> Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds.
This looks like a shadowban at scale. So you share something - potentially putting yourself at risk to do so - but with the hope that others will see it. The "local partner" decides that it doesn't show up in anyone's feeds but still knows you posted it, so now you're a target.
The description of how this tool is going to work is directly at conflict with Zuckerberg's quote:
> “It’s better for Facebook to be a part of enabling conversation, even if it’s not yet the full conversation,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, according to employees.
It's not a conversation anymore if you are left blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not. Either incredibly dishonest or incredibly naive.
Sure, but until that happens you've got no idea if Facebook ever showed it to anyone (whether it was shadowbanned by evil foreigners, or they just didn't deign to stick it on anyones news feed).
Shadow-banning / hell-banning happens on HN too, but you're right that it's not a very nice way of moderating. Obviously, it's worse if it also gets you in trouble with the state. Manipulating people's view of the world is pretty dishonest in any case though.
I'm sure China would love to hide posts that mention 'Fatty Kim the Third' [0]. If you control the discourse then you can control what people think. We've seen this in both the UK and US recently. Russia have an agency dedicated to false information with sockpuppet accounts on social media [1] and the US has done related activities [2]. I'm sure other countries and interest groups have similar institutions. If you have an official integrated tool to do this work then it becomes so much easier. Worrying times.
> Shadow-banning / hell-banning happens on HN too, but you're right that it's not a very nice way of moderating.
It's literally the worst way of moderating (short of serving the banned user destructive/malicious code). HN is wrong when they do it, too.
Fortunately we got some new mods a while back, they're very good, and nowhere near as trigger-happy with the hell-bans as before. And still, it's wrong, vindictive and dishonest, and if you're clever just as easily circumvented as regular bans, which would be the right option (otherwise I'd like to hear the argument why non-clever people should be punished more harshly).
Should an online community or its hosts have a say in shaping their community? If not, why not? If so, how should that be done? Why is shadow/hell banning in particular bad? I haven't seen a lot of discussions with reasons: just that it's bad. If you know of some, feel free to provide a link rather than duplicate it here.
It doesn't punish people intentionally trolling because they know to just create a new account. It just punishes people with unpopular opinions who are honestly trying to participate in the community.
From what I've seen on HN, those that have been banned have been warned, and it's been for either incivility or posting mostly unsubstantive/inflammatory posts. Which seems reasonable to me. Have you seen something different? Or have a different take?
Yes, an account with thousands of karma can be permanently shadowbanned by triggering a mod. The problem is that the line between unpopular opinion and inflammatory can be completely subjective in many cases.
This site implies that comments should be analyzed rationally, but comments from shadowbanned accounts do not get this treatment. It's the equivalent of claiming someone will be allowed to take place in a televised event but then secretly cutting all of their responses out of the broadcast.
Shadow banning is anti-intellectual behavior because it's essentially a systematic ad hominem.
Agreed that the line between unpopular and inflammatory can be a matter of perspective.
Regarding shadowbanned accounts not getting the same treatment: are you saying they weren't warned beforehand? Or not treated fairly before the banning? How long should those who have contributed negatively (wrt community standards) tolerated? Those who keep showdead and have enough karma can and do vouch for substantive and civil comments from shadowbanned accounts. Btw, are there particular instances you have in mind that you can point to? I've been following sctb and dang for the past month or so to see how they interact with the site and don't recall seeing anything grievious about their banning decisions.
I completely agree that there's some tension between an policing a community forum and perceptions of anti-
intellectual behavior, which motivated the additional questions in my previous comment. Would you mind weighing in on those? (And I'm not saying shadowbanning is the only tool they can use. Perhaps only voting and flagging should be used? I'm not sure if that's enough.)
Thanks! (Please pardon any lack of proper editing or phrasing. I'm on my phone and having issues with commenting.)
>Regarding shadowbanned accounts not getting the same treatment: are you saying they weren't warned beforehand? Or not treated fairly before the banning?
Their comments are not allowed to be judged based on the merit of their content. They are pre-filtered by a moderator's decision that anything generated by that person is not fit for human conversation. Every other account, including brand new ones, can create a comment and have it seen by everyone.
They may have been warned, etc, but I'm saying the shadowban itself is garbage, not the conditions under which it is administered.
>How long should those who have contributed negatively (wrt community standards) tolerated?
Downvote/flag individual negative comments, that's what we have the system for. If someone truly wants to contribute negatively, a shadowban is a joke because they can create new accounts.
As I understand it and have observed, users are shadowbanned because they've shown that they sometimes act in ways that are detrimental to the community as a whole. By continuing to act that way, they've accepted that they might be banned. Users can also appeal the ban by contacting the mods by email.
I leave showdead on and have vouched for comments of banned users. I've also seen users continue to spew vitriol after they know they are banned. Is the type of user that would pointlessly continue to contribute negatively in this fashion have on balance a positive impact on the community? Arguing that they're behaving this way because they've been banned shows that they don't have the maturity to recognize that their behavior continues to reflect badly on them. It's not going to change the fact that they're banned.
You're right that if you're a determined troll, you can get around a shadowbox. From what I've seen, banning has been on balance effective to deal with uncivil behavior. Creating a new account does add some cost to the ban. Relying only on down votes puts the cost entirely on the community at large at no cost to the user behaving badly. Do you think it's fair to the community to bear the cost of the user's behavior?
Do you have any other ideas on how to effectively shape community behavior, preferably ones that move the cost from the community to the user behaving badly? I'm honestly interested, because I've seen enough complaints about banning that I'd like to hear about alternatives that would considered fair and still be effective.
It would be great if everyone would contribute in a positive, or at least civil, way. In larger online communities it's much easier for users who contribute negatively to destroy a community where positive users no longer want to participate. Each community has its own standards and cultures (and what's considered good and bad behavior), which is great! So far, I think it's pretty remarkable that HN has been able to maintain the community it has in comparison to other online communities of similar users.
>From what I've seen, banning has been on balance effective to deal with uncivil behavio
Based on what evidence? Are you able to see the IP addresses of new accounts to correlate them with shadowbanned accounts? All we can see as outsiders is that shadowbanned accounts mostly stop posting, but we can't tell how many immediately signed up for a new account and started trolling again.
All we can see as outsiders is that shadowbanned accounts mostly stop posting
You're right. And this itself is evidence that banning is effective. It's not effective because they can't create new accounts (which they can); it's effective because they generally stop posting.
In addition,
- I haven't seen users obviously thumbing their noses at the mods with respect to the ineffectiveness of banning;
- I haven't seen the mods using or discussing any other methods stronger than banning to combat trolls, which I think they would if banning wasn't effective.
On the flip side, what evidence is there that banning isn't effective?
I've been a little frustrated by your lack of answers to some pertinent questions I've asked:
- Do you have particular examples where the mods haven't been fair?
- Do you have any other ideas as to how to fairly and effectively shape community behavior?
Beyond his somewhat hyperbolic list of "fake news" criteria, he's not wrong (although he's being a bit indelicate). Not sure why you would immediately assume his comment was in bad faith.
This sort of comment actually vindicates my stand. Whatever I said was sarcastic, perfectly civil and closer to facts yet (what I believe to be) a reasonable person like you downvoted, flagged and attributed motives.
Can we be sure that we aren't already shadowbanned even in the western world? An AI driven news feed and timeline is practically an intelligent shadowban.
"Your post about your cat is not as revenue-relevant as a fake story about Clinton/Trump. Bam, you are banned!"
Regardless of how much traction our posts get, or don't, the thing we can be still be reasonably sure about in the US and most of the western world is that we won't be kidnapped, caged, tortured, or killed for whatever sociopolitical commentary we post on Facebook.
Facebook's collaboration with a regime where none of that is true is a disgusting low point, even for that company.
I would point to the word "still". If something can be used against you, it will sooner or later be used against you. I hope we won't live long enough to see this coming true.
That is some very extreme words you are using. I would caution you not to use those words lightly unless you are absolutely sure they are backed up with facts.
Nope. Assuming what you asserted later are indeed facts, they only covers 50% of what you claimed in the original sentence. Still half of what you claimed is not grounded on facts.
Yes. I know many of my facebook friends in real life and see them on a daily basis. While it is possible to filter some of the things they say, in no way could they censor all of them, or completely make them up.
Facebook gives you the option of turning off the AI filtering and just getting a strictly time-ordered feed. (I tried it for a while but it was just less useful than the default feed).
At least I can be sure that I am not already shadowbanned because fuck you facebook. I am not interested in an AI feeding my ego with confirmation and protecting it from confrontation.
Hellbanning has always been evil. When you interact with a public computer, there is a trust that is established. When you click a vote button, you expect a vote to be counted. When you press the elevator close-door button, you expect the door to close. When you make a public comment, you expect you are making a public comment.
To, well fuck with people in this manner is evil -- I do not care what your reasons are, how many people are on your site, the incidence of mental illness in the general population, and so on. There are other remedies aside from using technology to lie to and manipulate people.
If it hasn't become clear by now, it should be: the major internet players are interested in only one thing: to keep being the major internet players. That doesn't make them bad or evil -- sometimes good people do evil things. It makes the rest of us realize we have a rather immediate obligation: fix this or be conquered by it.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, so at the risk of looking foolish, I'll just say, pressing the door close button on an elevator almost always does nothing. In most elevators it's not even connected to anything behind the panel. It's there to make you feel like you can effect the situation without letting you do so, which I think is the exact opposite of your point.
Where do you live? In my country, the close button almost always closes the elevator doors faster. Measurably faster, not a subjective milliseconds faster, but full seconds faster (so noticeable, in fact, that it drives me nuts when other people don't push it and also involuntarily block me from doing so). When the button doesn't work, it's acknowledged to be broken.
For pedestrians: In my city I have yet to find a bogus one. They are there to control traffic flow. You press it, you get a green light. You don't, you can die waiting.
It's there to allow the priority traffic to be interrupted only if necessary.
I believe I heard something like "press a button for a faster signal", but that doesn't make any sense at all.
Municipalities want to control the traffic in the most efficient way. Not to give any troll a button to break things.
However there are several places where there are e.g. sensors to allow for a favourable signal for drivers. But then again that is mostly in places where they would wait for a green light for a long time.
The theory and practice in the transportation field is quite interesting.
> I support Mark on that: it's better to have limited Facebook in China than not to have Facebook in China at all.
Better for whom?
For humanity in general, don't you fear giving people the illusion of a free platform for speaking is worst than not faking anything at all and thus encourage truly free platforms to emerge out of people's frustration?
And for Facebook's own interests, don't you fear Facebook applying even more censoring in some parts of the world is going to affect its image world-wide?
What's to say basic journalism isn't political? What about highlighting a massacre (inadvertently)? What about random abuses of power where the perpetrator happens to be related to powerful elite?
Hint: you don't know. I'm not sure I'd use it for my distant relatives who live in China.
There is something to it. When I saw your comment it was 4 min old and already [dead]. Just like most of your other comments, no matter what topic they touch.
A censored [favorite service] with state surveillance is better than no [favorite service] is the new normal. Really?
It's kind of depressing to see where the world is going,, where the world bends to the will of state actors eventually. Given a long enough timeframe any draconian law can be made the new normal and I think that is what is happening.
It's also sad to see the internet become a tool to control entire populations and have them see and experience the world in a way that is convenient for state actors. And every effort to circumvent state control gets regulated before going mainstream. Eg- Look at Bitcoin, the calls for KYC norms, asking customer data. Another example is Tor, numerous attempts to unmask users.
> A censored [favorite service] with state surveillance is better than no [favorite service] is the new normal. Really?
This is nothing new, it's been going on for a very long time in China and not part of some new global trend. Also, I do think that in China, a "censored [favorite service] with state surveillance is better than no [favorite service]" and so do nearly all the Chinese. Otherwise, by reductio ad absurdum, you'd be forced to conclude that China would be better off without the Internet. This has nothing to do with endorsing censorship/surveillance by the way.
Honestly, living in China, this might just be more convenient. It's not like my newsfeed is a particularly great source of news, I mostly use FB to keep in touch with friends abroad.
Chinese revolutionaries already know how to circumvent these things on Chinese messaging platforms. They'll just come up with a new set of codewords.
China's isolation is the responsibility of its government. Chinese citizens should expect their government to change to allow them access to foreign resources. They should not demand that foreign companies change for China, as China's rules are diametrically opposed to the essential values of other countries.
There's a lot of 'should's there. Whether China should or should not demand foreign companies change for China is irrelevant. China does demand it... And foreign companies do change.
They should be smarter and do like our governments in the "West" do, just brainwash their own citizens enough so they don't even care for external content/data.
You've got it a bit backwards, the state is in control, always has been; the world isn't going that way, it's been that way. The Internet is not immune to laws or nations.
> And every effort to circumvent state control gets regulated before going mainstream.
So efforts to break laws are circumvented by the state who's laws are being broken, hardly surprising or unusual. This is what's expected to happen.
The people in China do not really have a choice. Those that disagree or hold a contrary opinion disappear, are held under house arrest, or go on a show trial. Even if you agree 100% with the State but you have a faith or a belief system then you are harassed.
Every tool that accelerates information acquisition will accelerate state policy, even if that includes censorship. That the internet is being used for this isn't new - this year alone in Turkey President Erdogan encouraged masses to suppress the attempted coup.
If you pick out any (one/many)-to-(one/many) broadcasting technology, and I'll point you to a historical atrocity that used it.
>It's kind of depressing to see where the world is going,, where the world bends to the will of state actors eventually. Given a long enough timeframe any draconian law can be made the new normal and I think that is what is happening.
>It's also sad to see the internet become a tool to control entire populations and have them see and experience the world in a way that is convenient for state actors. And every effort to circumvent state control gets regulated before going mainstream. Eg- Look at Bitcoin, the calls for KYC norms, asking customer data. Another example is Tor, numerous attempts to unmask users.
I agree, and I have a question. What do you tell people when you don't use Facebook? I don't feel like supporting this, but is there a good way to sum this up for people that are non-informed (shit does that sound pretentious? Trying to think of a better way to put it. I think most people would not approve of Facebook and this associated trend you discuss, if they knew more about it)?
> What do you tell people when you don't use Facebook?
There are so many options.
* It's not 2006 anymore.
* That whole privacy thing, never can tell what they're doing with your data.
* I was creeped out when I saw a friend's face endorsing a product on a third party website thanks to FB. I couldn't be sure what my face was selling, so I dropped out.
* It's just gated internet, like AOL all over again. (Hat tip, Cringely.)
* People get addicted to FB, it's good to cut loose and experience the offline world every now and again, force real interactions.
* I think X social network is better.
* I'm a hipster / It's too popular.
* All my best friends use X instead.
* My whole family is on it.
* My whole family is not on it.
* Kept having fights with relatives.
* Spent too much time on it.
* Someone stole/hacked/forged my account once, it was a big hassle, so I've just stayed away.
* I stand with Native Americans / LGBT users / victims of abuse in protest of FB's true name policy.
* Facebook banned me after I [insert amusing story here].
I was on a first date and my date asked if I had a facebook. I said no (I didn't) and we she asked why. I said, "because I could give a shit less" (or something equally as cool).
She said it was "creepy" that I didn't have one and that I must be hiding something.
SMH. I was hiding something, my privacy.
Now I use facebook and I'm a dopamine junkie looping hamster.
* Makes people depressed
* Got caught performing unethical experiments on users a few years ago, monitoring how different news feed items changed their mood and emotional state
Native Americans have been repeatedly removed from the service without warning. Requesting explanation, they are typically informed that their actual name is obviously fake.
>What do you tell people when you don't use Facebook?
Never needed to say more than "I just don't". People in my circle seem to understand.
Note: My account is only deactivated, because I have commitment issues, but other than checking in once in the last 18 months, I haven't really been able to convince myself to get back on FB.
What is social media ? Best option relative to what ?
Without any details, I'd say the best social media option is going out with friends for a walk or a chat or alternatively traveling on your own in a foreign country for an extended period of time.
"It’s better for Facebook to be a part of enabling conversation, even if it's not yet the full conversation," Mr. Zuckerberg said, according to employees.
Larry Page (or, Eric Schmidt?) made a similar comment, before Google closed China office after Chinese officials were found to be monitoring dissidents through their internal tools, that censored Google is better than no Google.
> Larry Page (or, Eric Schmidt?) made a similar comment, before Google closed China office
For the record, I agreed with Google that a censored Google was better than no Google, and one of my biggest frustrations at the time was that sanctimonious Americans seemed to think they knew better than me, someone who would actually lose access to Google if they pulled out of China.
Google would tell me if search results were censored, and wouldn't shut down my internet for a few hours if I accidentally typed the wrong thing, which was much much better than anything else I had access to.
Then Google did pull out of China and it did suck and meanwhile Americans celebrated it because it didn't affect them at all. Ugh.
> after Chinese officials were found to be monitoring dissidents through their internal tools
Google pulled out of China because Gmail got hacked and Google assumed the hackers were affiliated with the Chinese government. I think the evidence pointed in that direction but wasn't conclusive, but either way, I haven't heard anything about monitoring dissidents through internal tools.
Anyway, I feel the same way about Facebook. It'd be nice to be able to access Facebook and talk to my friends while in China, and having censored communication is better than nothing.
As an American who was living in china at the time, yes, it was inconvenient, but at the same time I think they made the right stand. You can already get a western harmonious search engine in Bing, anyways, and I preferred google's course of action to Microsoft's (my employer at the time).
I don't think American companies have morally good reason to be complicit in Chinese censorship, but I understand why they play along, even if I personally don't agree.
Ignoring the whole hacking incident, does Google pulling out of China actually improve the world in some way?
I think "giving customers as much of what they want as possible" is a morally good reason. On the other hand, I don't see any morally good reason for them to pull out of China, other than holier-than-thou moralizing?
I improves the situation by letting china know that some American companies, at least, won't silently roll over and let the Chinese gov trample on any rights they want. And ya, I wish these stands would be made more often against the US government as well, but then we are comparing first world to third world problems.
They made a reasonable call. It was said that Sergey Brin's first hand experience with oppressive authoritarian governments played a major role in their decision.
> I improves the situation by letting china know that some American companies, at least, won't silently roll over and let the Chinese gov trample on any rights they want
Devil's advocate: how is that a material improvement besides making some people feel good? China wins (homegrown brands like Baidu), Google loses a market, Chinese Google users lose a search engine.
Taking a stand is useful. Before this happened, the whole world thought everything was "kind of ok" in China, and then Google just left, hinting at how the system was not well, the Chinese leadership lost serious face in the incident, rightfully so. And in China, face is almost everything.
But the fact is China or Chinese Government didn't lose anything. Meanwhile, after that they didn't stop blocking/censoring foreign websites. Meanwhile, there are lots of rumors Google want to return back to Chinese market by different ways.
The Chinese government DID lose a lot in that incident, basically a lot of the goodwill they built up during the olympics, a good image in the west that basically disappeared over night. "Western Media Bias" wasn't really a thing between 2007 and 2010-11.
China can block all the websites they want, the damage they do to their local internet industry is probably irreversible: they are unable to compete in even next door markets like Myanmar and Cambodia! On the one hand, they block the big western internet companies out of china, on the other hand, they give up the rest of the world. From the west's perspective, it is a reasonable tradeoff.
Google IS mobile, even in China, Android is a big thing. I heard they want back in mobile; e.g. Android Play Store, they don't care about search in China, it isn't where the future is for that market anyways.
> China can block all the websites they want, the damage they do to their local internet industry is probably irreversible
I'll need you to explain that to me slowly, because I can't wrap my head around your reasoning. Blocking foreign websites is the best thing China did for its internet industry: Blocking Twitter helps Weibo, Google exiting helped Baidu, and so on. Not having to compete with western companies on home turf can hardly be called "damage".
> From the west's perspective, it is a reasonable tradeoff.
A lot of western companies have effectively saturated the market in the west, the only room left to grow is in China, and so they pander.
They don't know how to compete with foreigners = they don't know how to compete outside of China - it is quite simple.
> A lot of western companies have effectively saturated the market in the west, the only room left to grow is in China, and so they pander.
That isn't true! They are eating the rest of Asia as we speak. Myanmar just opened up, and already Google/Facebook dominate its market. Not a WeChat to be seen. They are completely winning the east that isn't China. The same will happen in Africa when it gets to that point. Chinese Internet companies simply cannot compete outside of their home market without competitive pressure.
China is only 1.3 billion people out of a world of 7 billion. That China currently says our 1.3 billion are off limits is fine as they basically forgo 5.7.
Google is a public, profit making company. Can't really believe the "Do no evil" mantra. It was a financial decision to pull out. They were losing ground to Baidu and this allowed them to save face.
It's like how Google shuts down every other product - it's not making profit.
Even if they stayed, they wouldn't have been allowed to win or are much business there. Baidu was the sanctioned champion, and had huge unfair advantages given them by the government (e.g. They were allowed to index lots of porn).
It wasn't really a net loss given what we know today about China's protective policies.
> Google pulled out of China because Gmail got hacked and Google assumed the hackers were affiliated with the Chinese government.
Then it seems pulling out was the right move. If Chinese citizens trusted that Google could secure their communications, and Google was then unable to, that put certain citizens at risk of persecution. Better to have them using a Chinese email provider where the default assumption is that everything is monitored, and then use the proper tools for actual private communication.
By this logic, should they pull out of the US too because Google (and Facebook both) has been completely pwned by the US government? Not meaning to be snide.
Gmail was never hosted in china. When Google pulled out, it meant shitting down the china local search engine, with the one through HK eventually being blocked. Gmail wasn't even blocked in china until a couple of years ago.
It knew the hackers where the Chinese government. And they where.
What other highly skilled state sponsored attackers would break into Google China to steal information about people the Chinese government deemed dissidents?
It'd be nice to be able to access Facebook and talk to my friends while in China, and having censored communication is better than nothing.
Thanks very much for sharing your perspective.
My concern is that -- if we don't draw the line somewhere -- the U.S. will (continue to) become more like China in this regard, over time. A state of affairs which I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg will be perfectly willing to accomodate, and work with.
Well, that was way back in I think around 2005? So I don't remember it too clearly. But I remember a few times where I suddenly lost internet and the people around me said "oh, you probably tried to go to a site you're not allowed to, it'll come back in an hourish."
I haven't had that experience more recently, but I think that's partially because HTTPS is everywhere these days and partially because I use VPNs a lot more because I do need that Google/Facebook access.
It would basically put you in a penalty box if you searched for the wrong thing, with your internet not working very well for a couple of minutes. I'm not sure how they did it, but it was a real thing.
It doesn't really happen very much anymore, but mainly because most sites moved to https and can only be blocked completely ATM.
Yahoo closed their Beijing office but Google never did it. Google has 100+ engineers in Beijing and Shanghai. Google also has a lot of servers in Beijing, to serve dl.google.com etc.
Note, google didn't close down their office, they just shutdown operations. There were and are still engineers and sales people employed in china, and specifically the wudaokou headquarters.
This is sophistry. If I have a business, I can say "shirts and shoes required". We have laws about protected classes that are vulnerable to discrimination as exceptions, but on _my private property_ I can - within proscribed legal limits - dictate acceptable behavior, and ask people not adhering to those rules to leave.
You can dress it up, but Facebook is a private website. They do fancy stuff with information they collect about you and use it to sell you ads. They have terms of service that define acceptable behavior, and they have no SLA / guarantee about what you share reaching others or what others share reaching you. That is the deal.
If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals.
Now, what the article described, "Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds." <- This is completely censorship. Governments censor.
Facebook saying it doesn't want a bunch of Macedonian fake news click bait stories crapping up it's platform is a business decision by a private company.
>Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.
How does this not fit under said definition? Whether or not the act is done by a "public" or a "private" entity is irrelevant to the definition.
Many will say that "free speech" is a negative right, and as such it only means anything in the context of governments: in other words, it is something the government cannot take from you.
Government can use force (the very real threat of jail, fines, etc) against you to suppress your speech. All Facebook can really do is prevent you from using their site, in the end. Naturally, if they work with a government, Facebook becomes a kind of arm of the government, but that's a separate context (but it is also what this article is about).
>Government can use force (the very real threat of jail, fines, etc) against you to suppress your speech.
Is free speech a thing worth keeping or not? If it is, than anything that realistically threatens it on a global scale needs to be kept in check.
Now, let's not pretend that the only way to suppress speech is to use violence. Governments have a long history of using much subtler and sometimes more efficient tactics like blacklisting. For example, in Soviet Union many "inconvenient" people were free to live as they chose, except they had no chance in hell of getting decent housing or a good job, and were ostracized by many out of fear of "political contagion".
So it's not about violence. It's about power. And companies like Google and Facebook have "soft" power rivaling many nation-states.
I wasn't aware that Google or Facebook were required services. You can easily make the choice to use a different email or search provider, and can opt-out of social media. On the other hand, I am not aware of a way in which I can similarly opt-out of what the government of my country does, or even being forced to pay for what they're doing.
There are concerns that I have about the level with which some of these companies cooperate with state actors, especially when we're unaware of it. When these companies become partners of government in secret, the state security apparatus is accordingly expanded in ways that do threaten us.
Does that mean if I'm the editor of a newspaper I'm required to publish every letter to the editor I receive? Even if it's inarticulate neo-Nazi barf?
Censorship is something the government does. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private entities. Private entities are not obliged to provide a platform for whatever opinion you feel like spewing.
This topic has devolved into ridiculous flamewars.
It's sophistry because under your definition it is impossible for Facebook to apply any form of control over the content on their platform, which they are clearly entitled to do.
Your definition (accepting for a moment the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia article on censorship as a "definition") can be logically reduced to, "Suppression of information which may be objectionable by a group". That, for instance, describes HN comment and article moderation. It is so overly broad as to be able to describe practically anything.
When companies have wide-ranging impacts on real-world events (governments, economies, land use, etc) they tend to get regulated. I would be shocked if the large tech co's weren't subject to increased regulation 10y from now.
I still don't really see your point. OP is saying that they are censoring. Yes, they are legally allowed to censor whatever they want on their site. But it's still censorship. Just because they are allowed to do it doesn't make it not censorship. And it can still be morally and ethically wrong, but legal.
> If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals.
No one in their right mind thinks Facebook policy's are their rights. Facebook can openly start censoring news if it wants to. I view Breitbart as a publication that actively censors leftist news and NYT as publication that censors libertarian news. They are both good businesses but albeit far tinier than Facebook.
The moment facebook starts "dealing with fake news" I am going sell off my FB shares. Just like I sold my twitter shares long back once they banned account of my favourite blogger for criticizing Islam.
I think you've lost the thread with you NYT and Brietbart examples. These companies are publishers, and since when is publishing censorship? This makes as little sense as saying Comedy Central censors dramas because they choose not to show dramas.
> Comedy Central censors dramas because they choose not to show dramas.
Yes that is my point. It is indeed and absurd way to look at it yet the underlying principle is the same i.e. a business selecting only specific type of things to show because it makes profits for them. Facebook can use the exact same principle to deny their platform to some group of news just because it reduces their profits.
Facebook is a different beast than The NYT and Breitbart, and to a lesser extent Comedy Central. The later are creators of original content. Facebook is not.
I take a very dim view of saying that a creator of original content is censor by simply choosing not to create something. Censorship inherently is a veto over someone else's work. Facebook, because it is the middle man between the creator and the audience, is in a position to censor.
You can think that this is bad to expell people that way from social interactions with others. That it is bad for a minority to decide the news a majority should have easy access to.
And therefore, you could decide as a society that you want to forbid Facebook to do that.
It assumes you are in a democracy. China obviously is not. But if you're lucky to live in one, then you don't have to accept what Facebook does, at least in your country, because they are a private company.
When you run a global communication platform, you should be held to a higher standard.
Communication platforms are an oligopoly. When they each have censorship baked in the cake, the free-market-user-choice argument doesn't hold up very well.
The government wouldn't do it. A private company, perhaps even a Facebook-owned subsidiary or a partner, would do it, according to the government's guidelines. Does that make it not censorship?
I wouldn't be so quick to throw around that term. The reason many, including myself, dislike the term censorship as applied to private entities is because it equivocates the threat between censors.
If Facebook prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I simply post it elsewhere and distribute it there.
If the government prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I have no outlet for it that does not come with the threat of violence, in the form of jail.
Very different outcomes.
At the point in which Facebook = Government in terms of state monopolized communications channel with government enforcement mechanisms then this definition would fit. It is however, despite it's popularity, nowhere near that nor reasonably possible.
While it's true, that jail is the extreme on the coercion scale, it's the lack of options and the vast difference in ramifications that is the real point between censorship and private discrimination.
The PRC uses many methods to suppress other opinion and among the tools they have and use is jail/prison, so, despite having sophisticated as well as cruder alternatives, there comes a time when dissidents use all manners of dissemination at their disposal to counteract and the state resorts to jail, show trials, etc.
There is currently a subset of the internet talking about how the Earth is flat. While that may seem to be "misinformation" to you or I, why is it "wrong" for it to be shared/discussed/thought about on Facebook?
The fact that you chose a relatively benign falsehood (the earth being flat) reveals that you, yourself, understand that it's "wrong" for it to be shared in a way that incorrectly reflects its truth value.
It shouldn't be our concern if conspiracy theorists decide to share misinformation among themselves. It becomes our concern when they take advantage of human emotions and insufficient algorithmic filtering to manipulate their way to the top of the newsfeeds of major social sites.
You're probably posing this question to HN as a whole, rather than me, however, my comment was focusing on the term 'exactly' in the comment to which I was replying.
I personally think that there is legitimate censorship (child porn, detailed instructions for constructing weapons of mass destruction, etc), but that the vast majority of 'fake news' and even outright false information doesn't fall into that scope. Even there I have to hedge though, since some false information can cause very harmful panic.
Ah, you are correct. My apologies, and it was not meant as an attack on you personally.
I agree with your examples, of course. I'm not against common sense restrictions. But, I think these should be decided upon up front with a transparent review process for adding new categories. To leave that open ended would inevitably lead to abuse.
It's not wrong for it to be shared, but nor is it wrong to automatically affix a tag saying '90% bullshit.'
I would much prefer that such things weren't in demand; it'd be great to live in a world where every adult person had reliable bullshit detectors, so we wouldn't be swamped in logical fallacies and ancillary nonsense, but in the meantime the speed and connectedness of our social technologies has vastly outpaced the general population's ability to digest the available information, and so the disease of populism has broken out again as the new media go through their adolescent stage.
Sadly I doubt adding the hypothetical bullshit tag would help. The sort of people sharing and reading this stuff are ones who want to believe it. If you start tagging it as fake they'll just fall back to the argument that The Man doesn't want you to know the truth.
There's no quick fix for this. It's going to take a generation or two of concerted education from an early age in critical thinking, and somehow I doubt making people question what they're told is going to be a priority for the next four years.
All this talk of fake news and censorship increasingly makes me feel as though journalism is abdicating its responsibility to be a voice of dissent and skepticism by being entirely too cozy with corporate and government interests in exchange for access.
This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying:
News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
It does seem scary if they screw it up, but I can see how it could be done right, at least for the low-hanging fruit. How about a simple dialog?
"This article is mostly false according to Snopes. Are you sure you want to share it?"
Then if you think Snopes got it wrong, you can post it anyway.
Or how about: "This article is satire. Are you sure you want to share it?"
There's nothing wrong with posting satire if that's what you meant to do. If that's not what you meant, it saves you some embarrassment for posting it as fact.
Seems like that's what a (semi-)intelligent assistant should do, right?
The exact same thing happens within China many years ago. China is decades ahead in information flow control.
Websites like Weibo/QQ/Wechat will display a banner text saying some tweets (or microblogging cards as you call it) contains a mis-information.
Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution.
The result? Authorities fight mis-information with half-baked and premature refutes. In practice refutes can be 100% arbitrary even fake. You can't refute a refute because they are final, non-debatable and in-reversible. Remember the refute mechanism is to stop the spread of "mis-information" so debate refutes are dangerous and would cause Streisand effect.
The best part, the process is 100% manual, so PR firms totally lobbied website admins, officials in power, this corrupted industry is multi-million dollar business today.
So who watches the watchmen? It's a twisted long path ahead.
Good to know. Only, that doesn't sound like the "exact same thing". More like the parallel universe version (where Spock has a beard).
I think the key point here is making sure your intelligent assistant works for you. Unfortunately, currently available assistants all come from powerful companies.
To be fair, dealing with fake news doesn't mean taking posts down. He mentioned just showing a warning next to stories flagged as false -- much like how spam is treated in our emails.
This is the opinion of an a US citizen who has family in China. In fact, I just spent a month there visiting. My relatives are missing out on plenty because various US companies will not compromise with the censors.
Rather than have crippled foreign options that are better than what they have now, they get no foreign options at all. The lack of participation from foreign companies encourages the development of domestic companies that are far better at cooperating with censors than foreign companies ever could be. It also decreases the strain on the censors, making censorship even more effective. After all, there is no need to pay people to review foreign language content on YouTube when it is blocked entirely.
Downvote me if you want, but the reality is that refusing to cooperate with censors on things for Chinese IP addresses actually increases censorship. Cooperation does not mean that those cooperating support the censors. However, failure to cooperate does far more to support the censors than cooperation ever could.
I could say more, but I probably have said too much already. Concern for my family in China means that I can never truly speak freely on this topic in public.
I see your point but not how it increases censorship. If this platforms would show up then only because they are heavily censored. So what would change on that front?
The censorship is a blacklist, not a whitelist. You try reviewing all content added to YouTube in realtime and then decide what effect cooperation has on censorship via black listing. Even media companies armed with the DMCA cannot fully censor YouTube via blacklists in the form of DMCA takedown notices. Furthermore, YouTube is just one example.
However, it makes for a fantastic analogy. The MPAA would be thrilled if YouTube and every other video sharing site on the internet would just shut down. That is effectively what the Chinese censors experienced when foreign companies refused to cooperate. That is not just true for videos either, but that is where the MPAA analogy breaks down.
By the way, I had edited my post for clarity before I saw your reply. Your question might have already been answered by my clarifications.
Not sure if you ever used facebook. But to actually see new content you have to use it basically non stop. Otherwise you will only see the "interesting" content from hours ago.
Before someone explains me what the recent switch is. That shit is basically broken since years and should be called "different order"
I have not used facebook. However, my remarks are far more relevant to Google than Facebook. Facebook just happens to be in the same situation WRT Chinese censorship though.
I came here to point out the hypocrisy of condemning Facebook's censorship tool while at the same time demanding something be done about "hate speech" and "fake news".
Apparently, it's only censorship when the others do it. When we do it, it's to promote love, freedom, democracy, and "safety".
I legitimately hate most western values (I am French of German & Portuguese descent to give some context) for those reasons, hypocrisy central.
When I hear the French PM talk about our values, I want to go and ask him about ravaging countries who have not asked for anything, about lying to the general population, about helping entities getting away with ravaging our planet, about helping regimes that are an open disgrace to these so called value.
And also, where are our values when we support regimes such as the UK or US who are stomping on them on a daily basis. The only freedom western society tolerates is the freedom to agree with their views.
There is an illusion of freedom and democracy, we are only allowed to operate and debate on a small spectrum, any deviation is squashed violently and incorporated in the next generation teachings to make sure we format proper citizen who support "our values" and don't go on a thinking spree.
I'm not sure the values you talk of can be described as "western values". The actions you talk of are those of western governments not of western people.
While some of what you say I absolutely agree with, particularly "freedom western society tolerates is the freedom to agree with their views.", the actions of my current government (Australian) and the actions of the government in my home nation (the UK) are absolutely abhorrent and I certainly don't endorse their behaviour.
But to be honest, are there values in any part of the world that are any better? There's certainly worse. Given a free choice of where I would choose to live, I'd pick western nations every single time, as while the behaviour of our governments is utterly disgusting, they do at the very least give its citizens freedom to behave mostly how we see fit and, to a degree, the freedom to affect change in government.
- A democratic government making a transparent decision to censor something is different from a non-democratic one making the same decision internally in the case of fake news;
- Censoring the presentation of something is completely different from censoring the information present on that speech in the case of hate speech.
- Censorship done by a democratic government, using a transparent and fair judicial system, respecting other human rights is, again, very different from the same done by a secret court leading to capital punishment.
here's the thing: Facebook has always censored posts. Try posting a picture of a nipple -- will be removed instantly.
It's just that this is a form of censorship that most Americans find acceptable.
For example in Austria, where I live, most people have other standards, and Facebooks policies seem arbitrary. Recently, a story made the news where Facebook repeatedly refused to remove a harassing video of a girl being beaten by peers; we Austrians don't understand how Americans consider violent videos "free speech" while being super strict about policing anything related to sex.
Some things like Nazi symbolism that are considered free speech in the US are forbidden in most of Europe --- for a good reason! It took us a long time to get rid of the old ideologies, we don't want them coming back!
> Some things like Nazi symbolism that are considered free speech in the US are forbidden in most of Europe --- for a good reason! It took us a long time to get rid of the old ideologies, we don't want them coming back!
Austrian here too. IMO he is a minority, most people i know would agree that banning symbols is stupid. But in times before the internet it may was useful.
Yeah, censorship is really bad, but one positive aspect of FB available in China is that someone can now challenge the sole monopoly of WeChat, which Alibaba has been trying very hard but hasn't got much real outcome.
Talking about Google, as one living here, I really want Google to stay in China, for me I know Google from its early days when there was no censorship and the whole internet is freely (in terms of freedom) available, but looking at the kids these days, within 10 years, they live in a kinda dark age that it seems Google never existed. For me and people at my age, we can use whatever tools/costs to be able to access the whole internet, but for most of the young kids, their internet is much smaller than the real one, and I really feel sorry when they have to rely on the EVIL baidu to search for things, and baidu is infamous for all kinds of scams it relies on for its huge cash flow, which it pursues without any ethical bottom line.
The existence of Bing makes things a little better, but far from what Google can (or used to) bring if it's available in China, that probably will also relief the monopoly issue of WeChat, which is much worse than the similar issue with FB in US and other counties due to the absence of Google and related medias.
"If you work for Facebook, quit. It is morally indefensible for you to use your skills to make that company more powerful. By working there, you are making the world an objectively worse place. I'm sure you can find a job working for a company that you don't have to apologize for all the time.
Alternatively don't quit and work hard to enact change within the organization because it isn't going to happen all by itself.
I can understanding wanting to quit and wanting others to quit when a company is doing something morally questionable but this simply means the people who object are leaving while the ones fine with it gain a larger mind share within the company. It's my opinion that an inside dissenter has more power than a quit-in-protest when it ultimately comes down to changing things.
I doubt a regular employee has much say on policy.
But you can leak things. Leak like a sieve! Get all the embarassing details, company memos, internal private statistics out there. Tell the world what's really going on.
Majority of employees often don't have much say in policy. Quitting is the right thing to do. If no one quits everyone, both leadership and employees, thinks "It must be me as no one else has a problem with it". It applies to customers as well.
> Majority of employees often don't have much say in policy.
Going to have to disagree with you there. I think you'd be surprised how far you can take your ideas and concerns if you're willing to be assertive enough. I've worked in start-ups and companies with over 100,000 employees and if I've found something I felt needed to be changed I was able to find someone in the right place to talk about it with.
This isn't a retail employee trying to talk to corporate scenario (which, let's face it, good luck enacting change company wide when you're in retail). This is a technology company. Almost everyone I know at the major tech companies have at least chatted with the CEOs and other executives from time to time.
> Quitting is the right thing to do. If no one quits everyone, both leadership and employees, thinks "It must be me as no one else has a problem with it". It applies to customers as well.
I've been in a scenario where 7 out of 10 people on a team quit within weeks due to ethical concerns. I can assure you management had zero thoughts about anything being wrong, etc. They all thought it was simply a coincidence.
Now this is anecdotal but I was part of a large group who also quit in a similar fashion (approx 70 of 130 quit within 3 months IIRC). As far as everyone who was left could find out, their management felt almost exactly the same way.
Maybe Facebook and others would "get it" if people quit I'm just not convinced.
Management that takes critism positively without tit for tat attitude is not everywhere. By your own account you said "if you could find the right person to talk to, things could be changed from within". Well, is it employees' job to find the right feedback channel? Its the management's job to set up the right channels and make their employees aware of existance of such channels were they can give their feedback without fear of retaliation in any form. This feedback shouldn't be discarded or go into a black hole inbox. It should be openly addressed and appropriate action taken.
For bad examples for such process Snowden for one told he did go through such internal channels. Also Manning. Whistleblowers seems to be retaliated against with so much prejudice.
Also quitting a company that displays many such questionable ethical choices would feel good for my morale. Most people don't have such financial independence (runway) to quit and so they keep their jobs and keeps their opinions to themselves.
> Management that takes critism positively without tit for tat attitude is not everywhere. By your own account you said "if you could find the right person to talk to, things could be changed from within". Well, is it employees' job to find the right feedback channel? Its the management's job to set up the right channels and make their employees aware of existance of such channels were they can give their feedback without fear of retaliation in any form.
Sure. But a company that won't take feedback seriously I don't see why they would do anything when a large amount of people quit either.
At least in my experience if they're not receptive nothing but massive failure will actually change anything.
> For bad examples for such process Snowden for one told he did go through such internal channels.
To be fair we still don't know the extent of his attempts. He claims he sent emails to district heads but many in the DoD space know those typically are figure heads with little ability to change anything and there are better channels to go through. Granted I have no idea if it would have made any difference but I'm hesitant to use his example as one where a feedback channel failed.
> Also quitting a company that displays many such questionable ethical choices would feel good for my morale. Most people don't have such financial independence (runway) to quit and so they keep their jobs and keeps their opinions to themselves.
Maybe it depends on your definition of "rank and file"? I don't know anyone current at Facebook but I've heard rumors that he's somewhat approachable by developers. Maybe not, say, janitorial staff. But this is just stuff I've read so I have no clue.
But is a world with a more powerful facebook really worse than a world with a more powerful chinese native social network? We all applauded Googles decision to leave China 2010, but instead they have now Baidu there.
While i strongly agree with the spirit of the statement , unfortunately it falls under "if not me, someone else will do it". Now that people have found out the power of social media, it's a power to be abused.
All this talk of "fake news" recently has been scaring the crap out of me. I consume all types of "news" from the whole spectrum; left, right, center, lunatic fringe, everything. I've come to the conclusion that anything called "news" is roughly 80% bullshit, 15% ads, 5% truth. Sometimes you swap the bullshit to ads ratio.
This election really bugged me. A lot of people are complaining about right-wing news right now, but the left was spouting off some terrible stuff and presenting complex issues as clearly one-sided.
> The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas
Sounds like it's just censoring in China then. As long as they don't start censoring US content, I'm happy.
Facebook is probably doing censorship anyways without this China tool. I talk to a friend in Germany and he was telling me how the German government is mad at Facebook. There's some law that makes Facebook censorship Holocaust denial and hate speech posts. Which I guess if they have an office in Germany or even the maybe EU I guess they have to follow it but there's news story of there justice minster saying they have to do it. http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Germany-warns-Facebook-Clamp-d...
But from my understanding, all censoring is geo-located as is. So they could block those posts in Germany only, but in the US they'd still show up. I don't really support a government censoring speech even if I agree or didn't agree with the speech but I guess it doesn't really effect me so I don't really care. Germany or China isn't my government. Plus I grew up with American ideologies. America is one of the few nations left with free speech it seems.
German here. Facebook gave a private company (Bertelsmann/Arvato) that works directly for the government free reign to delete/censor as they see fit.
The laws regarding hate speech are so blurry that it practically gives them permission to remove anything they want and that's exactly what they do. They don't only delete content that is strictly against the law, but also content that is government critical, because it "incites public unrest".
They also remove content that promotes other political parties.
German here is well. Facebook agreed to remove certain comments. Facebook (and not the government!) contracted that work to Arvato and defines the rules under which they operate. This happens not because some laws are enforced but because Facebook agreed to do so (how volountary this is is of course up for debate).
Please add citations for the following statements, preferably with example posts (just so that everyone can decide for themselves whether that still falls under "just being critical of policy")
> content that is government critical
> content that promotes other political parties
One example is the German Anonymous channel. It was obviously fake, anti immigration and promoted the AFD (right wing party), but none of that is against the law. It had a ton of followers (I think in the six digits) and was removed just like that.
Interesting. So possibly even the same tool the article mentions, but different rules/config/people setup with access then for China.
Also interesting they have a private company working directly for the government. I figured in those cases someone from the German gov would have to mail or fax a letter to Facebook for every individual request, sorta like how DMCA works. Super spooky sounding they'd just outsource it to another company. Does sound it like's ripe for abuse then since you mention censoring content promoting other political parties. Seems like once the tool is setup, Facebook is then no longer directly involved beyond that point.
On another note, I am super surprised how many political parties Germany has compared to here in America. Seems like more choices, the better.
That company does not work directly for the government but is contracted by Facebook directly.
As far as I'm aware that team actively monitors content and doesn't need to have an explicit request to remove something.
I also have never seen an example that is just critical of the governing parties which was supposedly removed (every single example I saw was of the type "hang chancellor Merkel"). My Facebook feed is full of people promoting opposition parties from the complete political spectrum.
One example is the German Anonymous channel. It was obviously fake, anti immigration and promoted the AFD (right wing party), but none of that is against the law. It had a ton of followers (I think in the six digits) and was removed just like that.
In most cases that's true, but we have the same problem as the US: It's the same two parties that keep winning elections (CDU and SPD) and nowadays they're more like one party, because they got used to running things together.
Their methods of fighting upcoming parties are borderline illegal and sometimes clearly illegal (rigged votes), but nobody cares. They twist some words, give stupid excuses and the issues are not being looked into any further.
Yup, World War II was a ball. Everyone loved that, thought it was a highlight of human history (I'll concede the following fifty years have been pretty good if you live in the right part of the world with the right descendants).
They have been good for every part of the world. And wars are a fact for the entirety of human civilization.
I'll take doubling the life expectancy of people China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, other Asian counties, as well as most of Africa as a "concession". Thank you very much!
I'm traveling in Vietnam and the local friends that I've made all agree that the most liberalizing / westernizing force is Vietnamese-American Facebook friends. It seems like just the passive influence of friends living in a different culture can have an impact. I wonder if the same thing would happen over time in China?
As it stands it's kinda tough to maintain past friendships that I've made traveling in China. As soon as I stopped using WeChat, all those friendships died.
It'd be interesting to read if Chine has any good reasons for censorship. This is mostly likely a taboo question to ask in hacker communities but I wouldn't rule out that there are good reasons for censoring.
In fact, I have an anecdotal story about where censorship might make sense. In Jordan, we had Islamists subtly inciting jihad using online news outlets on benign things like Halloween parties. Calling them "satanist rituals" and in at least one case that incited violence against a group of people at a Halloween party.
In the West free speech is better understood, however, it's not the case in many parts of the world. The concept might not even exist.
In my opinion it's because China is a big target for Western propaganda.
The truth is that Western nations are still quite sophisticated in how their propaganda is spread. You can see this with the type of colonial mentality that some Asian nations have, where they inherently believe that anything from the West is "better."
It's quite insidious when you have a group of self-loathing people because they grew up feeling inferior.
So I can definitely see why China wants to fight against this.
Free speech doesn't work without lots of culture to support it. The enthusiastic defenses of free speech in the West are also intended to promote that culture (and claim that it can continue to coexist with free speech). If you have people organizing violence regularly using their freedom of speech, to the point where it is a serious problem, something of that culture has got to be missing. At least that's how I understand it.
I have commented on this issue several times here on HN.
I have 3 main points on why censorship can be justified in the context of China: preventing spread of rumours, unique culture background which values stability more than anything else, and different stage of development as other countries hence different priorities.
I wouldn't go into the realm of conspiracies where you have the Western propaganda deliberately destabilizing China for their strategic interests, since they are not backed up with facts.
That's interesting but a bit too general, anything more concrete to read -- a book for example -- to understand what's "unique" and what "different priorities".
I feel like anyone reading this, on this news site, should be telling every friend and family member they have to abandon facebook, if they aren't already. We, the "guy/gal I know who's really good at tech stuff" need to be the example here, and show in very simple terms why facebook should not be trusted with our information.
I've enjoyed having no alternative for several years. Not being constantly tied to status updates from others is very freeing, I'd suggest trying that for a while.
You might, but we are talking about broad circle of ordinary people here, most of whom spend considerable time on Facebook and will not leave it unless you give them a very good reason (privacy concerns, ethical reasons won't fly here, trust me) to do that or offer an attractive alternative. Good luck trying to convince some teenage girl to live at least a day without social media.
I wish for a dream world where every company faced with trying to drum up business in countries known for human rights violation instead focus on putting their own countries so far ahead economically that those latter countries have no choice but to 'play nice'. I'm aware a lot of people aren't fans of cultural exportation but this is just a half-formed thought.
This will almost certainly be used everywhere, not just China.
Us crypto cyber libertarian geeks have been warning about the problem of closed silos and Internet centralization for over a decade.
I kind of hate being right, given that the reality is turning out to actually be a lot worse than what I feared. I mostly was concerned in the past with loss of ability to innovate and surveillance, but the collision of deep learning, big data, and closed communication platforms is making those concerns seem petty.
The potential for massive scale propaganda and discourse shaping bordering on outright mind control is unbelievable. Imagine an invisible automated agent participating in every human conversation and quietly steering it toward desired topics and outcomes and away from undesirable ones. It's intimate influence at scale.
I know it's not a popular opinion here but there's an argument to be made that a censored Facebook would do more good than no Facebook at all. It's not like Facebook being blocked in China is going to spark a popular revolt or reduce government censorship/spying. It could help, for one, expose more Chinese to Western culture and vice versa.
For me however, the strongest argument is that nearly everyone in China would prefer a censored Facebook to no Facebook at all and I'm humble enough to accept that they know, better than me, what's best for them.
I think the concern is that if Facebook builds sophisticated censorship tools for China, the temptation for other nations to adopt them will become overwhelming. The Chinese level of censorship could become a defacto standard without a robust conversation about what that means for society.
Even those enthusiastically calling for censorship of 'fake news' may be given pause for thought when considering how those tools might be used by political opponents.
This. I'm sure our Russian government would absolutely love to have the similar level of control. Currently, Facebook's too big for them (although they test the water with LinkedIn), but this is a clear signal.
And more countries (e.g. Kazakhstan) will likely follow the suit.
I wouldn't say a large part but definitely some. Having lived in China for ~5 years, most of the censorship seemed to be targeted at internal scandals and politics.
This also assumes facebook is a net good, which I don't believe it is. Take away even the guise of freedom of speech on it, and it's absolutely a net negative, in my mind.
For a moment I thought that Facebook might be a good guy when they launched facebookcorewwwi.onion, to let users from China and other unfriendly governments access Facebook and bypass local censorship.
I simply find it ironic as hell that people demand Facebook "ban fake news" on one hand and then bash it for developing "censorship tools" on the other. Come on, what's the difference between the two at all? So what kind of authority is Facebook to decide whether a piece of news is "fake" or not? This is very, very dangerous and stupid if you are truly trying to hold on to your proclaimed "freedom of speech" or whatnot. As Greenwald very well put it, the Democratic Party are just scrambling to find every kind of scapegoat they can find, without ever admitting they themselves are the problem. Come on, people didn't vote for Trump because they were misguided by "fake" news, or to put it another way, news that don't work in the Democrats' favor. People did so because the alternative is simply too horrible/hopeless for them to contemplate. Simple as that.
So either you admit that what China has been doing is essentially not anything different from what you're demanding all over the place now (actually, the majority of the "censorship" in China is against smearing campaigns which entail totally false accusations against the Communist Party, which could be potentially very socially unsettling in their eyes), or you admit that what you've been demanding is some absolutely stupid and dangerous nonsense. Otherwise it's just another example of western hypocrisy, bias and double standards against China at its finest.
I think for fb to enter china it would first need to allow china to spy on its citizens. This censorship tool is just something they can publicly say they changed to allow them in.
Facebook would not be the first american company cooperating with chinese government. I remember Skype has a special version for China with censorship module built in. You can even find a list of censored words on the Internet.
Chinese government made it so that they win anyway: either Facebook cooperates or it is blocked and people use some local censored social network.
China's social network is WeChat. I suspect it's too late for Facebook to enter. With censored contents, what's Facebook's attraction to ordinary Chinese people? Without censorship, it would be a huge attraction.
Without the censored Google, search experience in China, monopolized by Baidu, has been stalling, even deterioratig for years. Lack of competition does so much more harm than censorship. I as an internet user in China applaud Facebook's rational effort to bring more competition and social connectivity with the world to China.
'He also rejected the idea that people’s news feeds are becoming increasingly personalized to the point that opposing views are no longer visible – a phenomenon known as the filter bubble.'
“We’ve studied it a lot. I really care about this,” he said, adding that in order to have a good impact on the world he wants people to have a “diversity of information”.
Now that fervor over "fake news" is reaching a boiling point, and people are now paying attention to the fact that information (particularly that from social media) shapes their entire material, even political, lives...
...makes totally sense for them to go full bore & embrace philosophies of more central control over who gets access to what information. After all, isn't that what everyone is clamoring for?
This is necessary as a salami method of bringing changes to China's policies in a generation or two when the old guards die out, a usual exercise in social engineering, given West is still relevant by then. Having said that, I am glad I am gone off Facebook and have means to block their tracking over unrelated Internet sites.
"The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas"
Censorship, suppression tools, fake news, Fb is moving into dystopian Sterling, Stephenson and Gibson territory.
“It’s better for Facebook to be a part of enabling conversation, even if it’s not yet the full conversation,”
Is the mission statement changing here? In 2010 I remember ploughing through "The Facebook Effect" on a plane to Singapore, reading about ^glowing reports^ of dissidents using Fb to organise themselves. The winds have changed. I'm more inclined to agree with Eben Moglens description of Fb as "PHP do-dads where you get spying for free".
At some point not far from today the western governments should legislate freedom of speech in social media. We are now at 40% of people getting their news from them. Is that not a big enough number to stop pretending they are "just private companies"?
1. They order you to censor contents;
2. They order you to give them the account of censored contents;
3. They find real person of the accounts and put them into prison.
The question is, do people in China really need Facebook now? I used to live in China and I still have lots of connections there, none of my friends are using Facebook-like social network services. People are using Wechat (a mobile-based semi-private social network), weibo (a Twitter clone with more features), and Zhihu (a Quora clone), and a zillion live streaming share sites. All the Facebook clone sites in China are dying.
That being said, I agree that this is still an evil move for Facebook.
Disclaimer: I was born and grew up in China in the first half of my life and been calling USA home the second half. And I am fortunate enough to be the first generation who grow up during the PC era and Internet era.
With the high likelihood of getting massively down voted given the predominant sentiments here, I am still going to to play the devil's advocate. So here it is: I am applauding Facebook's plan to enter China to connect 721+ million people(netizen count is not 1 billion as some of you claimed, see [1]. Population is 1.4 billion and a little over half of that have access to Internet.) and their pragmatic approach to get to that goal.
So you may ask why I am applauding FB bending over backwards to the censorship (which btw I don't agree to). Considering these:
1. Majority of the rules people here disputes in Chinese media censorship laws are political related[2]. But Facebook is NOT a political platform per se. So to me, by entering the Chinese market, it makes sense to put aside some ideology disagreements as a trade off to serve and connect the 721 million people who otherwise wouldn't have for a slew of FB services. And it's probably making a lot of economic sense for FB as well.
2. The tech-savvy few who will always be able to access the uncensored Internet anyway, so by agreeing to the local laws of censoring on one social platform does not significantly impact the freedom of speech. In fact, VPNs are popular and becoming the norm for younger generation who access information, which was dubbed as "climbing over the wall"[3]
3. Any company or mission claiming "organize the world's information" or "connecting the world" but fail to service half of the world is a joke. And yes, Chinese Internet users are accounted for that half[1] of the Internet world. By retreating or not entering(or getting involuntarily banned for that matter), they are doing a dis-service to the Chinese Internet users due to lack of absence[4].
About how developers should stand up and rail against their managers/CEOs when the company has asked them to build something unethical.
Where are all the developers now? That's right, underneath their desks coding away. The great ZUCK has spoken and as true CUCKs they bowed down and did his bidding.
No one on the development team is going to speak out. They need their lifestyle maintained.
The hipocrasy is not unexpected. To the world, developers will scream ethics. In private, they will cave, back to their safe spaces no doubt!
Mr. Zuckerberg was even more optimistic about the possibility of using the same tool to suppress fake news in the US. "China is a beta-test with a billion users," he said.
I'm not sure China will like the idea of being used as a "beta test" of a censorship platform designed by a western company such as Facebook. They still don't understand China do they?
> Trump also said an American-born district judge was unfit for his job because of his Mexican heritage.
Ironically, you've bought into fake news. The actual reason Trump's lawyers said this judge shouldn't preside over this case is because the judge was a member of SDLRLA, an extremely political Latino advocacy organization. Trump's lawyers were correct to claim conflict of interest.
Nope. It's only fake if you think CNN is so biased they're creating a CGI Trump and interviewing it. The debacle wasn't around something some lawyers said.
>the judge was a member of SDLRLA, an extremely political Latino advocacy organization.
The SDLRLA (La Raza Lawyers Association) is a Latino bar association. The NCLR (National Council of La Raza) is the political Latino advocacy organization. The two organizations are not the same.
Yes, I'm well aware; what would make you think I didn't know that? There is allowed to be more than one politically active Latino advocacy organization.
What is a legal latino? Is it illegal to be a particular kind of latino? Seems dehumanizing and hence dangerous to be labeling people, not actions, as "legal" or "illegal".
Heh I didn't know this and I'm not a Trump supporter but I had nonetheless noticed that The Onion was being pretty sycophantic and unfunny both before and after the election.
HN is a small self-contained community of semi-anonymous strangers. If it instead aspired to be the social network for a whole country, full of real names and faces and street addresses, it would be deeply troubling to have government censors tracking the actions of every person on the site and shadow-banning anyone matching some undisclosed criteria (but keeping evidence of their comments for potential uses in later crack-down).
It wouldn't be deeply troubling, it is deeply troubling.
The Chinese government has been at it for many years, on WeChat, Weibo, Renren, Qzone, QQ, etc. Having lived in China for ~5 years, it sucks but it is absolutely better than nothing. It also is not remotely like being "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". I don't feel that way on HN either though I know getting shadow banned is a possibility.
The fact is, there is some censorship and surveillance in China, and Facebook can't do anything about it nor is it exerting any sort of pressure by staying out.
I understand that it is scary for us, westerners, to watch this unfold, but for the Chinese people, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook it is essentially 100% censored).
What you're basically describing is a free-speech version of war profiteering. Instead of profiting from enabling the physical destruction and submission of a people, you're profiting from enabling their silence.
There's a big difference between creating a morally neutral tool (like Facebook itself, which may be used for evil, such as in cases like cyberbullying) and creating a tool for an explicitly immoral purpose to be given to an entity which will obviously use it for immoral purposes.
Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise?
Do you think Chinese people are thinking "I sure hope Facebook doesn't comply with the government so that I can keep not having access to it and therefore keep not being silenced by it. Ah also, I really just wish Baidu/Weibo/Wechat/etc. would close shop already because they are censorship enablers.". My bet is that very few people are and while they're probably unhappy with the censorship in general, they are happy to have access to some form of social media.
> Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise?
Yes. The principle of free speech is a fundamental American value and it should be upheld by American companies.
For them to sacrifice core values for access to a foreign market is unethical. I have no expectations that Facebook will be ethical, but the point of having values is that you stick to them. Otherwise they are just preferences.
If they don't take a stand in China then they won't take a stand in America either.
The Chinese people couldn't possibly care less whether they have access to Facebook or not, and the ones who do already have VPNs.
Well, in that case, we're at an impasse. I'm a consequentialist and care about the outcome more than the principles. I might agree with you in a world where American companies upholding "American values" exerts pressure on the Chinese government, but it doesn't.
The idea that Facebook has any chance to exert pressure on the Chinese government in the first place is not only imperialist but laughably unrealistic.
When South Africa had partheid, American companies disinvested themselves of the country. At that time, South Africans probably would have preferred to be able to buy Pepsi products. But economic isolation was the right thing to do.
China is the second largest economy in the world after the US and expected to surpass it within a couple of years, not really comparable. Its government is also largely supported by the people it governs.
> gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook is essentially 100% censored)
I don't think it's a step forward at all, because users won't ever know how much censorship their Facebook has. So they'll get the sensation of no censorship while being censored.
This is worse than not having access at all, which is at least an explicit censorship and makes citizens wonder, as opposed to something subtle and dishonest.
The majority of Chinese people know that social networks and the web in general are censored. Worse than that, it's considered common sense that publicly speaking up against the government is a risky thing to do, which results in self censorship and apathy towards politics. I don't think they would assume things to suddenly be different when using Facebook.
Building these tools for the Chinese government would give every other government grounds to demand that Facebook provide the same.
It’s a step down a slippery slope toward worldwide total surveillance and censorship.
These tools can and will be used against activists, members of minority political parties, dissidents, business rivals, etc.
When some African dictatorship jails some journalist’s whole family without charges, the engineers at Facebook who built the surveillance software will be complicit.
It is already starting to happen here.[1][2] Western leaders and the establishment media are all in a furor about 'fake news' being shared on social media, how it is a problem those platforms need to 'solve' in order to maintain public order and make sure citizens are getting the right information.
That's exactly the justification the Chinese government uses.
[1]
“Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.”
Merkel, 62, said the challenge for democrats was to “reach and inspire people — we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it.”
She said she supported initiatives by her right-left coalition government to crack down on “hate speech” on social media in the face of what she said were “concerns about the stability of our familiar order”.
I can empathize with this sentiment but it is very self centered in a way. It basically comes down to "I hope Facebook doesn't build censorship tools because it might lead to my government using them, too bad for those >1B Chinese people who won't gain access to Facebook". I can accept that but please, get off the moral high horse (not you specifically).
What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market.
I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.
The likelihood that Facebook or any other corporation cares about public good more than its own and its shareholders' bottom line is ludicrous. I'm not commenting on whether that's right. I'm saying that's how the system is built to work.
I think that's beside the point and couldn't answer because I don't use Facebook. I was trying to make the larger point that foreign companies refusing to comply with the Chinese censors is not necessarily a good thing for the people of China because it results in total and complete ban. I doubt that Facebook would be hugely successful in China but it would encourage competition and serve as an alternative.
While we are using numbers to establish our cred, I lived in China for 9 years, and i also found the metaphor of "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not" to not describe the situation accurately. But the reason is only that Chinese internet authorities haven't yet perfected their craft, and are absolutely willing to leave people in the dark and do whatever it takes to control the Chinese "intranet".
If nothing else, more choice and competition. It also has a large user base outside of China, which the Chinese social networks do not. WeChat is great and I use it a lot.
Sure, I didn't mean to compare it in that way. My issue was with the hyperbole: "you are left blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". Social networks in China are nothing like that: censorship is relatively rare and predictable.
And shadowbanning has already a bad reputation because of the problems it causes on sites like HN¹. And those are small sites that won't send the secret police into your home at night, and used solely to fight spam - the problems are exclusively because of false positives. It's not hard to imagine a nightmare once governments start doing it.
1 - The complaints here on HN stopped. Are you sure it's still used?
If I post on HN I have an understanding that the post is going to be on HN's system, and subject to the moderation of the site owner.
I have the same assumption of Facebook or any other online social service.
What's happening in this circumstance is that another actor is going to be in the middle, with Facebook's cooperation and consent, and not mine.
That Facebook has found a way to wash their hands of what they're doing here doesn't make it OK. That they're finding a way to remove themselves from censoring the posts directly shows that they know it's wrong.
Shadow-banning in HN works differently in that users can choose to see shadow-banned comments. If I ever felt that a user was being censored then I could (a) read the censored material, and (b) tell the user that they were being shadow-banned. This has never happened so far, I see no evidence that HN is shadow-banning as a form of political control.
You are right, however a secondary issue with much larger implications is the punishment (prison, labor camps, whatever) of people that the shadow-ban app finds spreading such prohibited information.
You might be just talking to yourself on HN, but aren't likely to go to jail for it. (Not impossible, but not likely).
Why hypocrite? It's way better for Facebook to do business in China with censorship, than do no business in China at all. Otherwise other companies will just take that role and do the same Facebook would do.
And you can give x% of your earnings to charity and talk in TV shows about how does it feel not being a [self-censored negative attribute]. That is why.
I dont know why you got downvoted, from a strict business point of view makes sense. Facebook is still a company looking for profit, and China market provides that. I hate gov and corps doing this evil things, but thats a different story.
Who is "we Austrians"? I'm an Austrian and I have no problem with Facebook not censoring that video!
Just so everybody here knows why the Austrian government wanted it banned: It showed how Muslim immigrants beat up a 16 year old girl and broke her jaw, reportedly as punishment because she dared to pull the veil off a Muslim girl.
That doesn't sit well with our government that wants to invite all of the Middle East here!
And probably the same is true for jakobegger, who enjoys freedom of speech only when it is an opinion that he isn't offended by, otherwise censorship is very much appreciated.
I have no opinion about Austrian politics but you can't post like this here, and we've asked you so many times not to, that I'm banning your account. It's one thing if people intend to use HN in good faith and don't know what the rules are; quite another to just keep flouting them. The personal attack in your comment was also egregious.
Using HN primarily for political or ideological battle is poison here. Regardless of what your politics or ideology are, this site exists to gratify intellectual curiosity, not weaponized conversation. This is particularly critical, because we can't have both: the one simply tramples the other, and that's not ok.
I'm flagging this article because while the topic itself is totally on-topic, the discussion has devolved into ridiculous discussions of "censorship of fake news" which is a totally different problem.
Or maybe not. I am pretty sure dissident views in China are or can be labeled as something close to what we mean by "fake news". Having a big beta test for Facebook in China can also facilitate the expansion of a similar tech to the U.S.
Nobody is proposing that the government decide what is "fake news" in the US. Thinking that developing such an algorithm for China (a massive market where censorship is a requirement) is a beta test for a similar tool in the US (where attacking "fake news" is a minor problem) has their priorities out of whack.
What part of the business' only imperative is to make money for its shareholders did you not understand? Do you really think any of these people care about any of the values that you hold dear? Maybe in the back of their minds. Maybe. But business as usual means that you do whatever to make money, and to make more money and increase your social and political power and market share. Sell secrets to governments? Sure. Unless it gets out and causes bad P/R. Then you do damage control, that usually involves scapegoating a someone, but that's just an opportunity for another company to exploit, and there are an infinite number of those and a limited number of consumers.
I understand the argument that businesses exist solely to make money. I dispute that it's true. Businesses are ultimately made up of people, and those people shouldn't be checking their morals at the door, they should be considering whether what they're doing is worth it.
We're standing on the cusp of fascism taking hold in both the US and the UK, and I for one am not going to just roll over and build the tools to facilitate that. I just hope we've not gone to far down the road of centralising everything to pull back from the brink.
No there are an infinite number of companies that can be created that service government needs. So someone will. Recently a company cut its staff in half because Twitter and FB cut them out of their streaming service after the media and ACLU reported that they were using to monitor protesters. But what do you want to bet that another company will not take its place? Supply and demand.
Remember when Apple was like na, we're not gonna build that feature for you Uncle Sam cause then you and every other government will abuse it. They must have allowed China to backdoor the iPhone. Also, this is evil.
Forget China and forget doing things they want them done. There are more people in the world not in China than in China. Would you rather the world be more like the USA or more like China? For better or worse I say USA.
This is how manufacturing left the US. We allowed it to happen. Why is there no regulation that says if you build stuff anywhere it has to be to US labor standards? I think that's what Bernie and Trump were getting at. Fair trade. I would put this Facebook debacle in that bucket.
Don't they own all that content according to their TOS? So what exactly is being censored when the content is owned by the same company that is choosing whether to show or not show certain content?
Edit: I stand corrected. They don't own the content. They can just do whatever they want with it.
Muddied thinking when it comes to these things doesn't help anyone. Facebook is not a champion of democracy or human rights. They're a business. No one should expect their core value system to be aligned with anything more than making more money and we should use the proper words. When they virtually own the content by asking you to allow them to do what they want with it we shouldn't call it censorship when it is suppressed. It's not like facebook went to the library and burned all the books that said bad things about China. It's more like the book was never put on a shelf to be accessible to begin with.
This looks like a shadowban at scale. So you share something - potentially putting yourself at risk to do so - but with the hope that others will see it. The "local partner" decides that it doesn't show up in anyone's feeds but still knows you posted it, so now you're a target.
Damn, that's evil.