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Zuckerberg On Facebook's Role In Ethnic Cleansing In Myanmar: 'It's a Real Issue' (vox.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Facebook's fake news problems extend far beyond Russian trolls interfering in U.S. elections. Overseas, false stories have turned into tools of political warfare -- most notably in Myanmar, where government forces have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, the country's Muslim minority group. In an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed Facebook's role in fueling and inciting anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiment. "The Myanmar issues have, I think, gotten a lot of focus inside the company," Zuckerberg said. "And they're real issues and we take this really seriously."
He recalled one incident where Facebook detected that people were trying to spread "sensational messages" through Facebook Messenger to incite violence on both sides of the conflict. He acknowledged that in such instances, it's clear that people are using Facebook "to incite real-world harm." But in this case, at least, the messages were detected and stopped from going through. "This is certainly something that we're paying a lot of attention to," Zuckerberg continued. "It's a real issue, and we want to make sure that all of the tools that we're bringing to bear on eliminating hate speech, inciting violence, and basically protecting the integrity of civil discussions that we're doing in places like Myanmar, as well as places like the U.S. that do get a disproportionate amount of the attention."
He recalled one incident where Facebook detected that people were trying to spread "sensational messages" through Facebook Messenger to incite violence on both sides of the conflict. He acknowledged that in such instances, it's clear that people are using Facebook "to incite real-world harm." But in this case, at least, the messages were detected and stopped from going through. "This is certainly something that we're paying a lot of attention to," Zuckerberg continued. "It's a real issue, and we want to make sure that all of the tools that we're bringing to bear on eliminating hate speech, inciting violence, and basically protecting the integrity of civil discussions that we're doing in places like Myanmar, as well as places like the U.S. that do get a disproportionate amount of the attention."
What a joke. You can't police so called 'hate speech' whatever that is and also protect anything, the more they stick their fingers into things the worse it gets.
Protection of speech means allowing everything and letting us decide for ourselves, we are fully capable of telling the wingnuts and assholes from reasoned discussion.
They are so desperate to control the narrative 'for your protection', its scary. Go ahead and cull the outright incitements to immediate violence but leave the rest and let us decide.
This is what happens when you destroy the original culture of the internet and replace it with a centralized authoritarian model which by the way is built to feed on narcissism.
Which happens to be exactly what FB did. And what 2 billion people and counting happily voted for.
These people are invaders from another country, and the government has every right to send them back to where they came from. Something goddamn Europe should do with the foreign invaders claiming to be 'refugees'. please!
He is probably getting a bit desperate there. Obviously this is one more attempt at distracting people from the extreme political mess he just had a part in. But selecting something this stupid as a distraction is impressive. Well, in the end, the harder he falls, the better for everybody.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...is to encourage behaviour from its users that is as divisive as possible. Or what Facebook calls "engagement.' Inciting indignant outrage and creating conflict between users and groups of users keeps them on the platform so that they see more adverts and so the money rolls into Facebook's coffers. Facebook's business model is the opposite of the Silicon Valley mantra "Making the world a better place."
The famous philosopher of science who gave us the modern scientific method, Karl Popper, had a great insight into intolerance, i.e. that we should be intolerant of intolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I think we can arguably view Facebook's business model as just one gigantic "meta-troll" that cultivates troll-like behaviour in its users (Not everyone becomes a troll but everyone is exposed to extreme, divisive troll-like episodes).
If we want to have more constructive public discourse in areas of conflict, it's probably better to ban Facebook in them. And if we want to make the world a better place, how about banning Facebook altogether. Let's be intolerant of a platform that breeds intolerance.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
He recalled one incident where Facebook detected that people were trying to spread "sensational messages" through Facebook Messenger to incite violence on both sides of the conflict. He acknowledged that in such instances, it's clear that people are using Facebook "to incite real-world harm." But in this case, at least, the messages were detected and stopped from going through.
Hang on there, I thought that Messenger was end-to-end encrypted. Someone help me out here—I can see how FB could become aware of these messages (abuse reports), but how could messages in an end-to-end encryption setup be 'detected and stopped from going through'?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Boz says that death squads shooting and raping and torturing is a small price to pay for the De Facto Good of connecting the world under the caring wings of FB. In fact, it is so good that FB will cheerfully swindle users out of their personal data with purposefully confusing language around permissions and authorization. FB lies to us for our own good. We should be grateful...
Is conveniently ignored, guess it's because the people being cleansed are white.
Much as I dislike Zuck, I do sympathize with him insofar as he is between a rock and a hard place. Keep his mouth shut, and someone else can take control of the narrative and successfully smear him as dangerously uncaring on top of that. Open his mouth, and the issue gets more complicated and stays in the news.
Poor lad. He took the worst of both. He is dangerously uncaring, has lost control of the narrative, and isn't going to be out of the news for a long time. If he hasn't spoken to Mueller's team yet, I'm sure he will be summoned soon. He's probably a bit frightened, and he almost certainly has a damn good reason to be.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is not escaping the reality. It was a plan to push the truthiness of Facebook, a reality social media forum, pushing it's users to accept Facebook content as real and true, so the users accept the idea and put more of the real lives onto Facebook, so that the content could be data mined and to hook people into keeping logged in as much as possible to keep up with what is going on in their digital lives. They pushed hard to make Facebook reality based for datamining and to create a real sense of consequence and risk of loss in not keeping up to data and continually posting, a pretty sick plan.
Even Facebook had chosen to go more fun, more make believe, more pleasantly social, social media, the hooks would not have dug as deep, the reaction to content would mostly be humour and they would have had a whole lot less to data mine. Facebook was made as dangerous as it is, on purpose as a business model, to sell the mind control of it's users to advertisers. Now it is trying to whine about how what it set up on purpose to do, was abused by others, yeah, they were not meant to do that, by design only Facebook executives and the advertising department were meant to do that.
Facebook ain't a social media company, it is a psychopath media company, a company run as psychopath alternate reality media company, an extremely dangerous and disruptive media company. Remember MySpace, that was just ugly on the outside, horrible to look at, clearly Facebook is ugly on the inside, looks pretty but seriously socially ugly on the inside. A closet supporter of terrorism because it generates huge numbers of page views, likely a criminal closet supporter of terrorism, I wonder if they have numbers for how much profit, what kind of terrorist attacks generate, so many died, so many views, so many ads served, most profitable attack locations, most profitable methods of attack.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The biggest difference is the usage of the service. I remember using BBS, USENET and mailing lists. YOU had, using a personal computer, dial up to a service, download the messages, read them on an 80x25 screen and then dial up again and upload the messages.
You didn't have a portable device capable of multimedia content, sending notifications always with you, in an easily digestible format, specially built to hook you and overfill you with advertising.
The information bubble you were creating there wasn't automatically generated by the system, but was a more active one, like choosing a newspaper or borrowing a book. You had to dial up to the punk anarchic BBS or the neo nazi one, and was a conscious decision, and you were expecting different content. Not that you were catalogued by the platform and served accordingly.
Well, I don't know who you are, so I can't judge the truth of the statement that "we" are able to tell the difference between reason and hate-mongering propaganda, but if by "we" you mean "people in general", your argument doesn't hold up.
When I was a teenager I had dinner at the house of an older Jewish couple; the other guests were an elderly German couple who knew my Jewish friends through classical music circles. The German couple was old enough to remember living under the Nazis, and when the conversation turned that way these very nice people made it very clear that in the 1940s they'd have turned in any Jews they'd known were hiding. They wanted me to understand that even respectable, cultured, intelligent people can be brainwashed.
Look around you. People are perfectly willing to go along with stupid, vicious, even incoherent ideas as long as there are a lot of other people doing it. Most people's behavior isn't governed by religion, or their professed philosophical principles; it's governed by what appears normal to them.
The reason that government censorship doesn't work isn't because people are wise and thoughtful; it's because government censorship spitting into the wind of perceived normalcy. However, shaming racist bullshit and shunning the people repeating it is very effective.
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