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by tonypace 3000 days ago
According to reports, invitations to lynchings of Rohingya are shared on Messenger. If you say freedom of speech, I say Facebook and all of it's evil is banned.

I think I have the better case.

4 comments

So if it's shared over SMS, we should ban the mobile network?
In most Western countries this would be a crime and the mobile network would be obliged to provide an intercept.
The invitations could also be shared via word of mouth (there were no problems organizing them in the 1800s US), POTS, postcards, email or GNU social.
Technology can be used for good or evil. Some technology is used predominantly for the former, some for the latter. Some empowers the latter more, or has to be used incredibly carefully to avoid bad outcomes.

You can kill people with sharp sticks, or with nuclear weapons. You would be incredibly shortsighted to throw your arms up in despair, and say that shucks, technology is amoral, ethics is hard, nothing to see here, it's all the same, let's all move on.

If Facebook wants to take credit for the good (Connecting people), they also need to take blame for the bad (Connecting lynch mobs with their victims.) If the bad outweighs the good, then we need to eliminate it.

I'm not really willing to give them credit for the good ("connecting people"): I was perfectly well connected before they started pulling in all of my friends into their network effect. If I were to break down and get on Facebook, I wouldn't give them a single drop of goodwill out of the buckets of goodwill between friends that they had weaseled themselves into being the courriers of. So, no, I don't give them any credit for what people write in Messenger.
They're connecting people.
You really really don't. If it's done over email should we ban emails?