> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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].
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
> “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.
That applies your entire facebook activity, you've no idea who if anyone actually sees anything you post?
Unless...
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.
[0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-northkorea-internet-...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
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).
"fake news" for who? For the Chinese government?
For the company that denies that their new phone explodes?
This is getting very ugly
"Your post about your cat is not as revenue-relevant as a fake story about Clinton/Trump. Bam, you are banned!"
Facebook's collaboration with a regime where none of that is true is a disgusting low point, even for that company.
And it stems from the sick fact that our society still glorifies money/power as our most central cultural value.
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.
Yes it is evil, but it is Chinese government that is responsible for that, not Facebook.
Realistically only some of the most popular messages would be affected.
It would not suppress political discussions at small scale (among several friends).
It would not suppress popular messages that are not political.
I support Mark on that: it's better to have limited Facebook in China than not to have Facebook in China at all.
Said every collaborator, active or passive, in every large-scale injustice or abuse since the beginning of time.
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.
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@jrcii:
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.
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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.
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.
Chinese revolutionaries already know how to circumvent these things on Chinese messaging platforms. They'll just come up with a new set of codewords.
> 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.
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 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)?
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 don't want to upset Cameron Winklevoss.
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.
"I did not agree with the terms and conditions".
Not that I need to be giving an explanation very often.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
What other highly skilled state sponsored attackers would break into Google China to steal information about people the Chinese government deemed dissidents?
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.
that is actually happening?
But even that went against Google's ethics, so rather than comply with the censorship regime, they withdrew from the market.
Will Facebook prominently disclose when posts are censored?
> Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform
That is exactly what censorship is.
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.
What is the definition of censorship?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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Banning a fake news post is moderation. And if someone would pay Facebook to block or promote some content it would be neither of those.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tianasquare.j...
But there are of course many subtleties between this and objective news.
One has to know the specific bias of the reporter, editor and the owner.
- 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.
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!
Sorry, that's not a good reason.
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.