[Eochei5h]

The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.

Imagine the leading social network weren't facebook but vkontakte or weibo and they imposed their own standards on billions of people communicating with each other.

Filtering should be a tool available to individuals and delegatable to groups that are aligned with their own standards. As long as we don't get that there should be zero surprise about strain between differing standards.

[danijelb]

But Facebook is not a worldwide communication channel. It's a social network/community owned by a single company and its shareholders. Internet is the worldwide communication channel. You can "filter" it and make sure it aligns with your own standards by simply choosing to visit and use websites, communities and services which do align with your standards, and by avoiding those which don't align.

[menacingly]

They'd better start acting like neutral carriers before government decides it for them. I totally get (and enjoy) the position that a private company can do whatever they like, but there is a scale at which you've enabled a platform with wide enough reach for enough people that restricting its use will be regarded as stifling speech by the only people who matter and who are more than capable of compelling you.

[d4l3k]

To be fair, the position of most governments is that Facebook isn't doing enough to censor fake news, hate speech, drug selling etc. I don't think having the government step in is going to fix any of these problems.

[smt88]

So if I want a non-neutral carrier, I have to go to a niche social network?

Forcing channels like Facebook to be neutral carriers only makes sense if they're a natural monopoly, which they aren't.

[gnode]

Arguably, due to the network effect, social networks like Facebook are natural monopolies / oligopolies. Niche networks function in a way that relies less on network effects to have value to users, e.g. it doesn't matter if all your friends aren't on Hacker News.

[joshuamorton]

What scale is that? As far as I know, within the US, fox has wider reach than Facebook, and it's under no such obligation, and the US is perhaps the only nation that's going to force the definition of free speech you propose on Facebook. Europe certainly won't.

[reitanqild]

There are currently realistic alternatives to fox for anyone.

The same cannot be said for Facebook or Google at the moment even if some of us prefer Google+, HN, Twitter and Duckduckgo personally.

(That said Duckduckgo can go mainstream soon for what I know and Google+ is IMO constantly one or two good and well timed moves away from eating Facebooks userbase.)

[mistermann]

> But Facebook is not a worldwide communication channel.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc are de facto worldwide communication channels. The degree to which they are the totality of communication is a function of their popularity, and this is the reason why it is so desirable to control speech on these platforms.

[jancsika]

> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.

Moral policing? This article is about the opposite-- Facebook telling its "moral police" not to moderate posts from pro-government posters.

The article also features a claim that someone at Facebook guided pro-government posters in the government to use dog whistles to get around their filters. Hence changing "muslims" to "migrants."

Not much evidence is given for the claim, but it's there.

[Eochei5h]

Selective choice of inaction and complaints about that all play into the same tune, that facebook is the one doing the policing (sometimes). That's the root problem. If facebook were not the ultimate arbiter this article wouldn't have to exist in the first place.

[18pfsmt]

>If facebook were not the ultimate arbiter

If people would stop using FB, rather than complaining about it, perhaps this would not be an issue?

[Eochei5h]

If you know how to solve the network effect that would be great. Otherwise we might just end up trading one master for another.

[wallace_f]

Plenty of things have been popular and then gone out of style.

Perhaps the answer is to make the concept of social networks no longer cool; or even make them undesirable. I think it's pretty clear they are not, anyways.

I use whatsapp, line, email and photo sharing services that allow me to easily share and communicate thoughts and media with exactly who I want. It's more personal, not addictive, creates better relationships, and helps me focus more on who I am rather than how others perceive me. And of course I don't have to use facebook and be a part of all its oft-criticized problems.

[pbhjpbhj]

To stop spam we can stop using email.

For hundreds of millions of people Facebook is the messaging system. There's postal, telephone, email, FB messaging. It's also the most used. I think you need to come up with solutions that assume it, or an equivalent, will continue to be a principle and primary means of communication for billions of people.

[nhfoiwehf]

If we don't complain about Facebook, how are the people still on it going to know all the reasons they should leave?

[kodablah]

> If facebook were not the ultimate arbiter this article wouldn't have to exist in the first place.

Just the myriad of other articles complaining about FB implicitly promoting hate by taking no responsibility for what is posted.

[white-flame]

This still reinforces that they do act as "moral police" and are practicing selectively enforcement by mandate. That is not a reasonable communications policy for anything of any scale or importance.

Facebook should not be tampering with and editorializing private communications or the public square, which they have become.

[tomp]

Only after being pressured by the government. The problem is that the pressure needed to be applied in the first place. “Weak” people (i.e. those not backed by powerful organisations) have no recourse.

[akerro]

>Facebook telling its "moral police" not to moderate posts from pro-government posters.

Would be it more OK if it was about Venezuelan pro-government mafia?

[StreamBright]

>> This article is about the opposite

Well no, this article is about moral policing you do not agree with.

[CapacitorSet]

They're imposing Facebook's moral indeed: racism is bad, but not if it's from a famous person that makes your social network relevant.

[corerius]

It also seems to me that people are quick to conflate censorship by Facebook with censorship by a state.

It would be a cleaner argument if Facebook merely viewed itself as a platform and a government found the need to restrict it within their boundaries, but Facebook has it's own rather mysterious law that it applies in an arbitrary fashion.

[crankylinuxuser]

Facebook and other megacorps are their own meta-nationstate built on top of physical nation states.

They only follow the law, kind of, or they skirt around it until someone holds a fire to them. And they can still threaten to pull out most or all economic activity from a country as "punishment".

It is clear to me that there is some sort of regulation that needs enacted against multi-homed and distributed companies. Now how that is enacted across most countries in the world, I don't know. Cooperation seems to be somewhat lacking these last few years.

[oconnor663]

This is a fair criticism, but at the same time you have to be realistic about what Facebook would be like with no content filtering. There would be lots of porn. There would also be lots of group harassment. It's possible to police some harassment without policing content, but those merge into a gray area quickly. Facebook wants to be an acceptable environment for teenage minors (there are legal requirements for this, not just social ones), and that one criterion alone probably requires the majority of the filtering they do today.

[DanielGee]

> The whole concept of "community standards" for a worldwide communication channel strikes me as newspeak for centralized moral policing.

This is a classic case of the race to the lowest common denominator. When the "community" is so large and diverse and often in opposition to each other, there can be no good standard other than free speech. This is why we had such strange issues of white supremacist content along with gay rights and atheist content being censored. If you censor one group because some people are offended by it what are these tech companies going to do when pressured by china, saudi arabia, israel, europe, etc to ban content they find offensive. They would ultimately have no choice but to simply ban everything that everyone finds offensive or lose market share.

Sadly, I think this is just the beginning of the censorship wars. Tech companies have set precedent the past few years which is going to cause them a lot of problems in the future. Usually the young "liberal" people lead the way in tech but they are usually followed by the much larger religious and conservative groups. The tech companies might agree with the censorship requests of today, but I doubt they'll like the censorship requetss of tomorrow. An organized conservative/religious censorship movement that mimics the recent liberal censorship movement can't be that far off.

[NegativeK]

> what are these tech companies going to do when pressured

Countries that wish to implement legal-based censorship don't care if an internet company has implemented moral-based censorship.

[DanielGee]

Sure they do. If FB stuck to legal-based censorship then they wouldn't need to ban atheist or gay rights content because those content are legal in the US. But if they swing to moral-based censorship, then those countries can appeal to morality ( their own ) and demand FB censor content in the US. Why? Because FB and tech companies have set a precedent.

What defense does FB or tech companies have against people who say they consider atheism or gay rights to be immoral or offensive? None.

What happens when criticizing a religion is considered hate speech? Wouldn't we have to ban atheism? What happens when people say they find content about gay marriage offensive?

Moral-based censorship opens the floodgates to unlimited censorship.