
Facebook’s community standards censorship has far-reaching consequences - corywatilo
https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-standards-censorship-has-far-reaching-consequences
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jurassic
To me, this just shows why it's important to build communication channels that
you own (e.g. podcast, mailing list, etc) if you want to have unimpeded access
to your audience. Today it's a censorship thing, tomorrow it'll be somebody
deciding to erect a toll booth between you and your followers. Social
platforms should just be the cherry on top of your foundational communications
strategy.

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mlthoughts2018
How can you own any online communication channel? Your domain registrar could
decide your domain is abusive and terminate it. Your hosting platform could
decide it doesn’t like the politics of your site / business / whatever and
refuse to host it. Your advertising provider could decide it doesn’t like your
ad content and refuse to serve it. Your billboard vendor could decide to cave
to local government if there are complaints about your billboard. The local
police could push you out of a public space where you try to hand out flyers.
Your landlord could not allow you to renew your lease because they privately
don’t like your politics and just invent any outwardly permissible fake reason
for it.

We live in a world where you’re not allowed to exist unless you (publicly
profess to) believe what one of two prevailing political parties dictates is
allowable, yet at the same time we pretend like you do have free speech but
just have to live with social consequences of it.

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Causality1
An unfortunate consequence of the private-only internet. If you want to send
out newsletters about how right-handed people are scum and the cause of all
earth's problems the postal service isn't allowed to stop you. If you want to
have conference calls about how much you and your friends hate right-handed
people the phone company has to let you. It's part of the social and legal
contract that neutral carriers are not responsible for user-generated content.
The internet doesn't have that. Because YouTube has the legal ability to
censor your "Righties are Wrongies" videos the public demands that they do so,
and as non-neutral private companies they will do whatever makes them the most
profit.

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maps7
How does not one of their well paid engineers flag that this will obviously
happen when implementing these features?

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akoncius
engineers implement what they are told to do, and decisions are made in upper
management level. very likely this direction came from very high levels and
then this implementation is trickled down to relevant departments /
developers.

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maps7
I can see this happening. This is one of the biggest reasons I think product
development needs to be close to the engineers. They understand it and
understand the implications more than someone abstracted away from it. In an
ideal world the engineers would also _care_ for the product too.

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jeffdavis
All of this content control will be an interesting social experiment. I would
like to see a clear hypothesis though, and ways we can judge whether this is a
success or failure.

(I'm using the term "content control" to mean something that kind of feels
like censorship but not done with laws.)

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jfengel
Even if the made a nice clear hypothesis, they won't have a control group. So
the hypothesis would be meaningless.

Real life rarely gives you as much control as you'd like. You can't simply opt
out of making decisions; even choosing not to do anything is a decision. You
take your best guess based on your best interpretation of what knowledge
you've managed to accumulate, but many of the most important decisions you
make will always be based on insufficient information. That's true at a
personal level as well as the social level.

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jeffdavis
I agree that it couldn't be a rigorous double-blind.

But the point is to make some kind of prediction about the results a policy
will have, so that you can later reflect on what actually does happen.

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nkurz
Hopefully this is deep enough in a thread not to be in the way, but I noticed
in some other threads that you were getting pushback on your username. Could
you possibly clarify, and perhaps add something to your profile, whether that
is "My name is really Jeff Davis" or "I'm a proud Southerner" or whatever the
reason might actually be?

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pjc50
Bets on what the content was that got foliohd banned?

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raverbashing
I would recheck logs and content hosted on the website and its subdomains

Maybe one of the other users has something really out there being shared in
another subdomain

(Or it might not be a customer - but someone who found a vulnerability and is
hosting questionable content unbeknownst to him)

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analyte123
His portfolio website arguably competes with Facebook, where artists sometimes
have pages for their work. I doubt this case is a deliberate attempt to
strangle a competitor in the crib (although I'm sure this does happen), but if
Facebook were actually scared of anti-trust enforcement I think their whole
blocking process would be a little less draconian.

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ycombonator
If Hillary had won none of this would have been a problem. No claims of
“election interference”, no one would have accused Facebook of being “used to
manipulate the voters”. Life would have been happy for Facebook, Twitter and
other entities.

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drummer
It seems to me that this guy is unaware of the hundreds of other people who
get blocked on Facebook platforms daily for years now. Otherwise he'd have
already drawn the conclusion to leave all those platforms instead of begging
Facebook to care. Because they obviously don't.

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greesil
Literally anything Facebook does will have far reaching consequences. Edit:
What I mean to say is that maybe we could choose a better title.

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busterarm
That's why it should do as little as possible.

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glofish
the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you, doing as little as
possible would make cease to be Facebook

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philipov
> _the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you_

Disagree; it's to hoover up your personal information to use for advertising.

> _make cease to be_

Sounds like a great idea!

