
Facebook Bans Far-Right Groups and Prominent Hate Figures - digighoul
https://digit.fyi/facebook-far-right-ban/
======
dsfyu404ed
I'm sure if Facebook existed in the 18th century people like Benjamin Franklin
(not exactly a promoter of diversity, shall we say) and Thomas Paine
(politically extreme by the standards of the day) would have been banned for
spreading hate and advocating violence or something like that. It's very
alarming that they're picking a side. It's one thing to censor violent/hateful
speech above some arbitrary threshold but to openly announce you're only going
to go censor it when one side does not sit well with me.

~~~
firemancoder
Many platforms have been doing this. It's likely because the majority of tech
folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience. It's
basic marketing.

I'm not sad that some of these really hateful people are blocked, that's a
given. But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate
speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be
considered hate speech.

~~~
bdhe
> But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate
> speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be
> considered hate speech.

I mean, the headline talks about far-right hate groups, and not about
conservatives in general. Why is it that a lot of conservatives seem to take
it personally when hate groups are banned? I think this victimhood complex is
unhealthy. Facebook is not choosing sides by banning hate groups.

~~~
firemancoder
It's not that conservatives don't want hate groups banned, every reasonable
person does. It's because of the ever expanding definition of what hate speech
is.

I'm no conservative, but I definitely see their point when "I love America" is
hate speech, yet "Straight White Men should die" is not. Look at Twitter as an
example.

~~~
didibus
I don't disagree that detecting hate isn't a hard problem. But I also feel it
isn't as ambiguous as you make it out to be.

"X loves Y" \- not hate speech.

"X should die" \- hate speech.

Now, context to these could change it. But the question is, can two random
person proficient in the same language tell apart similarly the two kinds of
speech?

If a human can perform the task with pretty good accuracy, then it's doable.

Now if we're saying that even people can't tell apart hate and violence, we're
in more trouble. But as of now, I think it's a pretty strong claim to make
that people can't actually decipher hateful tones in text.

~~~
turkeysandwich
I think the enforcement is way more imbalanced than you realize.

Here's an example, how about instead of "X should die", it's "lol, can all X
just die?". They give it a little jocular spin with the "Lol", but it's
effectively the same comment.

Here's the deal: if X in that comment is "black people", you get banned on
Twitter. If it's "white people" you don't get banned.

Now personally, I don't mind the comment in either form. I don't believe it's
an actual threat to anyone. It's kind of edgelordy, but whichever. And beyond
that, I'd be very unhappy if someone got banned for something like that,
because it just stomps over whatever other, more legitimate commentary they
might've had.

I'm interested in having conversations, even imperfect ones. All conversations
are imperfect.

But OK, let's move past "X should die".

But it's not just that. Any discussion where one side can be spun as a
vulnerable minority (merit be damned), that minority status can be used to
silence the other side.

So for example, consider transwomen in women's sports. There's a not-
insignificant push among trans activists to claim that transwomen are
"biologically female". I think the logic with that is: 1. sex is fuzzier than
most people realize (debatable) and 2. hormone treatments are sufficient to
tip someone over the line into the other biological sex (also debatable).

Referring to a trans woman as male for the sake of argument runs you a serious
risk of getting permabanned from Twitter if the person you're arguing with is
particularly ornery.

~~~
didibus
Hum, you make claims of this will get you banned and this won't. What are
those assumptions built on?

I'm not saying it's not the case, I don't use Twitter and don't know their
processes.

That said, in my work, we deal with similar scenarios. Normally, you look for
trends and you have different levels of enforcement for different risks.

So say you have automated systems doing monitoring which flags and alerts of
possible bad behavior. Normally these are scored and categorized. For some
score and category, you might take an automatic actions. Say, block the
comment from posting at all and tell the user to reword in a non hateful
manner their idea. Or you delete the comment. Now these infractions go towards
the account. When there's many if them, indicating a trend, it promotes the
account for manual review.

At that point, a person does a holistic overview of the account and its
infractions. If they can reverse some if them, feeding back into the automated
monitoring and alerting to improve its false positive rates, and they can
confirm them, to add weight to those labels. Finally, they can choose to
contact the account holder to justify themselves, give them a warning, take
partial enforcement like deleting certain posts, or outright ban them.

Even the ban has degrees. You could have the account ban, but be allowed to
create a new account. Or you can be banned with cross account detection, so
your IP, email, address, credit cards etc. are all banned to make it hard for
you to even sign up again.

And the processes in place and their rules are constantly adjusted and
reevaluated. And there's even backfill mechanisms, so if rules are relaxed in
the future, prior enforcement can be reversed if they no longer hold against
the new rules for example.

Would you find that if say Facebook or Twitter were to operate in a somewhat
similar fashion that it would seem reasonable?

------
yters
Why only the far-right? What about the far-left? Or the far-center?

Seems to arbitrarily single out the 'hate figures' du juor.

~~~
AWildC182
Has the far left killed anyone lately?

Edit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2010%E2%80%93present)

~~~
deweller
...on April 18 [2017], Kori Ali Muhammad, a 39-year-old African-American man,
was arrested and charged with killing three people in a shooting in Fresno,
California. Police said they believed race was a factor in the murders and
Muhammad's social media presence included Black Nationalist posts. Muhammad's
father said his son believed he was part of a war between whites and blacks
and that "a battle was about to take place."

~~~
sdinsn
How is that far-left?

------
trickledown
Finally - they may one day realize the is a difference between freedom of
speech and freedom to spread lies.

~~~
whenchamenia
Lies are free speech, and protected as such. Only threats and statements made
to intimidate are 'nor free speech'. Censorship is censorship, even when the
recipient is an unrepentant asshole.

~~~
chrismeller
And who defines “hate speech” and how do we know we’ll still agree with them
tomorrow?

I realize that this is specifically talking about UK groups and that even in
the US the 1st only applies to the government and not to any private person or
entity, but it amazes me how many people complain about the massive amount of
information Facebook has about them, complain about how Facebook has misused
or sold that data, and then complain that Facebook hasn’t banned someone they
find offensive.

Communication has become insanely centralized in recent years. Facebook can’t
be trusted to have or use your information, but you’re fine with them being
the free speech police?

~~~
lawlessone
>Communication has become insanely centralized in recent years. Facebook can’t
be trusted to have or use your information, but you’re fine with them being
the free speech police?

I talked with some friends at the weekend over pints. We didn't need facebook
to act as a middleman.

I don't need facebook to stand on soapbox either.

This hasn't changed.

~~~
chrismeller
Absolutely. Unfortunately the rest of the world has and now I’m a million
miles away from my friends in a country that doesn’t speak the same language
and there’s this great thing called the internet that makes it feel like I’m
not so far away anymore...

This is why the internet was invented and why there were free and open
protocols invented to communicate using it. Unfortunately then AOL and AIM
started and it was downhill after that... now we all rely on Facebook or
Google or Twitter to relay our messages and that’s not great for anyone.

------
didibus
Facebook says: "Individuals and organisations who spread hate, or attack or
call for the exclusion of others on the basis of who they are, have no place
on Facebook. Under our dangerous individuals and organisations policy, we ban
those who proclaim a violent or hateful mission or are engaged in acts of hate
or violence"

Now, as long as they keep to that, and steer away from partisanery, I think
this is a good thing.

There's probably going to be some mistakes made, and some wrong bans, but
Facebook is not the government, and other avenues exist to individuals who
want to speak and reach an audience.

------
LyndsySimon
Thoughts on the wisdom of deplatforming contrary (or even violent) views
aside, I find it interesting that this seems to be fairly narrowly targeted
toward UK actors.

I live in a town known for its racial history, and there are two very vocal
men here who are leaders of SPLC-listed hate groups. I just checked, and both
still have active personal accounts. The only people I can think of off the
top of my head who are more visible in those circles in the US would be Jason
Kessler and David Duke.

Perhaps this action was motivated by political pressure in the UK?

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sbmassey
Well at least the far right groups will be safe from having their emails
harvested by marketers and criminals.

------
samfriedman
Does anyone have the link to the original Facebook source?

------
snek
Friendly reminder that this is not a violation of free speech.
[https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

This is actually censorship. However, I personally believe that groups that
incite violence should be censored.

~~~
anonymousab
It's not a violation of a US constitutional right to free speech, insofar as
the Constitution restricts or guarantees against government actions.

But when people talk about free speech it is not limited merely to
constitutional rights, especially in an age where most communication happens
in platforms under some company or another's direct control.

~~~
lawlessone
It's a group of nazis based in the UK, the US constitution isn't relevant
either way.

------
Moodles
Facebook are a private company; they can remove whatever material they want
from their platform. Comments about free speech laws are misinformed: you
would be allowed to delete whatever comments you wanted from your own blog.

Having said that, I don’t like the idea that some people at Facebook decide
what’s “spreading hate” or not. Are they banning extreme left wing groups too
or not? Imagine Facebook was a company from China, Russia or the Middle East,
where those governments could pressure them a lot more. Imagine the small
group of people deciding what is “spreading hate” today leave the company and
some political ideologies take over that position a few years down the line.
Do we trust their judgement as much now?

------
jaabe
I think social media does far better when it isn’t political media. One of the
reasons HN and LinkedIn are the only two forms of social media I personally
use today is exactly the fact that the absence of politics on both platforms
make them tolerable.

The internet and politics in general seem to be a truly bad combination. I
think it’s understandable too, because it’s just so much easier to say radical
hurtful stuff when you don’t have to witness the devastating effect of your
words in person. I mean, can you even imagine calling the parent, of a child
who was mass-murdered, out to be an actor paid by George Soros face to face?
You would have to be stone cold dead inside to do that, and I really doubt a
lot of the alt-righters are that evil. On the internet though, it’s as easy as
ordering a pizza.

I think platforms should be held accountable for the content they host, even
if it’s produced by their users. I know that’s not a popular opinion on HN,
but the fact is that Facebook has been used to organise genocide and that just
shouldn’t happen.

~~~
firemancoder
I blame the internet for much of why politics is the way it is today. This is
why I too like HN, it doesn't seem to take a side, as far as I can tell and I
can ignore most political stuff if I want.

