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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

Parler explicitly advertises itself as a place of little or no moderation. Facebook has something like 15,000 professional content moderators whose job is so terrible that they literally get PTSD, but Facebook still fails to catch a lot of it. Being not great at moderation and actively advertising yourself as an unmoderated forum are fairly different lines.

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If the negative externalities are the same in both cases, then this isn't an excuse. Just because Facebook has proportionally fewer posts that violate its policies doesn't mean it should get a free pass. The fact that up to 15,000 people have PTSD is the societal cost we pay, even if the vast majority of FB users are using the platform as expected.

Facebook gets a free pass because Facebook is an influential organization. Parler had no network of elites protecting it, because as you say, it had no other purpose beyond being 'volunteer' moderated.

If at a minimum, the attack gets us to think about the type of questions posed by The Social Dilemma, we're trending towards a better place.

No one gets a free pass, that is disingenuous. These two things are not the same. Facebook makes a good faith effort to scale content moderation. Parler did not.

"Oh well, at least you tried" sounds like the definition of FB getting a free pass.

Really? And who exactly is qualified to divine the faith of Zuckerberg vs that of the Parler CEO?

"Facebook gets a free pass..."

No, Facebook devotes significant resources to moderation and makes good faith attempts to uphold their policies. Parler did not. That is the difference.

"If the negative externalities are the same in both cases, then this isn't an excuse."

No one is trying to rid the world of all negative externalities, only to make reasonable efforts to mitigate them. There may never be a perfectly moderated social media platform, just as there may never be a perfectly safe highway, and that is fine.

You're right, Facebook won't get a free pass. Congress will drag Zuckerberg back into Congress, give him a scolding, and then largely things will remain the same. Whether or not they moderate enough is certainly a gray question.

All sorts of industries have negative externalities (e.g., fossil fuels). But are Facebook's worth it if they destabilize the democracy in which allowed Facebook to grow and exist?

> No, Facebook devotes significant resources to moderation and makes good faith attempts to uphold their policies.

What's always missing here is that the outcome is still terrible and everyone is arguing from the premise that Facebook deserves to exist regardless.

If I maintain my rollercoaster in good faith but I just can't hire enough maintenance crew to do it well and people keep dying on it... maybe the rollercoaster doesn't deserve to be open and should be shut down.

We can look to China at what effective moderation looks like and then learn that FB would need 2-3 orders more moderators to make it ‘safe’

"good faith attempts"

If it's about intent, rather than results, then it's sure a big coincidence that Parler was deplatformed by Apple, Google, and AWS all within a few days.

AWS has actually been telling Parler to clean the site up for months.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

original sources can be found within the article.

But facebook doesn't just moderate. They control algorithms that decide what posts are presented to users. I think they should loose their common carrier status because of that editorial control. It's like if the phone company prioritized evil phone calls and delayed non-evil phone calls, it is a horrible influence on the conversations they are supposedly not involved in.

Can you substantiate that a little? Parler promoted itself as a champion of free speech which is not the same as saying "little to no moderation". They did have a moderation system in place.

I do not know how many users they have per reviewer, do you?

Parler's slogan was "the world's premier free speech platform." They had no automated content scanning. They reportedly employed no moderators. According to Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit, Amazon had spent almost two months repeatedly on calls for them asking them to take down several hundred specifically listed messages with death threats and such, which Parler simply declined to do.

Parler reportedly had a community "jury pool" system in which Parler users could volunteer to review reports for bad content and could decide whether to leave the messages up or not.

All this talk of Facebook being a paragon of skillful moderation while Parler was a Wild West of loose policy sounds a lot like comparing an acorn to an oak tree. Of course Parler didn’t have the same moderation tools, they weren’t a multi billion dollar company with a supranational sized user base and decades of growth. They were a small platform attempting to scale. What did Facebook moderation look like a few years after their launch? Or Reddit? They were just as cavalier as Parler.

Why does Apple and Google as a duopoly get to determine what businesses must do and not do to exist? (from a practical perspective not a legal one) For me that's the real question.

Because Apple and Google produced viable platforms that people want. Microsoft, Blackberry, and Palm all attempted to do something similar, and the market didn't coalesce around their offerings. Even Amazon tried with kindle/fire. Part of the reason this happens is that developers only have so much ability to diversify, so this is a natural marketplace where only a few big players can survive.

The Internet of the 1990's is still alive by the way. Anyone can put up their message on a website provided by a host of their choice.

Do you think it had anything to do with buying up competitors and technology that propelled them to domination as well as using their web of other services as an advantage? Even if everything is fair do you think free market theory cares about how they arrived at a duopoly?

I certainly didn't claim it was "fair". I stated that developers are going to coalesce around a small number of providers in a similar space.

They clearly have a dominant position now. Their disruption won't come from phones, just like their rise didn't come from phones either.

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