Facebook Must Better Police Online Hate, State Attorneys General Say (nytimes.com) 132
Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. From a report: In a letter [PDF] to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They outlined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users. "We hope to work with you to ensure that fewer individuals suffer online harassment and discrimination, and that it is quickly and effectively addressed when they do," said the letter, which was addressed to Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The officials who signed the letter, all of them Democrats, represent states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, as well as the District of Columbia. The letter adds to the rising pressure facing Mr. Zuckerberg and his company to stop disinformation and harassment on Facebook. Civil rights leaders, advertisers and some of the company's own employees have criticized Facebook for failing to curtail the spread of noxious content. Extremists and conspiracists have turned to social media -- most often Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- to circulate falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic, the coming presidential election and Black Lives Matter protests.
Facebook and other social media companies have made some changes to dismantle misinformation and hate on their services. Last month, Twitter announced that it would remove thousands of accounts associated with the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon, saying their messages could lead to harm and violated Twitter policy. In June, Facebook took down a network of accounts tied to boogaloo, an antigovernment movement in the United States that encourages violence. That same month, YouTube banned six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer. But according to the attorneys general, Facebook in particular has not done enough. The officials pointed to Facebook's recent Civil Rights Audit -- which found that advertisers could still run ads that painted a religious group as a threat to the "American way of life" -- as evidence that the social network had fallen short. "Facebook has a hate speech, discrimination, disinformation problem," Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal, of New Jersey, who led the letter, said in an interview. "The way I view it, as an attorney general, is that it directly affects public safety in my state, that the groups that are allowed to find community online, on Facebook, allow hate to be normalized."
Facebook and other social media companies have made some changes to dismantle misinformation and hate on their services. Last month, Twitter announced that it would remove thousands of accounts associated with the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon, saying their messages could lead to harm and violated Twitter policy. In June, Facebook took down a network of accounts tied to boogaloo, an antigovernment movement in the United States that encourages violence. That same month, YouTube banned six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer. But according to the attorneys general, Facebook in particular has not done enough. The officials pointed to Facebook's recent Civil Rights Audit -- which found that advertisers could still run ads that painted a religious group as a threat to the "American way of life" -- as evidence that the social network had fallen short. "Facebook has a hate speech, discrimination, disinformation problem," Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal, of New Jersey, who led the letter, said in an interview. "The way I view it, as an attorney general, is that it directly affects public safety in my state, that the groups that are allowed to find community online, on Facebook, allow hate to be normalized."
If you want to moderate content... (Score:5, Insightful)
If governments want to moderate contents, then they should legislate away privacy and make people post under their own names. Then the policing can be done by the police. Until then, as long as constitutions and laws grant the right to privacy, then what people do with it will always be a mixed bag.
They don't get it both ways. They can't pay lip service to privacy and then pin the onus on policing on the platforms. They aren't police, and I for one don't want them policing anything. No, if a government is going to get huffy on online content, then they can take the heat and try and legislate away our privacy and confront the problem head on.
Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think that the US has any privacy laws that go beyond medical records.
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It's almost like you don't consider the Constitution to be a set of laws...
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Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly do you think requiring a search warrant is?
If there's no privacy, warrants are a meaningless concept. If you agree, then let me plant drugs in your house and tip the cops off. You'll be sure to invite them in for tea and scones with a side of blow, just before you break out in handcuffs.
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Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Insightful)
A) search: you wouldn't even need the legal term 'search' if there was no privacy. Privacy and property rights go hand in hand. If you have no property, you have no way of obtaining privacy (e.g., preventing photon collisions and subsequent absorption by someone else's eyeball). If you have property rights, but affirmatively state that you have no expectation of privacy, then anyone could traipse into your house--and that would give the lie to your supposed property rights.
B) seizure: relates to property rights, at best a tangent to privacy. There's also arrest warrants, etc., but the ones that are really concerning with respect to privacy are search warranta.
Or maybe you claim you rightfully own that cocaine, and they were wrong to deprive you of your property rights to illegal cocaine? I'll give you a gold star if you make the argument to them.
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Re: If you want to moderate content... (Score:2)
The word "privacy" is not in the US Constitution.
It didn't need to be; there were fewer ways - by multiple orders of magnitude - that privacy could even be placed at risk in the late 1700's. It's a fucking given that privacy is an implicit right in this country, whether it's been enumerated or not.
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The word "privacy" is not in the US Constitution.
True.
Then again, neither does the words "poop", "fornicate", or "spelunk", but you generally have the right to do those things.
So, what does the Constitution say?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,"
A little old-fashioned and formal, but its meaning is clear: You have the right to privacy ... except when there is probably cause that you committe
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Other words/phrases not in the Constitution:
Breathe
Sleep
Eat
Yawn
Self-Defense
Pray
Walk
Look
Someone, no me, but someone, would argue that you don't have a right to any of those things.
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Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. Griswold v. Connecticut. [oyez.org]
Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even for those of us who think Roe V. Wade has been helpful and that women SHOULD have access to safe, legal abortion, that court case was on extremely shaky legal reasoning. It made little sense. It was very much an "end justifies the means" decision, in that the reasoning was unsound, but it arrived at a decision we wanted anyway.
It probably will be overturned, and it probably should be overturned; the value of precedent is the only thing propping it up. But it would sadden me at the same time to see it go because of what the consequences will be.
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This is what happens when you tunnel through the foundation of your house, for better or worse, instead of doing it laboriously and correctly with an Amendment.
You make a devil's bargain when you take the convenient over the correct with respect to the law and government and the social contract.
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Re:If you want to moderate content... (Score:4, Informative)
Ignoring precedent, the 4th amendment makes it sound pretty clear already:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I don't know how you can violate privacy without violating one of those things.
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Peeping.
Following someone around and taking photos.
Besides, those are restrictions placed on government, and privacy can be violated by anyone. Even if there was no way to violate someone's privacy without violating any aspect of the 3rd-5th Amendments, that wouldn't mean privacy was a protected right, just that it was protected as an unintended side-effect. It would be a logical fallacy (affirming the consequent I think) to state that privacy was being protected. By which I mean tha
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This whole double standard that bits on anyone's computers belong to a corporation, but your own writings on anyone else's computers don't belong to you needs to DIAF.
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For terms of service, and similar agreements, we might stipulate that the service provider must provide a negotiable fair market consideration in line with works produced by the largest prevailing media establishments in order to have a clause asserting ownership of content authored by the users of the service.
For personally identifiable information, it should be illegal to attempt to assert ownership of another's information, such as their birthday, their name, their purchasing habits, medical treatment, a
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In addition to ownership, make that ownership + any sort of licensing except as a utility publisher. If you want a license to own my data, advertise with it, sell it to someone, share it with someone in a way I didn't explicitly authorize (e.g., the government, charities, PACs, and so on)...
All of these things should require an explicit, negotiable consideration in line with the largest producers of copyrighted works, paid by the service to the author.
That would do a lot to clear up this snooping by corpora
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Which case was that, please?
Roe v. Wade - The right to first-trimester abortions was based on an implied right to privacy.
This doesn't make much sense. Abortion rights should have been based on property rights: A woman's right to own and control her own body. But, nonetheless, that is not the way the case was decided.
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Can your body actually be considered property? I know a body CANNOT be considered property of another person...
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Sure it can. See the 13th Amendment.
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The United States Supreme Court has decided in a number of cases that the right to privacy is, for lack of a better word, implied in more than one clause of the US Constitution.
Unless you are within 100 miles of a border.
LOL
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if you want to do away with privacy then let it be all privacy, including that of corporations, state officials, military ... everyone.
anyway, i even like the outlandish suggestions of attorneys general even less than yours. you're directly advocating for a police state, they're just making a fuzz.
(https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/facebook-attorneys-general-letter/50738870562dec84/full.pdf)
harassment is illegal and police can act when someone denounces it, as they have always been able to and expected
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anyway, i even like the outlandish suggestions of attorneys general even less than yours. you're directly advocating for a police state,
Whooooosh. Way to totally miss the thrust of OP's argument. It was subtle, I'll grant you, but usually we just call it, "the rule of law". You do things correctly or not at all.
There are no inherent guarantees that the right thing will be easy. It is frequently the opposite. Giving in to the temptation of the easy over the correct leads to the corrupt.
Re: If you want to moderate content... (Score:2)
More than that, the state AGs are asking Facebook to police speech. If Facebook doesn't do that, then what? They sue Facebook for something the constitution prohibits them from doing?
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More than that, the state AGs are asking Facebook to police speech.
And they'll change their tune if FB actually bans all hate speech, like "#CancelWhitePeople".
We're in a dangerous position where it's not the content of the message that is considered hate speech, but whether the messenger and the targets are of the correct demographics.
The people who are arguing so vehemently that those who think all lives matter are racist don't realise that that very same logic and rules can be used against them because it is all subjective.
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?!? Facebook is the problem because people use real names. Internet around for decades, social media, no one really cared everyone had fun, some were abusive no on really cared. The REAL NAME social media and it all turned to shite you PR HACK.
REAL NAME social media is the problem and you want more real names, LIAR, just a smoke screen to hide behind, you real name media troll.
REAL NAME is the problem and they should be bloody obvious to all and those companies who use it publicly should be held fully le
Interesting First Amendment question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Normally, private actors like these companies are not governed by the First Amendment. But when a private entity does things on behalf of, or at the direction of, the government, they become a sort of agent of the government. In this case, those actions can lead to actionable infringement of civil rights.
Does this letter establish that much agency? If not, how much farther would the state AGs have to go before courts recognize the companies as agents of the government with respect to these moderation policies?
For starters Facebook would have to take action (Score:2)
Even if Facebook did crack down on hate speech (unlikely, they seem to be making a lot of money off it) you'd have to trace that back to a government action.
At that point you can start to litigate it. You might not win that battle, since hate speech often does end in actual violence, which the state AGs have a legitimate right to investigate.
That said, I don't think it matters. This is just grandstanding by a bunch of AGs
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What concerns me are shutting off ISP access/peering and domain name seizures.
Those are utility functions in modern society. If you violently take their servers and their domain name then you validate their arguments about censorship.
It's not right to seize their personal property operating over an "open" public common and prevent them access to it because of their beliefs, hateful or otherwise with the caveat that the moment it crosses the line into a demonstrable physical manifestation (flesh/bone/propert
Re:Interesting First Amendment question... (Score:4, Insightful)
They seem to be concerned that crimes are taking place on Facebook and Facebook isn't doing enough to stop them.
Harassment and abuse can be criminal matters, that's well established.
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So? In the US, no one -- not even police -- has a general obligation to prevent the crimes if another person like you suggest. If the state AGs want to prosecute those crimes, they can do that. If the AGs want to subpoena social media companies for information that is relevant to the alleged crimes, they can do that. But if the state AGs enlist companies in efforts to prevent or punish crime, those companies become agents of the state and subject to constitutional constraints.
Whoa be careful what you ask for... (Score:4, Insightful)
When considering laws, regulations or procedures to curb "hate" speech the question should always be asked how could a wannabe authoritarian leader with dictator tendencies use this to their own advantage if they had the power.
For example I could easily see a narcissistic ego-obsessed transactional leader claim that all negative or critical comments directed at himself constitute "hate" speech and should be censored and the violators punished.
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Clearly the absence of those laws would hold up those claims from an ego-obsessed transactional leader. Oh well, back to banning Tik Tok somehow. I heard those people are mean to our current POTUS.
I think we also need to consider (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest I don't know how. I do know that the Nazis used the existing power structures and platforms to their advantage until they were in power and then that was that, no more free speech.
It's a long standing paradox. You have to be intolerant of intolerance or the intolerant will crush you. I think we had a bit of a balance going until Social Media kind of screwed that up. We need to put serious thought to how to address it or authoritarians will use it against us and we'll lose everything.
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TL;DR: We, the Good People, need to censor, or those Bad People will censor.
Change the Constitution if you don't like it. Until then, tough.
That's not an answer (Score:3)
I'm not saying I have the answers, but I do know this: if we leave it as is we're boned. About 20% of the population is easily misled and they're more than enough to fuck the entire country up, especially in a First Past the Post, Winner Take All political system like ours.
As it stands we've cleared all 14 of the 14 characteristics of f
In 2020 the 2nd is basically worthless (Score:2)
If you want freedom you need to hold onto it now. Tech has chanced since Ben Franklin was alive, and even he needed the French to hold the Britis
Re: In 2020 the 2nd is basically worthless (Score:2)
you and your AK and your 20 boxes of Ammo won't last a month against a modern military
It wouldn't really need to. That's not how asymmetric warfare works.
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Yes, you need that balance, that moderation to keep things stable. The idea of abandoning compromise has terrible implications. The Nazis had an easy sell to people who felt beat down by the Treaty of Versailles. It's easy to sell snake oil to those who are feeling sick and helpless. The physical and moral truths of the matter were irrelevant. Ultimately, the choice to stand firm in your intolerance of intolerance leads to the option of war, and you have to decide if it's worth it. If we can agree that
Actually the Treaty didn't hit them that hard (Score:2)
Moreover I don't think we've put serious thought about how to control racism & bigotry (which seem to be natural to humans, we're easily frightened of "the other") while maintaining a free society.
Right now the main thing I'm seeing is "Name & Shame" where outright racists get called Karens & Kyles, have their vids go vira
You're right. We failed to stop this slide (Score:2)
toward NAZIsm when our previous president announce he planned to "fundamentally transform" the United States of America and then proceeded to use the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA , the IRS, the State Department and Foreign spies against his political opponents. He used the powers of government to try to make NUNS violate their consciences! He ordered average citizens to buy a commercial product that HE designed and priced (Obama care plans). He took over huge parts of the economy (major auto companies) and sold t
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how we prevent a wannabe authoritarian leader with dictator tendencies from using platforms to spread their message and convert the country into a dictatorship.
You don't.
Protection against dictators comes from a strong separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Separation of powers between different levels of government. And a military that is firmly under the command of civil authorities. If your concern is about a dictator taking power then the answer is to limit the power of the government, not curtail the rights of citizens.
It's not a paradox, it's a power grab. The people pushing for censorship aren't trying to protect de
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If your concern is about a dictator taking power then the answer is to limit the power of the government, not curtail the rights of citizens.
The government is made up of citizens. You need to limit the rights of citizens to take away the rights of other citizens. So yes you ARE limiting the rights of people, but doing it for the greater good. That's where the paradox lies. You need to limit the rights of people in order to maximize the overall rights.
"government" is just a convention, it's people all the
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how we prevent a wannabe authoritarian leader with dictator tendencies from using platforms to spread their message and convert the country into a dictatorship.
You want to restrict the speech of an individual because you're afraid that people will vote for those ideas, and yet you are calling others authoritarian? What you are proposing is almost the textbook definition of fascism.
To be honest I don't know how. I do know that the Nazis used the existing power structures and platforms to their advantage until they were in power and then that was that, no more free speech.
Actually, the Nazis rose from the hard-left (which is where you are right now); people voted for them because they were saying exactly the same thing you are saying now. It's a long standing paradox. You have to be intolerant of intolerance or the intolerant will crush you. I think we
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And where does the actual meaning of tolerance come in? Tolerance is not approval, acceptance or support; it's allowance. An absence of active resistance. If you try to silence someone's opinion on the basis of their alleged intolerance, then you are in the wrong. If you are arguing against someone who wants to silence opinions they find intolerable, you are in the right. If you
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Just reading that ... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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It's my understanding that the technical definition of "hate speech" is any form of speech or communication that marginalizes any explicitly legally protected class of people, such as sex or sexual preference, nation of origin, skin color, age, etc...
Political leaning is not an explicitly protected class by law, afaik. Draw from that what you will.
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See, everything I see suggests that FB has a strong right wing leaning. It's full of right wing content
Hell, did you see the other story on /.'s front page about how Instragram is pushing a right wing narrative in their search results?
Facebook does (Score:2)
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Do you have any solid evidence of these claims other than potentially cherry-picked examples? I'm sure a lot of both left and right riff-raff get through because FB doesn't have enough people to review it all.
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Who defines "hate"? Facebook seems to think that ANY speech from Republicans and conservatives is hate.
Well that's some wild histrionics. It's a also demonstrably untrue.
The problem is the American right won't kick the nasty batshit elements out, so being against the batshit wingnuts means (according to the right) being against the whole of the right. I can hear you in drawing a big breath to eviscerate the left (as if that justifies the right somehow) and insult me at the same time for being a Marxist or
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liar. you nazi.
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Nazism. racism, and transphobia are pretty unambiguous.
Only in your head. Thinking that all lives matter, in 2020, is considered racism. Asking that men who identify as women not compete in women's sporting events is considered transphobia.
If a user's content bothers you on facebook.... (Score:3)
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I wish Zuck would just come out and say that. If you dislike Trump's social media then why are you reading it?
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.... can't you just block their content so that you don't see it?
The AGs don't want to control what they see. They want to control what YOU see.
missing a big piece.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just about the only guy I can think of who ACTUALLY got thrown out of office because he went too far was David Duke. Well.... That's what we consider progress????? You can't OPENLY wear your white hood anymore.... I guess that's the line nowadays.
We've seen the problem, and the problem is us. Our society has a LONG way to go.
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Lawyers want more laws (Score:2, Interesting)
Hate-filled trolls? (Score:2)
How dare users act like politicians.
Hate Speech is Protected Speech (Score:2)
It's been sorted out time and time again in State and Federal Supreme Courts-- the 1st Amendment protects hate speech. Why has this been decided? Because multiple public American universities, with the best intentions at heart, have been trying to institute anti-hate speech polices/codes since the 1970s/1980s. Unfortunately, no one has been able to write an anti-hate speech code that isn't overly vague and when the government (such as a public university) seeks to restrict a right, the restriction must be n
WHo is posting it? (Score:2)
Only "Official Hate" allowed (Score:2)
If they blocked Hate on facebook, what would the Facebook editors trend?
But leftist and black hate supported (Score:2)
Rappers are still making hate songs. Black leaders still making their racist speech. Leftist newspaper editors still making their anti-white hate speech.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see that Facebook was enforcing that policy in a way that wasn't actually racist.
hmm, why no Donkey icon? (Score:2)
This story is by the NYT (a Democrat-aligned rag that recently fired an editor for the crime of publishing an oped by a Republican Senator), and is about a bunch of Democrats demanding Facebook go even more fascist (in the classic REAL fascist way, where government controls the public indirectly through control of businesses). They label any speech they don't like as "hate speech" and then say they're not partisan at all, they're just opposed to hate..... while ignoring spittle-spewing, bile-spewing acidic
Hate, a basic emotion, is not going away, ever. (Score:2)
People talk about hate as if it is possible, feasible or even desireable to remove it altogether, from all people, for all times. Rather than talking about liberty, who watches the watchers, the how and if to remove and police speech, I would like to remind and address the elephant in the room:
Hate is a basic human emotion. It is pointless, futile and outright dystopic to try and externally police something like verbally expressing a basic emotion. One could argue that even most higher mammals or other soci
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Re:The First Ammendment (Score:4, Insightful)
This is from the FCC ruling over Obscene, Indecent and Profane Broadcasts
Obscene content does not have protection by the First Amendment.
For content to be ruled obscene, it must meet a three-pronged test established by the Supreme Court:
It must appeal to an average person's prurient interest;
depict or describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way;
and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Hate speech could fall in this category especially under "taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." but the US first Amendment over time has been judged to have limits, especially when it turns from explaining ideas to actions to harm people, or people do things that can create harm.
Also State Laws have greater leeway vs Federal law, in terms of First Amendment Protection, as well stated have power to influence such behavior, eg stopping tax breaks, finding a way to tax them more...
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that in the current political environment any speech that bears a point of view that opposes the tenets of the vocal minority is labeled as hate speech. For example, stating that the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome confers intrinsic differences would inevitably evoke a fountain of outrage. Heck, even stating that the "hate speech" label has been rendered meaningless by its overuse, would in and of itself be labeled as hate speech. To allow for policing of speech that's based on an ever-shifting goalposts is a sure way to the degree of thought policing that would have surprised George Orwell.
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That's simply not true.
If that vocal minority are racists or sexists or bigots of any sort, then yes, that's considered hate speech.
Not every "vocal minority" spews hate speech. Just some of them.
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But, if you want to play that game, I can too. This is what society is today (there are alot more people in this video than the video you posted, by the way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:5, Interesting)
Cause thats what you'd expect in a society where the far right has all the control.
Or maybe, and I'm just throwing out ideas here, maybe some ideas are just so patently wrong that it's not about who has control, but about the public finally seeing the reality of what a small group has been saying for decades.
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We have for so long be treating our founding fathers like mythological heroes. George Washington and the Cherry Tree Cannot tell a lie,
Statues actually put people on pedestals in cases where we see them as near perfect people. We need to realize the faults in these people and have their successes and failures to be realized.
The problem with a lot of people George Washington had slaves, George Washington was a great man. Great Men had slaves.
Washington was a real person, He did good things and bad things
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't even define, racism well, one persons racism is another persons logic.
For example "white lives matter" racist from the point of view some people and just a statement of fact to others. "black lives matter" same thing a rallying cry for some people, and a racist insult to others. "all lives matter" is also considered racist. It all comes down to perspective.
In order to police racism, bigotry etc, we need to have a definition that is objective, not subjective. To me it is when somebody is treated differently because of their (what ever reason the person cannot control, e.g. race, sex, height, being ugly, ...) . Under that definition things like affirmative action are racist, however I do not believe they give black people any significant advantage.
Without a objective, as opposed to subjective definition is it is far too easy to silence any opposing views by simply stating you are offended. That is how authoritarian regimes do it all the time. Dictators are definitely offended when you challenge their authority. I do not trust governments or the "benevolent" Facebook to police free speech.
When you get some moron posting swastikas on the internet the proportionate response is to ignore them, not ban everyone's opinion that differs from yours, you do not make their opinion go away, it remains hidden and festering, maybe even gets worse since they feel they are being ignored. That attitude is equivalent to saying if we don't test for covid-19 we will not have any cases.
I think the absolute belief that SOME people seem to have that they are right, and everybody else is wrong on both sides to me seems to be the problem, and because they are so certain on beliefs they not even willing to discuss, or allow other people to discuss opposing views. Kind of like blasphemy in religion.
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There is a popular trend in some segments of our
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:5, Insightful)
How is the above post moderated as "Troll"? It's expressing a view you may disagree but in a civil manner.
THIS is what I am talking about - whether this moderation was done by a bot or human, this is the core of the problem that faces our society, and damn you for perpetuating it.
Re: The First Ammendment (Score:4, Informative)
So let's understand your post:
1. You have no idea who I am yet you have already assumed that I am less intelligent and make virtuous than yourself.
2. Even if we assume you're right, that still doesn't make my post a troll.
3. As difficult as it appears for you to grasp, but people still have a right to have an opinion that differs from yours. The fact that you support the idea of trying to silence someone because you are "tired of explaining" to them that they are wrong illustrates exactly the behavior I'm talking about. Thank you for so poignantly proving my point.
Re: The First Ammendment (Score:2)
Typo: make should be "less"
You've never read "1984" (Score:3)
His novel was about TV and mass media.
You quite obviously haven't read the book. But you could at least read the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] on it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of government over-reach, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviours within society. More broadly, it examines the role of truth and facts within politics and their manipulation.
Since you're an advocate of thought control, [slashdot.org]
Actions don't happen without thought. We need to start thinking about how to get those thoughts under control.
at least part of Orwell's warning was about the dangers of people like you.
Re: Can you prove that? (Score:2)
And no, stating that the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome confers intrinsic differences doesn't evoke one iota of outrage.
I see you've never had the misfortune of running into Barbara Hudson. Let's just say that there isn't anything that the son of hud isn't outraged over.
Re:The First Ammendment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
the line for what constitutes hate speech will be forever sliding towards "I don't agree with you!".
If we're headed for a censored, authoritarian police state, it's not because of the conservatives.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and