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Facebook Are 'Morally Bankrupt Liars' Says New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner (theguardian.com)
New Zealand's privacy commissioner has lashed out at social media giant Facebook in the wake of the Christchurch attacks, calling the company "morally bankrupt pathological liars." From a report: The commissioner used his personal Twitter page to lambast the social network, which has also drawn the ire of prime minister Jacinda Ardern for hosting a livestream of the attacks that left 50 dead, which was then copied and shared all over the internet. "Facebook cannot be trusted," wrote Edwards. "They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions. [They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target 'Jew haters' and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. "They #dontgiveazuck" wrote Edwards. He later deleted the tweets, saying they had prompted "toxic and misinformed traffic."
That excuse might have worked ten years ago. After a decade of this bullshit it doesn't fly now.
A nice theory, however, it's not applicable to any media service that auto-screens content to improve your engagement by primarily showing you things you already agree with. That doesn't promote debate, it promotes extremism.
That's the difference between social media and real life conversations - real life conversations give you a semi-representative sample of what people believe, and you can have those productive debates (with the risk of physical violence encouraging most people to remain reasonably civil). Social media instead sorts people into groups that say things you "like", producing an echo-chamber to reinforce your pre-existing biases.
Of course people sort themselves in real life too, but if you go to the local skinhead bar, you're fully aware that you're going to a self-sorted establishment to hang out with a like-minded minority. You wouldn't expect the sort of disagreement you'd get voicing the same opinions in a sports bar. Social media though spans such a large population that it can easily provide the illusion that you're actually in the majority.
I would much rather see such auto-grouping abandoned than banning particular opinions - but that would severely impact profits, so I doubt it would happen.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Post a mastectomy reconstruction photo with a female nipple showing on Facebook and see how quickly it gets taken down. Repeat the process a few times to see how quickly your account gets permanently banned.
After that, come back and tell us all about how Facebook has a strong bias toward free speech.
The NZ terrorist's video could easily be blocked if they really cared. Look at how good YouTube is at recognizing someone merely humming a few bars of some copyrighted song. Play a 5 frame clip of some TV series in the middle of your hour long critique video and YouTube will copyright flag it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FB got as large as it did by disregarding all privacy or reasonable content controls. They weren't stupid, they didn't accidentally get where they are - they designed it that way on purpose. That's where they get their billions. Saying "well, it's too big to do that" is stupid. Yes, doing privacy controls after the fact is more expensive...but that's true for all companies and all scopes of software, it's not unique to large places. They didn't do that type of content 3 years ago. So, if they can't figure out how to keep live vids of rapes and mass murders off their platform, they should end that entire aspect of their platform. They should NOT profit off such things.
You say that like it's somehow a bad thing. Getting the weirdos out of mainstream channels and into their own private echo-chambers means vulnerable people (teens, mentally challenged and unstable people, etc) aren't exposed to their weirdness and are far less likely to join them.
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If you are in New Zealand, you can get up to 10 years in jail just for having the shooter's manifesto in your possession:
Link Here
Ten Years. For having a hateful text document on your computer.
I would call that morally bankrupt.