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Comment by javagram | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get higher profit.

I don’t think this is their argument at all.

Facebook regulates and removes far more content than required by law.

Under the US 1st Amendment almost everything offensive, racist, bad, pornographic, etc is legal. Facebook still removes quite a lot of legal content from their posts and their content moderators get PTSD from having to look at content which may be legal.

I think Facebook’s real issue is that they know they and their user base want them to be stricter than the law requires, but where should those standards fall?

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Agreeing on standards is one thing but what about taking proactive measures to limit the spread of harmful content in the first place?

Is giving anyone the opportunity to stream to thousands of users unchecked a responsible thing to do? We've already seen the downsides to that, how Facebook failed to remove the stream when it was in progress and their numerous failings to curb the spread of the video in the weeks that followed.

The standards should fall wherever society wants them. If Facebook is upset about that, they can exit the markets.

That means going for the lowest denominator.

If they want to profit from the whole of society then they'll have to strike a balance that minimizes offences which will drive away too many users or attract too many regulators.

Ok... And FB and their users are apart of society. Since they are the ones directly effected, their opinion on this matters.

Ah, yes, standards set by society - you mean laws?

I'm a big Facebook detractor generally but this illustrates why their problems are hard. In the case of the US, most of the calls to "respect society's standards" seem to mean "listen to me and mine as the sole arbiters of what society wants" instead of anything to do with actual objective standards, turning public policy from a matter of established process of law into a circus where loudness wins. If you want speech banned, campaign to change actual law rather than trying to use platforms like FB as an end-run around legal protections.

Honestly, the whole mess is why having massive centralized platforms at all is a mistake. Moderation is so hilariously fractal that comminutes placed close to the sources of local standards, who do not attempt to be accountable to nobody and everybody at once, and content-agnostic protocols, which defer the hard decisions around moderation to those nodes, are better-placed to deal with the complexities of reality.

How does their user base want them to be stricter as it applies to private communications? They censor posts on private pages and private messages. How is anything beyond what the law requires in that case not the policing of thought?

Users who get scammed or get spammed are usually unhappy, so that’s a big request right there.

I’m not a fan personally that Facebook has extended their anti-spam infrastructure to block some sharing of other disfavored links in PMs (e.g. the open-source gun building website was blocked). But I’m sure there are plenty of anti-gun facebook users who cheered that move.

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