
Undercover Facebook moderator told not to remove fringe groups, hate speech - dsr_
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582152/facebook-channel-4-undercover-investigation-content-moderation
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ilaksh
The Facebook moderation could become a wolf in sheep's clothing. The less
moderation the better. You let one group decide what is or isn't propaganda
and start censoring routinely and you fast track your conversion to the new
China.

Does that sound like a fringe comment? Do you want to have it deleted? If so,
please do some research and think through the path that you are on of having
opinions that make you uncomfortable removed.

It's important to put propaganda in a historical context. So I hope people
will research the history of propaganda in America and realize it still exists
and is even put out by our government. I hope people realize what a left-
leaning ideological tilt much of the online world has and that some of what is
defined 'fringe' is just a different worldview and also that people understand
how dangerous censorship is and how careful we must be about letting third
parties dictate acceptable worldviews.

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leppr
Indeed, seeing stuff like:

 _> "Facebook refuses to classify fake news as a violation of its rules"_

used as a denunciation in a mainstream news site, is quite disturbing to read
in 2018.

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olivermarks
One man's investigative journalist is another man's conspiracy theorist...this
article gets into dodgy territory defining political wings and what is
acceptable evidence and conjecture people are allowed to discuss...

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Bucephalus355
It’s odd that we depend on one “super content provider” to determine the truth
of everything. A long time ago, you just had two bias newspapers and you read
both of them knowing their slant, and then made up your own mind.

Right now I think the best way to get news is just to toggle back and forth
between MSNBC and Fox.

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ng12
It's a losing battle. 2-3 years ago they got significant pushback for
aggressively censoring right-wing content.

The best thing you can do is moderate as little as possible.

~~~
olivermarks
I'm a big fan of free speech, warts and all...

~~~
namlem
I believe this type of speech should be legal, but it that doesn't mean I want
private companies to give it a platform.

~~~
SamUK96
Calling Facebook a "private company" is rather odd I find.

~~~
mmt
The parent's point, I believe, was that it is privately owned, rather than
being an instrumentality of the public/government/state/people, regardless of
how it's called.

There's an argument to be made that even privately owned entities are to some
degree still stewards of the public trust and therefore owe some duty to the
public, especially if they benefit directly or indirectly from public subsidy,
and/or if they are able to exert monopoly power. This is generally expressed
through regulation.

There's another (albeit related) argument to be made that if a platform for
speech[1] is provided to the public, that it should conform to the same
standards of freedom as elsewhere, including government. I believe this is
what is mainly being debated here. Attempting to comply with the spirit of
such an argument can be challenging for a company whose platform spans
multiple "elsewheres", but there is also an argument in favor of greater
freedom of speech, no matter the local standard (which I personally happen to
support).

[1] or, perhaps, anything, such as a space for gathering

~~~
SamUK96
I understood the parent's point. I was stating that, regardless, I've always
found it odd how people think the large corporations as "private companies",
when they act far more like governmental agencies than even _governmental
agencies_ themselves do.

Many people seem to often not notice how never before in human history has
centralised communication existed, and it was never foreseen that a few
"private" companies would control almost all of it.

It's why I always think of it as rather rediculous when people refer to the
U.S. constitution and other literature and preach "but X says that only a
government is controlled and private-company-hosted speech is defenseless!",
and not realise that Facebook et al, if anything, _is_ a "government" to a
17th Century human (especially to those who drafted the Constitution).

If power is a measureable "quantity", then I'de say that FB alone has more of
it than what 17th, 18th, and 19th Century Governments had. The laws are very
outdated I think.

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writepub
Dubious to say the least. If anything, silicon valley culture is legendary for
being unapologetically left leaning, and has been harder on right leaning
content, let alone toleraing far right propaganda. This is a "sting" operation
that's looking to "prove" a narrative someone's pushing - cherry picking
evidence that suits their agenda.

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dragonwriter
> legendary

Legend ≠ fact

~~~
writepub
True. But silicon valley's left lean is a fact

~~~
dragonwriter
Silicon Valley in either the narrow geographic sense or the sense of the SF
Bay Area tech industry has strong faction in the center-right “identity
politics plus neoliberal economics” camp that anchors the _right_ wing of the
Democratic Party, as well as the right-libertarian, and technocratic right-
authoritarian factions. The broader SF Bay Area has a strong (for the US, at
least) faction on the center-left (democratic socialists, in the DSA sense if
not anything you'd recognize as such eslewhere) and a few visible, though
insignificant, groups on the actual left, as well as enormous or in the
previously mentioned center-right group.

In Silicon Valley (in either sense), the two right-wing factions tend to point
to examples of the powerful center-right group in Silicon Valley as evidence
that Silicon Valley is a hard-left monoculture, ignoring both their own
prominence and that the faction they are pointing to isn't even a left-wing
faction.

