
Open Letter from Sandy Hook Parents to Mark Zuckerberg - hownottowrite
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-sandy-hook-parents-open-letter
======
untog
Wow. Flagged already. Very telling that the HN community doesn't even want to
talk about this.

~~~
hownottowrite
I knew it would be flagged when I posted it but I posted it anyway because
it's something people should be talking about.

~~~
sctb
Being important, or something that people should be talking about, doesn't
make an article on topic for Hacker News. What I'm seeing in this thread is a
lack of focus on the specifics of the story, plenty of generic irritation, and
not as much thoughtful and substantive insight. If we're not getting what
we're here for—gratifying our intellectual curiosity—then users are right for
flagging the post.

~~~
hownottowrite
The social impact of technology built by members of the community is 100% on
topic. Sometimes that’s messy.

------
patient_zero
I just don't get the point of this letter. Why is it so difficult to leave
this particular social network?

The biggest problem _I_ have with Facebook is how it evolved from a great
place for me to keep up with my more distant friends and family to... whatever
it is now. I know I'm an outlier, but I quit Facebook around 2010 or so when I
noticed it was being too aggressive in pushing my account to be more public;
increasing my curated circle of interest to include friends of friends, and
_their_ friends too.

When I found I was spending more time negotiating the byzantine system of
settings to keep my page private than actually using the site, I knew it was
time to go.

Is it really such an important website that it must change to suit these folks
rather than them finding another way to network with _their_ contacts? It's
2018, and there are options.

Perhaps I'm wrong and having a Facebook account is more important in society
than I realize?

~~~
s73v3r_
Why should the onus be on those being harassed to leave? Why should the
harassers get to win, when these people did absolutely nothing wrong?

~~~
patient_zero
>Why should the harassers get to win...

Well, I don't really see it as winning and losing. After all, you simply
cannot win against crazy people. What's the old saying? About never getting in
an argument with an idiot?

My point I suppose (assuming I even have one) is why they would feel the need
to stay, rather than just leaving. It didn't impact my life at all to delete
my account, and I'm asking whether there were some development since that
makes one NEED to stay. I know loads of people have accounts with FB, but the
question I asked, and think they should be asking themselves is "why?"

~~~
s73v3r_
"Well, I don't really see it as winning and losing."

But that's not really a position that has basis in reality. To those doing the
harassing, getting the people they target off of social media is, for them, a
win.

"My point I suppose (assuming I even have one) is why they would feel the need
to stay, rather than just leaving."

Because they want to use FB and social media like everyone else is able to?

"It didn't impact my life at all to delete my account"

I'm glad for you, but you're not everyone.

"and I'm asking whether there were some development since that makes one NEED
to stay"

NEED doesn't come into it at all. If they want to continue to use the
platform, they should be able to without dealing with that kind of harassment,
plain and simple.

"but the question I asked, and think they should be asking themselves is
"why?""

And I think you should ask yourself why that question has any bearing on the
situation. Why they should have to consider whether they can continue to do
the same things that most other members of society get to do.

~~~
patient_zero
I get your point, people should be free from abuse. I agree. I am also asking
something you cannot answer, namely "why do _they_ need facebook?" Which is
not even what they are saying in their letter to Zuck.

That being said, you are coming off a bit aggressively. Perhaps I'm reading
you wrong, but I'm asking a honest question and you are (it seems) just
calling me selfish and thoughtless. These questions are not rhetorical, if
that was unclear.

Can you tell me please how you use facebook in your daily life personally and
professionally? It may not have bearing on the greater discussion but I _do_
want to know, as someone who hasn't used it in years.

~~~
haser_au
For the benefit of those who are off Facebook (each to their own), here's how
I use it;

\- my mixed sport team has a group page, where we discuss the next game time,
who can make it, etc. We don't need to Friend each other, or sign up to
another service. We all have FB, so we just add/remove people very easily.
Helps organise and track conversations easily. A new post each week, and
everyone just comments on that. \- my sister and brother live in other states
of Australia. FB helps me see what they're up to (photos, videos especially).
I call them regularly, so FB is just value-add.

\- I have a young (under 2) son, and keep most photos off him off FB. However,
occasionally (once every 2-3 months) we will share something so people in our
wider network can get an update. It's not for us, it's for them. \- I have a
lot of friends I met through a time in my life (university exchange overseas,
growing up, living in different cities). FB is a very casual, easy way to stay
in touch. The barrier to entry is very low (literally, just click the 'like'
button on their post).

\- FB messenger: I use this a LOT. I also use SMS (via Signal), Hangouts and
WhatsApp. Yes, they overlap considerably, but FB Messenger has the
functionality, and critically the contacts, I need. Lots of group chats about
different things (social events, family, etc.) and things like location
sharing when I'm on my way home from work.

I don't endlessly scroll through updates on my feed page, and I don't get my
news from FB. If I read the feed page (with the updates from friends, etc.),
about 50% of content is secondary (meaning someone has shared a viral video,
or something) and the other 50% is original content (holiday photos, though of
the day, etc.).

Can all of the above be done on systems other than FB, yes. Do other systems
have the low barrier to entry now that all of my friends are on FB, no.

[Edit] Formatting

~~~
patient_zero
sounds like you can still get a lot of value from it, if you know how to use
it properly. there's still too much noise to filter (for me) in the news feed
from what you say, if half of it is stale memes and stuff.

cheers and thanks for the explanation.

------
beart
When I step back, I realize there are a lot of good reasons not to police this
stuff. However, if I down scale Facebook to a 100 user forum that I control,
then I would ban this in a heartbeat. I guess subjective morality doesn't
scale?

~~~
rurounijones
I think it is the power imbalance / reach / social impact / chilling effect.

Subjective morality enforced over 100 people on an optional forum? Meh

Subjective morality over billions on a platform that many consider essential
(I know, I know) to daily life? Oooof

~~~
FactolSarin
All morality is subjective, though. Facebook bans some kinds of speech, so the
question isn't "should Facebook do that," but "where do we draw the line."
Facebook allows almost anything right now, in part because it's a US company
and has inherited the US propensity to allow pretty much all speech.

But that's not the only way to do it. Banning certain types of speech doesn't
necessarily lead to a slippery slope. For instance, in Germany, you can't deny
the holocaust and they haven't become some sort of dystopian Orwellian
society. I would argue Facebook needs to move more toward that model.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation are spreading right now. Hell, I
personally know someone who I considered a pretty normal person who's become
caught up in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering. Banning groups that
promote that kind of garbage make them seem illegitimate (as they are) and no,
doing so doesn't infringe on any rights. They're free to make their own
website somewhere and spout nonsense. But hey, maybe those kinds of things
shouldn't be getting hosted by big media companies like YouTube and Facebook.
That just makes them seem legitimate.

With great power comes great responsibility. Right now, it seems to me
Facebook (and others) want to have the power, but not the responsibility and
that's leading us into a new era of propaganda and idiocy.

------
Animats
The parents are also suing radio talk show host Alex Jones[1], and Wolfgang
Halbig [2] for promoting this idea. There they have a case for defamation.
Here's Halbig's Facebook page.[3] But blaming Facebook seems misplaced. These
guys are on Youtube, Facebook, talk radio, and their own web sites.

[1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2018/04/17/603223968...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2018/04/17/603223968/sandy-hook-parents-sue-conspiracy-theorist-alex-
jones-over-claim-shooting-was-fa)

[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-
the...](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-39458924/conspiracy-theorist-
spreads-fake-info-about-sandy-hook-shooting)

[3]
[https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/](https://www.facebook.com/WolfgangWHalbig/)

------
lcuff
It's a complex and emotionally charged issue. A others have said, even truly
offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment. A case that went to the
Supreme Court back in 2010, Snyder vs Phelps, allowed the Westboro Baptist
church to say it's offensive things at the funeral of a slain Iraqi soldier
from the location on the sidewalk where the police instructed them to stand.

While the First Amendment protects public speech, that doesn't mean I have to
allow somebody to stand on my lawn and spew. They have to be 'in public'. An
interesting question for me is, should Facebook be considered 'in public'? Is
there an argument that it's a venue that is not public? If Mark Zuckerberg
invited everybody in America to a party at his house, he wouldn't be obligated
to tolerate speech he didn't like. And the people saying awful things have the
opportunity to say what they went in various public forums. Their own blogs,
the street corner, email. Suppressing speech in every possible forum is
clearly a violation of the First Amendment, but what if it's only suppressed
in some forums?

~~~
berbec
The first amendment prevents the government from censoring you. Facebook can
be as draconian with the ban-hammer as they want. Freedom of speech doesn't
apply to private enterprise.

------
untog
I know they didn't mean to, but Facebook dug their own grave on this as soon
as they started applying algorithms to the news feed. It started off as a
means to get people to click more, but it's now very clear that people click
on what outrages them more than anything else. And for a lot of people,
Facebook _is_ the internet - something FB worked very hard to achieve.

So I have sympathy with Facebook because I don't think these issues are easy
to solve (yes, of course, ban Infowars. It's a toxic dump. But others will be
more debatable). But they also knowingly and deliberately put themselves in
the position they occupy today. This mess is making them an obscene amount of
money, they should try harder to clean it up.

------
jrnichols
What I still don't understand about Facebook is that they're letting people
charge money for Groups, yet the same very strict content guidelines still
apply. Paying adults are unable to have "adult content" of any sort on the
site (and their definitions are _very_ broad) but hate speech, Nazi
propaganda, radical right wing extremism, and out of touch conspiracy
theorists that harass tragedy victims are allowed?

Facebook continues to confuse me.

------
thaumaturgy
I really want someone to come along who has an answer to all this. I sure
don't. Just some observations.

I think the last decades have been an unprecedented experiment in massively
scaled two-way communication. People don't really seem to know how to handle
the current stage of this experiment. It was a little easier back when it was
much smaller communities on Usenet, or even IRC, and most of the time you
recognized the same names and could work things out like everyone had got
together for a slightly uncomfortable family dinner.

But it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for quite a while. The scale and
speed of things is just hard to fathom now, and we really aren't equipped for
it.

Facebook has shared some responsibility in ethnic atrocities [1] [2] [3].
Different groups are now exploiting Facebook's advertising platform to stir up
more social unrest [4]. Facebook isn't the only source of trouble; Reddit and
other sites are radicalizing youth [5] and struggling with self-policing their
most toxic bits [6].

Everyone's concerned about the loss of free speech. I'm pretty far left
politically, I get it. It's a big step, maybe the last, towards tyranny. I've
been opposed to forcing websites to police copyrighted content (DMCA, SOPA,
PIPA). I've been a little less opposed to forcing them to police sexually
exploitative content (FOSTA and SESTA -- although I don't love the execution
of it).

For people on the political left, who tend to both support free speech and
recognize the danger of unregulated firearms, it might be time to take a more
careful look at the damage done by massive social networks and ask: what makes
this different from gun control?

And is there any way to effectively reduce the spread of misinformation,
radicalization of people, and incitement of violence on massive social
platforms, without suffocating the free exchange of ideas?

[1]:
[https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/04/21/tinderbox-
countries-facebook-becomes-match/HK9BykGEbbnpnvWWwS32tJ/story.html)

[2]: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-
faceb...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-
hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis)

[3]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-
facebook...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook/u-n-
investigators-cite-facebook-role-in-myanmar-crisis-idUSKCN1GO2PN)

[4]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-
of-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-divisive-
facebook-ads-bought-by-suspicious-groups-study-idUSKBN1HN2KV)

[5]: [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-
amer...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-
nazis-628023/)

[6]: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-
the...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-
to-detoxify-the-internet)

~~~
berbec
Excellent points. I'll just take a small bit of one.

> what makes this different from gun control?

In my mind, nothing. Gun control and speech restrictions should be applied
with great care, but when there is something that threatens someone, steps
need to be taken.

I don't really mind that much if you have an assault rifle in your house. You
talking in your living room about Sandy Hook conspiracies is deplorable, but
not generally harmful.

If you take to Facebook and start trying to find these parents, get their
addresses, where they work, license plates and spread them around, that's a
different story. We need to have restrictions on intent to harm. Same as when
that assault rifle gets loaded with the intent to shoot people.

------
atonse
I’m expecting some downvotes for this view but in general, Silicon Valley
seems to have confused itself on what exactly the first amendment is. That it
prevents the GOVERNMENT from stopping you from expressing your views. But even
in that case, harassment and abuse isn’t protected speech.

But somehow since they’re confused they seem to be perfectly fine with
allowing hate groups, abusers, and doxxers run wild on their platforms, even
though even the first amendment doesn’t protect them in real life. As part of
some collective twisted libertarian dream, these companies give this scum a
platform again and again because they profit from it, but hide behind the
ideas of libertarianism.

I hope they come to their senses sooner rather than later. IF not, I honestly
hope we start looking at changing the law to making these companies liable for
crimes committed on their platforms.

~~~
icebraining
Hate groups are certainly protected by the First Amendment; see _Snyder v
Phelps_ , for example. It's hard to find any behavior on FB that counts as
more hateful than that, and they still won 8-1.

That doesn't mean FB can't ban them, mind you, since as you rightly point out,
it's (mostly) a restriction on government, not private companies.

~~~
atonse
Their speech is protected. But death threats aren’t.

------
omegaworks
An internet history has demonstrated since Usenet: not only do moderated
spaces generate incredible value, unmoderated spaces generally devolve into
toxic cesspools as they grow. The moderators of r/AskHistorians understand
exactly how propaganda spreads and combats it with clearly-defined content
guidelines and strict enforcement for things like holocaust denialism.[1]
Sandy Hook propaganda utilizes the same mechanisms of dispersal, and it
wouldn't surprise me at all if there was a link between the sources of this
stuff.

1\. [https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-
subre...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subreddit-
banned-holocaust-deniers-and-facebook-should-too.html)

------
SirensOfTitan
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but individuals and journalists alike should
really think through the consequences of having Facebook police content more
aggressively.

Almost every time I hear someone advocate for speech policing, they mention
obviously awful speech (e.g. Nazi Germany, Sandy Hook conspiracy theories) as
an example. And I agree, that speech sucks, most of us can agree about that
because we have hindsight to educate us. In reality, speech is really murky.
From what I recall from history classes, "Nazi" ideas like Eugenics weren't
Nazi ideas, they were popular at the time everywhere, including in the US.
Anti-semitism was not Germany exclusive (and still isn't). When you find
yourself inside a society, it becomes very difficult to separate yourself from
its collective delusions. In this, it becomes dangerous for a central
authority to police speech: how to agree on which speech is acceptable (past
the generally abhorrent speech like that mentioned above) is difficult and
bound to either be abused in the worst case or best case many mistakes will be
made.

Historically, because of the issues mentioned above, I feel against most
speech policing in general theoretically. Admittedly, however, I also
demographically don't really feel the effects of hate speech, so it's easy for
me to take this emotionally distant stance.

The best solution I can come up with here is, especially online, a series of
filters: bifurcate platforms like Facebook into a feed where content is
moderated, and give users options to opt into unmoderated streams (unmoderated
to the extent the law allows).

~~~
Tehnix
I don’t think your opinion is that unpopular, I just think it often gets
drowned in opinions of those that are louder.

Personally, while I can certainly see why people don’t like to be offended,
policing speech is a slippery slope, because there is absolutely nothing
objective about what is offensive/hate speech and what is not. There is no
perfect solution for it, but I would personally take the freer of the
approaches, come at the cost it will.

Side-note: I don’t understand why anyone would downvote this. It’s articulate,
thought out, and constructive.

~~~
seventhtiger
Here's a truly unpopular opinion: there is another option.

One of the reasons bad free speech is so common on the Internet is because of
anonymity. A lot of it like death threats, inciting violence, libel, and more
are already illegal. They just cannot be enforced due to anonymity.

I would like for speech on the Internet to be just as free as off the
Internet, and have the same consequences socially and legally.

I'm in support of something like the South Korean solution. Tie online
identity to real identity.

------
GW150914
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others hand out megaphones with international
reach for free, to anyone, and they accept no responsibility for what people
do with their megaphones. Mumbling into your can of lager as you wander down
the street, covered in feces? Have a megaphone. 9 years old and alone?
Megaphone. Complete psychopath? Megaphone. Out and proud neo-Nazi? Have a
megaphone on us guys!

Then they just stand back and try to maximize engagement and total time spent
on their service, and have a ratio of moderators to users that’s so low it’s a
rounding error. It’s like having a classroom of a million people with two
grossly overworked, underpaid, and traumatized teachers trying to keep a
semblance of order. Everyone is free to speak, to be drowned out by sheer
volume of numbers and _volume_.

Plus half of students are robots who do nothing, but shout at superhuman rates
24/7.

