third world compared to Alabama and everything costs about 30 to 50% more than it does in the rest of the country.
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The "All talk, no action" bit is of particular frustration to me for both BLM and climate conservation (among other things). Everyone hates the term "virtue signaling", but that's really what it amounts to. "We" need to demand [and, more-so, effect] actual change rather than lip service-- but it's difficult to convince others when most can't see it for what it is.
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I could do that. Or I could ignore him. Then the trolls go away.
The earth being round isn't an article of faith and was demonstrated by ancient greeks. look up their methods and calculations and reproduce them if you like. Me rewriting it ever time is not a benefit to anyone except trolls who get off on it.
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They need to be called out as such.
Yes, this! People to be called out--not silenced. Because if they're simply silenced, no one learns from their mistakes. (Unless one thinks learning in the "oppressed citizen" way is a good thing.)
Rights without responsibility isn't freedom, it's adolescence. We've forgotten about the responsibility to stop the spread of bad ideas.
Yes! It is everyone's responsibility to call out idiots when they say stupid things. The sooner people realize that and step up their own personal responsibility for issues in our/their society, the faster we'll fix a lot of issues plaguing this country.
Re: We're not debating some things anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to teach them so that they understand, you must also teach them why they need to understand: the potential for great evil exists in every person and the temptation to do evil can be seductive.
For that reason, you must understand what tempts the Nazi so that you may recognize it when it tempts you. And to do that, you must read the Nazi's own words, not your approximation of them. Your understanding may be imperfect. Your revulsion may prevent you from trying to understand, and you may justify that failure as a virtue. But the end result is that you will fail to understand what motivates the bigot, and thus fail to inoculate yourself and your children against that pathology.
This is not hypothetical. You yourself assert that a lot of the tenets of conservative/ libertarian philosophy are mere code words for keeping the black man down. This is inaccurate. And you fail your children by teaching them that Republican equals Nazi. A lot of Republicans are reasonable people with nothing but love in their hearts. Say your kid meets one of them. Raised to believe that Republican Equals Nazi, he might think to himself, "Nazis aren't that bad." Is that a desirable end result of your little crusade against bad thoughts?
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The best documentary I saw on the Nazis and Hitler was one that wasn't bleating about how evil they were the whole time. Hitler: A Career. Absolute gold for teaching people how that kind of shit really goes down.
I'll second that. It was excellent and really tried to understand the why and how from the Nazis' perspective, instead of merely demonizing them.
Yes, it is crucial to call out that sort of behavior: it is the responsibility of every citizen who believes in the Constitution, this nation, and our rule of law. Aspiring dictators and fascists should be shunned as such. In order to recognize it, you need to be educated in their history and strategies employed by them.
Democracy is a metastable system. To either s
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In that kind of culture, even Bernie Sanders would be dangerous.
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We are not all equal, the potential for evil acts is not equal. Genetics plays a role, the potential for evil in a genetic psychopath is pretty assured, they are very likely to spend their lives committing acts of evil and that includes starting wars to feed their ego and evil as it gets. Normies not so much, they are genetically inclined to be social.
Then there is the difference between reason and belief, again a genetic difference, those more inclined to empty beliefs and those more inclined to reason, th
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We need to start thinking about how to get those thoughts under control. Otherwise we're going to be a dictatorship really soon.
The thoughts are okay. The implementation of those ideas is what needs to be chastised and called out as an egregious affront to our ideals. Covering up thoughts sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me, regardless of which "side" one supports.
Also it's somewhat ironic that everytime I point these things out I get modded into oblivion. What about _my_ free speech?
I feel that way, too. Extremists on both sides are really quick to bury opinions they don't agree with. It sucks for all of us.
Re: How do you separate the two? (Score:2)
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Not to speak out of turn, but, I think rsilvergun was saying that they're not particularly fond of those solutions, but haven't yet found a better idea.
Why so much anger when someone else is frustrated by the same issue and looking for a solution?
You've made some good points in this discussion, and it saddens me to see this happen. "Cooler headers prevail", and all that...
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"Name & Shame" and "cancel culture" are anti-patterns. These things do nothing to address the underlying issue, and they serve only to further drive people apart (as seen by the growing political extremism on both sides in the US, among other places).
We may have innate "tribal" tendencies to support those that are most "like us", but clearly with education, grooming, and exposure to different lifestyles, people can move beyond that. You and I can have a civil conversation here about something that's imp
Re: The Nazis still won (Score:3)
Dude you're a right winger (Score:2)
This is the trouble with the right wing. You don't care what happens so long as your side wins.
Re: Dude you're a right winger (Score:2)
The problem with the American left is that they think they can get away with shit the rest of us would rot in jail for if they scream loudly enough while doing it.
Thought control? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to start thinking about how to get those thoughts under control.
No, we sure as hell don't. 1984 isn't an instruction manual. Here's a couple of quotes you should carefully consider:
"Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
~Thurgood Marshall
"Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well."
~Ma Jian
You keep claiming that the Nazi's came to power because of free speech. Even it that were true (it isn't), practically the first thing the Nazis did was ELIMINATE free speech because they knew it was a threat to their power. What you propose is EXACTLY what the Nazis implemented. If you think "Oh, we should implement thought control and censorship now, so Nazis don't take over", well the Nazis HAVE taken over and you supported it.
Here's another quote for you:
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
~Joseph Goebbels
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And so what; i can cherry pick a ton of examples as well.
Recent Nick Cannon got the ax for making 'anti-semitic' remarks. He also said that whites were sub-human and less evolved (something something melanin). His public chastisement so far is only regarding his statements on Jews. The woke mob ignores anti-white sentiment writ large.
But you know what? I'm okay with him having the ability to spout off on stuff like that. I think he's an abject moron, and completely fails at basic logic; but he still has
Re: We're not debating some things anymore (Score:2)
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How the hell did Wang's generation get this way? It sure seems like that whole generation took the "Those that choose security over freedom" quote and replied with "F#*$ your freedom, Fascist. It's hurting our feelings and scaring us".
Honestly, it's like those kids all cry and want to curl up into a fetal ball because someone said mean things!.
"The company is "trapped by our ideology of free expression," he said. Of particular concern to Wang was how the platform handled -- or didn't handle -- a controversial post by President Trump where he commented, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," about protesters in Minneapolis."
Free expression is a good thing, and there was nothing wrong with this post. He didn't target anyone in particular, and he didn't glorify violence.
It is a true statement: When there is looting there is violence and sh
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It's a superficially true statement, but the subtext is that he was quoting racists in the past who used that slogan to justify shooting black people. There's nothing objectively racist about a generic red flag which a white circle containing a black symbol in the center. But it's pretty clear that it's meant to call back to the Nazi flag. There are better examples, but I cannot think of them at the moment.
Re:"trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing dredging up the quotation was designed to whip up the voting base, like every other post. Dudes of a certain age (his voters) would likely know the original context, which was a police chief threatening to shoot people in the street. Make America Great Again - remind them of the good ol' days in the 1960s.
For myself, and I'm guessing anyone under age 60, I'd never heard the quote's original context. That makes it easier to read as a neutral statement that looting and gun violence can occur together. It is a pretty textbook example of a dog whistle. You want one group to hear one thing, and another group to hear something different. Then when you're questioned about it, drown the criticism in the muddy waters of plausible deniability.
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Yup. But there are now people who identify the dog whistles and explain why the speaker knew (or should have known) the original intent. So, that's good for accountability.
Without those people, I too would have thought he just wrote or stole a punchy phrase.
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For myself, and I'm guessing anyone under age 60, I'd never heard the quote's original context. That makes it easier to read as a neutral statement that looting and gun violence can occur together. It is a pretty textbook example of a dog whistle. You want one group to hear one thing, and another group to hear something different. Then when you're questioned about it, drown the criticism in the muddy waters of plausible deniability.
Maybe, but what is your evidence that that was Trump's intent? We hear all the time about how conspiracy theories are this great evil and misinformation has the "potential to cause harm." Yet then we hear accusations that Trump intentionally evoked a 60 year-old quote in order to dog whistle to an extremist base, as if we're supposed to accept that as fact.
It also doesn't help your hypothesis when you admit that "anyone under the age of 60" is unlikely to have heard the quote in its original context. So if
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Yes. Fascists are taking over our country. It's bad and should be stopped. And it scares me. I don't really care about Nazis' freedom to express their beliefs anymore.
Keep in mind, this isn't government censorship (which I abhor). This is a very large group of people saying they don't want to share a platform with fascists.
I mean, based on context, your enti
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Yes. Fascists are taking over our country. It's bad and should be stopped. And it scares me. I don't really care about Nazis' freedom to express their beliefs anymore.
Keep in mind, this isn't government censorship (which I abhor). This is a very large group of people saying they don't want to share a platform with fascists.
They're free to move to a new platform, aren't they? If they were as large as you think they are, they'd already have their own platform.
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Yes. They are complaining now, and will move if their complaints aren't recognized. Just like you complain would to a manager about a bad experience before putting a store/restaurant on your "do not return" list.
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Yes. They are complaining now, and will move if their complaints aren't recognized. Just like you complain would to a manager about a bad experience before putting a store/restaurant on your "do not return" list.
There's too few of them to matter, they aren't going to move and lose access to their entire social network. I don't know anyone IRL who thinks being woke and isolated is better than staying in contact!
Besides, they don't want to move to a social network that comprises only the converted. What would be the point in preaching to the converted? They want to stay on the platform so that they can continue preaching to everyone and virtue-signalling.
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Do you understand what fascism is? It's a collectivist ideology that seems society as an organism, with government as the "head," and to paraphrase a famous fascist, everything is within the State, period. No one has rights, only the collective has "rights," and the only thing that matters is the health and progress of the collective. Business is run by councils of what can generally be called stakeholders, and production is centrally planned. Megaprojects are a common propaganda method to show the strength
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None of that is fascism. You didn't address what the Franklin quote means.
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Fascist: noun A Republican.
Communist: noun A Democrat.
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Saw that as well...
What is wrong with freedom of expression? That's one of the pillars of of western civilization (if not THE pillar). Yes people MIGHT say mean things, and it MIGHT hurt your feelings.
But the alternative is far worse. Christ, a 12 year old in the UK was arrested for using the no-no naughty word on the internet. I'd take my chances with a platform that lets random people say mean things, than the thought police.
I'm still a little bit in shock that during the great wokening of 2020 FB is o
Re:The problem isn't mean things (Score:4, Interesting)
There's nothing good happening in Portland, but really; what would you have the feds do? They're responsible for protecting their people and buildings, they absolutely shouldn't allow the mob to chase them off.
The mob is being actively encouraged and protected by the local government...so what should they do?
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Why not try to ask people why they're angry?
Instead, we have a political and societal response of instinctive denial and aggression. There's no real attempt to understand each other.
We want the politicians to use their ears more, their mouths less, and not stuff their wallets with corporate bribes. I know it's a lot to ask...
Re:The problem isn't mean things (Score:5, Insightful)
And if that's what you want, great, but I don't care. I will support your right to protest to matter what you want.
Rioting, on the other hand, is not acceptable. I will not support negotiating with terrorists, particularly when their demands echo "defund the police".
Peaceful protesting? Go right ahead, make your voice heard. Rioting? I hope you get shot in the balls with a teargas canister.
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Do you simply assume that people are inherently bad and do bad things for no reason? The culpability does not rest wholly on the shoulders of the people.
The politicians, bought and paid for, with their ears plugged and legislation written for them by their owning corporations is the other side of the issue that you seem oddly reluctant to admit even exists.
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Of course it exists, but what do you think acting like animals is going to do to fix that?
Hint: nothing. Not a fucking thing. Why? Because you are forcing the general public into a choice. New rioting or old corruption. Guess which direction they'll choose?
Why was Dr King so successful? He was peaceful, and in doing what he did he forced the government to look like lunatics. He flipped the script, essentially; he made the government force the choice, which is almost always a losing position.
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You don't even know what those words mean (Score:2)
As a right winger you should be shitting bricks over what's happening in Portland, OR (and Chicago next). But it's happening to people you consider "The Other" so it's all good.
It'll come full circle around to you too, and by then it'll be too late for you to do anything about it. Something, something, I wasn't a
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False equivalency. Were these truly peaceful protestors then I'd agree with you; what the feds are doing would be terrifying. However, these are terrorists operating on US soil, with the blessing of the local governments for political purposes. That's actually far more horrifying to me than having the feds protect their property.
That you don't appear to be even slightly worried about that is suggestive of your own bias ( well, plus calling me a "right winger" ).
Didn't you hear about the Wall of Moms? (Score:4, Funny)
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Do you actually live in Portland, or are you just repeating what you've seen on the internets?
Do you have 24x7 monitoring of every area of downtown Portland? We have the same information as you. It's not like there's a special reporting outlet restricted to OR residents.
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Do you actually live in Portland, or are you just repeating what you've seen on the internets?
Do you have 24x7 monitoring of every area of downtown Portland? We have the same information as you. It's not like there's a special reporting outlet restricted to OR residents.
I don't need one. There's plenty of local reporting, friends around town who I talk to, obvious evidence that things are pretty normal except for the stormtroopers who come out every now and then and violate the constitution. You could go online and look at the cameras on the streets downtown and see an absence of a town under siege and a presence of people walking around and moderate traffic congestion. There have been BLM protests in the evening, which I understand are pretty common around the country.
The
Re:The problem isn't mean things (Score:5, Insightful)
So the footage we see of antifa/blm destroying things is...what? Made up?
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No no, those were clearly white supremacists and white conservative men in silicone body suits infiltrating the peaceful protests. CNN says so.
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No, it's from several months ago (Score:2)
Oh, and Antifa isn't real. You need to lay off the Fox News & Ben Shapiro.
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You're going to need to support your assertion with evidence, because right now that's in the "flat earth" category of nonsense.
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So the footage we see of antifa/blm destroying things is...what? Made up?
Real enough, but rare - you only need one event filed from 10 angles and repeated ad-nausium on fox news to make people think it's how the place is. Also almost certainly the troublemakers who don't care what the cause is, they just want to cause trouble and demonstrations provide and ideal situation to do so. I refer you to football violence in the UK through the 1970s and 1980s. Same psychology.
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Everyone, we can relax: I found the pedantic asshole.
Context matters, dumbass.
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You know full well...
Let me stop you there and point out that you've already been wrong once in this brief conversation; do you really think you're capable of assuming anything?
Go back and read the the thread to understand the context. If you're still confused you're either very very slow OR your extremely biased. Probably both.
Most others haven't made the same cognitive mistakes you're making, which is worth noting.
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You mean like a large bulk or Rap lyrics? Or Socialist Worker or things like that? They've been around for years.. Get with the program. :)
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However Facebook does it, it best get about it. The one thing advertisers are is risk averse. They do not want their products and services in any way associated with hate speech. That's the way media has always worked. Newspapers have long been able to stand astride this line, because reporting about something awful or evil isn't the same as effectively having "Glopso Soap, Brought to you by your local friendly Newark Nazis".
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'Hate speech' hasn't even existed for two decades yet. It isn't how newspapers have always acted.
And you have that last bit backwards. "Antifa Ninnies are brought to you by the Soap Company."
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We used to have safe spaces for those that can't handle real life. They involved a padded rooms and a straight jackets.
They are now called Republican party meeting rooms.
Disagree. (Score:5, Insightful)
Based only on the small amount of information in the summary....I don't think taking the post down would be responsible. It is not Facebook's job to censor the President's statements to the people of the country he serves, especially if they are asinine. Whether we like what he says or not, we need to know what he says, so we can make appropriate decisions in response to the statements.
I DO think that social media is straight-up toxic, in general. People on sites like Facebook, twitter, etc., tend to get very disrespectful to each other and conversations rapidly devolve into shouting matches. Fake news is proliferated, extremists get the most attention, lots of drama gets needlessly created, and people get depressed (or even bullied). So, that's a problem.
I don't think, however, that this problem should be solved through corporate-run censorship. I think the desire to do this is just more pettiness at work: people want to silence their rivals, and so they present narratives in which their rivals are the only toxic ones and hence are deserving of censorship. It's just more extremism robbing us of our objectivity.
Slashdot relies on community moderation, which isn't perfect, but it IS something, and it IS better than crowning some corporate executive as the final arbiter of which opinions can and cannot be expressed.
I imagine the best response here is a cultural-shift towards greater objectivity, and greater self-awareness, so that people can recognize when they are over-reacting to drivel being proffered by extremists. I don't know how to make that happen, but I sure don't think censorship will do it.
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Both parties are complicit and authoritarian, but people on the "left" are not all Democrats or Socialists or whatever. Some of us are just pissed that all of them are corrupt, that innocent people are murdered in cold blood under color of authority, that the credentialed press are arrested in the course of filming police acting in their official capacity, and so on, which apparently makes us "left".
They're all shit. How about politicians who actually give a fuck about the 99%? These government acts are far
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The problem isn't social media. This is how people have been since the beginning of time. Gossip, rumor-mongering, hearsay, old wives
It's not Facebook's job to censor (Score:5, Insightful)
How can it be anything other than a terrible idea to have the leadership of a corporation be in charge of DECIDING what speech gets censored.
Can't you see how terrible an idea that is? As a devil's advocate example, what if Facebook's executives and board decided to retire to holiday islands, by selling their stake and control of Facebook to the TikTok company, and not having to deal with all the flak any more.
Now I don't personally believe TikTok is manipulated by any particular foreign government. But let's stretch the thought experiment to where TikTok is a puppet of said government. And now THEY are, instead of Mark Zuckerberg and team, deciding on what speech gets censored.
There is NO LEGAL DIFFERENCE between the current case and the hypothetical case I described.
Yet that's the company-runs-the-censoring situation many people are advocating setting up here for social media companies.
If any mandatory censorship is required, social media infrastructure companies like Facebook, Twitter etc should be legally required to delegate the censorship function to some open, democratic organization that can make the decisions, and to have some kind of API functionality to make that feasible and efficient.
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The government? Someone appointed by and beholden to the government?
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That principle is derived from an assumption that private entities exist in some kind of competitive state. If one company isn't doing you fairly, the idea is you can move on to another one. But with FB you have many aspects of a monopoly. So when they censor, it functions more like state censorship.
A lot of these concepts don't fit perfectly to Facebook, however. They're kinda like infrastructure, but kinda not. Kinda monopolistic, but kinda not. Legally a private entity but functionally more of a "public
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It's not Facebooks job to be the President's forum they're job is to connect people socially
Apparently is their job, as defined by them, since they do it and they are a private corporation that makes their own choices.
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No, their job is to link college students. Their friends and family should not be on facebook unless they are enrolled in college.
Oh no wait, that's facebook from a decade and a half ago. Today's facebook allows anyone, including companies, to have a personal page and connect with anyone. It's an open forum. In other words you are completely wrong. Their Job is most definitely NOT to police the thoughts of people, and it isn't their job to determine which posts are radical-left approved.
Wang is clearly a ch
They really don't like free speech do they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: They really don't like free speech do they? (Score:2)
You can express yourself freely, but you can't control what others think about it.
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Imagine being a common carrier [cornell.edu] and trading off the concomitant privileges for those requirements.
Re: They really don't like free speech do they? (Score:2)
ISPs have not been classified as common carriers since 2017?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1... [nytimes.com]
Are the companies you're talking about ISPs?
Re: They really don't like free speech do they? (Score:2)
Re: They really don't like free speech do they? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, us communists would vote with our wallets to express our dissatisfaction.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see their business being destroyed by this. It's more about empty virtue signalling. How many of them are applying those saved advertising funds to raise their lowest-paid, heavily-melanated workers? Probably none.
Even so, "Freedom of speech" never meant "freedom from consequences". The single exception is when that consequence is the government shutting you down. Private actors in the market can stop transacting with FB at any time and for any reason. FB is not entitled to their business.
Re: (Score:2)
We've already got prison slavery back in America. Before long we'll want to stop feeding them so much.
Oh, we're already there. Soy diets, low calorie diets, and so on. [themarshallproject.org]
Nutritional standards at state and local facilities are governed by a patchwork of state laws, local policies, and court decisions. A Texas law requiring inmates be fed three times in 24 hours, for example, only applies to county jail inmates, not state prisoners. Some jails and prisons require low-fat or low-sodium diets, while others mandate inmates receive a certain number of calories. All detention facilities must have a licensed dietician review their menus in order to be accredited by the American Correctional Association. The association recommends — but does not mandate — that prisons offer inmates three meals a day.
Budget-conscience legislators in a number of states, however, have proposed reducing the minimum number of meals down to two per day, and prison officials are increasingly outsourcing food service to private contractors to slash food costs.
It's all in how you measure success (Score:2)
Articles like this irritate me.. (Score:4, Interesting)
They always start with: "A says...".
What they don't do is say "Well, to find out what was going on, we polled a few thousand from said area randomly, management and front line, looked painstaking at what the data told us and tried very hard to put our biases away when we did".
Usually, if they were to do that, they'd find a big mix of people that thought things were fine, that people as a whole were shooting themselves in the foot, and a myriad views , Not what an outlier says that someone managed to find to support their agenda.
It's the sensible thing to do (Score:2)
If you cannot solve a problem, the sensible thing to do is to stop wasting resources on trying to solve it.
"...about protesters in Minneapolis." (Score:2, Interesting)
'Of particular concern to Wang was how the platform handled -- or didn't handle -- a controversial post by President Trump where he commented, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," about protesters in Minneapolis.'
Protesters don't loot. Only looters loot.
Re: (Score:2)
Good thing then, that everyone protesting has been declared a looter. Makes it that much easier to shoot them in the eye with rubber bullets. Good thing the journalists being arrested are looters too. That still doesn't quite explain why it's secret police in unmarked vans that are being deployed, though.
Oh well. How about that terrible new security law in Hong Kong though? Communism! When Biden seizes the throne from its rightful regent, we'll turn into a police state!
His name. (Score:2)
Max Wang
Typical aristicrat (Score:2)
Oh no... not free speech! The HORROR! (Score:2)
Here's the real complaint, FTA (Score:5, Informative)
Now we're getting down to it. I see: If I work for a social media platform, I get to use it like my personal property. I can just imagine Zuck's response to that.
"trapped by our ideology of free expression" (Score:2)
Uh, did you ever actually go on Facebook? Were you even employed by Facebook at all? Are you even a real person? And why do you hate America?
Re: (Score:2)