Facebook claims people showing art, electronics, wheelchair mods is hate speech
blog.adafruit.comThis is why the centralization of all social interaction on a few big platforms is a cause for concern. Some of the blame lies with people too; ideally, companies such as Adafruit would simply run a Discourse instance (or another forum software), and have users communicate there and receive web push notifications, and so on, instead of just using a large social platform.
As for Facebook, there are no disincentives for over-moderation. After all, it is better to over-censor and avoid attracting negative news coverage, the attention of legislators, and negative sentiments among people.
Until we have protocols over platforms, we need to compel lawmakers to treat platforms over some threshold (perhaps 250M MAUs?) as "common carriers".
While platforms should be able to deboost or delete hate speech and harassment, there need to be robust escape hatches for when content is falsely flagged or when users return to normal community behavior. Nobody should be able to be de-platformed (or de-personed) indefinitely.
I routinely see folks on Reddit that complain of being blocked in some subreddit they enjoy because they merely posted in another subreddit once. Perhaps even in disagreement with the content of that subreddit. There's no appeal process or restitution, and Reddit's ban evasion policies state that trying to get around these bans can get you completely perma banned.
Imagine permanently not being able to participate in the biggest community for your {hobby, city, career}. And being told you must comply. That's messed up.
Even if regulation-compliant moderation winds up costing an order of magnitude more than it does today, it will be well worth it to preserve our freedoms.
Those that are pro-censorship and pro-user removal should realize that they could just as easily find themselves on the other side of the debate. A decade ago the dynamics favored the other side, and those now in power would be the ones finding themselves erased. The pendulum swings. It's best to make rules that protect everyone, especially the minority.
Censorship and permabanning are 1984, regardless of what the opinions or who the users are.
Protocols over platforms hasn’t happened because who is going to pay for the apps and polishing their user experience?
Software is really weird. For a car the engine and drive train and frame cost a lot more than the dashboard and the trim. For software this is backwards. The engine and drive train are often cheap or even free, but controls that people can use or trim to make it look nice is very difficult and expensive. It’s easy to make (most) software work but soul crushingly hard to make it usable.
It’s fascinating to me that you’re being downvoted for giving such a level headed opinion.
Adafruit does run its own forum but this is about live-streamed video that is also stored for on-demand viewing.
And as the post mentions, the video in question is not gone, they do the stream on multiple platforms simultaneously, for instance it's still on YouTube. They do this not only because of the expense of operating your own video hosting infrastructure but also to be where their audience is, which is in multiple places.
Here's the solution, if you'd like to use it: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Based on your own copy, Dreamwidth checks the boxes at least as effectively as your own offerings. "The" is bearing so much load here, we might as well be making jokes about jet fuel combustion and steel beams.
Where is Dreamwidth mentioned in our copy? Why specifically it? Seems to me that no other platform comes close to replicating most of the features of Facebook.
Dreamwidth is not mentioned anywhere in your copy. What your copy does provide are your criteria for what the "next big thing" is. You asserted that your offering was the exclusive solution to the problem. Dreamwidth is merely my proof by counter-example.
I am not sure it's much of a counterexample. Is Dreamwidth a decentralized replacement for Facebook that people can use? Does it replace most of Facebook's features?
Dreamwidth is a Livejournal fork, a blogging service.
Please take a look at Qbix, it is far closer to Facebook's feature set than that.
a discord instance is just shifting to another central platform, albeit more permissive for now.
They wrote Discourse not Discord, two different and unrelated things
Discourse itself is GPL, which means that even they shouldn't be able to revoke your license to the code.
Next headline: GPL considered harmful, enables hate speech, favors extremist websites.
I’m joking but GitHub was extremely woke in the two years before the acquisition. Banning open-source and making everything cloud-dependent would be a great way to ensure no ungodly website is run freely.
esr or rms or someone had a good essay on why “use for good not evil” license clauses (banning use by militaries was a favorite) werent a great idea for free software.
Still does not make it less centralized though. If the majority of people is on that one instance of terrible forum, and you get banned, you are still going to have a hard time participating. And just like with other social media, you could of course host your own thing. But with that come content moderation obligations, if open to the public. A lot of work to create a parallel service.
wow, my mistake. i even saw discourse and am so used to seeing everything move to discord that I think my brain just autocorrected it.
Last time I checked, you can self-host Discourse.
There is no centralization. There are many different websites to use to socialize, and not to long ago we didn't have any social websites and we still had plenty of social interaction - I'd say even more than now depending on if you count random garbage from anonymous strangers "social interaction." I do not, nor have I ever even been on facebook or twitter.
The reason she might have gotten flagged is because of stuff like this - where either her or a person of the same name says things facebook might not like to host. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/20/n...
"But in Negohot, a settlement of religious nationalists, no one is buying the government line. Virtually everyone here dislikes the peace process and deeply distrusts the Palestinians. "At the end of all this, the Jewish people will live in a high tower and the Palestinians will have all the land and big private houses," said Limor Fried .. "These two people are fighting for the same land and the same places, so there's no chance for peace."
If that's not the same person as the Adafruit lady, and they just share a name - well not a problem. There's a way to dispute the facebook autoban - it tells you right in the original message.
There's no issue here. Let's not create one. No one needs facebook, no one cares, don't make up problems just to get angry and have something to solve.
While we're at it, let's stop having news articles and news on TV about random crap someone anonymously tweeted from the toilet on their phone.
What the hell are you talking about? There is massive centralization.
You’re pulling a story (about a regional dispute) from 20+ years ago as proof that Facebook was correct to block this one video about art? How are you making this connection?
Facebook has no problem with Israel’s existence, I’m not sure what your problem with Jews existing is, but this is a very odd place to make a political argument.
The entire concept of "hate speech" should be thrown away.
Hate speech is the difference between "I disagree with your opinion" and "You should be killed for saying this". The latter is hate speech for which its explicit goal is to exclude the victim from the debate by inciting hate on them. When done by multiple individuals, you get harassment and the very important risk of harming the victim (directly or indirectly, morally or physically).
Let's say there's a group called "We Will Kill Them All", you might say that this is just words, but people live by words (politics is literally just that) and hate speech directly and explicitly encourages people to take an act on the victim and harm them. You might say that any individual could do that, but do not underestimate the power of a group binding people in hate, because this is one of the strongest bonds you can make (We v.s. Them) and peer pressure makes people ready to do much more horrible things than they'd do by themselves. One such example is the NSDAP party, many of their members wouldn't have been against the Jews if they had never interacted with this party. So do not underestimate the power of hate speech.
To go back to the Facebook case here, the problem isn't the concept of "hate speech", the problem is Facebook's bad enforcement of it cuz legally there's just nothing against this.
I agree-ish with you, but I think it would help if you made it clear why: "We should kill all the Russians in Ukraine" is different than "we should kill the russians who don't think we are a country." (When does context matter?)
I also think it would help if you made it clear if there is a distinction between "We should kill all the Jews" and "we should kill all the people who want/are planning to kill all the Jews." (When does precedence matter?)
I would assert that your definiton should probably be changed to speech used to oppress. Violence inciting speech against the oppressed seems like hate speech, but I don't think I'm on board with violence inciting speech against opressors being classified as hate speech.
Of course the opressors always see themselves as the oppressed so that muddies things even more.
What is your test for whether something is hate speech or not?
> "We should kill all the Russians in Ukraine" is different than "we should kill the russians who don't think we are a country."
I think you dropped some nuance. Killing all Russians who are in Ukraine in an effort to violently coerce Ukrainians and their government to comply with the will of the Russian government is different from both "We should kill all the Russians in Ukraine" and "We should kill the Russians who don't think we are a country"
Yes, I was not being careful enough.
"We should kill all the Russians in Ukraine" -> "We should kill all the Russians invading Ukraine." is probably the right phrasing for the question I was asking.
Yes and this is a important distinction, as there are many russians in the ukraine not supporting the invasion. They happen to live there.
And they feel threatened with such statements, as they are sadly way too common.
> the ukraine
You might want to switch to just 'Ukraine' without the 'the' when referring to the country. 'The Ukraine' is an outdated way of referring to the region without conceding that is also a valid and sovereign nation. Since the invasion this term has taken on further connotations.
Yes, that's a valid point, I am usually aware of, but just forgot.
You two have gone of some bizarre deep end here.
How's about we not kill anyone and find a peaceable solution.
Peace requires justice.
If there is no justice, there can be no peace.
If you support peace in the presence of injustice, you support the injustice.
So it is a good exercise to think about the language we use to describe injustice such as hate speech.
Then, should Kathy Griffin have been deplatformed when she showed a picture of her holding the severed head of a likeness of Trump? How is that not hate speech? Can I show a picture of a severed head of something looking like Nancy Pelosi?
When certain political groups say "we have to get in their faces" is that an incitement to violence or at least harassment?
Can I say, "in my opinion, politician X should be executed for crimes against America?" Is that incitement or just a protected statement of opinion?
When Hillary called 1/2 of Trump supporters "deplorables" isn't that hate speech? I heard plenty of people say that anti-vax people should be executed or at least left to starve to death (Chomsky said something like this). Is that hate or an opinion?
Hate speech is hopelessly vaguely defined and will be abused by whichever side is in power.
> should Kathy Griffin have been deplatformed when she showed a picture of her holding the severed head of a likeness of Trump
She was. Fired almost immediately.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kathy-griffin-fired-cnn...
> When Hillary called 1/2 of Trump supporters "deplorables" isn't that hate speech?
She apologized as soon as it happened
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables
> anti-vax people should be executed or at least left to starve to death (Chomsky said something like this)
Incorrect. He called for classic quarantining which is exactly what happened before vaccines.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/noam-chomsky-calls-for...
> Hate speech is hopelessly vaguely defined
Incorrect! Most organizations have reached wildly close consensus on the matter
> > Hate speech is hopelessly vaguely defined
> Incorrect! Most organizations have reached wildly close consensus on the matter
That wikipedia article indicates: """Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation"."""
There was a bill in Florida which: """The legislation would prohibit individuals from making people “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”""" https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/19/us/florida-education-crit...
Absent any other context, "hate speech is animosity/disparagement towards ... race" is consistent with what the bill protects against: "don't make people feel distress on account of race". The concerns are ostensibly in the same direction.
I suspect those opposed to the Florida bill would really prefer a more narrow interpretation of 'hate speech', and those in favour would prefer a broader interpretation.
It's not. Public libraries aren't considered hate groups anywhere but in the current propagandists wild imaginations.
That legislation is about weaponizing existing tools to whitewash history and in the context of the Florida "stop woke act"/"don't say gay" bill follows a lineage of curtailing and restricting education in some wild "satanic panic" style attack on the manufactured issues of CRT and "wokeism", specifically as spearheaded by the Florida GOP
This is part of that legislative agenda and is meant to remove topics such as civil rights, women's rights, LGBT history and labor struggle from school curriculum.
You're free to ignore that and pretend otherwise but you're not fooling me.
> That legislation is about weaponizing existing tools
Right.
It seems entirely reasonable to be concerned that if 'hate speech' is applied too broadly, it can be used to silence political opponents.
Don't forget drag shows. The such bad Florida has an issue with those too.
> She apologized as soon as it happened
She apologized for using the word "half", not for calling Americans deplorable.
Apart from that one, it sounds like you have it all figured out. The part I think you're missing is that many people are bothered that hate speech coming from those privileged enough to be holding the majority view is forgiven with a forced apology, whereas other hate speech will send you to jail.
More than ever, it really just seems "hate speech", for Americans at least, is better defined as "speech coming from people with views I hate". It's seemingly impossible to separate American party lines from their definition of hate speech.
No matter where you go, hate speech is pretty much defined the same way
Take the UN for example
https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/...
It's certainly a concept and as such needs comprehension to understand it.
People failing to grasp the concept write it off as being nonsense in the same way people write off everything else they fail to take the time to understand.
Hate groups which are always built on lies and propaganda seek to confuse the issue. They're kicking up dust. There isn't any actual confusion, only that which they've manufactured.
It's classic fear, uncertainty and doubt.
I would love to see a source showing Noam Chomsky advocating that antivaxers should be executed or "left to starve".
They probably meant something like this (no call for executions!)
https://news.yahoo.com/noam-chomsky-unvaccinated-remove-them...
Seems like all he really said was that people who refuse to get vaccinated should take responsibility for the fact that they're objectively a threat to other people and that dealing with the consequences of their own actions is ultimately their problem.
Interpreting that as him saying they should starve is certainly... creative.
> "How can we get food to them?" Chomsky told YouTube's Primo Radical on Sunday. "Well, that's actually their problem."
What if a majority group, maybe white Americans, decided that a minority group, maybe one with a high crime rate, like African Americans [1], was dangerous and should be segregated from society, and said that access to food was their problem to figure out? That they were a high-crime group, and it was dangerous to society if they continued to operate in it? I imagine you would be singing a different tune if those were the groups in discussion.
[1]: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2020-in...
This is very strange reasoning. Whatever I might have thought if he had said that, he did not say that, therefore it is not relevant.
He didn't even say antivaxers "should be segregated", the writer added that.
But clearly arguing in good faith is but a distant memory at this point. Let's just make up imaginary scenarios and argue about those, I guess.
> Whatever I might have thought if he had said that, he did not say that, therefore it is not relevant.
Do you not consider counterfactual thinking to have any value?
There's nothing wrong with counterfactuals in general, but you have to do it correctly. Doing it wrong leads to a strawman and that has very little value indeed.
Chomsky is arguing that unvaccinated people are a danger to those they come into contact with. Not a potential danger - a real danger. It's not like having brown skin; you can't choose not to have brown skin.
People are free to not be vaccinated; and other people are free to shun them.
That's his point, the way I read it.
> When Hillary called 1/2 of Trump supporters "deplorables" isn't that hate speech?
No, it is unequivocally, objectively not hate speech. Nowhere in there is there a threat of violence. I don't really care if it hurts your feelings. Make better choices in life.
It goes deeper even than that. I don't know if my childhood was typical, but for me the concept of hatred itself is narrow. Isn't it supposed to be an emotion that's especially visceral? If a person feels hatred, if they hate someone or something, shouldn't we see their jaws clench, shouldn't their blood pressure go up? Won't it be difficult for them to form coherent sentences, and so on?
But today, "hate" is any time you say something someone dislikes or the politics of which they disagree with. It's nearly a meaningless word now.
The entire concept of "hate" might be worth discarding.
"Hate", like many other words similarly abused, has steadily lost meaning due to deliberate overuse and overambiguity.
"Hate speech" doesn't factually exist anyway, all the sincerely objectional speech it claims to pertain to are already described since long before "hate speech" came into the lexicon:
You speak lies and/or falsehoods about someone? That's libel[1] and/or slander[2] and you can be sued for it.
You provoke someone into violence? Them's fightin' words and are not protected under the 1st Amendment.[3]
You change your behaviour towards someone based on their race, nationality, sex, or creed? That is discrimination and illegal regardless the context or undertones.[4]
---------------
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/libel
[2]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/slander
Hate (like love) is not an emotion, but an act of will.
You should find another word, then. Because "hate" is still an emotion in my dictionary.
GP is right, though. Love and hatred are the two manifestations of the will: the will to create and the will to destroy. When you see a scary spider near you, that first impulse is the will to destroy. By the time the pure will reaches your motor neurons, it creates a lot of secondary effects, such as emotions. That's why there's a saying that desire is a weak will.
You might be right. However I don't see anything wrong if I feel a will to destroy something and I resist it, so that no harm comes from my hatred.
Hatred by itself is not necessarily something to condemn. Therefore "hate speech" is a poor approximation of its commonly intended meaning, that is "speech aimed at acting (violently) against the object of one's hatred".
Mostly agreed.
> I don't see anything wrong if I feel a will to destroy something and I resist it, so that no harm comes from my hatred.
Agreed. One nitpick: "harm" may also be e.g. psychological self-harm. In my mother tongue, when you willingly sustain your hate, we say that you "feed hate" - it is a very wise intuition, I think.
And in my dictionary, "hatred" is always something to condemn - but OTOH, there is a vast difference between "emotional impulse" and "conscious will"... In other words, the words "feel" and "will" don't go together. To paraphrase EWD, you can no more "feel the will" than a submarine can swim;-). (Not a 100% correct analogy, but I couldn't resist.)
(For the sake of completeness: I'm not sure if I agree with the create/destroy distinction.)
So you think you can choose rationally who you love (or hate)?
Well, of course I can! Isn't that obvious? That's how love (and hate) work.
That said, I can also choose irrationally. But the point - that I can choose - still stands.
But you're so wrong. Emotions are the opposite of rational. You have much less control over your own actions than you realize, and definitely very little over your feelings. If that were not the case, depression would just not exist.
Read up on neuroscience. It may open your eyes to the reality of being human.
Some articles to get started:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/unconscious-brandi...
> Emotions are the opposite of rational.
Of course. (If not "the opposite", at least they are not rational.) But - again - neither love or hate are emotions. They are decisions. Of course, they may be made irrationally (like many others) or under the influence of emotions (like many others), and a lot of things other than emotions and rational analysis may influence these decisions (like many others) to some degree. But that is beside the point.
> Hate (like love) is not an emotion, but an act of will.
Like cheering for a football team.
The memetic encoding of who our political friends and foes are is just like a football rivalry. It's self-reinforcing and thrives on conflict and escalation.
Here's a mental picture of two different people:
- blue haired, sex-positive, polyamorous, anti-capitalist trans activist
- wife beater-wearing hillbilly wearing a cross; "don't tread on me" bumper stickers; gun owner
If you formed an association with these two and painted one of them as "unpleasant", then the virus lives inside you.
It's going to take a lot of hard work (and money) to climb out of this pit. And because of the difficulty, it's unlikely to change anytime soon. (I don't know if we can do it.)
I have no idea how this is relevant to my comment.
Nope. You don't have to go very far to look for a legitimate example of hate speech. Facebook itself. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59558090
The concept is abused more than half the time, but if it were dropped another one would pop up. So getting rid of the term would only have a negative impact.
We should get rid of „hate speech“ and clamp down on violence inducing speech. With a massive caveat for people participating in ongoing war.
Fuck FB for banning people over using slurs or even legit historic terms towards muscovite soldiers.
Wait, if we did that, how would we silence people we disagree with?
There was always some concept like this to shut people’s mouth (both for good and bad reasons). Throughout the ages it was called many names: taboo, blasphemy etc.
That's an interesting insight.
Indeed, the proponents of what may be modern-day equivalents, seem also to have superstition or religious-like beliefs when it comes to these topics. Also can be as hard to reason with.
Agreed, especially in this age where biological facts are considered 'hate speech'.
I suspect you may have been giving more than "biological facts" or bringing them up in a way that was intended to shut down someone else's expression.
Basic facts are very unlikely to be considered hateful if shared respectfully and with good reason.
I think insisting calling someone male, when they identify as female is indeed already considered hate speech by some people. I think even by some organisations. (but since I try to stay away from such issues, I don't have a example at hand)
I would consider this "rude", but not hate speech.
It's denying someone the right to assert their identity.
It's like insisting on referring to someone from Tibet as Chinese.
Denying would imply for me, activly supressing someones identity.
Merley saying it, is rude and offensive, but just another opinion and should maybe not put in the same bag, as hate speech, with the usual association of violence.
"It's like insisting on referring to someone from Tibet as Chinese. "
And this is the same. Someone saying it, is just a opinion and when the chinese government mandates it, than this is called political oppression and not hate speech.
Actively refusing to recognise them is suppression.
I'm not saying it's hate speech, I'm trying to help you understand why it's so far beyond "rude" that some people may react with strong emotions and feel further dismissed when your write off their objections using "biological fact."
What is your definition of rudeness then?
Rude is more like telling someone their tie is unfasihonable or taking the last slice of cake without asking.
What you're describing is to me borderline violence, as it's denying someone with a recognised medical condition (gender dysphoria) something that can help ease their distress (gender affirmation).
"Rude is more like telling someone their tie is unfasihonable"
People can also strongly bind their identity to their clothing. There are lots of ways to hurt other people feelings, but hate speech is just on another level for me (and this thread was primarily about hate speech)
I don't think gender dysphoria is an adopted identity in the same way as an interest in fashion, and neither does the medical community. But we can leave it here, it's all off the topic as you say. Another time perhaps.
(Well, the main topic of this thread was surely something else than gender identity and it is a flagged thread already anyway. I just wanted to make clear that I was especially arguing about hate speech.)
And I don't say, it is the same, but I don't talk about people who have merely "an interest in fashion". But people who really bind their identity towards it. That can be indeed fancy art clothing, or scenic cloths, like punks or goths dress or furry people. Saying they don't dress right, is a straight attack towards their identity.
Still, I would consider this rude and ignorant, but not hate speech.
That's fair enough. For me the difference is that if you don't like someone's clothes then you're still allowing them to wear them, but if you deny someone's gender or nationality which rely on outside recognition to feel real then you are actually limiting their expression of their self-perception.
Just to add as well: We're living through a time when the suicide rate of people with gender dysphoria is climbing and climbing because of difficulties in having their gender affirmed by the people around them.
I'll be first to defend people's right to dress as they will, especially in the case of women being forced to cover themselves (from burkhas to anti-toplessness laws), but the level of seriousness between being a goth and being a certain gender is currently worlds apart.
What is special about identity, that when someone asserts their identity is X then it is uniquely wrong for someone else to disagree? Is identity not just another fact about the world, about which reasonable people can have different opinions?
That seems pretty anti free speech. I agree that hate speech should end up in the trash, but people should be free to say what is on their mind (just as we’re free to put labels on it).
Any content where it looks like you are holding a gun to your head can be flagged. Power drills and hairdryers are close enough to do it and that kind of makes sense — both those objects can really hurt you if you push them up against your temples.
What seems to be missing though is the basic Bayesian statistics to go from finding a few instances of things that might look like self harm, to determining the whole video is about self harm.
It feels like the equivalent of millions of dollars of speech recognition being able to pick out individual voices, accents, and languages, only to then make final decision by string matching a list of known obscenities to the transcript thereby banning all videos about Scunthorpe.
I'd rather have 100 videos where it actually looks like people are pointing guns at their heads go unflagged than 1 video of someone using a hair dryer being wrongly flagged.
I often get stunned over how wrong facebook's algorithms constantly are. I get that they try out things a lot and it results in some weird stuff happening but facebook is overall the worst from my point of view.
Just leave thoose platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc...). Really... If no users, no ads, no money then the platform disappear... And voilà! If a trusted and trustfull post from Adafruit is not allowed to be public, imagine what can be "censored" too.
Saying "just leave" leads to a problem similar to the prisoner's dilemma: if everyone left Facebook, everyone would be better off for it, but if just you leave Facebook and everyone else stays on, you're way worse off.
Really interesting toughts, thanks for sharing. You're right, around me anybody has left Facebook except me. Do I feel worse about that, not at all.
Text recognition that first frame and you'd likely get "TO HELL".
A very stupid dystopia
Facebook isn't who censored adafruit. Obviously you realize 'hate speech' isn't true at all, yet here we are.
34 minutes long, so near impossible to figure out what exactly is the objectionable material but you clearly hit a US government list. They for some reason don't want you to publish this video.
What some people do is cut down this video into 11 videos and then post them 1 at a time and see which one the US government doesn't want you to publish.
It appears that they may be reaping what they have sown: https://facebook.com/adafruitindustries/photos/pb.6783679257...
When you give megacorporations unnacountable power to censor speech, that power will be abused.
The revolution eats its children.