So patronizing. Okay, people are "vulnerable" to misinformation; there's an unstated implication here that you've ascended to some higher level by virtue of consuming your daily dose of establishment media, and that you're no longer personally susceptible to this, and that there's no chance that any of your institutionally approved sources could ever misinform you.
> Facebook-propagated lies about COVID-19 risks and fake treatments kill both the people who believe them and the people believers are exposed to.
Well, that's tough, isn't it? If you're so afraid of that, maybe you should get a proper respirator, and only emerge into public to buy groceries, and then just live in full lockdown for the rest of your life. Sounds like you don't trust people to consume the information they want and to make their own risk judgements; too bad you're not in control of their actions. What a utopia that would be, eh? I'm sure you'd never misinform anyone, or say something and then have to walk it back a week later, or anything else.
Blaming Facebook for this is like blaming your municipality, or your car dealership, when you get into a car accident. Yeah, they built the roads, they sold you the car, but it's on you - it's your risk, ultimately, because it's your life. Yes, you can do risky things; yes, you can even do things that increase risks for others. That's life. It's all part of the fabric of living in a free society. You can only actually protect yourself, and even then, only partially. Controlling what other people can say or think isn't actually going to afford you that much more security.
> Reporting on Facebook's failure to act in response to its platform being used to incite the Rohingya genocide
As if these things wouldn't take place without Facebook; as though there wouldn't be some other way for people who are already morally in the position of wanting to kill others for their differences wouldn't just find some other way to kick it off. Again, you're blaming the medium for the message, and you have the misguided idea that somehow, if the right censoring moderators clamped down on discussion just a little bit more, that event wouldn't have happened. Of all the small-souled bugman mentalities, this is truly the worst.
> spreading propaganda that incites people to destroy their own democracy (pro-Trump)
I'm not an American, and so I have no real dog in the fight, but as far as I can tell being in favour of an establishment political party is kind of bread-and-butter democracy, isn't it? How is someone being in favour of your democratically elected president "destroying democracy", and how is acting like that's the case not in and of itself just as anti-democracy a thing to do?
Maybe, just maybe, you Yanks could stop frothing at the mouth about Orange Man Bad for ten minutes, and _use_ your freedom of speech to actually engage with people and find out what motivates them, what their fears are, why they've arrived at their conclusions, and maybe build some common ground so you can actually start to understand the underlying economic problems that have put you in the position you're in. The things that destroyed small-town Main Street are not too far off the things that destroyed the inner city, really....
> If Facebook won't do anything about their platform being used for these purposes, then Facebook should be shut down.
How about this: if Facebook won't do anything about your personal bugaboos, you should follow my lead and just delete your Facebook account and move on with your fucking life. Why do you feel this intense need to enforce your own personal qualms about what people say onto others? It's so easy, bro, just click that big X and go outside for a couple minutes. Get some perspective.
Because otherwise, you're asking for one of the most important freedoms ever won to be thrown away just so you won't be uncomfortable for a couple moments here and there. I can't imagine being so fragile.
I don't have a Facebook account to delete. This does not protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize the information deficient to vote to destroy the society I live in, or, in the worst case, protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize a lynch mob to kill me as a target-of-the-day. Individual actions, like not having a Facebook account, are not solutions to collective problems.
There is no inherent right to incite the destruction of society. That precedent was set when when the people behind Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines were sent to the Hague for crimes against humanity.
> This does not protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize the information deficient to vote to destroy the society I live in
The problem is that there are other people with polar differences in politics from you who also think that the society they live in is being destroyed, for the exact opposite reasons. Facebook should just butt out and let people have their own conversations; they should have no role in curating or doing anything about what people are saying as long as it's not absolutely illegal.
If you don't like it, then you've already made your choice to not have an account. Find some other outlet for your activism if you're so worried that society is being destroyed.
There is a very real difference between disagreeing over how to interpret actual reality (e.g. disagreeing over what is an acceptable level of income inequality in society) and disagreeing over manufactured issues created by feeding lies to people to make them fear for their society because of threats that do not exist.
There was no legitimate argument over whether pre-Brexit UK was on the verge of being invaded by Syrian terrorists, whether Obama is an American citizen, or whether there were 'caravans' of migrant-criminals approaching the US-Mexico border. These entire concepts, and the 'polar differences' they created, were entirely fraudulent inventions that Facebook was used to fabricate.
This is the face of the political use of Facebook, and for that it should be shut down.
So patronizing. Okay, people are "vulnerable" to misinformation; there's an unstated implication here that you've ascended to some higher level by virtue of consuming your daily dose of establishment media, and that you're no longer personally susceptible to this, and that there's no chance that any of your institutionally approved sources could ever misinform you.
> Facebook-propagated lies about COVID-19 risks and fake treatments kill both the people who believe them and the people believers are exposed to.
Well, that's tough, isn't it? If you're so afraid of that, maybe you should get a proper respirator, and only emerge into public to buy groceries, and then just live in full lockdown for the rest of your life. Sounds like you don't trust people to consume the information they want and to make their own risk judgements; too bad you're not in control of their actions. What a utopia that would be, eh? I'm sure you'd never misinform anyone, or say something and then have to walk it back a week later, or anything else.
Blaming Facebook for this is like blaming your municipality, or your car dealership, when you get into a car accident. Yeah, they built the roads, they sold you the car, but it's on you - it's your risk, ultimately, because it's your life. Yes, you can do risky things; yes, you can even do things that increase risks for others. That's life. It's all part of the fabric of living in a free society. You can only actually protect yourself, and even then, only partially. Controlling what other people can say or think isn't actually going to afford you that much more security.
> Reporting on Facebook's failure to act in response to its platform being used to incite the Rohingya genocide
As if these things wouldn't take place without Facebook; as though there wouldn't be some other way for people who are already morally in the position of wanting to kill others for their differences wouldn't just find some other way to kick it off. Again, you're blaming the medium for the message, and you have the misguided idea that somehow, if the right censoring moderators clamped down on discussion just a little bit more, that event wouldn't have happened. Of all the small-souled bugman mentalities, this is truly the worst.
> spreading propaganda that incites people to destroy their own democracy (pro-Trump)
I'm not an American, and so I have no real dog in the fight, but as far as I can tell being in favour of an establishment political party is kind of bread-and-butter democracy, isn't it? How is someone being in favour of your democratically elected president "destroying democracy", and how is acting like that's the case not in and of itself just as anti-democracy a thing to do?
Maybe, just maybe, you Yanks could stop frothing at the mouth about Orange Man Bad for ten minutes, and _use_ your freedom of speech to actually engage with people and find out what motivates them, what their fears are, why they've arrived at their conclusions, and maybe build some common ground so you can actually start to understand the underlying economic problems that have put you in the position you're in. The things that destroyed small-town Main Street are not too far off the things that destroyed the inner city, really....
> If Facebook won't do anything about their platform being used for these purposes, then Facebook should be shut down.
How about this: if Facebook won't do anything about your personal bugaboos, you should follow my lead and just delete your Facebook account and move on with your fucking life. Why do you feel this intense need to enforce your own personal qualms about what people say onto others? It's so easy, bro, just click that big X and go outside for a couple minutes. Get some perspective.
Because otherwise, you're asking for one of the most important freedoms ever won to be thrown away just so you won't be uncomfortable for a couple moments here and there. I can't imagine being so fragile.