When I step back, I realize there are a lot of good reasons not to police this stuff. However, if I down scale Facebook to a 100 user forum that I control, then I would ban this in a heartbeat. I guess subjective morality doesn't scale?
Subjective morality enforced over 100 people on an optional forum? Meh
Subjective morality over billions on a platform that many consider essential (I know, I know) to daily life? Oooof
But that's not the only way to do it. Banning certain types of speech doesn't necessarily lead to a slippery slope. For instance, in Germany, you can't deny the holocaust and they haven't become some sort of dystopian Orwellian society. I would argue Facebook needs to move more toward that model. Conspiracy theories and misinformation are spreading right now. Hell, I personally know someone who I considered a pretty normal person who's become caught up in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering. Banning groups that promote that kind of garbage make them seem illegitimate (as they are) and no, doing so doesn't infringe on any rights. They're free to make their own website somewhere and spout nonsense. But hey, maybe those kinds of things shouldn't be getting hosted by big media companies like YouTube and Facebook. That just makes them seem legitimate.
With great power comes great responsibility. Right now, it seems to me Facebook (and others) want to have the power, but not the responsibility and that's leading us into a new era of propaganda and idiocy.
What honestly makes me most leery about the movement towards "Sanctioned Speech" is as we can even see in HN itself. A sister response to yours, eloquent and advocating the questionable outcomes from policing speech, is downvoted past visibility despite a very functional discussion following from it.
For whatever reason, I've noticed a global (far broader than HN) decline in the quality/willingness to engage in good-faith discourse. This is extremely scary to me, and I fear having gatekeepers for discussion and "truth" only further pushes these underlying bifurcations further apart.
Absolutely. And I have no idea what to do about it, even within my tiny sphere of influence.
I see people (metaphorically) putting on armor and actively building barriers just in the _anticipation_ of defending their beliefs. It almost seems like a lack of empathetic imagination. When I imagine the motivations, beliefs, fears, desires, etc that might be behind opinions that I am strongly against, it is usually followed by the empty feeling that hardly anybody else is taking the time to put themselves in anybody else's shoes.
Even if that Facebook group has 100 people or 100,000, it still makes sense for the owner to ban content they think doesn't fit the community, such as conspiracy theories. But it doesn't make sense for Facebook The Company to ban conspiracy theories, in my opinion, unless those specific conspiracy theory posts are shown to be likely to directly result in someone's imminent physical harm.