Hacker News Reader

Comment by ImTalking | Hacker News Reader

Does not Facebook get to decide it's own morality, just like anyone else?

Well, it can, but it does still make a weird line in the sand

You can be naked for the following reasons: Breastfeeding, Satire, Comedy, Artistic (but only photos of art), educational, and surgery (but only reconstructive)

but being naked because you didn't exactly have time to grab clothes while fleeing from being burnt up, is too far on the nudity scale?

But why do you get to question Facebook's idea of morality? If you don't like it, don't use the service. To question someone's morality solely due to it being different than yours is, bluntly, a waste of time.

I don't know if this is a good analogy but should the phone company be able to tell you what you can have conversations about? What makes FB different? Yes there are alternatives. There are also multiple phone companies.

I can guess some differences. FB conversations are semi-public, phone conversation are generally not. Except AFAIK except for ads you have to opt into most info in FB. To get news from this source you have to have joined/liked their group. So you opted in. Maybe some friend shares the post but you opted into friending them.

I'm not saying FB should or should not limit what you can post. Only that it's interesting to consider other examples. Why should the phone company not be allowed to ban certain topics but FB should?

> But why do you get to question Facebook's idea of morality?

well, its literally a discussion on facebook's morality. Its a bit hard to talk about that without questioning it.

> To question someone's morality solely due to it being different than yours is, bluntly, a waste of time.

I'm not trying to change facebook here, I don't care /that/ much. I saw a discussion ("its facebook's morality") that I wanted to contribute to ("But its a weird sense of morality innit?"). Isn't that what discussions are for?

I think you meant to say "[...] like any other legal person?", perhaps?

Why complicate it? Morality is upto the individual entity whether it is a person, or a business, or a govt-body. For example, I believe there are still 'dry' counties in the US. They have decided that a no-alcohol policy is the morality they want to have within their town. I say fine, and I can accept that or move or try to change it... totally up to me. And as long as their morality does not infringe upon my rights to have my own morality, and that is certainly the case with this Facebook example, then it's all good.

Oh, I thought you were being sarcastic :/.

There's quite a bit of difference between corporations and people which means that granting corporations "personhood" is quite... crazy, IMO. In particular, almost all corporations are (almost by definition) asocial, don't care about what their peers think of them, etc. etc. They're basically sociopaths. Besides that they are (when big enough) effectively invulnerable to judicial sanctions, etc. etc.

It should be obvious why this is a bad idea.

But we allow this to happen across society. The Catholic organisation, for example, has it's own morality. And it is completely accepted that you should not join that church if you do not agree with that morality.

> But we allow this to happen across society. The Catholic organisation, for example, has it's own morality.

That's true, but the Catholic church only imposes it's will on Catholics. It may certainly try to influence non-Catholic people towards its views, but... let's just say that it's been met with "limited success".

The problem with (large) corporations is that they have the power to impose their wills almost without regard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com