Solomon Islands set to ban Facebook in the name of 'national unity'

Who is doing that here? 2 Things can be bad at the same time. Just because people are critical of FB in the west it doesn't mean they support authoritarian regimes.

Who exactly is siding with an authoritarian regime here? The article indicates it was a unilateral decision on the part of the government. The article also states:

>I't has drawn a heated response from the Government's opponents, with Opposition leader Matthew Wale labelling the ban "pathetic" and unjust."

I have personally concluded that there is no practical difference between credulity and corruptability - both make it easy to get them to support and commit evil. I can only conclude that a lack of critical thinking is a moral flaw in itself as strange it may sound at first blush. But really if greed can get people to do bad things nobody would deny that it is a moral flaw so why should credulity be any different?

May not require active complicity from Facebook and may even happen despite them.

Not saying that is the case here, but the truth is this cuts both ways, and I would say this development of free flying unverified information is overall more helpful to bad actors than good.

Facebook is an effective media outlet in cases where country are too poor to bribe Facebook and too small for Facebook to ignore market altogether.

In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places, it creates disruption and discontent through dissemination of (true - or false - doesn't matter) informations that in turn fuels civil unrest.

In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening.

Some of us see an unfortunate trend recently, in which our political powers collude with or badger the owners of these companies to engage in censorship, and find it highly alarming.

Anyway, during WW2 the press was controlled by the occupants (and before, possibly influenced?), so after WW2 we said never again. We still take the piss on newspapers that cooperated with the invaders instead of fold.

In Victoria, Australia, the government used social media to track people organising lockdown protests, which led people to be arrested for 'inciting' protest.

Think speak 101.

I think much of the West has always fallen under that umbrella in many ways. Look up "yellow journalism". Hell, look at how the media is currently controlled by corrupt businessmen.

You severely overestimate the independence and faux-organic nature of "western" social media. Every last aspect of it is controlled by "corrupt businessmen or politicians".

If you're in "the east", wishing for a system like in "the west", be careful of what you hope for and be cautious of what you actually build.

Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/213282...

If your status quo is shit, random change is statistically likely to improve the situation. If the status quo is decent, random change is statistically likely to worsen the situation.

It seems the way moving forward will be "crypto-activism" where key individuals distribute information through end-to-end encrypted messaging channels; when they act in the public eye, it will not be obvious that they are affiliated with an organized group. In this way their actions will appear to represent "the will of the people" rather than the agenda of a single organization and it will also shield the organization itself from misinformation.

Just my two cents based on what I observed this year.

Tor isn't particularly difficult to use (client-side), the only obstacle is having to remember the links

Until, we curb massive disinformation campaigns and lack of fact-checking in media and political speech...

There will be always be politicians and government officials who will spread falsehoods and work to discredit the truth.

It’s not important for everyone to believe a lie. Corrupt, despots only need enough votes to obtain power and then subvert established norms and laws.

That said, I do know what they mean. I also hate to see people getting almost traumatized by the random crap they find on social media. Especially if it's bullshit - and it's obvious that it's bullshit, but you can't say it, because that would invalidate the other person's feelings. So yesterday, it was "did you know our government wants to XYZ?!?!!" (no, they don't, the news article was lying, as usual). Today it's maltreated pets (could you please unsubscribe from the feeds that trigger you every couple weeks like clockwork?). Tomorrow it'll be a YouTube drama (between a very niche vloggers).

Perhaps it is human nature, perhaps it was also present with the old media. But what seems different is isolation. I remember that before the web became truly mainstream, people would talk a lot about bullshit they've heard on the news. But they would all talk about the same bullshit. People would ultimately take comfort in an understanding that they share the knowledge about the story. Today? Everyone has their own isolated social media feed. So you end up having people unload completely random and unexpected stuff at whoever is willing to listen to them.

OP was so eager to regurgitate the popular news narrative that Facebook is ruining the world, he failed to see that in this particular case, Facebook is being banned over online leaks of documents proving government corruption with Covid-19 funds.

The government in this case isn't doing this because they want to protect people. They're doing this because they want to freely steal money without public scrutiny on social media.

2) Facebook demands and aggressively enforces that your profile represents you and has your real name and other credentials associated with your identity. If your pseudonym gets reported it will definitely get banned.

3)

> With requiring payment comes the ability to trace where the money came from.

Yes that's true for literally every transaction on the internet when done with a credit card. Not sure why that's a problem.

> And that should be the right of everyone.

Facebook is a company selling a product. You do not and definitely should not have any "rights" on their private platform. Just like you do not and should not have the right to force a local business to trade with you if they do not want to.

There's this thing called "cash". There are (and have been for at least a century) ways to transfer it from place to place, even electronically, in a mostly anonymous way - as mobile minutes, through western union, etc. The farther it has to go, the easier it is to track, but locally, it takes non-trivial effort to track transfer to the point that governments mostly do it when they actually have a reason rather than "just because".

> When I use FB or whatever, I want to be completely anonymous.

Well then, you're doing it wrong. You are violating FB's "real name" terms of service. And also, rest assured that almost everyone of the people you've talked to on Facebook has de-anonymized you, by having your real name in their address book somewhere which they uploaded to FB/WhatsApp/Instagram knowingly or unknowingly.

> I neither want FB, nor random strangers there, nor the government to track what the real person behind my pseudonym posts on FB.

Then FB is the wrong venue. With FB, the only winning move is not to play. They do an enormous amount of work to connect your online FB account with a real world identity. And the almost always succeed.

If you care about your privacy, get off facebook.

> To not become a fascist country, you cannot regulate social media access.

To not become a fascist country, you have to regulate social media.

Keep in mind it's already against the FB terms of service to use it anonymously. You're supposed to use your real full name.

> With requiring payment comes the ability to trace where the money came from.

One possible solution could be bitcoin. I'd be more worried about where the money is going, though. Do modern democracies need to be collecting even more money from us, to do god knows what with? Would this new tax come with a decrease in other taxes? Probably not.

I think disincentivizing social media is a good idea, but a social media tax isn't the right move. Brainstorming some other ways of doing so:

- Ban certain social media Skinner-box features like endless scrolling, recommendation algorithms, likes, whatever. This is more likely to get to the heart of the problem, but gives the government more control over the internet, private businesses, etc.

- Create alternative social media platforms which don't use the same rage-inducing and addicting mechanisms. These will fail because they are by definition less addicting than the alternative.

- Make current social media unusable by flooding it with spam. This could be accomplished "extra-legally", preferably using AI to make spam hard to detect. This is already being done to an extent by bad actors (Chinese Communist Party, though you don't need AI when you have over a billion cheap workers), but could be done on a larger scale not to sway opinion, but to ruin the platforms altogether.

- Social media companies could use semantic analysis to downrank rage-bait and negativity and up-rank positivity and thoughtful discourse (though hopefully not that hollow "you go girl!!!" faux-positivity you sometimes see on social media). This is uncomfortable because it means social media companies get to engineer our conversations to be whatever they want, but they are already doing this, they're just doing it in a malevolent way.

- Somehow educate the entire population on the dangers of social media the same way we did with cigarettes. Whether through a public information campaign, or by generally getting people to meditate and realize the true important things in life. This is a terrible solution, and obviously social media companies would fight it tooth and nail, but I only mention it because I've heard it seriously proposed too many times. If your solution is "educate everybody", but everybody is currently hooked up to disinformation machines, you're screwed.

That's all I've got. Anyone else have any ideas?

A large and diverse network is likely to offend more as more people come into contact with people they don't already have familiarity with, and less as they are less likely to come into contact with people they do.

Rephrased: I'm better able to tell sincerity from my dear friend Eliza when she says something, whereas those same words phrased the exact same way may cause offense when heard from a stranger at a bar.

Excuse me for sounding daft, but I think the intensity with which you are confronted with these opinions has changed drastically. I think you're purposefully being a bit ignorant here; no one (viz: 'they') wants to cancel opinions they disagree with. However to think that false information has the same platform today that it had 50 years ago is also just plain wrong-- and whether you agree with it or not, it does shape the public discourse these days. Unless you want to erode discussions to a point where its a battle of who can fabricate the biggest claim (true or not), you're going to have to accept that in a modern information society we will eventually need some form of controls.

Case in point: https://twitter.com/0x445442 (Seems you have a problem with "Leftists" and like to retweet right wing tweets)

Check out all the censorship laws in the past and even present. Content ratings, censorship committees present even today in many countries, including democratic ones.

Just for fun, check out how many pictures of Roosevelt showing him as a cripple you can find ;-)

This is the bottom line.

Back in the day you'd join a forum over a particular topic or hobby. Everyone had screen names. Moderation was tight, if there was politics it was confined to a single area that was easily avoided. You only saw "links" to "topics" that included images, not images.

Now with social media, people share images, memes, quotes, posts, etc. But while before that could be confined to one particular area and wasn't visible with fully anonymous screen names, now you see a real person that you know saying it, in your feed. It makes it feel more real. And get this - 50 people liked it and shared it themselves.

Where Facebook's brilliance comes in - is that it gamed the process of popularity. Most want to have as many "friends" as possible at first, they see old people they knew and want to see what they're up to, want to be popular, etc. But they don't realize that they really just don't want to get to know that many people that well. Some people are insane, some are borderline white supremacists, some are borderline anarchists. Before you never saw that side of people often. Now it's right in your face.

My advice? use social media for what it was originally designed for - staying in touch with friends you actually care about. Not politics. And mute/remove any friend who cares more about their agenda than seeing a good friend's cool vacation or neat artwork or cute newborn.