[jakamau]

In a semi-related tangent, The Economist recently had an article about the unintentional destruction of evidence when deleting terrorist propaganda.

The content should be removed from discourse, but I think there is value in making it a silent ban instead of deletion. Keep the post visible to only the poster, no one else can see or interact with the material once it's been flagged. It's effectively deleted, evidence maintained, and the user loses their behavioral dopamine fix once their content no longer generates any support or any controversy because it's fallen off into the void. I'm not sure what the unintended consequences would be of such a strategyth.

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/09/26/...

[Cthulhu_]

I do believe the propaganda should be archived though, for research purposes, fingerprinting, and like you mentioned, evidence. I hope Facebook is handing everything over to the right authorities (internationally).

Of course, there are some people who are given the extremist / terrorist label - e.g. Antifa - where the brand may not be warranted. Antifa is not a real organization though, just a name abused by the anti-antifacists (?) to try and make protesters the boogeyman.

[fouric]

Antifa is very much a real organization (with [1] being only one of the cells), made up of very real people committing very real acts of violence[2]. The "terrorist" label is completely warranted - a terrorist is someone who attempts to enact change through the use of fear, which is exactly what these people are doing, by literally killing, injuring, and threatening[3] anyone who doesn't agree with them, and by wantonly destroying property[4]. There's nothing "antifacist" about these people, nor are they "protestors" - they're looters, rioters, and terrorists.

Edit: "protestors", by definition, do not threaten or attack people, or destroy property.

[1] https://www.rosecityantifa.org/

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/08/31/man-suspected-in-deadly-portla...

[3] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/04/...

[4] https://www.foxnews.com/us/costs-protests-financial-toll-cas...

[nrmitchi]

The points are all valid, and grey-balling content like this is a common pattern to prevent abuse; if it is clearly deleted, it will just be re-posted.

That being said, I'm not sure I understand the destruction of evidence concern... are we to believe that Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc ever actually delete anything? Even if it's totally removed from Facebook externally, I have 0 doubts that Facebook could product the content if required.