The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive dissonance when reading this article.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".
The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.
This is the flip side of the "self-made man" narrative.
It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.
I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D
(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)
"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
These people have all set up financial constructions that will see them and their children safely into old age with the very best of medical care, pocket money to the tune of being able to just buy off the whole evening of their favourite fancy restaurant for the night for just the two of you on a whim, and owning one or two private fucking islands in perpetuity, whatever happens to their megacorps.
They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.
What they don't have is financial constructions that would leave them in nominal control when they go down that path. And they absolutely do want to stay in control, or else they would have sold a long time ago.
Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.
> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this
A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st.
The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.
The parallels between today's techbros and the plantation magnates who pushed us towards the Civil War are unnerving, when you know that history (which is why they don't teach it).
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home.
The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
I didn't even have to go read it to immediately know that it was Eric Schmidt who was the Google executive in question.
He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions.
Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example):
>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.
Well I'm sure bob mueller would know a thing or two about disinformation given how he participated in the worst hoax in recent US history.
>As director Tennant has pointed out, secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical, or radiological material
Anyways I might care more about Seth Rich "conspiracy theories" if anybody had bothered to investigate what happened to him instead of chalking it up as a "robbery gone wrong" (in which nothing of value was stolen) and calling it a day. In about six more months it will have gone unsolved for an entire decade.
The lesson, to me, is remembering company mottos like these are meaningless because corporations are fundamentally amoral. They are made of people, yes, and these people do have moral values, but the corporation as a whole doesn't. Whatever tagline, whatever "inclusivity commitment", whatever "anti-discrimination" policies, whatever "diversity makes us stronger" motto: all of those are shallow, meaningless taglines. The corporation will adopt them when it will help their business, and ditch them just as fast when it doesn't (e.g. when a powerful politician doesn't like it and can harm your business).
Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.
Pushing back for the sake of conversation: corporations are amoral, because they're containers for business activities. Those activities don't necessarily inherit that amorality, though. A business decision is made by a person, and so is a task undertaken or okayed by an employee; those can therefore be subject to measures of morality. Because people involved in a company have the capacity for moral or immoral action, it is in the company's best interest to monitor and correct behavior.
I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior.
However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline:
1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!".
2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber!
3. (election happens, government changes)
4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you!
So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did).
If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this.
Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.
The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
I don't think anyone is "mincing up unborn babies". I think you might misunderstand how abortions work in practice, but anyways.
> If you want control over your body, exercise that control to not get pregnant in the first place.
So you are of the opinion that if someone "screwed up" something, essentially made a mistake, they should have no options to correct that mistake?
What about if someone else made them pregnant without their consent? Would bodily autonomy become more important in your mind then, or same "don't get pregnant in the first place" apply, even if it's outside of their control?
> Start with the infamous account from the practitioner who boasted of her novel technique that begins with cutting the baby's vocal cords to muffle its screams
You mean the woman who lost their medical license after clearly not understanding how abortions work?
> It also says that Torres has made “public statements related to the practice of medicine which violate the high standards of honesty, diligence, prudence, and ethical integrity demanded from physicians licensed to practice in Alabama.” - https://cbn.com/news/us/abortionist-who-gloated-about-cuttin...
> I think we would be better off if people experienced the consequences of their actions
I think so too, but not everything is under your control, like pregnancy. And sometimes you try to do everything you can in terms of preventing pregnancy, yet it happens anyways, is it really compassionate to punish people who made mistakes? As a Christian (maybe you're atheist), I just cannot comprehend the lack of compassion for people and forcing them to have a unintentional pregnancy.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to have an unintentional pregnancy. What an unusual and manipulative way to frame the consequences of one's actions.
I'm not sure where you live, but most places on earth have a really shit situation wherever humans live, which is called involuntary sexual intercourse, if you haven't heard about it before, I guess consider yourself lucky. For the rest of the people who do experience that though, I feel a lot of compassion, and whatever they need and want to do to heal from that sort of trauma, should be OK, as long as they're not hurting other humans.
> Humanity was just fine for millennia
You also don't seem to grasp the long history of abortion, probably longer than even written history which is just 5000 years.
> By making abortions accessible, you make abortions necessary
Accessible or not, abortions are sometimes necessary, and sometimes the most compassionate route. If you were Christian, you might have understood, so I hope whatever degeneracy your chosen religion seems to have forced upon you, eventually lets up so you too can start to see compassion against your fellow human beings.
1. Don't pretend that rape is the reason in any significant proportion of abortions. Anyway, as I said earlier, I support abortion in such cases. This is not what we're discussing.
2. Don't pretend that historic abortion practices were anywhere close in scale and shamelessness to the very proud and public industrial slaughter that we see today. As I said earlier, if abortions came with appropriate repercussions to ensure it won't be necessary again (lifestyle counselling, community obligations, celibacy commitment or sterilisation, social restrictions, etc) then it would be far less common and far more acceptable, in my view.
3. If you actually want to convince anyone, you need to be careful with the 'compassion' angle. Assume the other person is not evil. I know it's hard, I'm struggling too (I'm sure you can see the obvious angle: someone claiming to be compassionate while facilitating the proliferation and ease of the practice of mincing up unborn babies, leaving millions of young women with terrible stains on their souls). It's not helpful.
Doesn’t the very rise and fall of trans youth identification contradict your claim? Being queer was novel and cool, and now (for many) it’s cringe. People adopt what is novel and cool and reject what is cringe, particularly as naive children.
Or, and this is gonna sound crazy, I know, it's not because it used to be novel and cool but because young people feel less safe to come out now that the trans panic has done its thing and the current administration has spent an inconceivable amount of money, time and attention painting this marginalised community in a bad light at every perceivable opportunity to do so?
Now do anorexia, bulimia, or any number of social contagions. The difference between being allowed to be who you are vs. being encouraged into a lifestyle is not easy to distinguish.
If another kid tells you that they're going to beat the daylights out of you to gain the acceptance of their peers, other kids get the message pretty fast and that message is to conform and to isolate the kid that is going to be the subject of the beating. It has nothing to do with adopting what's cool and rejecting what's cringe, unless you consider the current shift against human rights to be cool and supporting human rights to be cringe.
I can say that the data you're sharing suggests it's just as likely that the drop in numbers that your site claims started sometime between 2023 and 2024 are due to people becoming more afraid to identify as such due to Republican attempts to restrict LGBT rights and make life miserable for anyone who doesn't identify as straight
OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
If you're going to broaden the definition of grooming so absurdly to include normal things in culture you just don't like then it seems like you should allow people to conclude your intent is to diminish the seriousness of things that actually are grooming.
> OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
Irrespective of the upthread discussion, MAGA is absolutely both being racist and quite actively grooming people, particularly children, to be racist. That's fairly overt.
No, normalizing taboo behavior especially towards specific audiences has always been grooming. Grooming does not require active persuasion, but simply creating a context conducive to some intended outcome.
You are broadening this out to the point that is absurd and would excuse cracking down on almost any liberalisation, in a way that is kind of prurient.
Honestly it's rather creepy and I hope you one day consider what you are saying.
You've been misled by the recent narrowing of the term to mean specifically attempts at sexual exploitation. The term has always had a wider meaning. Google "grooming definition" if you don't believe me. I would link it but I don't see a way to.
And your pathetic attempt at shaming for daring to disagree with you is utterly transparent. Using the moral high ground as a weapon is poison to discourse.
Grooming of a person in a non-abuse setting involves deliberately changing the environment around an individual who does not yet feel they could be someone's successor or confidently exhibit the qualities or experience needed.
Again: it is an active, targeted process aimed at someone who does not necessarily know they are being changed.
Grooming has never been as broad a concept as you are talking about such that it just means changes in the moral or social landscape that some find undesirable.
It has always meant a form of targeted attention (even in the literal sense of care and attention to a specific animal). Social liberalisation you do not care for is not grooming.
Yes, an active targeted process. No, it doesn't have to be aimed at "someone". It can be aimed at creating an environment conducive to one's interested in some class of people.
Yes, intentionally targeting kids with an ideology is grooming. It is preparing them to be amenable to your ideology to increase acceptance of it in the broader culture. At least that's the most innocuous reading of it.
I would not, as a broad matter of policy, talk about "good faith" in any sentence involving a claim made by Matt Walsh, who is both a bad faith actor and a fucking liar.
You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. And there's no reputable research to back up your claims. Your religious beliefs are not enough to make something true.
As a state tends toward either communism or capitalism, it starts dictating the economy more and more, until it hits the ceiling and becomes a totally dictated war economy, where a fundamentally fascist ideology replaces previous values. At that point, war is inevitable, because a war economy requires active warfare, and war provides ample opportunies for pilfering at multiple levels, both home and abroad.
Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.
You're saying this like it's some absolute truth, that any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism, but based on the amount of states in the world that haven't automatically turned into either communistic or capitalistic hell-holes, it seems like this only happens to a small fraction of the states in the world.
You are downvoted, but correct. Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. A kind of panic-driven hyper-authoritarian capitalism that pretends unity can solve material contradictions.
> Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics.
This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.
It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.
As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
Fascism is a reaction against capitalism-the-system in much the same way (but a different direction) than communism (it is "capitalist" in that, like most systems, including pre-capitalist ones, and including most claiming to be "Communist", it has a narrow self-perpetuating class controlling society by means including control of the means of production, but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; fascist corporatism looks a lot, in practice, like the state capitalism that vanguardist "Communist" regimes tend to get stuck in.)
> but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems;
What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.
No, the defining feature of capitalism-as-a-system (as opposed to capitalism-as-a-feature of systems including those which predate capitalism-as-system) is the set and preeminence of property rights, which are very different under fascism, because fascist corporatism subordinates all interests (not least of all property interest) to central authority.
Fascist corporatism is as radically opposed to capitalism as Leninist “democratic centralism” is (and, arguably, despite the opposing rhetorical stance, in very much the same substantive direction in practice.)
Maybe we should take the definition from the mouth of an expert on fascism, Mussolini, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
This attribution leads to a truly fundamentally broken reduction of what Mussolini actually thought fascism was (though his own definition of it was largely pseudointellectual drivel).
But even then, "corporatism" doesn't mean "capitalism" at all.
Companies are not helpless dames in a fascist takeover. History has proven that the people on top of the capitalist hierarchy generally actively welcome fascist elements in government.
It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does.
The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"
I have news: this is bullshit.
This quote is literally falsely attributed to Mussolini. There is no evidence whatsoever that he said it. It's also somewhat at odds with things he did say (though most of that was pseudointellectual gibberish) and the way he ruled.
It's central to the 21st century misunderstanding of Fascism and it is the convenient misattribution that will not die. (Also what I was referring to up thread)
And what "corporatism" means, in a Fascist context, is not what western readers think it might mean. It is a term talking about collective organisation, not capitalism.
It's part of why the word "fascist" is so completely blunted to the point of uselessness in US debate.
Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year.
Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.
Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
Wouldn't the same rule applying to everyone be consistent with the censorship, if every org is subject to the same strict censorship on reproductive themes and sexual orientation ?
NSO also claimed that their Pegasus software couldn't target US or Israeli phone numbers, but we now know that isn't true, so excuse me if it's hard to take their word for anything they say publicly. Not to mention that time they claimed they weren't involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and then later we found Pegasus on the phones of his fiancée, wife, and other relatives.
Same goes for Meta, at one point it becomes blatantly obvious that you cannot trust any of their statements, because they turn out again and again to not be true.
This is not a new behavior for Facebook. Back when I was on Facebook (left in 2016) the LGBT groups I was part of kept constantly getting banned or suspended, but they never once acted on a report I sent them from people posting blatantly racists content or inciting violence.
Someone could post that all black people are stupid and were better off enslaved and Facebook would respond to a report saying it doesn't violate any policies, but someone posting a shirtless photo of themselves to an lgbt group gets it shutdown for a week.
Facebook has never had a consistent policy with what's allowed and what isn't. They haven't banned several obvious scams I've reported, but have banned a post that contains a picture of dog medicine (a blister of pills). The vague reason given was that it (could've been?) related to recreational drugs or something like this.
Nearly all of the LGBT groups that I am aware of are primarily on Discord and other, similar services for this very reason. All of the other socials exist only as on ramps to the real community. The weirdos can shout into the void all they like, but nobody's listening to or engaging with them.
This is also why I keep saying that the Discord model is the future of social media, not Facebook or Twitter. Turns out that when you can allow users to exert meaningful control over their social spaces, instead of relying on the judgment of some of the most sociopathic, self-interested and immoral people in tech, you can create actual communities.
Curious what it is about Discord you think is different enough from other social media to warrant this claim. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other, just curious.
Discord lacks the "capriciously moderated town square" that most other social media has, and this is a feature, not a bug.
Instead, it harkens back to the older era of web forums and IRC channels where communities were siloed and moderated by actual humans using moderation tools, permission abstractions, and even bot API's that are actually fit for purpose.
The key advantage that Discord has over the pre-social-media status quo is that Discord gives the ability for users to moderate their social spaces without the overhead of having to run their own forum software or intuit the arcane NickServ/ChanServ deep majick. The friction for creating a new social space is quite low, and joining one of those spaces is as simple as obtaining an invite - which can either be publicly posted or only handed out to specific users on a case by case basis.
Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are antithetical to this - they want you to throw you in the deep end and get hooked by engagement-bait. Reddit was probably the closest prior art, but Reddit still gamified engagement using voting, kept the walls between subreddits very thin, and refused to give moderators adequate tools to properly moderate their subreddits. As time has gone on, further changes to Reddit's structure and userbase have turned moderators from being community curators to doing free janitorial work for a tech company.
FWIW, this seems to be consistent across political lines.
I've been part of several gun rights groups on Facebook, both for political advocacy and plan information sharing, that have been banned without warning. Meanwhile there are groups where nothing is ever posted that isn't for sale - I haven't seen one of those taken down for several years now, and many of them are scoped to an entire state and have tens of thousands of users.
No it is not. When I say “my husband and I”, I am asserting a fact and who I am as a gay guy and I’m not stating anything sexual.
> being US companies retain a puritanical attitude
I do not know that to be true. The US is an also a playground of very explicit pornographic online services. But everything has its place.
There is a real practical problem that is not easily solvable, and that is how to draw a reasonable line at scale across different cultures and legal frameworks. Anyone saying it is easy or clear is not a serious thinker.
They have been reporting on this trend for a considerable time. Confirmation bias is obviously a risk but I don't see any particular reason to doubt their reporting because they are reporting on organisations who do long-term tracking and saying so. Reporting what concerned and informed people say is still one of the jobs of journalism after all.
They do some data-oriented investigations with partners but their budget is very finite as an organisation.
> Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
This reads like what you’re accusing them of doing. The way you’re asking the questions communicates skepticism in favor of facebook’s official statement. Facebook’s track record on policing content is not exactly one that inspires confidence in their narrative.
The Guardian has a duty and responsibility to not create false narratives or misinformation.
I am entitled to a dose of healthy skepticism.
If I believed that Meta is suspending accounts for the mere fact that they link to abortion information or non-pornographic queer content, rather some other policy reason, then I WOULD dig deeper because apparently The Gaurdian can’t be bothered to.
However, I don’t believe that to be the case by the mere fact that there are millions of accounts active that DO link to queer content or abortion information.
I would assume some good faith on their part. Verification would be valuable, but so would timely release of information. If the reports are true, an active harm to those organizations are being done, and it would be valuable for the public to know sooner than later. If you attempt to verify the information, but it's taking more time and resources than you have to do the job quickly, releasing the information with attribution to a reputable source is the least harmful option.
> but so would timely release of information. If the reports are true, an active harm to those organizations are being done, and it would be valuable for the public to know sooner than later.
I do not believe that that is The Guardian’s goal with this reporting. If it were, wouldn’t it make more sense to list the organizations (provide actionable information), rather than spending time telling a story?
I also have a hard time seeing the harm or the size thereof without knowing more context about any of the organizations, what they do, and how much they rely or depend on Facebook to be effective.
If I were an organization that had my Facebook account suspended unfairly or unjustly, I would simply find a different way to stay in touch with others. Meta does not owe me anything
Nobody is claiming that Facebook is shutting down all accounts posting abortion info and queer content. The fact that some high-profile accounts are still online doesn't in any way invalidate the possibility that it is shutting down smaller accounts at an increased rate.
The Guardian article interviews several people whose accounts have been shut down. Are you proposing that all those people are lying, or is there perhaps the possibility of Facebook not telling the whole truth? Should you not be skeptical of Facebook's "we didn't do anything" claim as well?
What matters is the reason for them being shuttered.
I totally believe that those accounts have been shut down (without checking even one), but I do not buy that it is for the mere fact that they link to abortion info or queer content which is the framing in the article and a lot of the assumption in this discussion thread, because the counter evidence is clear and voluminous.
I get that people are passionate about topics that are important to them, but I will also say that one ought to keep a level head, even if only for one’s one emotional resilience.
I also accept that people need to vent (against corporations, rich people, government, etc.) and I try to give people the space to do so even when I think they’re wrong. At the same time, I think what is more helpful is to lean in with curiosity and not to assume you’re right.
Imagine you are a media outlet. How exactly would you verify the claim if everything you have is a link to suspended account and testimony of account owner (and Meta doesn't want to comment on details)?
To steelman the opposing view, sources from inside the company might hold a little more water.
But that's just a steelman. If I were to guess as to what is actually going on, I would suspect that it's due some sort of automated reporting system that has been successfully gamified in the case of smaller content creators, and there's simply no human oversight of these features.
That said, IMHO trying to tease out if Meta is banning these accounts out of maliciousness or depraved indifference is a distinction without a difference. At the end of the day, the buck still stops with Meta.
>What matters is the reason for them being shuttered.
So they should explain the situation rather than dropping a generic “our policies are great and this is fine.” We’ve seen them be inconsistent in their enforcement time and time again and with Zuckerberg openly kissing the Trump admin’s ring as he once again shifts course with the political winds, some of us (rightfully) think it is likely Facebook, not The Guardian, that is wrong here. Yes we need more clarification from both parties but my money is on TG.
Your skepticism is warranted but it is misdirected IMO.
> but in a world where nobody cares about the facts when spreading a story, is there still a point?
I might be an illogical optimist, but I undoubtedly believe that’s the job of journalists and newspaper editors in such a world. To FIGHT false narratives and misinformation.
I'm an optimist, myself. But, I think the system can't be fixed until the ability for individuals/influencers to spread false narratives is heavily modified. The news literally cannot keep pace with the fake news. The latter takes a fraction of the time to generate and spreads using more guerilla like techniques.. and nobody is punished at all for enabling it.
We're asking credible news sources to fit a gun fit with sticks.
Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
I think I'm getting bored with all the deflection bots and puppets on HN saying, "Don't discuss the issue in the OP's article! Look over here, instead!"
I always wonder, when it's so clear some corporate decision will cause social harm, what the story the perpetrators tell themselves is to avoid feeling guilt or responsibility.
Nobody believes themselves to be the bad guy, but many people frequently make decisions that cause harm.
This is also, not incidentally, how police and military work, with dire consequences if decision makers are not aligned with non-enforcement non-military citizen ethics.
Pretty sure many of Meta's tech workers are furious about these actions, as they were in the previous story where 404media published a number of employee comments:
WhatsApp is a fact of life in locales like Europe, India and Indonesia. There is literally no avoiding it if you want to have a job or function in society.
I don't use Meta products, and haven't for many years. But I still have a Facebook account, because a) deleting it would be a fairly rigorous process, and b) as long as I maintain the account, I have some control over the information about me that Meta maintains; if I deleted the account, they would maintain a "shadow profile" for me that I had no control over, and (for instance) any photos tagged as containing me, I would not be able to go in and untag.
> It’s even easier to delete your WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.
Unfortunately, it's not, at least for Whatsapp.
That's a part of the issue - as there is no open access federation requirement, there are messenger islands. Whatsapp for the non-tech folks, Telegram for those who either are wary of Meta, want gambling, or a service decidedly not affiliated with the American judicial sphere, Signal and Threema for the utter nerds/journalists/activists, iMessage for the Apple crowd, or the now-defunct rich bro network of Blackberry. SMS, MMS or its replacement RCS that the carriers are trying (and failing) to push, I don't even count these given how faded to irrelevance they all are. Oh, and then there are (particularly in the Asian market) all the country specific "everything in one"-apps that Musk tried and failed to convert X to.
And particularly among the non-tech folks, no way to get them to use anything but Whatsapp. Network effects are a thing, hence the EU's push to break up the walled gardens at least a tiny tiny bit, but it will take years until it's implemented.
Ok sure, delete Instagram and Facebook then. That seems easier to start, no?
But you're assuming these messaging apps are something we need and have to have and then solving backward from there.
While I certainly recognize that a society may have made the mistake of going all-in on a proprietary app in order to participate in society (whoops!), I can tell you for a fact that it's not required for any given society to function because I don't have any of these apps and just use SMS and e-mail and I am able to work, coordinate events with friends, make dinner reservations, and send funny videos. I can also vouch for the United States, specifically that such apps aren't required.
So we can clearly separate out that we don't need these apps to function as a society - we can go back to the question of morality. In the US if you are "against" Meta or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, you can just delete the apps because you don't need them.
The world has serial killers. Some people just neurologically can't feel guilt, and their entire life has been a training ground in how to appear as if they don't have this characteristic.
I share your distaste of lawyers, but please consider this: How do you feel about prison doctors who provide medical services to child murderers? Does everybody deserve medical care, as your lawyer friend thinks everybody deserves legal representation? Should the prison doctor feel any guilt for helping such horrible people?
You've specifically mentioned the topic I intentionally avoided discussing, because of the sensitive nature, but:
My genuine hope would be the other prisoners would be more successful in avoiding the need for any professional services rendered [read this as a survivor, which I am].
You cannot cure these abusers here on Earth — you have to send them somewhere else.
Aside from prizing their salary more than the guilt, if it was "so clear" it wouldn't be a controversial issue. For some in Meta they could very well think that the opposite caused social harm, either in absolute terms ("abortion is a sin/murder") or in relative terms ("has its uses, but we go too far and make it too easy"). Why the assumption those working in tech would be liberal? Thiel isn't.
The Corporate religion demands unwavering profit orientation. "Ethics" is just barely maintained right above the limits of market research. All for the betterment of man, amirite?
These people only think in terms of money. Their bank accounts will tell them if it was the right decision or not.
Someone like Zuck actively isolates themselves: from buying huge tracts of land to literally isolate themselves, building underground shelters, hiring security to keep riff-raff away, etc. They have no concept of society. They just don't see themselves living in the same world as we do.
To complete sister comments: people who go work for Meta already have their priorities in place or won't have these kind of conundrums.
A few elite people are poached, some are acquihired, but most applied to get the job. I believe if you can make it to Meta you can make it to equivalent mega companies, it's a choice.
I mean, you've got to imagine that Facebook tends to drive people who would be worried about such things away; if you had any sense of responsibility and could get another job, why would you stay? It's not like this is the first problem Facebook has had...
There's no story. You need to remember - big corporations are not your friend. They're your enemy. They don't care about you. They don't care about doing good. They care about money. They care about control. They care about their stock price. That's it.
You might ask - but what about the people who work at those corporations? And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
They are not your enemy either. They are… businesses. Whose purpose is to survive and thrive. Just because you don’t like them or what they do doesn’t make them your enemy. And, lots of very talented and smart people work there every day for their own personal reasons. No need to bash or show hatred to them.
Less of the "not liking" and more of an "are an existential threat to."
This isn't high school. This is about real people having real experiences of fear, stress, violence, and horror facilitated by deliberate cultural engineering.
If the very talented and smart people don't get that, that's a them problem.
What a sad, sad take. Do you even know what the word “enemy” means? Just because I don’t like my neighbor doesn’t make them my enemy. We are not going to war with each other, we just don’t like each other’s company. Just because I don’t like your comments on HN doesn’t mean I hate you. Good grief.
You've entered into a logical fallacy there - the parent was saying that not liking someone or what they do is a prerequisite for them becoming an enemy. They did NOT say that everyone you don't like is your enemy, which is the straw man you chose to respond to.
I disagree. If you take statement X to be "you don't like them" and Y to be "they're your enemy". Then OP said "Just because X is true, it doesn't mean Y is true". In other words, "X does not imply Y". Meneth said "yes it does". In other words, "X implies Y".
All enemies are people you dislike and / or people who do things you don't like. This does not make the opposite true, not all people you dislike or who do things you don't like are your enemy. The statement "all cats are black" does not also mean "all black things are cats".
I roughly agree with you on that (with the caveat that e.g. opposing army generals can be enemies but admire and respect each other). I disagree that Meneth was saying what you said.
But if your neighbour actively and deliberately makes your life worse then they certainly could be your enemy.
If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.
Maybe the word “enemy” is too much but if so I think describing the idea as “sad” is equally as so. Giving a corporation a pass on behaviour you consider abhorrent simply because it’s a company and not a person seems pretty sad to me.
>If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.
Why queer community will not find an alternative app?
This is the incredibly profitable contradiction Facebook lives in.
They do everything they can to become the central place for online communication and profit enormously from that. But they reject any of the responsibility that ought to come along with that, the refrain being what you're saying here: "well, you can always just go somewhere else"
Except that when online communication is as deeply siloed as it is it's extremely difficult to set up an alternative. How will people even find out about it when their entire online lives are lived on Facebook? This capture is exactly what Meta wants. Remember internet.org?
No, because then what happens when the place they move to starts censoring them as well? Then all the places start censoring them? You're basically arguing for "separate but equal", and we know how that works out. The correct move is to fight for your rights, not to assuage bigotry.
And you are arguing every business must support your agenda, and if not, they are your "enemy"? What an odd take. Again, you are free to use other means of social media to spread your message but no one is obligated to read or support it. And, that does not make them the enemy.
And by your own logic, how does censoring content actively suppress your way of life? Did someone from Meta go to your place of residence and actively threaten to harm you? Sure, maybe you don’t like the censorship, but how does that make them your enemy? Have you openly declared war on them? If you don’t like their content, simply move along.
> And by your own logic, how does censoring content actively suppress your way of life?
Because it erases our existence, which is what a substantial slice of straight society wants. Queer content and spaces are important for queer adults, because it gives us places to comfortably be ourselves without feeling subject to leering or judgement from bigots, and safety in numbers in case someone starts something. It gives us people to be among who we can talk to, form community with, and support one another. And for people just coming up, it's literally lifesaving. Numerous studies have shown that queer-leaning teens and kids are MUCH safer when they have access to safe places to explore who they are, even if they don't "turn out" that way, prevents awful, irreversible things. [1,2,3] Not to mention it can be lifesaving also when their parents are bigots themselves and they need a way out.
> Sure, maybe you don’t like the censorship, but how does that make them your enemy?
The bridge between "they suppress expressions of who I am" and "they participate in my extermination" has been proven to be quite short and easily traversed for queers many times, and for racial groups, and for religious groups too. [4]
By your definition they may not be my enemy today, but they may be in a short period of time.
> If you don’t like their content, simply move along.
This is actually great advice for people who keep trying to take down queer content.
Edit: And this is exactly what figures like Breitbart have been openly trying to do for over a decade. And it isn't just him either, you have the Family Research Council, Fox News hosts, Daily Wire personalities like Matt Walsh, and Libs of TikTok have all made careers out of normalizing queer erasure. For them, "winning the culture war" is not only their stated, in-text goal, it's a means of pushing us out of public life: sometimes just running us out of town, other times things too ugly to say aloud.
Erases your existence? Would your existence be threatened if Meta was not a company? What about the countless number of other companies who are not pushing your content? Do you feel threatened by them? Now I see why you chose the word "hate"...
No, my existence isn’t contingent on Meta existing. But when a platform with billions of users decides queer content is unwelcome, it erases us from one of the largest public squares in the world, at a time when public squares are at a premium. That’s not the same as "some random company doesn’t carry my stuff."
There's also a difference between not amplifying something and actively suppressing it. Neutral omission is one thing; deliberate censorship is another. When queer content is singled out for removal, it sends a message: you don’t belong here. That's erasure.
History shows us that erasure is rarely neutral. It's part of a continuum: silence leads to exclusion leads to violence. Pretending censorship is harmless ignores the fact that queer people have lived through this cycle many times before, and we're far from alone.
> And, lots of very talented and smart people work there every day for their own personal reasons. No need to bash or show hatred to them.
Lots of very talented and smart people work for big tobacco, Aramco, Stake (crypto gambling), Kick (streaming of crypto gambling), Purdue (made billions on manufacturing an opioid epidemic), DuPont, Shein, Nestlé, NSO group, the GEO group (private prison industry), Clearview (facial recognition at scale including for ICE) and indeed Meta.
What would be a resaonable cause to bash them, in your view, if not disliking what they do?
I don't think we should hate them or show them hatred. I don't think that if you're working at a company that's suppressing someone's way of life you're somehow above criticism or contempt.
The question is, why do you feel the need to bash them? Do you feel the need to bash the coders of YouTube because they have ads or censor content? Do you feel the need to say ugly things to your grocery store because they don’t actively have the goods you want? Are they your enemy because they hire a certain type of person?
I don't mean to be a dick, but no, the question was what is a reasonable cause to bash someone if it's not disliking what they do. I don't know if these weird Socratic replies are meant to be thoughtful but they read as dismissive and condescending.
But hey, I can also play stupid games!
> The question is, why do you feel the need to bash them?
Why do you feel the need to defend them? (I answer this question less flippantly below.)
> Do you feel the need to say ugly things to your grocery store because they don’t actively have the goods you want?
Is not stocking garbanzo beans censorship? Why do you think this is equivalent?
> Do you feel the need to bash the coders of YouTube because they have ads or censor content?
Depends what Youtube is advertising. Depends what they're censoring.
> Are they your enemy because they hire a certain type of person?
Who'd they hire?
...
There is a difference between my grocery store stocking or not stocking something and having problems with a multi-national trillion dollar company that has wedged itself itself into most people's daily lives and has a history of censoring content to curry favour with authoritarians.
I sympathize with the folks who are working there trying to change things for the better, and I sympathize with the people who are legitimately stuck for whatever reason (don't know a lot about visas to the US, but those are probably a good reason). I also think they're tough enough to take it when they dunked on, and have the reading comprehension to realize that when people are critical of Facebook employees, there's context where it absolutely makes sense. Being a Facebook employee is not an identity, it's just a job. Facebook has pivoted to censoring queer content at a time when queer people are being marginalized after years of gains. Most of my ire is directed at the executives and management, but yeah, if you work at Facebook knowing what they do, you're not getting a pass.
My replies are not meant to be dismissive and condescending - they are just frank/honest questions. No need to try to decipher a hidden message.
BTW - Meta wedged itself into most people's lives because the people let it happen. It started off well enough, but just like many companies, they adjusted their content based on the people consuming the platform. Its (Meta's) survival is based on getting views and posting ads. That's the business model. If they started showing content that appealed to a small percentage of their viewership, they would probably go out of business.
While privately owned business can put ethics before outright profit, large public companies are always bound to become assholes so yes they become de facto our enemies while also being our best friends because our pension depends on them.
Some businesses go out of their way to be awful and they deserve every ounce of scorn. Some even know they are causing harm, bury the evidence and continue.
Also, simping for these companies is such a bad look.
I dunno. I used Market Place yesterday to get a new dry erase board (new to me). And, many people use FB to communicate with friends and family. How is that working to make the world a worse place?
No idea. There was once this German guy who planted flowers in front of factories. His name was Adolf Hitler and I'm not sure why everyone hates him so much. (This is sarcastic and do you see the problem with your comment now?)
> And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I've come to strongly dislike this quote, because it's so often used on HN to decide that whoever's disagreeing with you is doing it for simple, stupid and greedy reasons, thus absolving you of the duty to think a bit about whether there might be nuance you're missing.
We all have limited cognitive budget. Keep nuance investment were there is relevancy for it makes more sense than spending it on things where it’s not going to bring any value to anyone.
You have the point of view that having publicly available queer content and abortion information is a good thing, something I generally agree with.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
Corporations aren't people, but in the end it's still people that are responsible for this crackdown on liberal content. It's someone at Facebook making these decisions, someone who is a person, we just don't know who the responsible person is.
Zuck has shown he's more interested in money/power than the well-being of other humans (the "dumb fucks"), he's cozied up to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's co-opted the religious nuts that are anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, and Zuck is more than happy to please him rather than risk prosecution and losing his money or freedom. What a model of cowardice.
Welcome to the world of antisocial personality disorders. The rationale goes:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It's called the "narcissist's prayer", it's what narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves to absolve themselves of accountability. Whatever the situation, they have an excuse as to how it's not their fault. It's like the stages of grief but for people trying to avoid consequences or guilt for their actions.
Feels a lot more like the reporter already had a problem with Meta and chose the examples most favorable to their anti-Meta slant to report in the article. Of course on HN we're all just to happy to eat it up as it aligns neatly with our little bubble. Here's some still publically available posts from Sex Talk Arabic who they directly quote in the article complaining about these shadow bans. It makes it a lot harder to trust the reporting here when these examples were so easy to find.
There is no detail at all about what caused these accounts to get suspended. The Guardian just wants us to blindly trust this leftwing propaganda group when they say it was due to political censorship rather than a consistent application of Facebook policies.
I know it's against HN rules to ask if people have read the article, but you clearly didn't read the article.
The "non-sexual nudity" example is at the bottom of the article. It's a stylized cartoon drawing of a nude man and woman with arms around each others' waists viewed from the back as they walk along a path. There is a heart strategically placed around waist level so you can't even see their whole butts.
It's about the tamest artistic depiction of nudity you can imagine, certainly something that is totally fine anywhere else on Facebook. Very clear that this is a bullshit excuse being used by Meta.
> Fatma Ibrahim, the director of the Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based platform which offers Arabic-language content on sexual and reproductive health, said that the organisation had received a message almost every week from Meta over the past year saying that its page “didn’t follow the rules” and would not be suggested to other people, based on posts related to sexuality and sexual health.
If you're getting a warning every week for a year, I would like to see the other 51 non cherry-picked examples that they didn't give to the guardian. Based on a quick look at some of their posts that are still publically available, I think Meta is completely justified in restricting visibility of some of these posts.
Indeed, how do we know they are nude if we can't see any of their parts? I mean, living in SF I've seen people walking around in public like that, wearing the most minimal covering possible.
I particular when every American blockbuster and TV show needs more girls with generous breasts and love scenes than actual plot and actors, but plain clothed girls holding hands online is nudity.
Somewhere along the way we decided that kids can't see boobs until they're 21, but should be fine watching people get murdered.
I don't have the words for it, but it seems like everyone is fine with MASSIVE violence in every piece of media. I feel like I've lost the plot somewhere.
It went off the rails with Game of Thrones. Before that hyperviolence was found mostly in horror movies, and that's fine imo, it's a specific genre. But nowadays it's in so many shows and movies.
All the american action movies we watched in the 80s and 90s with Rambo and Schwarzenegger etc were all about violence? Most American movies seem to work guns into them somehow too.
American TV has always been violent. It may have been less gory in the past, but there has always been gun fights and fist fights and violence of many kinds.
US culture imperialism. Only the US culture is right. Every other is wrong. This has been going on for 40 years with TV and then on the internet with social media.
And if you read further than the very first line...
>A message from Meta to the group dated 13 November said its page “does not follow our Community Standards on prescription drugs”, adding: “We know this is disappointing, but we want to keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone.”
>“The disabled accounts were correctly removed for violating a variety of our policies including our Human Exploitation policy,” it added.
... which is much more in-line with the idea that the actual reason is ideological positions. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the article you'll see that the "nudity" that was banned was not nudity at all. So non-nude they actually included the drawing in the Guardian article itself.
> The offending post was an artistic depiction of a naked couple, obscured by hearts.
Well, in these wonderful times we cannot exclude the possibility of entire flows being ran as just prompts, especially moderation and on an AI boo-boo having to roll back by a human. I do believe that's (much) cheaper than human moderation anyway, so it'll grow (even more).
that's a pretty heavily-worked little phrase. What is "non-explicit" nudity? That sounds to me like starting at the violation and then working backward to ensure that the people they want to be violators turn out to be violators.
Covered in the article (I realise, of course, that it is most improper to read those on this website). Stylised drawing of two humans with the naughty bits obscured based on how the picture was framed. However, that seems to have only been one account in any case and is probably not the thing to focus on.
i'm aware of the picture. i was trying to bring focus to the fact that no one has an intuitive definition of "non-explicit nudity" because these policies are kept intentionally vague so that anyone can be in violation at any time for any reason and the selectiveness with which they're enforced means that they can always be used to accomplish authoritarian goals with a fig leaf of non-authoritarian reasons for banning people.
Wow. I'm very involved in LGBTQ, sex positive and poly communities and locally and I have to say I hadn't noticed this yet. For IM we mainly use telegram, not WhatsApp, but Instagram is used the most as a social network, by far. "What's your Insta" is a standard line when you meet someone at a party. But everything is small scale and not big enough to be on the global radar.
It does mean that people will see more and more bans now when they are reported by haters. I guess it's time for a new common social media network. But which? It'll be hard to get traction for fediverse networks in such a diverse and non technical community.
I don't really understand why though. I understand they're against LGBTQ for religious reasons or something but why try to ban it? They can just like... not follow the content they don't like? The algorithm does the rest. And the content on insta is already very mild. No nudity etc.
On one hand i love that nowadays there's an alternative to giving people you just met your phone number. On the other hand, I loathe the fact that it was post-acquisition instagram that filled that gap...
Not really, instagram is a way of keeping in touch, getting notified of new events, parties etc. I also follow a lot of people doing tattoos, makeup, cosplay etc.
One of the reasons was that Instagram until about 2 years ago was pretty cool about just showing you people you follow instead of dumping unwanted algorithmic shit on you. But after the rise of tiktok they have unfortunately mirrored that. You can still switch to following in the app but it keeps switching back.
It also gives the ability to follow people without giving your phone number which is really important because most of us aren't even known by our real names.
>One of the reasons was that Instagram until about 2 years ago was pretty cool about just showing you people you follow instead of dumping unwanted algorithmic shit on you. But after the rise of tiktok they have unfortunately mirrored that. You can still switch to following in the app but it keeps switching back.
So it’s become an embarrassment within the last 2 years. Yeah, this is what I’m talking about.
Members of any social activists groups seem likely to me to be of the more forceful vocal type and abortion and "queer groups" (that seems crazy broad to me) are two categories that particularly attract people with strong feelings.
It's not surprising to me that people in those groups would get banned more than others, especially the queer one because the topic of the group is explicitly sexual and I could see their posts more often crossing the ban line.
Now if all members of those groups are getting banned, that's surprising but I doubt there's anything malicious here (unless you consider their general content policy malicious).
We're not 'activists' or so. Often conservatives claim we have a 'queer agenda' or like to turn their kids trans, but we don't care about that. We aren't organised, we just want to be as we are in society. That does include wearing pride flags but not as a means of some kind of mind control, just like an identity. The same way people wear crosses around their neck or fly national flags at their house, because they care about those things. We're not very activistic as we're all in Europe and we don't need to campaign for our rights (yet).
On insta we just want to communicate and organise parties together. Behind closed doors where were yes, we often do freaky (yet consensual) things to each other ;) But the photos will not end up on insta as we obey the policy. In fact these events have very strict no-camera rules anyway.
It's always been a bit difficult and most people create several 'backup' accounts already that people can follow in advance in case they get banned. Sometimes that's justified according to the policy, usually it's not. The moderation policies have always been a bit erratic with instagram, even worse since they fired all of their moderators last year and moved a lot of it to AI.
I'm specifically not talking about everyone in these groups. I'm talking about the vocal minority of any group that also exists in these communities.
The bans don't appear to be targeting these groups otherwise the groups would be empty. Instead, it appears that the bans are toward a subset of the groups.
My speculation is that, due to the nature of the groups (sexuality and abortion), it seems very reasonable to me to expect that the more vocal members of the groups might post content that is against Facebook guidelines.
So when you say "we", I'm not sure who you're referring to because I'm likely not talking about you.
> Sometimes that's justified according to the policy, usually it's not.
Says everyone who's ever been banned from anywhere. If people are often getting banned amd don't change their behavior, they'll probably continue to be banned on their alts, especially since alts to avoid bams are usually a banable offense itself.
Facebook's policies are probably stupid, I don't know, but they are their policies and if someone can't figure out what crosses the line after multiple bans, I think that's on them. If you don't like their policies, there are a lot of other places to go rather than creating a bunch of alta on a service that doesn't want you to do what you want to do on it.
As long as you support social media companies censoring people you don't like, you're in a weaker position arguing against their censorship of people you do like. There should be a strong social objection to all such censorship, but I don't know how we get there from here. All the justifications for censorship during Covid were corrosive, "The 1st amendment only protects you from _government_ censorship, etc."
At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
Yes. But it cuts both ways. People are complaining about content that they value, being censored by Meta; but it's of course, legal. The point is that the line should not be drawn at legal. There should be a strong impulse in society towards letting people speak, and letting other people hear, things we disagree with. So that means, letting LGBTQ+ say their piece, but it also means letting people who have "bad medical advice" blather on as well. And if you think the world is better off by censoring either of those groups, don't be surprised when they're both censored (and a lot of other people too). Once the cultural norm is suppression and censorship, there's no end of places where people will want it applied.
I agree, we should play fair and form opinions using principles more, but I think there is a caveat to that. If what you are defending actually causes a considerate amount of harm or violence then I think you need to start to think in a more nuanced way and weighting the pro and cons
There's a difference between, say, restricting posting of targeted harassing hate speech, or incorrect medical advice that can harm people, versus restricting people from posting about themselves, if it mentions things they can't change (their race, disability, sexual orientation, etc.)
Indeed, the two are so different that being in favor of the former doesn't at all weaken the argument against doing the latter.
It turns out there's a middle ground between "no content moderation" and "restrict people for discussing some innocent physiological aspect of themselves they can't change", and that middle ground can be totally ok
Just like there's a totally-ok middle ground between libertarians who oppose any regulation at all, and authoritarians who want to control literally everything
That's just another way of saying "my opinion is acceptable, and theirs isn't". The thing is, everybody draws that line in a different place. And it's just too easy to cast everything you don't like as "medical harm". It wasn't just people playing doctor who got censored for instance, it was also people just stating what decision they were making for themselves, not advocating anything for anyone else. And on the flipside, it's pretty easy for assholes on the other side to claim that they're "protecting children from medical harm (transgender operations, etc) from the LGBT community.
The only way this works, is if we become more accepting of opinions we fundamentally truly disagree with. Anything short of that, and you're always going to run into people who draw the line in a way you find harmful.
So, as an example, then, you would be ok with someone putting up billboards with your picture calling for you to be executed? I mean, you have to be accepting of an opinion you disagree with, right? Otherwise you're arguing in bad faith and showing that there is a line you feel can't or shouldn't be crossed.
The point is not to allow anything, the point is to be more tolerant that we currently are. If it's legal, we should default to being accepting of it. There are obvious extreme cases where the law gets involved, but the law should do so reluctantly, and only in cases where the vast majority of people agree. Cases where the population are split 50-50 should be hashed out in public, without those in positions of power artificially inhibiting a fair and open dialog.
It sounds, then, like you'd be okay with the example in question: a billboard saying you're mentally ill, grooming children for sexual activity, and should be executed, because that is the rhetoric we're discussing, except that it is directed towards people who are LGBT (which you may or may not be)
I believe the law should be enforced, and that the legal system should be where these issues get hashed out. And that the legal system should be very suspicious of a need for censorship; they are few and far between.
My personal take is, it's very different saying "I'm against murder", and saying "that man is a murderer". We have libel laws to protect individuals from slander, and I think that's a good thing. But I don't think there should be any prohibition on talking about policy in general.
So it should be legal and tolerated for people to loudly proclaim "all white people are racist", but not put up a billboard of some white dude, and claim he is a racist, unless you're prepared to defend that allegation in court.
It still sounds, then, like you'd be okay with the example in question: a billboard saying you're mentally ill, grooming children for sexual activity, and should be executed.
Because again, that is exactly the rhetoric we're discussing: Rhetoric which says 'X is mentally ill, grooming children for sexual activity, and should be executed'.
If it's okay to say it when X is an LGBT person, or all LGBT people, then it is also okay to say it when X is you. So why try to sue for something you are okay with?
Conversely, if it is inappropriate censorship to try to moderate such messaging when X is an LGBT person, or all LGBT people, then it is also inappropriate censorship to try to moderate such messaging when X is you.
While we're at it, maybe the billboard includes some false claims about the subject engaging in inappropriate and/or illegal behavior with children, etc.
After all, no line means no line, right? That's what the minorities in question are being subjected to, that's the sort of rhetoric we're discussing. Indeed, such a billboard would be as much about "protecting the children" as the example OP gave.
> That's just another way of saying "my opinion is acceptable, and theirs isn't".
Is it? According to who? After all, anybody can say "A is just another way of saying B" (especially if they ignore the differences), but it doesn't make it true. To wit: the differences I cited prove that there are differences.
> The only way this works, is if we become more accepting of opinions we fundamentally truly disagree with.
Historically speaking, accepting violence against minorities, and the rhetoric which fosters it, has not "worked" for the minorities.
Medical advice was quite different between nations. Doctors and chief epidemiologists gave their advice, sometimes opposite advice to others, grounded in scientific beliefs that the individual held at the time. One of the biggest controversy and debates was the effectiveness of non-N95 surgical mask against airborne virus particles. Different studies gave different results, and depending on which culture, country and professional you asked you got different medical advice. It only got more muddled when it came to outdoor vs indoor.
That is just one example. It is well known in medical research that culture has a major impact on research findings and should not be overlooked. What is correct or incorrect is not obvious in a international context, and what help people in one place can be directly harmful in an other.
> The only way this works, is if we become more accepting of opinions we fundamentally truly disagree with. Anything short of that, and you're always going to run into people who draw the line in a way you find harmful.
We've tried this. This is what lead to Florida removing the vaccine mandate, something that is going to cause real harm because people have bought into a shared delusion. This tolerance of fundamental disagreements has metastasized into people committing real harm using the power of the state rather than any sort of centrist utopia.
1. Causing real harm via people buying into a shared delusion can describe more than one conspicuous left-wing position.
1. "We've tried this [and it doesn't work]" is not a position you really want to hold. If we, all, stop trying this, things are going to look very heterosexual and very White. The current progressive zeitgeist is a direct result of the majority accepting foreign opinions of minorities.
1. Removing a mandate is not "using the power of the state", it's explicitly not using the power of the state.
> That's just another way of saying "my opinion is acceptable, and theirs isn't".
No, it's not. There are laws in several countries of what kind of things you can publish in public. Sure, the line is definitely blurry, but there are lots of cases where it's not. Of course, Meta being an American company often means that local laws have less of an effect.
This once again brings up the point that while Meta and other "single company" social networks can easily exclude you, you can't get excluded on Nostr.
It's designed in a way that that's not even a thing. Anyone can create account locally on their computer or mobile phone (even completely offline) and that's it.
If you save & store your "notes" or "posts", you can always re-broadcast them later to different "relay" servers - and this is what your app can do for you anyway.
Protip: don't use Facebook. Meta doesn't control the internet. Post whatever you like. I'm sick of people kowtowing to these platforms; people are increasingly censoring themselves, afraid to even post a picture with a word like "kill", "murder", "suicide", etc. (regardless of context) without obscuring the offending word in some way.
Looking at all this as an outsider, I'm a bit baffled at the responses. Basically, it seems to me that the vast majority of Americans want this.
And by "this" I mean that they want organizations to proactively make changes that fit with the policies of whoever is in power, even if there's no actual laws that make them do this. When Democrats ran the place, big tech was going out of their way to out-woke one another, with product announcement videos somehow starting with land acknowledgements and the likes, and now the same companies are going out of their way to out-dumb one another and this is just one of many examples.
I mean, America is a place with only two sides, and both sides are very on board with having their particular preferences and ideas enforced informally without any sort of legal framework. I think it would be useful for a lot more of the outrage to be directed at that fact.
Just.. be against all of this! This shit where legally you can do whatever the fuck you want but actually in reality you're going to get in serious trouble if you don't toe the party line, and oh by the way the party line switches every 4 years... that's no way to run a business! It's banana republic stuff.
I mean I agree that there's a difference in scale, in that censoring access to abortion advice is actively harmful and most things people felt they had to do under Biden (eg land acknowledgements, DEI trainings etc) are just cringe. But come on, don't politicize everything! It will only come to bite you back in the arse, as this episode illustrates beautifully.
When one side is actively trying to make most people miserable, poor, or dead, while the other side is trying to save people from ruining their lives (e.g. through an unwanted pregnancy), or just be proud of who they are without hurting others, the whole "both sides" argument reaaaly doesn't work. You're comparing the issues of being cringe with committing human rights violations?
It's interesting how they're so concerned with censorship now. Weren't they the ones who were all up in arms about censoring everyone with right-wing views? But now that the script has flipped, suddenly it's a problem. It's not like we didn't try to warn them that if they force open the floodgates of censorship, then it can happen to them too. Maybe, just maybe, we should all stop trying to control what other people think and say. Mind your fucking business and leave other people alone. I hope this gets resolved. I don't believe that anyone should be censored, whether they agree with my views and beliefs or not.
I think the key thing (which we used to understand but seem to have forgotten) is that restrictions (including censorship) should be based on conduct, not opinion. Someone spamming commercial links, crap flooding, posting child pornography, even constant off-topic posting etc can justifiably be censored on a platform based on their conduct. But as soon as you advocate for censoring someone purely based on an opinion then you're making it dramatically easier for someone who shares your opinion to be censored later on. Although if we're being intellectually honest, even if there hadn't been any banning of wrongthink in the past, this kind of thing might still have happened anyway given the current administration and their allies. But it's definitely made it easier.
I remember when Alex Jones (or someone of that ilk) was being "de-platformed" by Google, Facebook, etc. Not only were people cheering for it, they were denying that being banned from YouTube (for example) was censorship since "there are other video hosting platforms" (yeah, there are but also not really) and "it's only censorship when it's the government who legally restrict you from speech".
(And Alex Jones is a detestable piece of shit just in case you think I'm a fan. But to paraphrase an old saying, freedom of expression is only a principle if it applies to people you utterly despise).
I just got a seven day suspension from Reddit for reminding a commenter that freedom of speech in the US only protects you from "consequences" from the government. Reddit's claim? That I was "encouraging violence". The root post was about that woman who got fired from Cinnabon after a video of her calling customers the n-word went viral and then the alt-right donated nearly $100,000 to her.
The ban message also claimed the suspension was done without automation.
reproduction and abortion has nothing to do with fake news tho. you're lumping groups of people into a side to justify your bigoted, selfish and ignorant views.
Not just them. Anyone being slightly critical of vaccines, Russiagate, etc. Anyone warning about building this censorship apparatus. To paraphrase "Man for All Seasons," they crushed every law to get to the devil.
Now the Devil has turned, and there are no laws to protect them from it.
Who is this nebulous 'they'? The woke? The queer? Or the people in favor of abortion? The way people use 'they' in these arguments implies some level of equal power. And in this same thread in an entirely separate post you go directly to bat in favor of censorship as long as it's part of a 'content policy', which indicates that you're not actually being forthright with what you truly believe.
Right wing views like taking away rights, eliminating trans people, murdering civilians in fishing boats, extraordinary renditions of brown people without cause, ... ? Fuck you.
I hate political posts on a tech news site, especially ycombinator.
These problems will never be solved and only cause agitation on both sides.
Closing the ycombinator tab for the day.
It's not about that. It's about making the subject taboo so that people will be ashamed to talk about it.
If the religious conservatives actually cared about children's lives they'd provide free healthcare, great schooling and opportunities for them. As it stands they only care about them until they're born. Then the amount of care drops sharply especially if they happen to be of the "wrong" colour.
It's much more about suppression of women's rights than actual care about children.
We have Trump blabbering about EU censorship, but here's the US oligarch's social network doing it at his orders.
The "bastion of free speech" is exporting its censorship to other countries... If I'm an EU lawmaker, I'd honestly use this to just ban Zuckerberg's entire social media sites and get it over with
It's not an obsession, it's network effects. I say this as someone whole mostly uses Telegram and Signal and has requested friends to text me on those apps instead of Whatsapp. But most people don't want to have several apps and to have to choose which is the correct one to contact each friend. So the status quo seems to be Whatsapp for people they only have the phone number, and Instagram for the rest.
As the Democrats reminded us regularly back when they had total control of social media, freedom of speech as a legal principle only applies to government actions.
If you are lonely that might be because you are not easygoing, or you criticize people too quickly(as you just did). If you were just unusual, as everyone else is, you would have friends and wouln't feel lonely
Why should it bother me? Sex is universal, we all do it. It's certainly not information I desire to seek out, but I'm not sure why knowing what goes on would be so terrible.
I see a difference between hiding your identity and not loudly shouting about it in public. Personally, I quite enjoy recreational drugs and my close friends know that but my coworkers don't and that's fine. Why is sex so much different? am I bad for being "closeted" about my drug use?
edit: don't mean to imply being queer and using drugs are the same or anything. Just an example of "thing you personally are okay with but the wider society might judge you for"
There is an epidemic on this website of right wingers with victim mentalities who feel like they have to create a throwaway account to voice their "real" opinions. Get back to me on your main account.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
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