
Let’s Not Put the Government in Charge of Moderating Facebook - bifrost
https://onezero.medium.com/lets-not-put-the-government-in-charge-of-moderating-facebook-954562b62635
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sansnomme
A government is accountable to all sorts of laws. A private entity only to
some. There are entire branches of governments whose sole job is to make laws
and decide what's wrong or right. Kicking the ball to companies is just
intellectual laziness.

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acct1771
The responsibility is ours.

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thrax
We don't have the tools. If FB won't moderate the content they publish, then
the government will have to. Putting the burden on users is how you 4chan/gab

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acct1771
No problem with either of those, here.

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jammygit
Frankly, the biggest reason by far that Facebook is dangerous is that
government will step in one day and start manipulating/tracking people.

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bifrost
We have tons of examples of government overreach, abridging rights, stripping
of due process - we don't want this to apply to our online social lives as
well.

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averros
Facebook currently enjoys essentially the same legal protection from liability
arising from the content as do post and telephone companies (this is known as
"common carriage"). The legal reasoning for such protection is that common
carriers do not look into content of what they ship or transmit and merely
provide a content-neutral service for the public.

This protection should not apply to the corporations which do exercise
editorial control (or, as it happens, de-facto censorship) over the content
they transmit, since they're no longer common carriers but rather publishers.

And, of course, the government is already heavily involved with Facebook -
just not overtly but in the worst clandestine and unaccountable way
imaginable. Anyone who thinks a company executive is going to deny anything
spooks ask for is rather naive.

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javagram
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

> Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44, 49-53 (D.D.C. 1998).[25]

> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's
> agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content
> did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was
> created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a
> policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service
> provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content
> prepared by others."

Facebook is in a weird situation. The editorial control they do exert is
demanded by governments and by users. A truly uncensored Facebook might start
looking a lot more like Gab or Voat, and would then be attacked even more
heavily by politicians as promoting hate, being anti-democracy, and so on.

I think Mark Zuckerberg is trying to pivot the company to privacy to avoid
this. Not sure if it can succeed though.

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runawaybottle
You don’t have to use Facebook. There, moderating solved.

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joeblow9999
duh. obviously

