[article]She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook.
Hannah Byrne joined Facebook to combat far-right extremism. She’s now convinced the tech giant can’t be trusted with such power.
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Yeah, and my avatar is not Aiai and her cig. /s (inb4 yes, I'm aware of removepaywalls.com)
That’s because terrorism, her instructors insisted, was not something governments do.
See, when I shit on "ackshyually", it's because of things like this: technically true statements can mislead you into believing completely outrageous implicit claims.
Byrne would only notice her mistake due to her first-hand experience. But how many people would never notice it? And I don't mean just dumb people, I mean otherwise reasonable people, who get caught in the words.
It wasn’t just the shock of a reversal on the Azov Battalion, but the fact that it had happened so abruptly — Byrne estimates that it took no more than two weeks to exempt the group and allow praise of it once more.
"Oceania was always in war with Eurasia" style. (Reminder 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a textbook.)
“We’re taking some of the most complex, unrelated, geographically separated, just different fucking things, and we’re literally using this word terrorism, or misinformation, or disinformation, to treat them as a binary.”
Yet another example on why getting caught on the words might literally kill.
Unlike past Big Tech dissidents like Frances Haugen, Byrne doesn’t think her former employer can be reformed with tweaks to its algorithms or greater transparency. Rather, she fundamentally objects to an American company policing speech — even in the name of safety — for so much of the planet.
As much as I love to shit on the three stooges (the governments of China, USA, and Russia), this shit would be equally problematic if Facebook was the armed force of another government.
IMO the best policing is like the one here, in the Fediverse. Government? Corporation? Nah, it's a bunch of non-profit-motivated individuals acting on their moral principles.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
Some food for thought for the folks here.
Sorry if this sounds like rambling, I was commenting as I was reading the text.
I haven’t read the article yet (about to), but you can type in any word, followed by @website.suffix for the email gate
moral principles
And individual petty ego rampages and social reflexes.
Which is still orders of magnitude better.
I recall popular demands on reddit for more social media censorship with their arrogant claims that public pressure would reliably steer private companies to censor the right speech. This is what it got us: an instrument for government collaborators to project power imbalances through moderation controls. They suppress the powerless from reporting the truth, and steer public opinion against them.
The solution was always there: demand free speech. Don't cower away from words like a removed. Don't moderate beyond legal necessity. Censorship by private companies isn't noble: it's for protecting the brand & advertising revenue from fragile egos while avoiding controversy & enabling abuse.
Online speech police are not the answer of a free society. Handling dangerous groups is the job of real authorities. Letting dangerous groups organize & communicate openly gives authorities more evidence to convict them.
A free society argues with words, not control or force. The only legitimate response to speech we merely dislike is speech to counter it.
Not fight. Starve.
It's extremely easy and they can't do a thing to stop it.