Facebook watchdogs say the latest whistleblower accounts of wrongdoing underscore the need to regulate the platform.
“It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of the civil rights organization Free Press Action. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The allegation is that Facebook allows people to say things that progressives don’t agree with. Therefore Facebook must be regulated so that people cannot say things progressives don’t agree with.
There really isn’t anything else to see here, that is the whole and the full of it.
I know that the yanks don’t “do” irony… But surely even they can see the absurdity of the “Free Press Association” calling for censorship measures?
This is deeply unpleasant and corrupt. Facebook puts up a “whistleblower” to complain about itself in order to force through legislation that will hamper any competition and expel deplorables from their site.
It is indicative of the sad state of the USA today.
A little thing called the First Amendment.
I wonder if–had Americans been able to see 12 months into the future–the USA would have been happy for Trump to have forced an election-audit. And stayed in power.
Facebook would like nothing more than a big regulator, of course it must be funded by fees paid by the companies it regulates rather than the taxpayer. These fees will be pocket change to facebook and other incumbents, but a significant barrier to entry to any potential competitors. Being funded by the companies it regulates will also have no effect whatsoever on how the regulation is carried out.
Timmy’s blog will have to pay the same fees, or face being disconnected from the internet. It will just be a policy of the platform you are hosted on. Might last a little longer if you host on your own server, hide behind cloudflare (although they are also going a bit woke), that kind of thing. But they will get you and shut you down eventually.
Exactly, BiNK. There is more to say, because this isn’t just about Facebook not allowing people to say things “progressives” disagree with; it’s about nobody being allowed to let people say things “progressives” disagree with. And if you find stopping them doing so objectionable, or simply too expensive, then tough; you’re out of the game. Leave it to The Experts at Facebook.
Facebook already is censoring heavily “to protect the innocent”, and it’s starting to show through their cock-ups with it.
The past week peeps in my circle ran into a spate of bans/blocks because they obviously installed a contextual Naughty Word Filter. Peeps who, by all means, are real dangerous right-wing revolutionary housewives, hippies and other assorted Unwanteds, incidentally. Some of them even….knit and crochet…
Our best bet is that they took a dutch dictionary and applied a flag to anything that could be considered “Bad Words”, using either AI/algorythm or someone who really doesn’t know any dutch at all.
With the obvious result that about 30-ish percent of my dear language got flagged as Downright Evil, given our habit to use a lot of words in both complimentary and derogatory forms depending on inflection. ( sort of like built-in sarcasm. )
Add to that the fact that vernacular dutch tends to make a swearing scotsman blush….wellll… you can imagine the mayhem..
The most surprising thing is that it took them days to revert…
Just goes to show that FB et.al. quite definitely are trying to bend their little gardens to a very specific US model of “propriety”, and that they’re failing horribly at it.
Even extremely normal Dutch sentences sound like a cursefest when spoken in Dutch Dutch (as opposed to Belgian Dutch).
Yes. 🙂