Facebook says it will not remove fake news from its platform because it does not violate its community standards. The social network is currently running an advertising campaign in the UK that declares "fake news is not our friend". But it said publishers often had "very different points of view" and removing fabricated posts would be "contrary to the basic principles of free speech". Instead, it says posts that it deems to be fake news will be "demoted" in the news feed.
Private companies aren't really beholden to free speech though. Demotion is fine, but....
CNN reporter Oliver Darcy asked how the company could claim to be tackling the spread of misinformation when it allowed the InfoWars page to remain on the platform. InfoWars produces live talk shows online and has more than 900,000 followers on Facebook. Its primary host, Alex Jones, has more than 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube. However, the platform has pushed demonstrably false information, such as the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was faked by the US government.
How is that going to help with established nonsense ? I suspect it won't without a coordinated effort by Google and Facebook towards deletion rather than demotion; the only people who will be bothered to resubscribe to whatever sewage channel Alex Jones remerges on will be the nutters who'd believe something equally crazy no matter what. That said, I'll take whatever method works. It's views that matter, not subscribers, so trial demotion and see what happens.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44809815
I don't care how nuts Alex “turns frogs gay” Jones is — i would not want him silenced.
ReplyDeleteAlso 1st Amendment ≠ free speech. Free speech has much wider importance then the just 1st Amendment and it's not just the government who needs to uphold the principles of free speech.
Martin Krischik free speech is not about being able to say what the fuck you want.
ReplyDeletePiero FilippIN Actually it is. Free speech is being able to say what the fuck you want. That's the very definition of free speech.
ReplyDeleteThe American definition of absolute freedom of speech under any and all circumstances is an impossible absurdity. It is utterly incompatible with civilisation. Plato understood this very well, because he witnessed the chaos brought about by divisive rhetoric. His solutions - particularly his definitions of "moderate" - weren't any better, but he recognised the problem.
ReplyDeletehttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/h41evK26G7l6FtVY0h8D4CtXUaIh17JSxZ0eW8OwZGKURvOy8tQLIw9VPPzc4N5J_8a6mPJ3Qyb92NcdPopbSZtDHHXn7FQtJ8IY=s0
Martin Krischik no. That's your misconception, and good luck pulling that off anywhere in the world.
ReplyDeleteNo civilised society can function according to that definition of free speech. Almost everywhere in the world false advertisement is punishable by law, so it is fraud, lying under oat, defamation - and that's not a comprehensive list.
Free speech is about freedom of expression, not about making stuff up. “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.”
Piero FilippIN So should we delete all copies of The Lord of the Rings because J. R. R. Tolkien was making things up?
ReplyDeleteMaking things up is part of free expression and free speech
But you are right, fraud, lying under oat, defamation, libel, slander and injurious falsehood are all restrictions to free speech.
But being a restriction to free speech does not make it part of free speech.
And more importantly: It's up to a proper court of law to decide if those restrictions have been broken.
Until a court of law has come to the conclusion that Alex “turns frogs gay” Jones has broken one of those laws he is free to speak.
Martin Krischik do you really don't see the difference between a novel and a lie?
ReplyDeleteMartin Krischik en.oxforddictionaries.com - freedom of speech | Definition of freedom of speech in English by Oxford Dictionaries
ReplyDeleteOPINION. Not all the fuck you want.
And even opinions are not all allowed - hate speech is a crime in UK - and that, yes, is a limitation of free speech.
I don't care. I stopped FaceBork forever. Those who still use it have agreed to what it does.
ReplyDeletePiero FilippIN i can see difference very clearly. It was you who did not make that difference. And that was a hyperbole to point out that you forgot to make thar difference. You are grasping for straws now.
ReplyDeleteMartin Krischik are you seriously failing to grasp the difference between stating something "is your opinion" vs stating something that is not true 'is a fact"?
ReplyDeleteSo you don't see a difference between saying "I don't like like Hillary Clinton, she looks like someone who would give pizza to children to get them in her van" vs "a white supremacist Twitter account that presented itself as belonging to a Jewish lawyer in New York included a display of a claim that the New York City Police Department, which was searching emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop as part of an investigation into his sexting scandals, had discovered the existence of a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party." - is the latter "free speech"?
Piero FilippIN No, it's more like I can't type and put put silly typos sounding the use of the word “not” into his postings.
ReplyDeleteThere are different regulations one can apply to speech. Some of these are morally better and more practically effective than others. It's not a question of imprisoning anyone who says anything offensive - that would self-evidently be authoritarianism gone mad. But it would be at least equally stupid to stand idly by if insane content gains wider support. You don't have to lock people up, but you do have to do something.
ReplyDeleteGiving people a voice - even the nutters - and letting refutals occur naturally is often effective enough at keeping the crazies in check without censoring them, fighting speech with speech. That, I think, should generally be the default option. A likely exception would be the incitement to immediate physical violence. If someone says they're planning to murder someone, you have to arrest them. There isn't a sensible alternative.
Also, sometimes clamping down with bans and other reactions produces a backfire effect that makes things worse than before. However at other times simply not reporting statements at all, or treating all sides with an undeserved impartiality, can promote rather than restrain different views.There's a nice piece about that here :
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/
I won't claim to understand the circumstances under which restricting speech can aid or impair an argument. But both do happen. Hence I favour trying different methods when it comes to dealing with the abject crazies : demotion might be effective. There's a difference between the right to say weird stuff to some bloke in a pub without being locked up, and the right to appear on national television ranting your ass off about the gays, or whatever. The right to speak and the right to be heard are interlinked but nevertheless different; an absolute insistence on the latter is crazy because it removes the right to have freedom from offensive speech.
Personally I don't even like the term free speech; I think it's inevitably a matter of what regulations you want to apply. Neither extreme of total control nor total lack of regulations are even remotely sensible, the only debate to be had is as to what regulations are applied. It's too important and complex an issue for a crude black-and-white choice.
Demotion and algorithms (human or automated procedures) to prioritise news feeds are one possible sort of regulation. Deletion is another. Demonetisation (or restrictions on profit) of video content , restrictions on media ownership (e.g. preventing corporate media monopolies), forbidding the use of social media platforms, prioritising how often individuals and/or specific viewpoints get a prime time TV slot or newspaper front page (and importantly how often their critics get an appearance), control of bots etc. are others, and that's before we even get to the possible different penalties or other sorts of responses that could be exacted. Go too far with any of these, and without even mentioning prisons you end up with an authoritarian dystopia. But avoid them all completely and you end up with a realm where all freedoms are completely usurped by those willing and able to exploit the lack of laws. They both just lead to marginally different sorts of tyrannies.
No, the only way is accept that the whole thing is complex and necessarily subject to a failure rate - but a flawed, regulated system is infinitely better than one of total control or total lack of control.
OK, rant over, back to science...