
Two non-profits stop accepting Facebook funding - samizdis
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/11/facebook_nonprofit_funds/
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easytiger
From their website

> Public Knowledge promotes freedom of expression, an open internet, and
> access to affordable communications tools and creative works. We work to
> shape policy on behalf of the public interest.

From the article

> "However, platforms shouldn’t hide behind the First Amendment as an excuse
> to allow hate, misinformation, and abuse to run rampant on their services,
> particularly when they hold such a dominant position in the marketplace.
> Doing so distorts what the First Amendment means, and ignores the influence
> that moderation has on our civic conversations and system of democracy."

Firstly the predicate that Facebook is unmoderated is not true clearly. They
do have policies and they do remove things.

If the representative of an organisation claiming to be in persuit of freedom
of expression is taking a stance on what can be considered to be said, then it
surely can't claim to believe in that fundamental.

The philosophy behind free speech is being distorted widely.

My expectation is that venues like twitter and Facebook simply become such
horrible noise machines allowing lunatic to speak on to lunatic that they fall
out of use as a source of information.

At the very least news sources should be discouraged from using them as an
information source. The BBC are particularly terrible for regurgitating "Jane
in Basingstoke is outraged about this non thing" type articles. Not everyone
needs to be heard and virtue signifies no authority.

Twitter is already responsible for a great many ills. Much more so than
Facebook in the west at least.

