Page 4 of 6 FirstFirst ... 23456 LastLast
Results 31 to 40 of 51

Thread: Social Media Censorship

  1. #31
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Always logged in
    Posts
    25,383
    Quote Originally Posted by ToomuchStuff View Post
    Don't newspapers do the same thing? They give priority to stories that drive up readership and sales, and then give out more free papers when calculating their output to calculate sales/ad inputs as "they reach more people".
    As to your last question, it isn't the public square, it may still be a square, but it is in a location that you rented under their T&C, where if you didn't like those, you were free to send a lawyer with a boatload of cash to negotiate ones more favorable to you.
    Just because you fell into the trap of everybody else does it, doesn't make it public.
    What point you want to make it a utility and provide access to everyone, is another matter.

    There are other social media platforms, including some open source ones. The thing it, they don't have the marketshare.
    I think I agree with this, I just am not sure what WmSmith is saying.

    Publishers do promote a specific point of view in their publications, be it newspapers, books, online media. Facebook is a platform, or a publisher.

    I dont see Facebook as a public utility that

    1) needs regulating
    2) must be free of bias

    Is this the issue WmSmith is talking about?
    Last edited by iris lilies; 8-15-18 at 1:43pm.

  2. #32
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    San Francisco
    Posts
    9,802
    Quote Originally Posted by LDAHL View Post
    Apart from the existing law on slander and harassment and libel, what would you like to see?

    It’s not illegal to be a jackhole. I’m not sure I would trust anybody with the power to punish them if it were.
    Actually i’d like to see exactly what has happened. Facebook, has finally decided to remove the figleaf of ‘news site’ frim a major jackhole. I dont think the government or anyone else needs to do anything. The free market took care of the problem.

    But i’m also not particularly worried about the slippery slope of broad public censoring. Maybe if facebook removes fox ‘news’ i’ll begin to worry about it, but until then facebook’s bar for what constitutes news is still quite low.

  3. #33
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    San Francisco
    Posts
    9,802
    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    I dont know which murder case you are talking about.

    Upthread I talked about reading legal definition of hate speech in the Wikipedia.

    Is there a question here?
    I’m talking about the samdy hook parents who have been receiving numerous death threats after being doxed by gun nuts after alex jones called them crisis actors who hadnt actually lost their children.

    Earlier in the thread i was talking about te pizza gate hoax promulgated by alex jones that resulted in a man goig to the pizzaria with a gun. How many more things does jones have to do before it stops being controversial that reasonable people want to take away as many of his platforms as they can?

  4. #34
    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Location
    Nevada
    Posts
    12,889
    I would think that jones is starting to cause dangerous issues. You can’t yell fire in a movie theater so I don’t see a whole lot of difference with what he is doing.

  5. #35
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Always logged in
    Posts
    25,383
    Quote Originally Posted by jp1 View Post
    I’m talking about the samdy hook parents who have been receiving numerous death threats after being doxed by gun nuts after alex jones called them crisis actors who hadnt actually lost their children.

    Earlier in the thread i was talking about te pizza gate hoax promulgated by alex jones that resulted in a man goig to the pizzaria with a gun. How many more things does jones have to do before it stops being controversial that reasonable people want to take away as many of his platforms as they can?
    Ok, I did know vaguely about the parents of these dead children being hassled.

    Anyway, I think of this situation you describe with this Alex Jones person as being one of two representations of ideas by reasonable people.

    1) Reasonable people can think Alex Jones has reached such a level of influence with his hate speech/lies (however you want to characterize it) that they put pressue on their favorite publishers, like Facebook, to shut down his content, his voice. I am not in that camp. Just because I am not in that camp doesnt mean I think this is the fringe-crazy camp. I just think you are wrong. You have a different dominant value. My guess in representing your point of view is that you would say you value human life and human dignity over abtract thoughts of freedom of speech.

    2) Reasonable people can also choose to show more respect to the abstract concept of freedom of speech than you are doing. We are not fringe-crazy, we just value something differently, we give it more weight than you do. And, to put a practical spin on it, I think your camp is playing whack-a-mole by closing down Alex Jones because there is any number of nutjobs with guns who look for an inspirational guru, and there are plenty of those gurus in the Alex Jones mold.

  6. #36
    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Vermont
    Posts
    14,637
    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    With all due respect to the reactive censorship being discussed, I was thinking along the lines of whether or not the tech companies have crossed the line from being just platforms to being publishers.
    That is the interesting question. We have always assumed the internet to be completely open and democratic, and people like Zuckerberg have figured out a way to provide a common platform for everyone to use. It has worked. So, to your point, if FB or any other social media platform starts deciding who may contribute and who may not, does it cease to be the very platform it started out to be? What happens when a social platform's censure starts defining its own vision, in the same manner the publisher of Mother Jones or The National Review would?

    The interesting thing about FB and its ilk is the self-selection aspect. It's a positive thing and also a negative thing. In other words, it's positive in that you can find any group you want--Republican goat farmers who knit. You tend to "like" organizations with similar peripheral interests/attributes. It's good because you can find these micro segments; it's bad because the singular focus tends to be isolating and confirmatory of your own likes and biases.

    So most of us will never be influenced by a neo-Nazi's rant, or given misinformation by a homophobic, mysogynist psychopath. We'll never get there. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. At what point does hate become a virus, spread exponentially via technology? I don't think we're there yet, but I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had had a Facebook page.

    As we've discussed, FB is an enterprise owned by the shareholders and they don't have any responsibility to censure free speech. But maybe it's a great question to think about: At what point would a government have to go over the heads of a social media company that's been built on free speech and eliminate a social virus?
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
    www.silententry.wordpress.com

  7. #37
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Posts
    8,306
    Quote Originally Posted by catherine View Post
    That is the interesting question. We have always assumed the internet to be completely open and democratic, and people like Zuckerberg have figured out a way to provide a common platform for everyone to use. It has worked. So, to your point, if FB or any other social media platform starts deciding who may contribute and who may not, does it cease to be the very platform it started out to be? What happens when a social platform's censure starts defining its own vision, in the same manner the publisher of Mother Jones or The National Review would?

    The interesting thing about FB and its ilk is the self-selection aspect. It's a positive thing and also a negative thing. In other words, it's positive in that you can find any group you want--Republican goat farmers who knit. You tend to "like" organizations with similar peripheral interests/attributes. It's good because you can find these micro segments; it's bad because the singular focus tends to be isolating and confirmatory of your own likes and biases.

    So most of us will never be influenced by a neo-Nazi's rant, or given misinformation by a homophobic, mysogynist psychopath. We'll never get there. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. At what point does hate become a virus, spread exponentially via technology? I don't think we're there yet, but I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had had a Facebook page.

    As we've discussed, FB is an enterprise owned by the shareholders and they don't have any responsibility to censure free speech. But maybe it's a great question to think about: At what point would a government have to go over the heads of a social media company that's been built on free speech and eliminate a social virus?
    And who do we trust to decide who the social viruses are?

  8. #38
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Always logged in
    Posts
    25,383
    Quote Originally Posted by catherine View Post
    That is the interesting question. We have always assumed the internet to be completely open and democratic, and people like Zuckerberg have figured out a way to provide a common platform for everyone to use. It has worked. So, to your point, if FB or any other social media platform starts deciding who may contribute and who may not, does it cease to be the very platform it started out to be? At what point you editing, curating, defining a vision, in the same manner the publisher of Mother Jones or The National Review would?

    The interesting thing about FB and its ilk is the self-selection aspect. It's a positive thing and also a negative thing. In other words, it's positive in that you can find any group you want--Republican goat farmers who knit. You tend to "like" organizations with similar peripheral interests/attributes. It's good because you can find these micro segments; it's bad because the singular focus tends to be isolating and confirmatory of your own likes and biases.

    So most of us will never be influenced by a neo-Nazi's rant, or given misinformation by a homophobic, mysogynist psychopath. We'll never get there. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. At what point does hate become a virus, spread exponentially via technology? I don't think we're there yet, but I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had had a Facebook page.

    As we've discussed, FB is an enterprise owned by the shareholders and they don't have any responsibility to censure free speech. But maybe it's a great question to think about: At what point would a government have to step in and eliminate the virus?
    I disagree with quite a lot of this.

    “The Internet “ is not Facebook, and Facebook is not the internet.

    I have not always assumed the internet to be open and democratic[ally managed.]

    Zuckerberg may certainly decide who posts on his platform, nothing wrong with that.*

    Zuckerberg may promote a point of view as surely as does Mother Jones, nothing wrong with that, and the users and ultimately the stockholders will shape that decision, as they should

    The technology of the internet supports the distribution of ideas across many people and communities, much like how the printing press supported distribution of ideas through words on paper. Hitler had newspapers, broadsides, radio, the technology of the day.

    I think speaking of “hate” as a “virus“ can be hyperbolic. Really, it is pretty simple: reasonable people may disagree, and there is a lunatic fringe that we can recognize as not healthy for our society. The reasonable people need to come together and strongly denounce those ideas. Ideas can be trounced with other ideas. Ideas should not be trounced by silencing them. ESPECIALLY ideas should not ever be—never!—stomped down by our government.

    *edited to add: in the abstract, I support Zuckerberg in disallowing anyone he wants (cough cough Russians!) to have FB accounts. That doesnt mean I think he makes correct decisions each time he purges people for their expressed thoughts.

  9. #39
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Always logged in
    Posts
    25,383
    Also, there seems to be the thought running through this thread (if I am understanding things here) that publishers are free of bias, they do not censor ideas.

    not true. They do not promote every idea equally, a form of soft censorship.

    Freedom of the press means government does not quash what publishers publish or dictate what they publish.The constitution does not place expectations on publishers to be free of bias. And they are not! Just as major websites like Facebook will not be free of bias

  10. #40
    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Vermont
    Posts
    14,637
    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    Also, there seems to be the thought running through this thread (if I am understanding things here) that publishers are free of bias, they do not censor ideas.

    not true. They do not promote every idea equally, a form of soft censorship.
    I think Williamsmith is saying just the opposite, as am I. Publishers have a point of view--of course they do. That's why I used the twin examples of Mother Jones and The National Review. And everyone knows that even news sources that are supposed to be unbiased are not. All news is curated and edited to fit a particular bias or agenda.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
    www.silententry.wordpress.com

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •