The article didn't mention it, but it's relevant that after the news of this broke in India, the lady in question filed multiple police complaints alleging online harassment. These complaints were targeted at anonymous Twitter accounts that had tweeted abuse at her, but also at a journalist who maintains he has never interacted with her in any capacity online or offline and simply posted a set of questions he wished to pose to his Facebook. The Committee to Protect Journalists has come out in support of that person, who has filed a counter-complaint alleging criminal intimidation.
Corruption of the political values in Indian politics, media and public in general is surprising. Religious fanatism is on the rise, earlier taboos like horse-trading of elected members is completely normal and is popularised as a master-stroke by the media.
Facebook executive who shared anti-Muslim post apologises: Report
Ankhi Das apologised to company staff for post that dubbed Muslims in India a 'degenerate community', BuzzFeed reports.
Remember this the next time HN commentators decide that Facebook should be the arbiter of truth and censor those who make "factually incorrect" statements.
There's a more reasonable middle ground where independent fact checkers take that on -- that at least has a chance to get monitary influence out of the picture
Independent fact checkers are no better than Facebook, in fact in some cases are worse. Politifact, Buzzfeed and Washington Post are all included in the program and none of those are neutral. Politifact regularly spins political "fact checks", and will nuke evidence of their false claims from the internet (including from Archive.org) when they've been caught out.
The number one problem with these fact checkers is that statements usually cannot be proven to the standard they advertise. When Trump speaks, it's usually saturated in hyperbole, exaggeration, imprecise language and metaphors. Politifact use this ambiguity to their advantage to achieve their political goals, usually by labeling a statement false because the figure was off by 2% or Politifact assumed context from a statement that was never given.
If Trump says 37% of people do X, and Politifact posts "actshually, this is FALSE because it's only 35.78%", then that adds precisely nothing and is a clarification without meaning.
In fact, Politifact regularly labels factual statements false if they think some factors behind the numbers invalidate the argument made (which is patently ridiculous, especially when you talk about statistics).
"Fact checking" is so wishy-washy, subjective and rife with politically biased grifters that nobody should be trusted with the censorious power that Facebook bestows upon these biased entities.
I have criticized Trump in internal messages at work, that doesn’t mean my employer is structurally biased against the Trump administration. Not sure this would even be the case if I was CEO. The CEO of any company votes one way or the other but that doesn’t mean the company is biased.
Overall I think FB is fucked here, they have created a problem they can’t solve. They have created a large pool of basically everyone’s thoughts at all times, and now people want very specific things removed from that pool, and nobody can agree what those things are.
Thoughts can't be removed or undone. They need to be pushed forward passed the issues. That is why free speech is so important. We need to keep talking in an educational forward-thinking manner.
The reason facebook is fucked is they are touting free speech while claiming they will control bad speech by popular demand. Except, any manipulation is censorship. There is no such thing as conditional free speech.
