Facebook is banning leftwing users like me
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We will revert back to the internet that was 15 years ago. Where if you wanted information you had to work for it, and if you wanted a good discussion you had to find it.
Facebook, Twitter is now TV. One way media spoon feeding its users.
Sub-cultures will grow stronger and this honeymoon phase with centralized social media is over. I'm glad.
This will certainly not be a mainstream approach, but I compare it to the DIY punk ethos of the 80's, specifically in the skateboarder culture. The for-profit skateparks of the 70's closed, so people had to build their own ramps, organize contests with zines, make their own music. This was all done while promoting others to build their own scene too.
It ended up revitalizing skateboarding, until it became corporate again, and waned. It's a constant cycle. I think in terms of internet communities, we currently find ourselves in the "most centralized and corporate" end; but its starting to turn.
How? What will make people—not people like us, who have eschewed Facebook for years, but those who still rely on it not just for connection to their friends and family, but for news and information—abandon Facebook, start questioning its neutrality as a platform, or generally change anything about how they have been behaving?
What you suggest will only happen if we force Facebook to change. And honestly, I'm not sure if there's a way to make Facebook change that would not leave it still massively prone to manipulation, echo chambers, and bubbles, even if the people in charge genuinely want to eliminate those things.
All that's changed now is we can federate between these "message boards".
This is an important statement. One argument can be that most of the population do not have any interest in finding the truth. It is same in the age of social media, and was the same before. Social media just exacerbated the problem.
Facebook is a company. It has a community security/trust team. That team drives the community direction by some rules (manual or learned and automated through data). Banning the leftwing thinkers is wrong, unless they violate the guidelines.
Uh, no it wasn't. You could try to pull the privilege + prejudice argument to claim it's not strictly “racist”, but it's still completely unreasonable racial stereotyping even if you accept that argument.
In the section entitled “Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability,” Reddit indicates that protection against harassment only protects “marginalized” groups.
Here is Reddit’s definition of marginalized groups:
“Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.”
It’s the next part that’s alarming:
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
A meme I like but never saw until recently, "But what if I told you a bird needs both wings to fly?"
Hey guys, we've encouraged Facebook to ban everyone we dislike but now they are banning the people we like and this needs to be framed as problematic, and specifically because of what team I am on.
its those same people who cried for blanket deplatforming of anybody left of Josef Stalin
and now when that same tool is used against them,its too late
its like the history of authoritariansm repeats itself
This FB is the best FB there will ever be. If it was in the hands of the government, it is hard to see how it could have been better. If it was in the hands of the people, you cannot be sure it would have been better (see blockchain projects).
What will end up happening to these platforms will be what is happening with TV today: CNN - FOX.
People need to start to think 10,20 years from now, and begin to build new platforms for communication. Or just use group email.
Now that you brought it up, it would make for a better discussion if you dialed down sarcasm.
Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Otherwise the conversation devolves into this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25852297
When you reach full monopoly on a market you have to be regulated.
FB has no right to dictate what can be said publicly. This is the role of governments.
I don't mean to be a pedant, but its literally as old as time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
All TV stations have an editorial guide, this defines what can and can't be said. Sure you can push at the boundaries, but stray to far and you'll be pulled off air.
All newspapers have editorial standards as well.
This is why there was such an explosion in 'zine culture in the late 80s early 90s.
censorship by private individuals has always been there, we forget that in the last 10 years we've been able to literally say and do anything we want on the internet with little to no repercussions.
>When you reach full monopoly on a market you have to be regulated.
Facebook doesn't have anything like "full monopoly" on any market. They don't have a monopoly on the internet, they don't have a monopoly on social media. They don't have a monopoly on human communication. They're not even the most popular social media platform among some demographics.
>FB has no right to dictate what can be said publicly.
They're not dictating what can be said publicly, they're dictating what can be said on their platform which, yes, they have the right to do.
If you are finding it difficult to reach people, the onus is on you to find a way to reach an audience, not on them to provide it for you.
> What I find more interesting is that when that same argument is used in other situations, such a small businesses deciding to open during the lockdown, it is routinely down voted and shouted down.
The key concept is that it would be a violation of Facebook's First Amendment rights to forbid them from banning their users (i.e. force them to carry their messages). It would be compelled speech/compelled association.
Your example about businesses defying covid lockdowns is a completely different thing. Being a private company is not a license to do whatever you want: Facebook still has to comply with the law, as do those businesses.
If you're looking for something that looks like a contradiction, the one you're looking for is antidescrimination law: why can Facebook ban users of type X because it's a private company, but it's illegal for a wedding cake maker to refuse customers of type Y? If you're looking at it simply as a legalistic First Amendment thing, the situations look they should be the same. If they're not, it's because it's not a simple First Amendment thing, and other principles and context have to be balanced with First Amendment principles.
Or maybe governments don't always follow the law. That's a possibility too.
It is, but I think it's way more common for people to be broadly ignorant of the law and legal concepts except a few little bits about some rights that they believe very strongly and rigidly.
It's sort of like software requirements: things usually seem simplest at the beginning, when you know the least. Then you learn more and the requirements get complicated match the actual needs. Then sometimes you get some cowboy who comes in later, makes a flash judgement on little understanding that things should be simpler, and then either breaks everything or re-discovers the lessons you already figured out.
Facebook can’t be seen as a right or left media, that’s bad for business. They also can’t have groups and users that overly hostile towards other users, that’s also bad business. They are trying to be the Disney of social media.
In general Facebook isn’t great at moderating their platform, there’s to much content and their automated systems are rubbish, according to the human moderators. The result is that the moderation that do happen can seem extremely random, and some may feel like they are unfairly targetted.
I don't expect consistency. There's just too much to do. And for all I know the user already had at least one warning, in which case a (temporary) ban isn't unreasonable. It would shift the burden of proof to say that they're going after that kind of racism and not other kinds.
I'll note that I have said similar things myself. It obviously doesn't apply to every single white male (I am one myself), but I've seen it happen so much that I've said the same hyperbole. And if they wanted to warn me, then worse when I continued, I'd accept that -- as long as I had reason to think that they were also applying at least roughly similar standards to other people.
Just imagine another description prefixed by another color and another sex and think how that would go down.
Where commutivity of addition is a + b = b + a.
Commuitivity of racism would be black person called a white person something bad for behavior x which is not equivalent to white person called black person something bad for same behavior x.
In this case "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" in response to Liam Neeson’s confession that he once roamed the streets looking for Black men to harm. Is not equivalent in a sense of the speaker being racist as "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them" in response to (I'm making up a fictional situation to find some equivalent scenario) where let's say Denzel Washington saying a confession that he once roamed the streets looking for White men to harm. Do they have racial overtones? Yes. Are they equivalent? Absolutely not. The world Liam Neeson lives in is a white person's world where the dominant culture is white and a black person has to be searched for. He was caught in his mind demonizing black people and being racist searching for them to harm for it. In this hypothetical Denzel Washington is clearly a minority, not only targeted and put upon by white people but also other minorities. To find a white person, he only has to step outside and walk a block at best.
Even the construction of this sentence seems so ridiculous: "Black men are so fragile and the mere presence of a White person challenges every single thing in them". Black people have had to deal with racism and being the odd person out due to their race since they gained social awareness as a child. They've dealt with that BS long since being alive. White people like Liam Neeson "White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them" makes sense since he's encountered so few black people and he's built up this false belief about Black people from the racist media and his social group and he has to try to find black people to hurt.
:%s/white/mid_white/g :%s/black/white/g :%s/mid_white/black/g
is not valid.
While the Japanese person in Japan being racist against this non-Japanese person and seeking him out to beat him up deserves no such empathy. This person would be the more misguided of the two and is the racist initiator.
The two are simply not equivalent. I'm pointing out that people think it's an equivalence relation based upon commutivity of the races, and that is wrong.
Racists say "see they're being racist too" as if they are equivalent. They aren't.
And that's exactly what's being discussed here: what people hear, regardless of the language. That's precisely what "white fragility" is all about: the way some white men jump on every perceived slight. Because there are so many of us and we're so relatively powerful, people hear us when we say it, when less favored groups are dismissed.
So when you say "what if it were some other group", the fact is that we're not some other group. When minorities say "We demand equal rights" and white men say "Well, if you're getting more rights, then so should we", you can understand why people get grumpy.
There isn't an easy general solution. But in going about looking for a better one, it does help to listen to what people rather than just the surface meaning of the words. The surface meaning is often the least important.
By saying "all" you leave no room for a generically accused group to have members that can feel they are being unfairly assigned a behaviour they may not be conducting. This flames the fires and creates more us and them, because now some (in this case, white men) then might feel, well these are bad people, they don;t deserve xyz, because they continually accuse me in no uncertain terms of doing/being something that is not true. Quickest way to turn someone bad, is tell them they are bad.
Power. Power is in the eye of the beholder, what some people feel is power, the holder may feel is an entrapment or inescapable obligation. Unil recently, even now in many places, if I as a man valued to stay at home with my children and raise them day to day, I may well not have the "power" to enact such an outcome, but it only matters if the power to make that choice is important to you.
This raises the issues about rights. Many "rights" shouldn't be rights for anyone, they should be opportunities. Not a whole lot of things in life are really rights, you have to work for them, taking the opportunity. When these opportunities are denied or deliberately stacked against a section of society, thats when rights are trampled on.
Whic leads to my last point, just because a section of society was treated badly historically, doesn't gie them the right to be treat others as less to make up for it, that is not called equality, it is called revenge. And revenge only perpetuates the cycle by creating inequality, but now the roles are reversed and if thats how it's going to be an undamped isolation will ocur and no resuluinevery achieved.
Straight away he labeeling by salient differences has to sto to stop the grouping, which is the root of much of the problems.
Yet it deserves neither a warning nor a ban. Even more ridiculous than the statement itself is the idea that someone needs to protect our eyes from seeing it, and that FB’s random content moderator contractor knows what is best for us and will be our protector. I am familiar with someone who used to do content moderation working for Cognizant in AZ. He seems plenty likable, but he is certainly not someone who knows what opinions will hurt me. And even if he were, I shouldn’t expect to be protected from hurt feelings when engaging controversial topics. That’s for me to navigate, and if it proves more than I can handle, it’s incredibly easy to block people.
Then they banned the nazis,
Then they banned the fascists,
Then they banned the free speech advocates,
Then they banned me, and the platform treated me like an unperson,
But I'm privileged enough to embarrass them into unbanning me.
I don't think we did. Social networks seized it by updating terms of use, privacy policies, and community guidelines.
Funny how only certain colors are capitalized.
It went from pretty being a meme to being a part of "Black support" which is worthless virtue signalling at best, and devalues actual black support at worse.
I'd think leftwing activists should be treated exactly like rightwing activists.
I don't think the answer is to legally regulate free speech on social media platforms. I want online platforms to have the power to moderate. However, Facebook in particular has an awful moderation process. Their knee-jerk reactions are a consequence of a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
The rest of this is copy-paste from a previous post I made, explaining why I don't want full freedom of speech on social media:
Take a look at HN. HN mods do a brilliant job of moderating. We don't have 100% free speech here and the platform is better for it. The discussions here tend to be much higher quality than on similar platforms like Reddit. That's probably a big reason why you're here reading this comment thread.
However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.
Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I think the HN moderation strategy makes for a much better platform. I'd rather talk with a respectful person who I disagree with than a jerk with whom I agree.
I'm very anti-regulation in general, but I think that regulation is absolutely needed regarding censorship of DMs on platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, and the like. Posts and groups are one thing, but they're also censoring people's private conversations.
There are entire domains that you can't even link your friends to via Messenger. This is a dangerous situation. Much of our society's only contact details for much of their social graph is via these censored platforms that can suspend you on a whim.
Regulation to enforce availability of data and contacts export/takeout after suspension would be good at the very least. Saying something the platform doesn't like shouldn't cut you off from your address book.
Social cooling is just as much a phenomena on HN. By its very nature, it’s invisible unless it affects you directly. HN loses plenty of voices it’s never aware of.
Because if not nobody knows what you're referring to, and you could just as well haven't made the comment in the first place.
Why the aggressive tone?
You could activate "showdead" in the settings and watch any thread with controversial/political topics yourself.
I understand why you wouldn't want to provide any additional details, but it's also hard to take your claims at face value given my own experience. Perhaps you could share examples which do not compromise your own identity?
It's subtle and masked by the "politeness", that's the trick.
Now, we can't totally fix it, the way HN currently works. If I make a point denying your humanity, that post can be downvoted to death, flagged, and I can be banned. But the post is still there, and everyone with showdead on can still see it. So, depending on how sensitive you are to what was said, "fixing" it may not actually be fixing it.
You have your own reasons for deciding what you do. But I'd at least suggest that you give us some kind of hint, so that we can try to make HN better.
That subset of users is not representative of the community, or even close to 10% of it. If I'm wrong about that I'm open to changing my mind, but that would require real data. People's generalizations about HN are unreliable. The unreliability is proportional to the passion and confidence of the pronouncement. Typically, someone has seen a few egregious cases (or even just one) and then makes a generalization from them. The pain of running into egregious comments is real and needs to be taken seriously (and I'm sorry that you don't feel that we do—that really sucks). But the generalization is a non sequitur.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It even used to be a sport on Twitter for awhile to find the most egregious HN comments that hadn't been moderated yet and then pass them around as examples of things the HN moderators "agree" with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But of course we don't. Anyone can look through the moderation comments and if they find even one example of us doing anything other than trying to get people to recognize and respect each other's humanity, I'd like to see it. We've written thousands of emails trying to do the same.
The assumption that we see everything that gets posted here is false (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), as is the assumption that there's any way to stop anyone from making an account and posting what they choose. It takes time for moderation mechanisms to kick in. That's the way an open forum is, and if you think about it, it's rather amazing that HN isn't dominated by such shit.
The issue that I’ve experienced here isn’t, strictly speaking, a failure of moderation. It’s more an occasional failure of culture. For the most part discussions go very well here, and I see the hard work you do to make that happen. In fact if someone were to ask me to name the best and hardest-working moderators on the internet, you would come to mind first. There are, however, some topics where the tone of the whole discussion—not individual posts, but whole discussions—is toxic to the point where I have to take a HN breather. If you’d like, I can send you examples of these as I see them in the future.
It’s difficult to address this in a framework where the unit of moderation is an individual comment. A more significant challenge, and one that I think isn’t talked about nearly enough, is that the kind of toxicity I sometimes see here is of a subtle (but no less poisonous) sort. I suspect, in fact, that recognition of it might be difficult unless you’ve become attuned to it as a survival mechanism after experiencing it over and over throughout one’s life. I’m not necessarily saying “there’s no way for you to see it unless you already know it,” which would be tricky indeed—but I’m not ruling out the possibility either. In any case my point is that there is a holistic view that gets lost when we dive into the weeds of individual comments, and in my experience at least, the hurt happens at that holistic level.
I hope this is helpful, and does not feel accusatory; I have nothing to accuse you of, and I very much appreciate being able to work these issues out in good faith. Thanks again for all the hard work you do.
That would be great! And thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Absolutely, and it’s an excellent principle! Notably, however, HN does restrict what types of stories can be submitted, which has much the same effect of limiting what "ideas can be presented" (particularly when combined with an expectation to stay on topic).
To me, the difference is that HN isn’t trying to be a one-stop destination for all of your communication, whereas Facebook absolutely is.
Which is to say, I agree that complete free speech on any individual website is impossible without it devolving into a hellscape, so the best way to support free speech on a societal level is to have a diversity of social networks, instead of a handful of major platforms.
And we're failing at the diversity part.
Not making a case for Facebook, I just don't think we have a good solution to this yet.
From where I'm standing, the rise of Facebook et al's recommendation algorithms seems to have been far more effective at creating echo chambers. And importantly, these algorithms only really work if they have a wealth of potential content to recommend—ie, if the social network is absolutely massive!
This is true and I've seen some extremely vile, reprehensible things said, but that went unmoderated because they were said politely (I've actually seen people responding to these vile things get banned because they weren't nearly that polite).
And I'm not providing links because I don't have them, these are things I've noted over the years as a lurker. There's so much back patting about the moderation on this site that I'm often miffed that no one sees the negative consequences. No system or approach is perfect, and the approach you guys take on this site has its share of downsides as well.
I once saw a person on this site argue all safety regulations should be gotten rid of and let the market decide the cost. The theory is that as more accidents happen the insurance will rise and that will self-correct by causing companies to enforce their own internal safety requirements.
The implication being it's ok for Bob to live the rest of his life without a leg because the company was willing to pay the insurance premium. That Bob's quality of life shouldn't factor into the equation.
The problem is that when someone has an opinion like this, they cannot be put down as strongly as they should. "In real life" if someone walks into a public space and announces they believe a 30 year old should be able to enter into a sexual relationship with a 10 year old, not only would there be a reaction, there would be a __very strong reaction__, and the strength of that reaction is a part of the policing we do amongst ourselves as a society.
But because of the values this site has, if someone were to express that opinion on these boards, the people getting banned would be the ones reacting strongly.
And _THAT_ is why I agreed with the other poster that you do, in fact, moderate based upon HOW someone says something while pointing out that it has its downsides.
Actions are usually transparent and with a personal comment by the moderator.
There are no private space in HN.
Comments are focused on the text, while usernames and user identities are de-empathized.
HN moderation is handled consistently by the same persons, and there have been a open discussion with the community that seems to resulted in refocusing on tone rather than content.
> Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".
I don't think there's as much to this observation as it seems. Firstly, HN is a different site than Facebook, which means it has a different userbase with different moderation problems. It's not like people are civilly and respectfully planning insurrections here, and if they were, the moderation would probably shift to stopping those "wrong or 'dangerous'" things. Also, the kinds of dis- and mis-information the the major social networks are fighting hasn't gotten much of a foothold on HN, and is often moderated away when it shows up.
Secondly, to your earlier point: HN has human moderators who can (more or less) keep up. While Facebook has human moderators too, there aren't enough of them to keep up, so it relies heavily on automation and crowdsourcing. They don't have the capacity to pay attention to "how you say it," even if they wanted to.
It's sort of like day care: if you have one teacher and ten students, the teacher is doing a good job if each student gets a lot of high-quality personalized attention; if you have one teacher and fifty students, the teacher is doing a good job if she manages to just barely keep them from hurting themselves.
It's perfectly possible to rationally think it's reasonable to ban Democrat A or Republican A for some infraction, but at the same time that it is unreasonable to ban Democrat B or Republican B for some other infraction. It's also perfectly possible to come to the conclusion that the platform did act with bias across the two cases, without necessitating hypocrisy to show support for one of the cases.
The subject of the discussion could be about the nature of the separate cases, whether each was reasonable, and, completely separately, whether there was evidence of bias handling the two cases. But no - all that seems to matter is that at some point person A was banned and there was any support for it, and at a later point person B of opposite political identity was banned and there was any opposition to it, and, regardless of what those two people even did, that somehow means that everybody is a hypocrite.
Edit: And yes, the article's author is also participating in a similar fallacy.
The party is always right.
Yes. People who attacked Trump thought Biden would reward them. But actually, he can’t risk that they just enjoy attacking any government regardless.
When they are on the left, they are 'activists.' When they are on the right, they are 'extremists.'
> An organization which finds it so difficult to distinguish fascists from Black leftwing activists should not be trusted to make such decisions.
While I disagree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, as long as you agree with Facebook banning people for their political ideology, I will not shed a tear when Facebook bans you for your political ideology.
> In August 2020, Facebook expanded its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy”, aimed at removing the presence of far-right extremists from its website.
He doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, but now he thinks it’s wrong that it’s his views that are censored.
World War 3 seems pretty near with those extreme swifts to the extreme right, and economic downfall of the west.
But the label "antifa" or "antifascist" is forever burned for me. This wasn't just some "bad eggs" or "misguided youth". I've never met a self-declared "antifa" person who wasn't either a violent asshole or supported violent assholery, and I've met quite a few.
>70 years ago
Who were you fighting in 1951? ;)
By the way, the Sturmabteilung (SA) was founded as a reaction to communist street terror (Roter Frontkämpferbund). Will history repeat again?
-You can post any content you want.
-It must be civil in tone.
-Other users can tag your logical fallacies.
-If their tags are accurate, your article is downvoted.
-Downvotes only happen if your article contains logical fallacies or violate the civil discussion standards. You can’t downvote someone without tagging a logical fallacy.
-You explicitly cannot downvote or tag someone’s content simply because you disagree with it. You can try of course, but if your tags are found to be consistently inaccurate, you get shadow-banned or something.
So you breath air? Even though Hitler breathed air as he was murdering millions? And you're seriously willing to defend that? Monster.
Yes. As a jew with immediate family who died in the holocaust, I'm willing to defend free speech, even the free speech of ethno nationalists or whatever other boogeyman you wanna throw out