EU Justice Commissioner Quits Facebook, Describing Her Experience as 'Channel of Dirt' (washingtonpost.com)

The European Commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality shut down her Facebook account, describing her experience on the social network as a "channel of dirt." From a report: At a news conference Thursday in Brussels, Vera Jourova said that she received an "influx of hatred" on the popular platform and decided to cancel her account as a result. "I don't want to avoid communication with people, even with critical people," she said, noting her decision to leave Facebook was not to avoid public criticism. Her mailbox is filled with critical comments, she said, and she responds to those people who don't use vulgar language. "This is my nature, I speak to everybody who wants normal, honest, descent communication." Euractiv earlier reported on Jourova's remarks. At the same news conference, Jourova warned Facebook that it faces the prospect of sanctions from European member states if the company does not comply with consumer protection rules.

Comments

Nothing New

[amiga3D]

I remember the flame and channel wars on IRC and FidoNet. When a friend of mine signed up with his ISP (HomeNet) back in the 90s he laughed about their description of IRC in their brochure. "If you don't like being harassed, attacked, hacked and otherwise subjected to hate and vile behavior, stay off IRC. It's the Wild, Wild, West of the Internet." And that summed it up perfectly. I loved it!

Re:Nothing New

[Solandri]

IRC was that way because of the anonymity (other services like Usenet required an email address, which back then was almost always based on your real name).. The Wild West was tamed as civilization and the rule of law rolled out. But this sort of bad behavior on the Internet will persist as long as people can interact anonymously.

I firmly believe anonymity has benefits for democracy, but it has this unfortunate drawback as well. We need to come up with ideas for how to keep those advantages while discouraging the disadvantages. The real problems are the people who think this is justification for eliminating anonymity entirely, and the absolutists who defend anonymity to the point where they won't accept any compromise.

Re:Nothing New

[Luckyo]

Not to even mention servers. I've never seen this sort of stuff on IRC in significant numbers, largely because mods in major channels I frequented usually had direct talking line to server admins, who really weren't interested in tolerating pointless trolling. You didn't just get banned from the channel, you got thrown off the server.

When nickservs became a norm, this became even easier to enforce. Want to go into those good channels with interesting stuff? Register with nickserv and be registered for a certain minimum amount of time. That killed something like 99% or so of trolls, because trolling is rarely something you are willing to create an account and then come back to it in a week just to troll. The rage has long cooled off by that time.

Now artful trolling, that was generally appreciated. But that's nothing like the description given.

The important part of this article:

[DogDude]

"I want #Facebook to be extremely clear to its users about how their service operates and makes money. Not many people know that #Facebook has made available their data to third parties or that for instance it holds full copyright about any picture or content you put on it."
— Vra Jourová

Too bad we don't have anybody looking out for regular people in the US.

She's not wrong, but...

[nitehawk214]

I fully support someone that thinks "Facebook is dirt, I want nothing to do with it."

But when a politician says this, they mean "Facebook is dirt, nobody should be allowed to use it." Especially if those somebodies have something mean about the politician.