> Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said.
To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation.
The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.
I had followed the case since the beginning. Having watched the videos, it was plainly obvious that in each case, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense. (Intriguingly, many pro-Rittenhouse voices were arguing that he was guilty of the gun charge, though some were a bit more eagle-eyed and read the statute the way the judge ultimately did when he dismissed it.)
The interesting thing about Rittenhouse is that even despite the NYT telling the truth through their video analysis, the rest of the press and tech monopolies ratcheted the story in one direction: that Rittenhouse was a "mass shooter" who was carrying out a white supremacist terrorist attack.
During the trial, my overlapping bubbles either had seen the videos and/or watched the trial and believed him innocent, or had only read the media reports, and believed him guilty.
Given the weird nature of this case, and how only one viewpoint about it was allowed on social media, I wonder if that constitutes defamation on the part of the social media companies, since they were in practice making an editorial decision that he was bad.
That said, I doubt any courts would ever actually find that section 230 does not shield tech monopolies when they do this, but I am curious.
A very curious part of this is the president of the US calling him a white supremacist before the verdict is reached and the press secretary defending that portrayal [he shot three white guys]. A president who promised to 'bring normality back to the whitehouse'. That cavalier attitude toward justice creates unnecessary tensions in the community ['if the president says so, it must be true, and if the accused is acquitted then justice is broken and we can take it into our hands']
I am not American and I didn’t follow these events but sorry for me after watching that video it’s still complicated: the self-defense seems justified, but the initial issue of protecting property with guns is not: material possession and private property is not on the same level as human life. I understand a law allows it in that state hence the jury logical decision, but that doesn’t make it right, just legal. Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me. So in the end I surprisingly understand Facebook choice.
Which content is that? Saying "Rittenhouse acted in self defense" didn't violate the FB policy, so what, specifically, could you say that is consistent with the jury that Facebook would remove?
The jury didn't conclude that Rittenhouse is a good person, or that his victims deserved to die, or that they were bad people or looters. The jury didn't conclude that America needs more people like Rittenhouse, or that we should celebrate his actions.
The jury concluded that he wasn't guilty of murder. That's all. You're a lawyer, you know that.
This case is so weird from a european pov. Rittenhouse would be certainly convicted of murder in countries like germany. The self-defense argument would get you some laughs at the trial.
Somehow I watched 1 or 2 videos on twitter right at the time, and got a good sense of what happened, that ended up being consistent with the jury ruling. These weren't even political posts, just some OSINT people I follow. I was not aware of any "misleading media narrative," since I don't consume any mainstream media outside of occasional twitter posts. Once the trial started I was actually very surprised how many people had zero clue what really happened, yet had strong opinions one way or the other.
This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.
Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society and this is just further evidence of it all. If Facebook employed an even remotely accurate sample of the population based on political leanings and backgrounds for their content policy team this would have never happened. I think the amount of blame the left and media placed on Facebook for the 2016 election of President Trump are to majorly to blame for the whole situation.
I mean I agree with you on the technicality, but the uniquely American view that someone can take a gun to a protest and not be looking for trouble is a very interesting one.
I really think we should bring back a version of fairness doctrine [1] or right of reply [2] targeted at platforms like Facebook or Twitter. This is not really my area of expertise, but I suspect that might be more effective and practical than repealing Section 230 for addressing blatant censorship like this.
The BBC does not mention it, but Rittenhouse's ability to raise funds for a legal defense was also hindered on many levels, including blocks by Twitter, GoFundMe, and the Discover payment processor: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-ri...
Perhaps if their blocks were successful in preventing his legal defense, they could now claim to be justified by a guilty verdict..
Yes. The tech industry has made itself look exceptionally bad here. Facebook did something deeply unethical and now it's blown up in their faces. They will not admit that's what they did, but it was. They have directly contributed to the erosion of the principles of justice for no better reason than to appease radical employees.
The funny thing about social media companies censoring is how they keep making the case for free speech over and over again without realizing it.
Mill:
> First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
The last point is the least obvious. Pro-Rittenhouse views were "held in the manner of a prejudice" by those who had them because they were censored. When those views aren't censored and there's a healthy back-and-forth, moderacy tends to prevail.
Facebook can choose to host whatever opinions they like as they own the platform. Obviously as long as those "opinions" are legal and not such things as terroristic threats, etc. That also is free speech and the right to with your property as you like.
I hadn’t heard of this policy. It makes sense to me how people were so uninformed about what happened that night if Facebook was banning videos supporting Kyle and most of the media wasn’t being impartial. Anyone who spent time watching the videos wouldn’t be surprised by the verdict.
Considering Kyle killed people, at a very contentious and politically sensitive time, its understandable that the story was banned.
I've heard some very bad hot takes that basically amount to "he should have killed those people". Advocating for killing people is way less controversial than whatever "nuance" people want to assign to the case regarding legal standing of guns and various self defense laws.
Its not crazy to imagine someone thinking to just ban that whole discourse from a platform, even if takes some "genuine" and not-murderous conversations with it - simply to avoid people advocating death.
Gofundme did the same thing. They killed the gofundme for Kyle's legal defense and then after it didn't matter anymore they "reversed the decision".
this article talks about a post the family of a recent school shooter made praising/defending him on facebook - so obviously facebook is applying this rule very selectively. I think it would help their credibility if they had examples of other times they apply these rules - but it seems more like they make up the rules on the spot and apply them based on their internal politics.
Definitely gives me pause to hear things like Facebook disallowing support of an individual embroiled in a hostile media environment and dubious criminal charges. Where would figures like Amanda Knox be if a similar wave of thought-crime style censorship were deployed at scale?
Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.
I think the big question that we have to ask ourselves is, in the contest between the right of speech of the individual and that of private corporations; Where, if ever, do we draw the line when the latter erodes that of the former.
The whole self-appointed "fact checker empowered to cancel" movement has to stop. Far too much fair disagreement, and objective truths, have been maliciously "cancelled" for not adhering to a given narrative on public forums.
I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.
Facebook fact checked a friend's locket that her mother gave her. It was bizarre. She posted a photo of the locket, Facebook blurred the photo and added a 'Independent fact checkers have determined this is false information' warning. The problem? The locket has a quote on it by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Apparently independent fact checkers are unable to verify that Emerson ever said the quote so it had to be blurred for our protection. Whether the quote is accurate or not, it's strange that Facebook is now policing gifts people give their children.
> by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.
No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.
I really don't think Facebook should be in charge of making speech moderation at this level of specificity.
Social media platforms have become the public squares of the 21st century, and as such we need to treat the right for free speech on those platforms as important.
That doesn't mean we can't change these platforms to favour desirable engagement. If our physical public square were very small, everyone might be reduced to yelling to hear each other. So we make our physical public squares large and open! Maybe if we put a tree in the middle, it will calm us down and help us engage with each other.
But we will never appoint a public square moderator who arbitrarily decides what can and cannot be said. Neither should Facebook.
The problem isn't you, but others who do not try to curate their own diverse sources. When time comes to make democratic decisions, if those who are influenced outnumbered people like you, there'd be no way for you to make your case and convince the others of your correctness.
Orgs like Facebook who use "Independent Fact Checkers" need to reveal their sources otherwise there's no reason to believe the "Independent Fact Checkers" aren't Facebook employees making arbitrary or even ideological rulings on what is true and what is false.
Might be downvoted but there was a fact checker website that denied at the time President Trump’s claim that Kyle had acted in self defense. This was a year ago and I saw it for myself as still being up a few weeks ago. I am not an American and I really see both sides here. The jury system worked as per the law defined in the US (and I am not a pro 2A person ) but I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one.
> I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one.
If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police.
If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).
The increased vigilantism is directly related to the media demonizing the police and misrepresenting facts. If the police are demonized and told to stand down by mayors during times of riots then someone will fill that vacuum. If you don't want vigilantism then you need police and politicians to do their jobs.
In my opinion, this and many other issues in the past few years are due, almost exclusively, to reporters viewing themselves as activists instead of reporters of fact. This specific case has too many examples of this to be coincidence, from the way the Jacob Blake story was reported initially( failing to report on the knife), to the intentional misrepresentation of the facts in the Rittenhouse case.
Between Facebook banning any support, President Biden labeling him a white supremacist, and the Democrat head of the judiciary committee Rep. Jerry Nadler suggesting a unanimous jury verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” which needs to be investigated, Rittenhouse is going to a busy man.
Most likely not. As was pointed out by a lot of lawyers who followed the case (that I watched on YouTube), defamation lawsuits after a criminal prosecution are very hard to pursue. Also public officials enjoy anti-diffamation protections generally, especially the president and member of congress and members of the senate.
I praise all censorship and all inconsistency by Facebook. Poison discourse to the point that it stops happening. Facebook is a platform for manipulation not for communication.
Fail-fast attitude can be attractive until you realize that the failing is not happening in the way you imagined. What if Facebook censors very inconsistently, AND people end up being indifferent toward it? Then Facebook will be a successful platform for manipulation, the polar opposite of what the fail-fast fantasy would project.
The question is, if media centralization continues, what evidence/perspectives could have been removed from the public sphere, and what impact could that have on impartiality?
Tech has the potential to decentralize power. Alas...
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation.
The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.
[+] [-] baryphonic|4 years ago|reply
The interesting thing about Rittenhouse is that even despite the NYT telling the truth through their video analysis, the rest of the press and tech monopolies ratcheted the story in one direction: that Rittenhouse was a "mass shooter" who was carrying out a white supremacist terrorist attack.
During the trial, my overlapping bubbles either had seen the videos and/or watched the trial and believed him innocent, or had only read the media reports, and believed him guilty.
Given the weird nature of this case, and how only one viewpoint about it was allowed on social media, I wonder if that constitutes defamation on the part of the social media companies, since they were in practice making an editorial decision that he was bad.
That said, I doubt any courts would ever actually find that section 230 does not shield tech monopolies when they do this, but I am curious.
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuamorton|4 years ago|reply
The jury didn't conclude that Rittenhouse is a good person, or that his victims deserved to die, or that they were bad people or looters. The jury didn't conclude that America needs more people like Rittenhouse, or that we should celebrate his actions.
The jury concluded that he wasn't guilty of murder. That's all. You're a lawyer, you know that.
[+] [-] siva7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Benjammer|4 years ago|reply
This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.
[+] [-] uncoder0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RC_ITR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0fuchs|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] finite_jest|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply
[+] [-] NoRelToEmber|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps if their blocks were successful in preventing his legal defense, they could now claim to be justified by a guilty verdict..
[+] [-] native_samples|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slibhb|4 years ago|reply
Mill:
> First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
The last point is the least obvious. Pro-Rittenhouse views were "held in the manner of a prejudice" by those who had them because they were censored. When those views aren't censored and there's a healthy back-and-forth, moderacy tends to prevail.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxHoppersGhost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vineyardmike|4 years ago|reply
I've heard some very bad hot takes that basically amount to "he should have killed those people". Advocating for killing people is way less controversial than whatever "nuance" people want to assign to the case regarding legal standing of guns and various self defense laws.
Its not crazy to imagine someone thinking to just ban that whole discourse from a platform, even if takes some "genuine" and not-murderous conversations with it - simply to avoid people advocating death.
[+] [-] hasdf|4 years ago|reply
this article talks about a post the family of a recent school shooter made praising/defending him on facebook - so obviously facebook is applying this rule very selectively. I think it would help their credibility if they had examples of other times they apply these rules - but it seems more like they make up the rules on the spot and apply them based on their internal politics.
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article25...
[+] [-] qqtt|4 years ago|reply
Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.
[+] [-] esyir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ctdonath|4 years ago|reply
I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.
[+] [-] thumbellina|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HumanReadable|4 years ago|reply
Social media platforms have become the public squares of the 21st century, and as such we need to treat the right for free speech on those platforms as important.
That doesn't mean we can't change these platforms to favour desirable engagement. If our physical public square were very small, everyone might be reduced to yelling to hear each other. So we make our physical public squares large and open! Maybe if we put a tree in the middle, it will calm us down and help us engage with each other.
But we will never appoint a public square moderator who arbitrarily decides what can and cannot be said. Neither should Facebook.
[+] [-] thumbellina|4 years ago|reply
That said, it's clear they are not in a position to act as a neutral platform for civic discourse.
I try to support technologies and platforms that provide a voice to all. Decentralized over centralized.
I try to curate my own list of sources, rather than rely on third-party curation.
How else can I ensure a healthy and diverse information perspective?
[+] [-] chii|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anshumankmr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru...
It is still up.
[+] [-] hagbard_c|4 years ago|reply
If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police.
If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).
[+] [-] Jtype|4 years ago|reply
In my opinion, this and many other issues in the past few years are due, almost exclusively, to reporters viewing themselves as activists instead of reporters of fact. This specific case has too many examples of this to be coincidence, from the way the Jacob Blake story was reported initially( failing to report on the knife), to the intentional misrepresentation of the facts in the Rittenhouse case.
[+] [-] koolba|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeMassive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
Rittenhouse stayed out of the politics for the trial(very smart) and later he revealed that he was in the "Yang Gang"
"I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but I was a pretty big Andrew Yang supporter before all this,"
He was far left and the left wing are who attacked him as white supremacist and all that.
Just goes to show how the media is just completely full of shit.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idontwantthis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npteljes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhettoComputers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stareblinkstare|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thumbellina|4 years ago|reply
Tech has the potential to decentralize power. Alas...
[+] [-] literallyaduck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply