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by Randosaurus 1707 days ago
Doesn't it seem odd to you that a company with the resources of Facebook are quicker to pull down a post by a practicing medical doctor stating masks aren't 100% effective than they are to pull down a post inciting violence in a country that has been in the middle of such violence for the last 3 years?

The problem with opinions like yours isn't that they're wrong, it's that you've lost all perspective.

1 comments

Facebook drew up some pretty clear guidelines about what was permitted in terms of posting covid related opinions. That makes it very simple for them to make decisions regarding removing flagged posts about masks or vaccines.

Facebook doesn't have a set of approved guidelines on what news Ethiopian media can report about their own domestic conflict. The article doesn't share the content of the post in question, so it's impossible to tell, but they don't say that it violated Facebook's general community guidelines in regards to hatespeech or provoking violence. The article just states an opinion of one person that the local media created a post blaming the wrong group.

I don't see how facebook can judge whether that news report is right or wrong. It's just he said/she said.

People often get things backwards.

If an entire village is razed to the ground then whatever led up to that is wrong, period. What people get backwards is thinking that if the actions that led up to the razing were themselves not ethically problematic, then the result has no bearing on whether or not we should continue allowing said actions.

Then there's the fact that actual FB employee's have gone on record that FB is making things worse in Ethiopia. Or aren't we allowed to take that into account when condemning FB?

Discounting this as being simply "he said/she said" is itself ethically dubious.

"If an entire village is razed to the ground then whatever led up to that is wrong, period"

This is where we fundamentally disagree then. I think perfectly innocent things can contribute to deadly consequences.

For instance, Timothy McVeigh rented a moving truck and filled it with fertilizer to blow up Oklahoma City. But I don't think renting moving trucks or buying farming essentials are morally wrong.

I also don't think that posting on Facebook or Facebook algorithmically promoting posts that gain traction is wrong.

Like I said in my original comment, the worst thing you can say about Facebook here is that they're not picking sides in a messy ethnic conflict happening in a foreign country.