
Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing' - f0qu3
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/facebook-rohingya-muslim-women-ethnic-cleansing-burma-myanmar-socila-network-rakhine-state-a7954791.html
======
frgtpsswrdlame
I'm kind of split on our current gray area about free speech on the web. It
seems like the only way to do good moderation is if it's powered by actual
people sitting behind computers and following a well-written policy. But tech
companies have proven themselves totally unwilling to pay for that. I'd rather
FB just said "we'll never pony up the wages necessary to moderate well so
we're just going to make facebook a complete free speech zone."

~~~
tdb7893
This seems like a classic catch 22. If they go completely free speech people
will complain about all the propaganda on Facebook and some countries will
just block it. On the other hand if they do moderation people complain about
censorship. There is no actual way for them to win here

~~~
rhizome
They're already doing moderation, though: Rohingya media gets blocked, white-
supremacy media is allowed.

~~~
timthelion
It has gotten to the point where an American anarchist writing that they want
to travel to Yemen to fight imperialism is considered a terrorist and
censored, but a white supremacist person saying we should "shoot all those
monkeys in St. Lewis" is considered sacred free speech.

------
__jal
Reason #37,758 that centralized communication services are, at the very least,
suboptimal, and at worst, are a matter of life or death.

More generally, we need to stop supporting client-only systemts. Cell phones,
for instance, could have a fallback peer-to-peer mode, if the carriers would
allow it. Unfortunately, being a choke point tends to make more money than
building resilient systems.

------
macrael
Metafilter remains one of my favorite places on the web and it has strong and
serious moderation. I'm not sure how that would translate to Facebook, since I
am not sure Metafilter's voice needs to be the same voice everywhere, but
moderated discussions seem pretty strictly better than the alternative.

For me this always goes back to the observation that corporations are fairly
dictatorial constructions, and that especially when it comes to communication
networks the decision makers are quite insulated from the huge number of
people actually talking to one another. What would a company that gave
representation to its customers look like?

It could be modeled after the US government, as an option. The company of
today becomes the executive branch, you add a legislative branch that
customers can be a part of. There's where you influence the product, there's
where you define the rules of engagement on the network. And a judicial branch
can determine if those rules are being followed correctly, etc. This is a
rough cut, I'm interested in more refined takes on how a company could escape
the dictatorship model that is taken for granted these days.

~~~
skybrian
A big social network is not a single community like a blog or forum. It's a
collection of communities that do some of their own moderation (blocking
people and deleting off-topic posts), with some moderation outsourced to the
larger network.

This is good; each community can have its own standards, to some extent. When
there is good local moderation, there's no reason to bring the legal system
into it most of the time.

The problem is at the next level where you decide which _communities_ are okay
to host at all. And what do you do when people in one community attack
another? Then it the dispute gets bumped up to Facebook or Reddit, to
employees who don't have much context.

In some ways "share nothing" is a good standard. Each blog or forum is an
island with its own membership. (Or its own bubble, you might say.)

But that's not where we are, with overlapping friends lists and follower
lists, subreddits with absentee moderators, and lots of resharing. People want
to cross the streams. They also want good moderation.

I wonder if there should be an intermediate level between local communities
(tens or hundreds of people) versus the social network (hundreds of millions).
Maybe it needs to be _more_ hierarchical?

~~~
macrael
Yeah, I think more hierarchy is probably necessary and at some point people in
that hierarchy need to be paid.

Twitter is my main social network, and there the lines are very fuzzy. There
aren't distinct subreddits based on topic, there is just your follow list and
that is always changing. Harassment is bad on twitter, and I think that's
partially because it isn't contained to little communities but is all in the
big stream by default.

I don't know what the right solutions are for harassment, but there haven't
been any effective ones tried so far.

------
__Julia
Snapchat did the same thing few days ago
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-removes-al-jazeera-
cha...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-removes-al-jazeera-channel-in-
saudi-arabia-1505692263)

------
sergiotapia
Interesting, here's a first-hand account of what's happening:
[https://streamable.com/zota1](https://streamable.com/zota1)

~~~
nkoren
Watched for a few minutes.

"Muslims are like African Carp. They breed rapidly [... yadda yadda yadda ...]
Our entire race has been suffering under the burden of this minority..."

That's grade-A genocidal rhetoric he's deploying. Good for observing that evil
can wear any kind of face. Not good for much else.

~~~
askdufuga
People are not evil simply for disliking aspects of other cultures or
populations.

For example, Americans enslaved Africans for hundreds of years. That is a
claim of fact. I believe it is true. I believe slavery is bad, it should be
stopped in all its forms (including as punishment for a crime), and I'm glad
that the 13th Amendment was passed.

Hating what white people did to Africans does not make me evil, in fact it's a
morally superior position.

To say that this guy is being evil, is like denying that slavery occurred
because you're ignoring his claim of fact. You're effectively saying "No,
Muslim populations in Myanmar are not attempting to take over the country by
means of rapid reproduction. You are lying to gain support for genocide."

Just because you disagree with someone's proposed solution (assuming that's
what he's proposing), doesn't mean there isn't a problem. It would have been
one thing to be opposed to the Civil War - maybe the costs were too high - but
it would be quite another to claim slavery is moral, or that slavery wasn't
going on, or to just ignore the whole issue and pretend that anyone who's
encouraging war is evil.

What if what he's saying is true? Would you support genocide? Would you be
okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can
just to affect future demographics? Just because there's no good solutions,
doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. At some point global warming may be
beyond every solution, but that won't undo the facts or absolve humanity for
its blame.

~~~
ralmidani
> Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many
> kids as they can just to affect future demographics?

You are defending the rhetoric of a genocide perpetrator. It's like saying
"what if Hitler was right about the Jews? I don't agree with his tactics, but
that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem."

~~~
askdufuga
I think you'll agree that I am not advocating genocide, I'm just curious about
the facts. I like to learn. I want to vet everyones' claims.

What I don't understand is why are you arguing your position? What do you
propose I do with respect to the acquisition and spread of knowledge?

~~~
ralmidani
You are not advocating genocide, but you are saying the genocidaire's
"justification" is worth considering.

Even if Muslims have higher fertility rates than Buddhists, the observation is
meaningless.

------
nkoren
Please tell me it's just a coincidence that the independent.co.uk domain name
is no longer resolving...

~~~
mtgx
Try using a different DNS server such as OpenNIC.

[https://www.opennic.org/](https://www.opennic.org/)

~~~
nkoren
Hm, I'm using the Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4; it should be pretty robust.

------
forgottenpass
Even if you forget everything else about facebook deciding what can and can't
be posted there, I'm still can't believe they have the balls to call it
"community standards" with a straight face.

~~~
fleitz
They also call it Facebook instead of AdBook, but meh.

------
otakucode
Who wants to advertise on top of such bummer news? Cheer up and post some
family friendly content instead! Thanks, Facebook.

~~~
quuquuquu
This is so, so true. What a surprise that this comment at the bottom of this
thread.

FB's, Twitter's, and YT's new policy is "if it goes beyond E for Everyone,
demonetize and or censor."

And these are supposed to be serious platforms for journalists and people who
want to grapple with the realities of human life?

No, this is just Digital Disneyland, where nothing goes wrong.

~~~
otakucode
If forced to label myself as a human being, I would probably go to 'Pervert
Philosopher'. I am a big believer in the utter critical importance of facing
the "ugly" side of our human nature and dealing with it openly. It disgusts
me, and I see it as immoral, that so many platforms wish to scrub the primary
conduits through which modern human culture is both formed and transmitted of
the 'human' element. Humans cuss and spit, they stink and fuck, and they do
this alongside those who heal and build, who help and protect. Any attempt to
eliminate one side will eliminate both in equal number, because people aren't
immutable. They move across and among those groups throughout the course of
their day, week, month, year, or life.

Eric Schmidt's book, 'A New Digital Age' is starkly terrifying. He openly says
that Google, because its rich, should use its position to actively mold human
culture. We've seen individuals or small cabals take outsized roles in culture
many times throughout history and the result has always been the same -
tragedy. I see no reason why this would be any different.

Internet access should be a public utility like water or electricity. It
should be metered. The cost of it should be tied directly to the price of
providing the actual service (and its tech so that means the price will
rapidly go to zero). It should be regulated by municipalities just like water
companies are. The amount of profit they earn should be capped, just like
water companies are. And just like water companies aren't allowed to charge
restaurants a higher fee just because they make soup from the water and sell
it, muni ISPs should never be permitted to charge different rates to people
just because they're doing business over it.

I'm not advocating for the idiotic 'muni owns the fiber, private corps get
access to the fiber and share' model, I'm advocating for muni ISPs. So that
when the feds come knocking on their door, they will get told to pound sand
unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. Private companies just bend
over, especially ISPs who largely depend upon the government for most of their
business existence (how long would they make it if it was legal for anyone
else to run a line next to theirs and compete?). Municipal govt employees love
telling the feds to get lost. They'll have their neighbors backs.

~~~
quuquuquu
Thank you for your interesting and raw thoughts :)

I too agree that the internet should be as free as water. Interestingly, there
are movements that attempt to do that, but I think that government and
corporation forces are quite good at driving a specific type of usage and
penalizing another.

So I think that will continue to be a problem. If enough people wanted to rise
up, build their own fiber, run their own mesh network, and or build tools like
Tor and TPB to work within the system we have, then the free and open net
would win.

Multiple times people have tried to do this, and they have been shut down by
force, intimidation, expulsion, imprisonment, confiscation of assets, slander,
blacklisting from jobs, you name it.

So to advocate for a free and open net these days is pretty much a social cue
that 99.999% of people will say "ehhhh I don't want to associate with that
guy."

That's why in 2004, TPB was king. Now in 2017, the internets is all walled
gardens and censored platforms. And 99.999% of people are there by choice.

It is a complete and total shame. The herd of lambs carrying each other to
slaughter.

~~~
otakucode
Each utility fought a real battle when being initially established. It's very
interesting history. For awhile I was researching it pretty deeply, interested
in whether my ideas were total lunacy or what and possibly considering writing
a book about it. I started off with the question: What criteria was used to
say 'yes, water should be a utility, natural gas should be a utility,
electricity should be a utility, telephone should be a utility', etc? How did
that actually come about?

The question weighed for those things in the past turned out to be a fairly
simple one, but which can be tricky to approach honestly and fairly for both
sides: Would the benefit to society be greater than the damage caused by the
elimination of competition in that space? To judge it correctly, one does have
to attempt to quantify and judge how much damage would be done by eliminating
the competitive aspect, because that would have to happen. Then one lines up
the benefits society would garner by having it available ubiquitously and
cheaply.

Personally I think the call isn't even close. The Internet meets the
requirement of providing more social benefit by being cheap and everywhere by
miles, much moreso than some of the other public utilities even do. (First off
the bat, you can get rid of the phone utility. And the TV quasi-utility.) You
can actually close a gigantic number of government offices and let their
employees work from home. You can tell people to 'do it online'. You can't DO
that, ever, in law if universal access is not guaranteed and it remains a
luxury. Small businesses would get huge with it, no longer chained to a
"business class" connection that bleeds them dry and hosting companies that
manipulate them, they could just run their servers themselves on their own
lines. There are all sorts of other benefits to having a guaranteed-present
communications network which is not a luxury but a basic service.

And sure, the companies like Comcast that originally made their money from
distributing media and then got into the ISP market to try to stop or destroy
or control it to prevent the threat to their cash cow will go nuts about it.
Their death warrant was signed the day the Internet came about. Distribution
is a solved problem. Sure 50 years ago if I made a video and wanted to show it
to 10,000 people I'd HAVE to sign up with a distributor and beg and scrape and
HOPE they only skimmed 99% of the value out of that transaction. Distribution
was flat-out the single most valuable economic activity and dominated the
entire global economy from the advent of factories (it made factories
possible) up until the Internet came along (computers helped). Now
distribution is something a clever 12 year old can do in their spare time for
fun. And most importantly, the 12 year old will do it faster, better, and at a
radically lower cost compared to the established gigantic players who feel
entitled to still be kings. They love capitalism and the free market until
they're stuck holding a huge order of buggy whips and watching everyone
driving around in automobiles. Suddenly they wish their lobbyists could get
the government to require cars to have a buggy whip installed before they'd
start up.

~~~
quuquuquu
I agree once more with everything you have said!

Sadly I am still worried about the "details of implementation", because they
will need to occur within our lifetime, and are influenced by very very rich
people who hold all the keys.

Do you think ISPs will become public utilities in the next 20 years? 40?

If so, how? It seems to me that corporations, their politicians, and their
supporters have a pretty tight grip on everything.

I am not hopeful that any massive or meaningful changes will occur. The
Washington Consensus seems to ensure corporate dominance will continue, to our
detriment.

------
rakibtg
myanmar authorities brutally killing helpless people in front of their family
members, torturing, ripping off body parts from a living human, and facebook
is doing this :o
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-
rohingya-muslims-myanmar)

------
mudil
It should also be emphasized that Trump administration, so easily labeled as
racist by practically everyone on the left, has urged 'strong and swift' U.N.
action to end Rohingya Muslims crisis.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/trump-
ur...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/trump-urges-strong-
and-swift-u-n-action-to-end-rohingya-crisis-idUSKCN1BV0CD)

~~~
zhemao
And how open is the administration to taking in Rohingya refugees who've been
displaced by the violence?

~~~
mudil
United States is literally on the other side of the world. There are places
like Malaysia, a very good friend of Rohingya Muslims, China, Thailand, and
others that would be perfect places to accommodate. I am not sure why you
think that United States should be a deposit box for all sorts of human
miseries from across the globe.

~~~
forapurpose
Because the U.S. can afford it, being the wealthiest nation on earth, and
should therefore take on its share of the burden. Also, because the U.S. can
do good, and give these people liberty and safety; if they don't deserve it,
why do you?

~~~
mudil
Thanks for your personal donation to the Rohingya Muslims fund! You are a very
generous person.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting flamewar-style comments to HN?

This particular comment crossed into personal attack, too. That's bad. We ban
accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

