For starters and for enders. How vulnerable do you think that dissident pages are if a group of former CIA and Homeland Security gets to decide that one drop of the wrong element means it has to go? now Facebook can hire Erik Prince to monitor their traffic if they want, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lick his boots.

That's why I decided not to do it :P

Yeah, I think this is about right.

How vulnerable do you think these groups will be if FB sits back and lets Russian intelleligence dick with their website?

Then perhaps, as the organizers point out in the article, Facebook could have just notified them and removed those users. That's what they would have done if it was the Democratic National committee's event or the Republican National Committee page but for black lives matters they just removed the page.

Probably depends on what you mean by "the state". Like the FBI or some part of the executive branch? Obviously a horrible idea. But I think that the federal court system does a much much better job of deciding speech issues than the current plan, which is #TrustZuckerberg I guess? So I'm thinking that some sort of legislation aimed at social media that lays out for what reason they can deplatform folks, which would put the ultimate implementation of that power into the hands of the courts?

Maybe OK for America, though I think it'll be interesting to see how well your courts are doing when all those Trump appointees are nicely settled in. Doesn't solve the global problem, though, and at first glance I don't think it solves Alex Jones, either.

WAT

From an article on this page:




From a PCMag article:

I've been thinking about this situation using the analogy of the railroad industry.


(1) Rails - Cable/Satellites, the physical infrastructure on which the system operates

(2) Trains - Hosting sites, the conveyors of the product

(3) Manufacturers - Authors, the creators of the conveyed product

(4) Goods - Information, the product


Let's assume that everyone in the debate is acting in good faith, and nobody wants malicious fabrication (information known to be untrue by its author yet held out by the author to be true) conveyed to the public.

How do we prevent railroads from ferrying nuclear waste through our towns?

Don't we hold accountable every participant in the chain who can be shown to have known, and therefor have been complicit, in the resulting contamination?

if the train company is asked to carry a product from a known distributor of nuclear waste, do we fault the train company for refusing to accept any product from that distributor?

prana,

The real organizers don't see it that way and say most of them did not receive that message.

I guess we have a disagreement between Mark Zuckerburg and the Atlantic Council and real anti-racist activists.

Yup, unfortunately letting the state enforce any kind of truth rules on the media would lead to Trump closing all the "fake news" outlets that don't like him. It's also obvious they can't self regulate themselves either. I wonder if less anonymity on the internet would help? It may help the market solve the problem of bogus news sources if it was easier to see who was doing the reporting?

Not for much longer when Trump's nominees become a majority of the judges on the bench...

lol dude. From your quote, the organizers say they were made aware and some were dismayed that they weren't made aware before the event was removed.

That completely contradicts the comment you made that I corrected.

I don't know enough about the judges in question to have an opinion about that, but isn't free speech something that didn't necessarily adhere to left/right paradigms in the court? Like wasn't Scalia one of the bigliest protectors of free speech on the court?

Yeah, in theory the courts sound better, but court based solutions can end up being used mostly by corporations and decided by money even more easily than political solutions.

If FB were truly the only reasonable place to speak the comparison with utility companies and the need to apply the first amendment might be apt. The situation is not 100% different, but it's definitely not the same.

It does't need an analogy. Your premise is wrong and is at the root of the problem with the media; not everyone is acting in good faith. There is no governing body overseeing "the media" requiring what they say is true. Creating such a body runs the risk of that body being compromised or biased toward some view.

Of course not everybody is acting in good faith - that's why we're seeking a solution to begin with.

The assumption I levied is that we, the participants in this discussion, don't want to see maliciously fabricated information, mascarading as truth, propagated. It is an objective standard to fit the "nuclear waste" in the analogy.

restating the problem; does not address the potential for solution

Can this not be said of any regulatory body?

The whole ****ing point is to be a humanitarian. Orwell was very honest, though not perfectly, and, just like the right you don't understand him. You cannot be a misanthropic egalitarian. The left is for suckers who happily accept even imperfect illiterates (not that that was accurate) if they are humanitarians.

Yes, but the press isn't like any other industry. Getting the government involved, which is how other regulatory bodies are reigned in is probably unconstitutional when it involves the press.

isn't the FCC is already involved in regulation of both infrastructure and content?

I'd imagine they cover things like swearing on the radio and nip slips at the superbowl but not anything directly about what the press does. But I don't know that for a fact.

Fully publically owned social media is the only real solution. Nationalise facebook and have it run like the BBC for the benefit of all rather than the profit of the shareholders. Let the arbiters of truth be journalists who aren't desperately trying to get a click at any cost but who are invested in the idea of public service. News shouldn't be a commodity.

You mean like NPR?

I like the "government as market participant" angle

Don't make GovBook the only social media platform (for some reason, I think China does this), but make it available to every citizen to guarantee 1A-permitted access and participation.


Administration seems like a nightmare, though.