The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.
Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other.
Filtering should be a tool available to individuals and delegatable to groups that are aligned with their own standards. As long as we don't get that there should be zero surprise about strain between differing standards.
But Facebook is not a worldwide communication channel. It's a social network/community owned by a single company and its shareholders. Internet is the worldwide communication channel. You can "filter" it and make sure it aligns with your own standards by simply choosing to visit and use websites, communities and services which do align with your standards, and by avoiding those which don't align.
They'd better start acting like neutral carriers before government decides it for them. I totally get (and enjoy) the position that a private company can do whatever they like, but there is a scale at which you've enabled a platform with wide enough reach for enough people that restricting its use will be regarded as stifling speech by the only people who matter and who are more than capable of compelling you.
To be fair, the position of most governments is that Facebook isn't doing enough to censor fake news, hate speech, drug selling etc. I don't think having the government step in is going to fix any of these problems.
Arguably, due to the network effect, social networks like Facebook are natural monopolies / oligopolies. Niche networks function in a way that relies less on network effects to have value to users, e.g. it doesn't matter if all your friends aren't on Hacker News.
What scale is that? As far as I know, within the US, fox has wider reach than Facebook, and it's under no such obligation, and the US is perhaps the only nation that's going to force the definition of free speech you propose on Facebook. Europe certainly won't.
There are currently realistic alternatives to fox for anyone.
The same cannot be said for Facebook or Google at the moment even if some of us prefer Google+, HN, Twitter and Duckduckgo personally.
(That said Duckduckgo can go mainstream soon for what I know and Google+ is IMO constantly one or two good and well timed moves away from eating Facebooks userbase.)
> But Facebook is not a worldwide communication channel.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc are de facto worldwide communication channels. The degree to which they are the totality of communication is a function of their popularity, and this is the reason why it is so desirable to control speech on these platforms.
We've asked you quite a lot to please stop posting flame-y ideological, political, or nationalistic comments. It's not happening, so we've banned the account. If you'd like to use the site as intended please email hn@ycombinator.com.
It seems like Twitter is a good thing. It’s great that politicians and leaders and communicate directly with the public. In the old days, it got filtered through anointed gatekeepers that have the ability to filter and interpret based on their “angle.”
Yes, it is good to have more transparent insights into what the POTUS is doing. I just think that Twitter being an official policy platform for the country is concerning. Further, I think the impulsive and childish nature of the current POTUS should be severe cause for alarm.
I think it actually speak volumes about those who surround the POTUS and what a poor job they do as "handlers" -- shouldn't we have far more professionalism at that level?
But to your point, it was previous that this made it easier to spin the angle that the public sees...
It just makes me lose faith that anyone at the supposedly most elite positions really know what they are doing - they all seem so incompetent and looks like idiots, and it makes me want to acquiesce to their authority even less. Basically, it undermines and de-legitimatizes the power structure.
> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.
Moral policing? This article is about the opposite-- Facebook telling its "moral police" not to moderate posts from pro-government posters.
The article also features a claim that someone at Facebook guided pro-government posters in the government to use dog whistles to get around their filters. Hence changing "muslims" to "migrants."
Not much evidence is given for the claim, but it's there.
Selective choice of inaction and complaints about that all play into the same tune, that facebook is the one doing the policing (sometimes). That's the root problem. If facebook were not the ultimate arbiter this article wouldn't have to exist in the first place.
Plenty of things have been popular and then gone out of style.
Perhaps the answer is to make the concept of social networks no longer cool; or even make them undesirable. I think it's pretty clear they are not, anyways.
I use whatsapp, line, email and photo sharing services that allow me to easily share and communicate thoughts and media with exactly who I want. It's more personal, not addictive, creates better relationships, and helps me focus more on who I am rather than how others perceive me. And of course I don't have to use facebook and be a part of all its oft-criticized problems.
For hundreds of millions of people Facebook is the messaging system. There's postal, telephone, email, FB messaging. It's also the most used. I think you need to come up with solutions that assume it, or an equivalent, will continue to be a principle and primary means of communication for billions of people.
This still reinforces that they do act as "moral police" and are practicing selectively enforcement by mandate. That is not a reasonable communications policy for anything of any scale or importance.
Facebook should not be tampering with and editorializing private communications or the public square, which they have become.
Only after being pressured by the government. The problem is that the pressure needed to be applied in the first place. “Weak” people (i.e. those not backed by powerful organisations) have no recourse.
It also seems to me that people are quick to conflate censorship by Facebook with censorship by a state.
It would be a cleaner argument if Facebook merely viewed itself as a platform and a government found the need to restrict it within their boundaries, but Facebook has it's own rather mysterious law that it applies in an arbitrary fashion.
Facebook and other megacorps are their own meta-nationstate built on top of physical nation states.
They only follow the law, kind of, or they skirt around it until someone holds a fire to them. And they can still threaten to pull out most or all economic activity from a country as "punishment".
It is clear to me that there is some sort of regulation that needs enacted against multi-homed and distributed companies. Now how that is enacted across most countries in the world, I don't know. Cooperation seems to be somewhat lacking these last few years.
This is a fair criticism, but at the same time you have to be realistic about what Facebook would be like with no content filtering. There would be lots of porn. There would also be lots of group harassment. It's possible to police some harassment without policing content, but those merge into a gray area quickly. Facebook wants to be an acceptable environment for teenage minors (there are legal requirements for this, not just social ones), and that one criterion alone probably requires the majority of the filtering they do today.
> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.
This is a classic case of the race to the lowest common denominator. When the "community" is so large and diverse and often in opposition to each other, there can be no good standard other than free speech. This is why we had such strange issues of white supremacist content along with gay rights and atheist content being censored. If you censor one group because some people are offended by it what are these tech companies going to do when pressured by china, saudi arabia, israel, europe, etc to ban content they find offensive. They would ultimately have no choice but to simply ban everything that everyone finds offensive or lose market share.
Sadly, I think this is just the beginning of the censorship wars. Tech companies have set precedent the past few years which is going to cause them a lot of problems in the future. Usually the young "liberal" people lead the way in tech but they are usually followed by the much larger religious and conservative groups. The tech companies might agree with the censorship requests of today, but I doubt they'll like the censorship requetss of tomorrow. An organized conservative/religious censorship movement that mimics the recent liberal censorship movement can't be that far off.
Sure they do. If FB stuck to legal-based censorship then they wouldn't need to ban atheist or gay rights content because those content are legal in the US. But if they swing to moral-based censorship, then those countries can appeal to morality ( their own ) and demand FB censor content in the US. Why? Because FB and tech companies have set a precedent.
What defense does FB or tech companies have against people who say they consider atheism or gay rights to be immoral or offensive? None.
What happens when criticizing a religion is considered hate speech? Wouldn't we have to ban atheism? What happens when people say they find content about gay marriage offensive?
Moral-based censorship opens the floodgates to unlimited censorship.
"When there is false information but the the poster is not trying to mislead anyone, that's just someone on the internet being wrong, and there is no Facebook policy against it."
In and of itself, being wrong is not a problem. You can be thwarted by debate and evidence. However, it's much easier to spread a lie than to effectively repute one, so this gets out of hand very quickly.
"This is why Facebook concentrates most of its efforts on the last category, when someone spreads lies with the explicit intention to mislead."
The trouble is that most of the second category is actually the third category. Just because the lies are coming from random people, your uncle Joe, or some innocent organization sowing dissent in the US and secretly run by a Russian, and just because they don't say, "This is what you should believe so that the world can be run by neofascist forces", doesn't mean that the intent isn't to mislead. Any attempt to spread lies and falsehoods via the common viral video or meme styles IS an attempt to willfully spread lies. To assume that much of this isn't willful is naive.
Leaving it to Facebook to decide what's intended to mislead has not been working. The solution is not to trust anything you see on Facebook or to leave the platform entirely.
> "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
And yet, there are so many instances where their is no ambiguity about the lies. They are simply bald-faced lies, and there is no doubt that they are indeed lies. And Facebook is quite aware that they are lies. And those lies get very widespread distribution on their platform. And those lies have real political consequences.
In the land of the deceived, Facebook is king. (And those who are good at spreading lies on their platform.)
> And yet, there are so many instances where their is no ambiguity about the lies.
I suspect everyone can agree there are instances where there is no ambiguity about what is a lie and what is truth. But it seems unlikely that there is any consensus on which instances these are, or what the truth is. If there is consensus, then almost by definition censorship is not needed, because all the though leaders can identify the lie easily.
The argument in favour of moderation is to build a specific type of community, not to establish truth. The hope is that people will vote with their feet and move to communities that favour the truth.
I'd be careful in immediately dismissing a new user.
It's convenient to make a statement into a boolean true|false. However, as we have learned many statements, especially in the political arena, are truths mixed with false premises, out-of-context quotes, partial quotes, and much more. Snopes and Politifact try to provide accurate in-between answers.. But yet, the damage was done.
And whom plays "truthmaker", Someguywhatever asked? Facebook? Google? Apple? Or the lord of some other fiefdom? Do we trust them? Do we have any other choice?
Or what happens when LGBT supporters say that lifestyle is perfectly normal; and Christians and Moslems have significant issue with that. Is that a lie? Truth? Fake News? What should social media orgs do about this?
All I can suggest, is wait and see before making rash horrible laws that will harm us worse than this crisis. There may be a clearer law that can be applied later on, with more research. (I've found that rash laws are almost never amended - DMCA, CFAA, et cetera)
Oh man, if only this argument worked on segfaults! "Shut up kernel, who are you to decide if that memory has been free'd? Just run the code as I meant it damn it!"
"When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority."
What about forced displacement? There are 10s of milions of forcibly displaced people around the world. It's not a small group compared to some other mentioned protected groups.
If the basic idea is that you can't attack people for things they didn't choose, this would match too.
Anyway why it's ok to attack someone for something he chose and not ok for something he didn't choose? Choice is often based on intellect and education, and many people don't really choose that either, even if you accept the basic premise of choice being the main differentiator.
> “When asked, Facebook officials told us only immutable characteristics and traits that people are born with warrant special protection. Being a migrant is not such a trait, therefore freedom of speech takes priority."
Oddly, to illustrate this, the article compared the words “Muslim” with “Migrant” noting one word is protected and one not. How is someone’s religious choice considered an immutable and “born with” trait?
EDIT
This is the trouble when you start to try to “moderate” content according to some moral, as opposed to legal, standard: you inevitably end up creating this huge, complicated tree of rules that are often inconsistent and conflict with themselves, need to be interpreted and argued about, and frequently require escalation to more senior people when there is disagreement.
I’d love to see the financial justification for all this expensive moderation.
> This is the trouble when you start to try to “moderate” content according to some moral, as opposed to legal, standard: you inevitably end up creating this huge, complicated tree of rules that are often inconsistent and conflict with themselves, need to be interpreted and argued about, and frequently require escalation to more senior people when there is disagreement.
That's absolutely not a result of using a moral standard as opposed to a legal standard.
I mean, that description is word-for-word applicable to legal standards, too.
> How is someone’s religious choice considered an immutable and “born with” trait?
If the penalty for changing your religion is death, then it is almost immutable. And children usually don't have much choice about the religion, so it is almost as if they were born with it.
Yes, the world is complicated. :) But it would still not be a born with trait. Perhaps some propensity to accept religious beliefs might be a born with trait.
People can also say something and think a differnt thing. Also while someone may identify with Islam, it could mean very differnt things in real terms, as you can see from various sects and interpretations, and real world behavior of believers. So what is really being protected?
Also, clearly if you are a ISIS member, your religion is not a protected trait despite many of the memebers being quite Islamist, idealistic and devoted to the ideas much more than many of the regular muslims. Your attitudes toward religion are suddenly also not viewed as unchangeable, if you look at various deradicalisation programs. Not by anyone, mind you, there are people who think that all ISIS memebers should just be killed, and that that's the only way.
Almost noone in Europe is “forced displaced” as they would need to cross many fairly safe countries to get to the EU. So that’s their choice (a logical one, of course, as they’re pursuing a better standard of living, but a choice nevertheless).
The quote by Facebook is a big fat lie anyways. Protection of religion is a generally supported concept, even though it’s very much a choice, not fixed from birth.
"538 000 asylum seekers were granted protection status in the Member States of the EU in 2017"
These have gained refugee status, which is a subset for the forcibly displaced persons category.
That's quite a bit more than noone.
Fairly safe "closer" countries may not accept you, or be much safer to the particular individual. It may still be too close so that people affiliated with your tormentor may be able tro track you down there and harm you.
So it may make sense to try to get as far as possible. Also "farther" countries may have offered to accept you, so while you're crossing many coutries you may be doing it on the offer of a remoter country.
> What about forced displacement? There are 10s of milions of forcibly displaced people around the world. It's not a small group compared to some other mentioned protected groups.
People who were forcibly displaced apply for asylum and (if the system works right) eventually become refugees. AIUI the overwhelming majority of the migrants in question are not seeking asylum.
> Anyway why it's ok to attack someone for something he chose and not ok for something he didn't choose?
Because that's most people's moral instinct, even across different cultures?
The Facebook video in question is linked in the very first sentence, but the yellow highlighting doesn't distinguish the link from the rest of the text. So here's the link for the curious (in Hungarian of course): https://www.facebook.com/lazarjanosfidesz/videos/19566176783...
I watched it with subtitles and I'm mystified why it would be offensive enough to censor. Anyone with the opposite POV, that mass immigration from the Third World is desirable for the First World, could make their own video (and do, no doubt).
>Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other.
I would argue that their standards vs Facebook (which isn't that great) are exactly why they aren't the leading global social networks with billions of users.
And rightly so. I'm surprised more countries haven't enforced rules on Facebook, like China does. Saying like "only things that are illegal are to be prohibited". It's insane to leave it arbitrarily to the opinion of a foreign company.
Why would Facebook have any content moderation obligations towards any government? It is their private platform, their rules. A community they built = their community standards. They can decide what content they allow on the platform. Governments imposing content rules upon private companies is a form of censorship. China is not a democracy. If a country doesn't like their citizens having free and unlimited access to the internet, they can come up with their own versions of "Great Firewall"
They don't have any obligation, but then again neither has the government any obligation to permit/not penalize the business. If Facebook wants to operate in the EU, it will have to follow EU rules.
Personally, I'd rather not operate in a country than face arbitrary censorship requests, but then, I don't run a billion dollar business (and even countries like EU and US have some fairly "arbitrary" censorship requests).
I know you're being ironic, but I think that's the way it should work. The customs and culture of a country should be respected and followed; the same we ask immigrants coming to first world countries to adapt to our customs, our businesses should adapt to theirs if they want to sell there.
Hungary is a sovereign country. Why would a government have any obligations towards any medium, to allow it to operate within the country?
Esp. when said medium has an agenda to influence public opinion? (In this case, by taking down videos expressing the opinion of the democratically elected government, and by only allowing videos criticising the opinion of the majority of the citizens).
Governments can decide what content they allow in the country. Or is it the case that Facebook's community standards should for some reason be universally accepted?
You are absolutely right. Hungary is a sovereign country. If they don't like their citizens having access to a particular private platform/medium, they can block access to it. It's very simple. The same way it's done with everything else. If a country doesn't like a particular book, they ban imports into their territory. If they don't like their citizens having ability to catch a TV/radio transmission from a neighboring "enemy" country, they can jam the signal. They don't ask the publisher from that other country to modify the contents. So, if they don't like Facebook operating in their territory, they can copy what China does and get rid of it. But once a country decides to do such things, they can no longer be considered a democracy.
Facebook should not accept instructions from Hungarian government. Now it's "Please don't remove videos from our minister", tomorrow it will be "Please immediately delete any bad comments about our government. Oh, and that opposition candidate's page? Delete that too"
Facebook's community standards should not be universally accepted. Does anyone force Hungarian people to use Facebook and accept their community standards? No. But if they freely choose to use it, of course they are expected to accept the rules of the community they willingly chose to participate in.
I am not a Hungarian, and I don't care what the Hungarian government is doing within their own country. If they want they can censor newspapers, ban TV shows on local media, close the borders, not have foreigners in their country, whatever. But they shouldn't influence foreign media the same way that they cannot ban a TV show airing on some Croatian television because Hungarians near the border can catch it...
>Why would Facebook have any content moderation obligations towards any government?
This argument, if applied strictly, would allow any government to meddle in the affairs (say, influencing elections) of any other government simply by establishing ostensibly private companies that'd perform to their wishes, whether overtly or secretly. That being anti-democratic, there's clear need for limiting actions of private companies.
While I am against compelling speech, I do not consider Facebook a newspaper publishing its own editorial content, but rather a platform for publishing third-party content. In fact, posts on Facebook are clearly attributed to the author, which, with minor exceptions, is not Facebook itself. On the other hand, official communications of Facebook are marked as such and clearly delineated from users' posts. Thus preventing Facebook from deleting posts (i.e., forcing them to let posts remain) would amount to preventing them from performing (the seemingly arbitrary and capricious) censorship, rater than compelling them to speak.
For me the line is clear - illegal content must be removed, legal content must be left undisturbed, and if Facebook considers law of some country to run counter to their conscience, do not operate in that market.
>For me the line is clear - illegal content must be removed, legal content must be left undisturbed, and if Facebook considers law of some country to run counter to their conscience, do not operate in that market.
The only problem is, since the internet is free and open, whether Facebook operates as a legal entity in a particular country or not, doesn't prevent internet users from that country to access the services. And Facebook doesn't have any obligations to ban IP ranges from that country. So, it's the country's responsibility to ban traffic to Facebook.
Facebook is a business, Youtube is a business, Twitter is a business. If they determine that certain legal content is going to cost them business, they are not going to allow it. That's just the way it is. Which is why all of those companies disallow harassing content, and why two of those three has kicked Alex Jones off of their networks. These are business decisions.
The comments here are mostly focused on the Vienna video so it seems the article failed to properly explain to foreigners the other (imho more serious) part: the whitelisting of origo.hu
It's difficult to explain in a few lines just how awful that site is. Used to be the biggest, well respected hungarian news site until it was bought by Orban's friends a few years ago. Since then the political columns are literal fake news and smear campaigns against political opponents. The kind of thing that would be (rightfully) censored by Facebook if it was posted by anybody else. Letting the government (and only the government!) peddle this kind of rhetoric with oversight explicitly lifted is a very dangerous and morally questionable practice.
In some case there is direct harm caused by the posts. Pizzagate was an example which led to a man turning up to a pizza shop with a gun based on the fake story and the business owners received death threats. Not everything is as easy as just unfollowing.
When it comes to hate speech, incitment to do harm or lies about elections a subset of people unfollowing doesn't mean there still won't be harmful consequences.
Let me try to draw the line you're not following here. The solution parent is outlining is assigning responsibility for actions to the users of the platform, not is creators or maintainers.
> From October 1993 to late 1994, RTLM was used by Hutu leaders to advance an extremist Hutu message and anti-Tutsi disinformation, spreading fear of a Tutsi genocide against Hutu, identifying specific Tutsi targets or areas where they could be found, and encouraging the progress of the genocide. In April 1994, Radio Rwanda began to advance a similar message, speaking for the national authorities, issuing directives on how and where to kill Tutsis, and congratulating those who had already taken part.
Almost a million people were killed during the genocide, egged on by radio stations. "Just don't listen to it" wouldn't have been an effective strategy.
This is a interesting example, quoting from the article so more people can see it
> [Radio Rwanda] was barred from continuing to disseminate hate propaganda. This led the Hutu Power circle around President Habyarimana and his wife to found RTLM as a private radio station. RTLM became immensely popular as a young, hip alternative to the official voice of the government. It played popular music, and encouraged the public to phone in and participate in radio broadcasts. Amongst its listeners, RTLM attracted the unemployed youth and Interhamwe militia.
Right. If you ban racists openly spouting hate speech and inciting violence it's clearly a very fine line between that and banning baseball. Slippery slope. How can we possibly draw that line.
I think the video is fine but it’s ridiculously wrong. They were trying to paint Vienna as some immigration caused hellhole and why Budapest is so much better.
As someone living in Vienna I found it mostly amusing considering how many Hungarians immigrate here.
Lazar, who was a minister back then went out to Vienna and made a video that said the city is flooded with migrants, it isn't safe and Budapest is much better, safer and such. Oh, also he didn't feel safe in it too.
nhanq is a one day old account posting fake news. Let's hope that the trolls don't take hold here on HN too.
There are many valid criticisms of these kind of surveys, but crime, which is the hook that the anti-migrant posters like to use, is one of the criteria - so the idea that "It's getting bad there" is the one that needs rapid rebuttal.
In the 2000s, Glasgow was known as one of the most violent cities in Europe. The average homicide rate from 2000 to 2002 was 62.9 per million people.[1] The homicide rate for San Francisco in 2014 was 45 per 100k people.[2]
Glasgow at its worst was comparable to Oklahoma or Indiana today.[3] Compared to Europe, the US just isn't safe.
(Homicide rates aren't a perfect metric, especially for comparisons over large periods of time, since social decline can be masked by medical advances. But they're good enough for back-of-the-envelope comparisons of similar areas.)
The US is a very, very low bar to clear. Things here in Europe are getting worse every year. Of course, not getting-shot-by-a-gang bad, but bad. They are not horribly bad, but they don't have to be this bad.
Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other.
Filtering should be a tool available to individuals and delegatable to groups that are aligned with their own standards. As long as we don't get that there should be zero surprise about strain between differing standards.