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Facebook Now Deletes Posts That Financially Endanger, Trick People (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It's not just inciting violence, threats and hate speech that will get Facebook to remove posts by you or your least favorite troll. Endangering someone financially, not just physically, or tricking them to earn a profit are now also strictly prohibited. Facebook today spelled out its policy with more clarity in hopes of establishing a transparent set of rules it can point to when it enforces its policy in the future. "We do not, for example, allow content that could physically or financially endanger people, that intimidates people through hateful language, or that aims to profit by tricking people using Facebook," its VP of policy Richard Allen published today. Web searches show this is the first time Facebook has used that language regarding financial attacks.
"We do not, for example, allow content that [...] aims to profit by tricking people using Facebook,"
That's our job, dammit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...they sure do edit and moderate a lot of the content. Weird.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
It's their platform, and you are not directly paying to access it. They are free to censor or filter content as they wish, and you are free to walk away from it at any time, just like any other online platform that has existed since usenet.
Why do people still treat it like they are entitled to do as they wish with zero consequence? Would you walk into a police station with an NWA "Fuck the police" shit on and expect to be left alone? Of course you wouldn't. If you choose to pull bullshit in someone else's house, expect to be called out. If you do not want to be called out, keep walking.
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And yet at the same time facebook sends out hundreds of thousands of emails a day to people to get them to join facebook (which itself financially endangers and tricks people).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I think it is worth considering the other side of the coin here, though.
The 'net isn't what it was back in the days when we read usenet with tin. It has become massively centralized, and controlled by a very small number of corporations. To a great many people, the 'net IS Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google.
As a result, for all intents and purposes, they are the public square. It may be a privately owned public square, but it is the public square. It's not like protesting with a sign in a private mall; there literally is no other place on the Internet where one can have a reasonable expectation of being heard than the "primary set" of platforms.
So, while yes, these are privately owned platforms, they have also been allowed an unprecedented amount of power over information, thought, and speech. I think that we need to be very careful about giving them carte blanche to silence voices and thoughts that those who control these entities do not agree with.
Check your premises.
... or people could just use other parts of the Internet.
I don't respond to AC's.
Stupid people deserve to be separated from their money. For example, star citizen backers.
No, of course they don't. Fraud and deception are not okay, even against easy marks.
Are Star Citizens those people who want to be citizens of a satellite and have it recognized by the UN? There are all kinds of wacky people in this world, eh?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
> But in both those cases, "Censorship" was dressed up in other civil liberty arguments.
The baker was being forced to create content. Facebook (or Slashdot) is only required to merely tolerate what you post. It's a VAST difference that you're just casually glossing over.
The baker is also is just one guy, much more like you than a global corporation controlling a platform used by BILLIONS with a large enough share of the market to be subject to the Sherman Act.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... or people could just use other parts of the Internet.
"Why do you need to be in the public square when there's this back alley available to you?"
Check your premises.
Is this going to result in removal of posts by televangelists asking for donations to help God save the donors?
Not only is the God they are peddling an illusion, but televangelists usually spend the money on their own pleasure and comfort instead of any missionary activities of their religion.
They are both useless to the donor and actively fraudulent in their own universe.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
If Facebook is promoting a certain candidate or party, then it can run afoul of campaign finance laws. If it is shown they are acting in a political manner, they open themselves up to being prosecuted for illegal contributions. If they are running ads, for the benefit of political entities it is clear cut that they are making in-kind contributions to the political entity. If they are suppressing one side of political speak it is less clear cut, but the same argument could be made. How much is exclusive advertising worth? The value in the commercial world is real. A bank could sign and exclusive contract with the local newspaper to be the only bank that runs ads in the newspaper. This generally requires significantly more money than a normal ad buy, since the newspaper is forgoing the opportunity to receive ads from competing banks.
Remember FOSTA-SESTA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If politicians can run around and suddenly start holding site operators liable for one kind of content, how long until they start holding them liable for all types of damning content? Site operators might just be trying to get ahead of the curve, because of the giant can of worms that FOSTA-SESTA opened up.
If someone wants to cry about First Amendment violations, this is really the avenue you need to approach it from. This is the government forcing a proxy to censor speech by making that proxy liable for any criminal activity that speech perpetrates.
I'm confused... I thought Facebook was the back alley...?
I don't respond to AC's.
What does Facebook have to do with access to news?
I don't respond to AC's.
Facebook has an interest in keeping its site clean and hospitable
I think Zuckerbergs testimony on Capital Hill is relevant particularly with Cruz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sure, Facebook has an interest in keeping its site clean but they cannot be both a platform (neutral public forum) and a publisher at the same time. They are either responsible for all the content on their site or not. They are either expressing their political speech or they are enabling others to speak. Facebook wants it both ways and the censorship culture and normalization has enabled Facebook and other social media sites to abuse the rights of others and use their position to negatively impact the political discourse.
What is even more worrying is that the culture of censorship is growing. There must be some irony that the left is defending giant international companies to trample over the rights of individuals because of some misguided attempt to sanitize the internet.
"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." - Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine
Aren't ads just messaging designed to trick people into making bad financial decisions?
Because the web has caused the privatization of public discourse
No. That was clearly done by TV before the web. That was clearly done by radio before TV. That was clearly done by newspapers before radio. That was clearly done by monarchs before free press. Shall I continue? Each iteration has allowed the creation of platforms to become easier, but let's not kid ourselves here, the big ones that everyone notices are organized because unorganized ones don't tend to become massively big things since they just reduce down to pretty much background noise. With that organization comes rules and policies and so forth that inherently censor some groups. What Facebook et al are doing isn't unique, only its medium is. Does that make censorship in general right or wrong? That's a point that's debatable for the ages, but what social media groups are "currently" doing is inline with what has come before and we have seen progress from kings of yore to Internet with that system. So I'd argue that while it would be great to have completely open everything in theory, the actual implementation of that would be horrible, and that the current implementation is balanced enough to get us to whatever the next point on the tech tree of the universe is.
I need you and everyone to understand that this whole topic is arguing a topic that's been brought up since the Classical and Hellenistic Period. How does one allow the free exchange of ideas without the entire thing devolving into madness? Guess what, thirty-six centuries later, we still haven't figured it out. And it's starting to seem like the answer is to the "where does it stop?!" question you are asking is, "somewhere, people need to keep their heads up, but ultimately it stops somewhere." Blanket openness is clearly not an answer, because that's just saying "society as a whole is just lazy and if we don't have complete openness, then we're just a slippery slope away from having all our rights taken away."
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll change your tune once it's taken over and turned against you, though
That is the entire point. It stops at some point because as much as we on Slashdot like to diss the general public, they do ultimately seem to understand when basic rights are being trampled unjustly, Who determines that? Well we all sort of do, there's not a hard and fast rule to that and I get it, that makes some of the hard liner type folks a little uneasy. Society doesn't have clear distinct lines for every single thing. So there's two things a person can do about that.
One, accept that society doesn't have clearly defined boundaries and that you'll have to do your part if and when the time comes.
Two, don't accept that and get all upset that humanity seemingly just can't get its crap together and live your entire life in frustration.
If you are intent on hanging your hat on the latter, well there's not much anyone can do to help you. We're basically always going to be having this discussion until the end of time. Advocacy for human rights isn't a spectator sport. But if you're willing to consider the first point, then you'll have to first start working on the whole, "am I ready to die on this hill or not?" thing. Once you've got a good grasp on that, you'll need to ditch the "slippy slope" argument every time something you don't agree with comes up and work on the whole "persuasive argument" thing. And trust me, there is tons of room in this debate for a rational argument, like the seemingly inequitable application of those policies, and so on. But you are going to fall far and fast if what you lead with is, "They'll be coming for you soon too! Just you watch!"
A) they enforced their own rules equally
This is pretty much the only argument that you make that has worth. To enforce something equally we would need to have sort some of "thing" (for lack of a better term) that we agreed on that could judge when a policy is being applied equally. In law, we have the court system (for better or worse) that does that (at least in theory, I'm not trying to make this an argument about the shortcomings of the US judicial system). We'd need something for that in things like EULAs and what not. The only problem is that currently those kinds of things aren't seen as have the same weight of enforcement like laws. So you're going to have this, "we don't have a system to ensure equal application" and "we can't even agree that we can compel people to abide by these rules." Long story short, if anyone wants to get anywhere on this point, we're going to need a massive overhaul to the laws currently on the books. I cannot think of anyone in US Congress ready to go down that road, but November is coming soon, so there you go.
B) if they were responsible for the content posted on their platform (hint: they're not, otherwise they'd be shut down the moment someone posted child pornography there)
Social Media sites are held responsible and liable for "some" things. I'm not going into a laundry list of what those things are, but they all ultimately require someone to attach that failing to something that is currently illegal as defined by US law. Also, there's about 500 different steps in between being a site in operation and being shutdown by the law. Posting of child porn on Facebook doesn't mean Facebook has to shut its doors. It means that Facebook needs to take reasonable steps to prevent it and remove it when found. If they didn't do at least that, then yes, we start getting into shutdown territory. It's not the binary state system that this point tries to make.
C) if they weren't (with Twitter and Youtube) the equivalent of the new town square in which people used to communicate
Well they aren't and even if they were, you can be escorted off the property of town square and into a cell at any rate depending on how egregious your act is. The town square is paid for by tax dollars and thus the public (vis-a-vis law makers) ultimately get to dictate the going and coming on the town square, but the dollars that built social groups wasn't tax payers. Now, if we have qualms with "the Internet town square" being owned by a private company, well that's going to require all of us to look deep into our hearts and really start questioning how "free" we've allowed the free market to become. There's a lot of soul searching that's really needed in the US about how much we've allowed private companies to become pretty much everything around us. But all of that aside, they're private companies and, yeah, we don't get a say to an extent. So you're point about them being a public square for information exchange is pretty lacking since we all pretty much allowed this whole thing to exist in the first place by allowing free market to trump basic rights. That's not saying free market and rights are opposites, that saying that since they aren't exact polar opposites, it becomes easy to mix the two with unexpected results. Unexpected results like leading to this wonderful thing that a lot of folks use being dictated by just a handful of people with zero recourse from the users.
Actually I would expect to be able to walk a police station with a fuck the police shirt on. It would be ironic and just expose my stupidity if I actually needed help, but I would not expect non-service, much less harm.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You (and a huge part of the Slashdot community) seem to be slightly misinformed about US law on these matters. Under US law (which is what matters for most of the big Internet companies, being that they're US based), ISP's are immune to suit and from liability as long as they meet certain, quite minimal, requirements. When I say, ISP, I'm talking about anyone which provides some kind of service over the Internet, not just providers of Internet service. So Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Anyway, those requirements are as follows:
1. You allow users to post material without inspecting or curating it first.
2. You take action to remove illegal content within a reasonable amount of time.
That's it. You do that and no one can sue you for what was posted on your website in the US. Most of the rest of the Western world have similar laws. It's called safe harbor. This is why Facebook, Youtube, etc, all removed Alex Jones' crap at roughly the same time. They realized that some of what he posted was possbily/probably illegal (specifically, his libel and incitement to violence) because it hit the news. They heard about it and said, "Oh, shit, he might be posting illegal shit on my site too! And now I know about it. I must take action to maintain my safe harbor. To the banhammer room!"
So, anyway, they aren't really worried about lawsuits any more now than they were a while ago. And they're acting like this to keep it that way. I suppose that's sort of a bankshot "worry about lawsuits" kind of thing, but I don't really think that it counts. Making sure you keep your safe harbor status isn't the same as worrying about liability and lawsuits the way people usually mean when they talk about worrying about liability and lawsuits.
That would be true if A) they enforced their own rules equally
They are free to enforce their rules anyway they wish to, you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up to use it. If they have a complicated censorship mechanism they owe you zero explanation of it and it is their choice if they wish to incur public outrage by not disclosing it or enforcing it in a negative way.
B) if they were responsible for the content posted on their platform (hint: they're not, otherwise they'd be shut down the moment someone posted child pornography there)
Who says they are not responsible? Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA).
It's more like your phone company cutting off your phone line because they were listening in and didn't like what you were saying.
It is absolutely nothing like your phone company! They are not providing you connectivity to the internet, they provide a platform you can interact with if you agree to their terms of service. You are NOT paying for it and there are other tools online available to you to use or you can create your own and negotiate with the very same phone companies to provide priority QOS on their networks.
You are not entitled to use it, you are invited to use it - shit, the outrage over this "censorship" of Alex Jones whose own site has the same damn terms of service criteria is stupid.