Facebook & Instagram ban extremist accounts

[Landlord]

On 5/6/2019 at 1:33 PM, BigRedBuster said:

 

That is completely immaterial.  

 

Not to me it's not. Scale matters. Viable competition also matters. If AT&T is the only internet service provider in America and they act unethically that is magnitudes more of a big deal than if one of my local small town ISP is acting like a$$h@!es.

 

 

 

On 5/6/2019 at 1:44 PM, knapplc said:

 

That's what I'm confused about with this. Some people seem to be acting as if this is a new thing. It's always been this way.

 

The small amount of private companies controlling such a large percentage of public discourse and avenues/access to news and information like this is somewhat of a new thing I'd say. But regardless of that, I'm not acting like it's a new thing I'm just saying it's a really dangerous thing that should be sounding lots of internal alarm bells for concern.

[JJ Husker]

On 5/6/2019 at 7:30 AM, teachercd said:

If it is "your" business...do what you want.  If I owned a business I would pretend like I was into whatever that customer was into...I want to make dollars.

 

Also, if you don't like something just don't read it or listen to it.  I don't like country music so I don't listen to country music.  I don't like stuff with onions and/or mushrooms so I don't buy stuff with onions and/or mushrooms.  

 

When I was a kid Farrakhan was on TV like once a week...giving his sermons/speeches whatever...I would be flipping through the stations...see him talking...and keep flipping.  

 

Onions...strike one.

Mushrooms...strike two

 

You're on thin ice fella 

[BigRedBuster]

8 minutes ago, Landlord said:

Not to me it's not. Scale matters.

And, you are free to have that opinion.

 

But, that's not how typically these issues are looked at.

[Landlord]

1 minute ago, BigRedBuster said:

And, you are free to have that opinion.

 

But, that's not how typically these issues are looked at.

 

 

Every human being in the world thinks bad things at bigger scale are worse than bad things at tiny scale.

 

Genocide is worse a single murder. Natural disasters are worse than one house burning down. Giant tech companies controlling public discourse is worse than small irrelevant messageboards doing the same thing.

[BigRedBuster]

2 minutes ago, Landlord said:

 

 

Every human being in the world thinks bad things at bigger scale are worse than bad things at tiny scale.

 

Genocide is worse a single murder. Natural disasters are worse than one house burning down. Giant tech companies controlling public discourse is worse than small irrelevant messageboards doing the same thing.

Ummmm......you're getting really really hyperbolic here and taking this completely off track.

 

Amazon discriminating against gay people would be the same as a cake maker in Denver discriminating against gay people as far as the law and constitution goes.  Just because you have freedom of speech, doesn't mean you have the freedom to say whatever you want WHEREVER you want.  

 

This has been explained to you over and over again and for some reason you just can't accept it.

 

Now, if you want to have your own personal opinion that these companies should not be allowed to do this....fine.  But, it's not going to change the fact that media companies have the ability to ban people from saying certain things in their platform....no different than the mods have that ability here.

[Landlord]

2 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

Amazon discriminating against gay people would be the same as a cake maker in Denver discriminating against gay people as far as the law and constitution goes. 

 

This has been explained to you over and over again and for some reason you just can't accept it.

 

 

I have explained over and over again that I understand perfectly fine that both situations regardless of scale fall under the same umbrella in regards to law. I've tried explaining over and over again that I am not talking about the law and the constitution. I'm talking about good and bad ideas. You're the one that's responding to me with arguments based on law. I don't know why you're doing that when I know what's true and it's irrelevant to the point which I initially started.

 

 

2 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

Now, if you want to have your own personal opinion that these companies should not be allowed to do this....fine.

 

 

Okay, cool. You finally have responded to me in a way that actually responds to what I've been doing. Moving on.

[Guy Chamberlin]

3 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

Ummmm......you're getting really really hyperbolic here and taking this completely off track.

 

Amazon discriminating against gay people would be the same as a cake maker in Denver discriminating against gay people as far as the law and constitution goes.  Just because you have freedom of speech, doesn't mean you have the freedom to say whatever you want WHEREVER you want.  

 

This has been explained to you over and over again and for some reason you just can't accept it.

 

Now, if you want to have your own personal opinion that these companies should not be allowed to do this....fine.  But, it's not going to change the fact that media companies have the ability to ban people from saying certain things in their platform....no different than the mods have that ability here.

 

I won't quibble about moral consistency, but I will quibble about scale. 

 

Social media is an incredibly powerful platform and for a shocking number of people, their only news source. Perhaps six private companies control a vast amount of the information available. If they align on unacceptable content and messengers, it's de facto censorship. While I am naturally thrilled that InfoWars would lose lots of amplification, they would no doubt crawl into a hole on Reddit and 4Chan and continue as ideological martyrs. I'm also aware that there's a less bats#!t segment of people genuinely concerned about things like illegal immigration and gun rights who begin to feel that free speech isn't applied equitably in this country, where the most hateful attacks on Donald Trump and followers are gleefully spread across social media every day by people like me. 

 

Keenly aware of the differences between laws and private policies, I still gotta go with Team Slippery Slope. 

 

 

[Enhance]

I think the situation highlights the negative and positive impacts of social media, to a degree. By and large, social media is a wonderful thing, but reliance on it for news and information has become somewhat damning. For the longest time, Facebook wasn't doing much to curate what was being shared and what wasn't. It has enabled dueling fact perceptions where opinions are based more on someone's beliefs or values instead of knowledge.

 

Much like a media outlet has a responsibility to its audience to generate honest, factual journalism, I personally believe Facebook has the responsibility to do much the same. They have become a media outlet, in all intents and purposes, even if they don't have "reporters" out there in the field like perhaps the NY Times or CBS News.

[BigRedBuster]

 

[TGHusker]

This is kind of related.  Research has shown that those who take radical views (left or right) find it hard to question their own positions and to change their mindset. 

 

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/people-with-extreme-political-views-have-trouble-thinking-about-their-own-thinking?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Quote

 

Radical political views of all sorts seem to shape our lives to an almost unprecedented extent. But what attracts people to the fringes? A new study from researchers at University College London offers some insight into one characteristic of those who hold extreme beliefs—their metacognition, or ability to evaluate whether or not they might be wrong.

“It’s been known for some time now that in studies of people holding radical beliefs, that they tend to… express higher confidence in their beliefs than others,” says Steve Fleming, a UCL cognitive neuroscientist and one of the paper’s authors. “But it was unknown whether this was just a general sense of confidence in everything they believe, or whether it was reflective of a change in metacognition.”

He and his colleagues set out to find the answer by removing partisanship from the equation: they presented study participants with a question that had an objective answer, rather than one rooted in personal values.

They studied two different groups of people—381 in the first sample and 417 in a second batch to try to replicate their results. They gave the first sample a survey that tested how conservative or liberal their political beliefs were. Radicalism exists on both ends of the spectrum; the people at the furthest extremes of left and right are considered “radical.”

After taking the questionnaire, the first group did a simple test: they looked at two different clusters of dots and quickly identified which group had more dots. Then they rated how confident they were in their choice.

People with radical political opinions completed this exercise with pretty much the same accuracy as moderate participants. But “after incorrect decisions, the radicals were less likely to decrease their confidence,” Fleming says.

Unlike political beliefs, which often have no right or wrong answer per se, one group of dots was unquestionably more numerous than the other. But regardless of whether or not there was an objective answer, the radicals were more likely to trust their opinion was correct than to question whether they might have gotten it wrong.

This finding—which the team replicated with tests on the second group of participants—suggests that the metacognition of radicals plays a part in shaping their beliefs. In other words, they actually can’t question their own ideas the same way more moderate individuals can.

It’s not currently known whether radical beliefs help shape metacognition, or metacognition helps shape radical beliefs, Fleming says. That’s something his team is still trying to unravel. But their work already has potential social implications, he says.

There is a body of work out there—small, but growing, Fleming wrote in an email—showing it may be possible to help people gain better metacognitive skills. This might enable individuals to get along better and make shared decisions.

“Widening polarization about political, religious, and scientific issues threatens open societies, leading to entrenchment of beliefs, reduced mutual understanding, and a pervasive negativity surrounding the very idea of consensus,” the researchers write. Understanding the role that metacognition plays in this polarization may help us step back from it.

 

 

[BigRedBuster]