[shmichael]

On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty.

Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.

[crote]

Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago?

If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.

If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.

[JuniperMesos]

Before Zuckerberg loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favor he tightened them in favor of anti-Trump forces (and even using the terms "loosened" and "tightened" is assuming a frame that online speech that politically-benefits Trump in some way is inherently more worthy of moderation than speech that politically-harms Trump, which is itself an object-level political stance).

It's probably a mistake to characterize that as "Zuckerberg" himself making a decision - the sorts of people who worked at Facebook in the mid-2010s were overwhelmingly Democrats or Democrat-aligned people who found the sorts of things that Trump was saying, and that Trump's supporters were saying, immoral and horrifying; and often felt they had a moral duty to censor this speech on their platform in the name of protecting people they considered marginalized. This didn't necessarily need Zuckerberg's involvement himself, and I think he may have personally changed his mind about Meta's moderation policy during the Biden administration, although of course it's hard to be sure what is actually going on in the head of any specific public figure.

Trump is making a point of putting allies in high positions at Meta because in general it's now clear to everyone in American politics that being able to control the moderation policy of major social media platforms is politically important; because those platforms are where people who vote or otherwise make policy in your country do it. Every future administration in the US will attempt to do the same thing - the details might differ as the landscape of social media changes - and every single one will claim to be acting in the name of authentic free speech and safe, reasonable discourse.

I wish that practical free-software alternatives to every proprietary social media network were available, that by construction had no central organization that could be targeted by any branch of government to censor political speech. This is unfortunately a difficult technological and social problem to solve; we have a bunch of half-solutions that very few people actually use, and the bulk of the population continues to communicate on proprietary social media platforms.

[the_why_of_y]

Facebook has always moderated (in those languages where they do moderate at all) according to policies, and politicians are exempt.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/facebook-confirm...

Joel Kaplan was hired as the VP of global policy at Facebook in 2014, and he was hired for DEI reasons, i.e., specifically because he was Republican.

Before his role in the GWB White House, he participated in the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Florida vote recount in 2000.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/img-src-images-joelk...

[alex1138]

I want to know who was responsible for the "it's ok to call gay people etc mentally ill" policy. Kaplan? Zuck?

Not that it matters. FB's moderation and policies are so inconsistent it's unlikely they banned it before or would ban something now that supposedly goes against their TOS

Awful company and awful people

[JuniperMesos]

> Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate’s rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service’s hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.

This is exactly what I'm talking about - Facebook in the late 2010s had a huge number of employees who thought it was morally important to censor speech that they thought harmed groups they considered marginalized (here, Muslims in general), using anti-hate-speech standards as a tool; and eventually higher-ups at the company felt they needed to come up with some reasonably politically-neutral public rhetoric, which amounted to "we won't censor things polticians say directly in the news". This stated policy still made a lot of pro-censorship people mad, hence this 2019 Ars Technica article attacking Facebook for it. Obviously Facebook (and various other social media companies) changed their stated and de-facto policies several times over the next several years in response to the changing political landscape in the US, which is a process still going on now.

Any attempt at all to define community standards for moderation that have some definition of what hate speech even is, is tantamount to making an object level poltical statement. I am opposed to the existence of any private social media platform that even attempts to do content-based moderation at anything approaching society-wide scale.