
Facebook content policies tweaked over time to accommodate POTUS - thelock85
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/28/facebook-zuckerberg-trump-hate/
======
0zymandias
I am not a fan of Facebook and have deleted my account. But Zuck is right in
trying to avoid policing political content. It just won’t work.

Twitter’s attempts, although idealistic, are a complete failure. Some tweets
that are sanctioned are far less harmful than others that aren’t. Some tweets
that are allowed are outright lies. Inserting Jack and his buddies as the
arbiters of truth is not going to work. And frankly, I don’t want the Twitter
exec team to tell me what I should believe or see.

I understand that there is more pressure on Zuck to follow. And he may very
well have to bend to the outrage of people even though it makes no sense.

~~~
osrec
Serious question: why do you limit your argument to policing political content
only? Do you think they should also not police sexual content/paedophilic
content?

I personally believe that inoffensive* content does not deserve policing.
However, content that strays outside the bounds of common decency, probably
needs to be censored. If a political campaign started advocating for the
legalisation of child marriage, for example, despite it being a political ad,
it is also far beyond the realms of common decency and should be censored.
Similarly, for political ads that insight hate or xenophobia.

\-- *Defining "inoffensive" is difficult, but that's part of your job if
you're running the largest social media platform in the world. Once you filter
out the bots, your own "like/hate" buttons should allow you to highlight the
more controversial items.

~~~
albntomat0
I agree with your point, but am personally skeptical of anything more than
what is literally illegal speech, with controls for individuals to personally
filter more if they so choose. There are too many ways for Facebook, Twitter,
Reddit etc to fail. The policies that shape speech restrictions on the primary
means of communication for many people should come through the appropriate
political processes, as problematic as those can often be, not SV boardrooms.

~~~
the_snooze
By that standard, doxxing is fair game. It's not technically illegal in most
cases, and the victim, their loved ones, and employers are free try their best
to personally filter out the abuse.

~~~
albntomat0
Thanks for pointing it out. That was not a abuse case I considered.

It's straightforward to create a list of restrictions based on types of
information to prevent doxxing, at least from my understanding. Avoiding
postings of addresses, employers, etc without the consent of the original
person can be made an unambiguous rule. I don't believe such a restriction
could be used as a weapon to silence legitimate speech.

My ultimate concern however, is the poor application of harder to define
restrictions like "glorifying violence" being used maliciously. I could see
pressure from various people that recent protest organizing would fall under
the same category (not that I agree with such assertion). As Twitter has
decided to filter some speech, bad actors are going to try to use that
filtering to get opposing speech filtered.

Additionally, that's all assuming Twitter, Facebook, etc are acting in good
faith. There are numerous ways the good intentions here result in dystopian
outcomes.

~~~
the_snooze
I'm not sure it's so straightforward. Under the anti-doxxing restrictions you
laid out, journalists could have been muzzled for identifying the unmarked law
enforcement officers in DC a few weeks ago [1].

[1] [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-dc-protests-
unidenti...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-dc-protests-unidentified-
law-enforcement-officers/)

~~~
albntomat0
Maybe different categories for government employees in their public roles?

I think this highlights my original concern even more. While an ideal world
would have some board at Twitter able to make these decisions in an ideal way,
the implementation you desire requires subjective judgments. Based on the
recent stories on HN about difficulties with app store filtering that should
have an objective standard, I am still highly concerned about giving the power
to make subjective speech filtering decisions to SV social media companies.

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mxcrossb
This is why I find all this talk about free speech completely disingenuous.
From the start, these websites had rules to moderate content. They’ve just
been afraid to enforce them against the president.

~~~
cageface
They've been moderating content since they introduced algorithmic feeds. If
they want to claim to be neutral then bring back a simple chronological feed
of the people I follow.

~~~
guerrilla
You can just switch to "Latest Tweets" mode by clicking the little stars
button at the top right.

------
riffic
Call your congress critters and ask them to look at drafting legislation
requiring the Executive branch of government to self-host its own standards-
compliant social media site, using government infrastructure.

We live in a day and age where ActivityPub exists and the White House could be
running its own Mastodon server (well, I would not recommend that exactly, but
it could be running something that speaks the same language).

~~~
mc32
Why only exec?

In any event rather than the official account for the office, they’ll
communicate from their personal non gov account —which given first amendment,
they have a right to.

~~~
riffic
okay, widen the scope. Any public official should be communicating from
publicly owned and controlled infrastructure.

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justapassenger
Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations
policing and setting standards of content and political discussions.

I hate how discussions look online about politics, but I worry that instead of
pushing for accountability of public figures, through democratic tools and
institutions, articles like that focus on trying to get a private police up
and going.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc censoring more and more content from public
figures won’t change the fact that USA have a racist president and that tons
of people support him.

And while I think it’s a valid question how much of their racist and
discriminatory content they should be allowed to say before they’re thrown out
of office, it shouldn’t be decided by Silicon Valley.

~~~
Animats
_Free press is surprisingly supportive of an idea of a private corporations
policing and setting standards of content and political discussions._

Yes, and it's a worry. Twitter and Facebook are entitled to label or comment
on inflammatory posts, but if you're willing to post non-anonymously, what you
put up should stay up. High volume trolling by anons, though, needs to be
detected and stopped. That's bulk spam, not discourse.

As a kid, I used to walk past the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, a
house in a residential neighborhood in Arlington, VA. They had a big sign:
"White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". They were a local joke. We
survived that.

~~~
justapassenger
I personally think that having 3 tier policy is reasonable. Anonymous -
anything can be removed. If you attach your name to it - internet companies
should still be able to remove really bad content, as in the end they’re
private business. But for highly ranked elected politicians, especially
president, bar for removal should be really really really high.

But at the same time, adding context and flagging demonstrably false
statements is no brainier that companies are falling behind on

------
noscrewstoyous
love that everyone is expecting some sort of impartiality from advertising
companies and data miners

policy isn’t the problem, it’s the platform itself

~~~
viraptor
That generalises over almost everything in real world. "Everyone is expecting
done sort of impartiality from X companies" is the reason why we have many
laws.

~~~
noscrewstoyous
laws aren’t impartiality! in general you’re never going to get something akin
to federal free speech with a privately owned publishing platform!

------
kyle_martin1
[https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE](https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE)

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NN88
whats stopping a new titan website from ignoring this pressure?

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sacks2k
Why is it that I can have a group called 'the only good cop is a dead cop' and
this doesn't violate any of Facebook's terms? It's clearly a hate group that
is biased against an entire group of people. Aren't we supposed to be against
bias and bigotry? Or is it accepted because it's a group that isn't liked?

I also see death threats on Twitter all the time to: white people,
republicans, white people, Jewish people, and police officers. These are
allowed to persist to this day.

Ice cube, for instance, had a cartoon ripped straight out of anti-semitic
propaganda from the Nazi era and it was taken down after many weeks because of
a 'copyright violation'.

Yet, if I even hint that I don't agree with BLM or underage trans surgery, I
will get booted off of Twitter for hate speech and if I'm not anonymous, mobs
of people will attempt to get me fired from my job and kicked out of society.

The system does need to be changed.

We need to start with the uber-progressive tech companies that take it upon
themselves to stifle the speech of people they deem unworthy.

Nobody should be able to have this much control over the population and it's
definitely going to start affecting our elections. It's so much more powerful
than the handful of fake Russian ads that were purchased in an attempt to sway
voters (which wouldn't have caused stadiums of people to come out to see Trump
when he was running in 2016).

The reason we have Trump today is a direct result of this meddling. Trump and
his team realized that all he needed to do was create the perfect sound byte
and they would run with it and it would give him free advertising. He cast a
net out and social networks and the media ran right into them every, single,
time.

His team was also the most tech savvy. They used data mining companies to find
out the best ways to get votes and played the social media game better than
anyone.

Obama did almost the exact same thing in 2008. His team exploited a Facebook
app that allowed them to get information on you and your friends when you
installed it.

I still remember all of the tech magazines lauding his campaign as
revolutionary, genius, and the the new way of political campaigns. It clearly
violated Facebook's TOS and user privacy. Yet, we saw no investigations.

It's proof once again that it has more to do with politics than anything else.
Progressive and liberal candidates and supporters of progressive and liberal
causes can get away with murder.

I just wish we had true equality instead of special treatment for select
groups of people.

~~~
throwaway4715
Sounds like you have a persecution complex because your positions aren't well
liked.

I'd suggest you look at the data around who and what is popular on Facebook.
It supports none of what you've written. Sometimes it's not the kids who are
wrong...

------
flyinglizard
POTUS is one side of it, and Facebook is a very big regulatory target if it
decides to start a pissing contest with the elected US government; but apart
of that, half of the voting Americans voted for POTUS and silencing their
elected official is quite alienating too.

~~~
aniro
More like half of those that cast votes in the last Presidential Election cast
votes for the sitting POTUS (well, technically a significant number less than
half but that argument is pointless b/c of the electoral college).

It turns out that group represents less than 20% of the population (~63
million out of ~328 million is less than 20%).

If alienating them is an unintended byproduct of simply labeling a verbal
invective that incites violence and provably presents lies to the detriment of
public health might be a worthy venture in content moderation. The mere act of
labeling outright lies and calls to violence as such really shouldn't be so
controversial.

~~~
spoopyskelly
Social media platforms should only moderate illegal content, not things they
(you) don't agree with.

~~~
aniro
First Amendment guarantees were created to prevent The Government from
regulating speech, not to private entities from doing so. Are they private or
public entities? Are they required to use their technologies and resources to
publish any and all content that isn't explicitly illegal?

What if some content is deemed illegal in some jurisdictions and not illegal
in others? If a community decides to ban a piece of art (such as a book, or a
photograph, or a movie) should the platform then be liable for moderating that
content specific to that location? Doesn't that imply that in order to
accomplish that task they MUST track user location? What a win that would be,
legislation that requires location tracking in order for compliance to occur.

Should "Legal" be the ultimate arbiter of what is right, or what is just? How
has that worked out for us in the past?

