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Do you agree with facebook banning people

  • yes

    Votes: 6 50.0%
  • no

    Votes: 6 50.0%

  • Total voters
    12

Sugar Cookie

Veteran Member
Bold Member!
Facebook announced Thursday afternoon that it had designated some high-profile people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who’s notorious for using anti-Semitic language, and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as “dangerous” and said it will be purging them from its platforms.

Jones and his media outlet InfoWars had previously been banned from Facebook in August 2018, but had maintained a presence on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. On Thursday, Jones and InfoWars will be barred from Instagram as well.

Other people banned on Thursday included Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semite who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 and 2018, and fringe right-wing media personalities Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN Business. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

A Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business the company goes through a lengthy process and takes into consideration a number of factors before determining an individual to be “dangerous.”

The Facebook spokesperson said such factors include whether the person or organization has ever called for violence against individuals based on race, ethnicity, or national origin; whether the person has been identified with a hateful ideology; whether they use hate speech or slurs in their about section on their social media profiles; and whether they have had pages or groups removed from Facebook for violating hate speech rules.

In some instances, when Facebook bans an individual or organization, it also restricts others from expressing praise or support for them on its platforms, the spokesperson said, adding that the company continues to view such action as the correct approach. That policy may not apply to any or all of the people banned Thursday, however.

The spokesperson added that Facebook will remove groups, pages and accounts created to represent the banned individuals when it knows the individual is participating in the effort.

Some of the individuals who were designated as “dangerous” responded to the ban on their accounts in the brief period between when Facebook announced the ban and when Facebook scrubbed the accounts.

Loomer, for instance, denied in an Instagram post that she ever violated the company’s terms of service. Loomer asked people to follow her on an different platform, adding, “Looks like you guys will probably never hear from me again.”

Yiannopoulos also published a final post on Instagram.

Watson used Twitter, from which he has not been banned, to write, “In an authoritarian society controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley giants, all dissent must be purged.”

Farrakhan, Jones and Nehlen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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He calls out people who do that. Also very good at debunking conspiracies.

Yes he does. But because those people he calls out are Islamic, and because the conspiracies that that he debunks are leftist, his speech is declared to be 'hateful', whatever that means...

It blows my mind that there are people arguing against freedom of speech, while advocating for censorship.

Just let me see if I have this straight. Trump is a Nazi because he advocates border security and national sovereignty. Twitter and Facebook are 'woke' and righteous because they censor dissenting opinions? Is that right?

That goes both ways. Farrakhan is a racist piece of shit (still embraced by the Democrats, however), but as long as he isn't advocating for violence he too should be allow to spew his bile.

“I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” - Voltaire
 
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Larry Cook has lost his gofundmes and was crying on fb, begging people to donate directly. Was a huge source of income lost. Now he's lost fb too I think.
No fucking tears here. He's a pond scum nipple dicked pro disease dog shithead.
 
Larry Cook has lost his gofundmes and was crying on fb, begging people to donate directly. Was a huge source of income lost. Now he's lost fb too I think.
No fucking tears here. He's a pond scum nipple dicked pro disease dog shithead.

I hate anti-vaxxers with the fury of a thousand suns. But these companies are in reality 'platforms'. They enjoy the legal protections of 'platforms' while instituting the censorship policies of 'publishers'. The difference is vast and extremely important.

They need to choose. Are they 'platforms' or 'publishers'?

They want to act like 'publishers' while enjoying the legal protections of 'platforms'. They can't have it both ways.
 
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Freedom of speech comes with the responsibility to use it well. Inciting hatred & violence don’t meet that standard. You can’t yell Fire! in a crowded theater just for shits & giggles.

Also Facebook is a private company— they have no obligation to amplify people’s hateful messages. The first amendment only says that the government cannot suppress your speech.
 
Yeah, nothing to do with freedom of speech. That's such a tired and ignorant argument. Facebook can do whatever they want with their own platform and their own money - THAT is freedom of speech.

If the government banned them from the site? That would be a problem. But nope, Facebook is tailoring their private business because that is their goddamn American right.
 
I have very little to do with FB nowadays. It seems to be a clandestine information gathering and marketing platform that masquerades itself as social media and now with a conscience, ha ha.

The problems these platforms claim to be so concerned about cannot be solved by shutting down the lie factories. That would be impossible at this point. The virus runs too deep and has infected almost everyone on the planet through the medium of language. The actual solution would be to concentrate on creating awareness and show users how to break the agreements they've made, primarily through domestication programming, that enable lies to continue to infect humanity and affect the welfare of every person on the planet.
 
Inciting hatred & violence don’t meet that standard.
If Facebook doesn't want them because they have a right to reject any user, and it is in their terms of agreement that they can deplatform anyone at anytime without giving reasons, then that's what they should do. And state "We don't have to give a reason, we have a right to do it."
It's the very selective righteous indignation that pisses people off.
 
My first thought was they banned Farrakhan because they knew they would be slammed if they allowed him to stay on the platform while banning others.

As I have always said I would rather know what people are thinking and if I have a problem with someone's point of view I just ignore them.

If people are inciting violence they should be banned but having a different or unpopular view should not get you banned.

I will say Lf, Aj and MY are entertainers and nothing they say should be taken seriously.

PJW has videos on you tube so I will check him out.
 
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This is fucking stupid. FB is lying their fucking asses off just like Twitter. FB owns Instagram so of course they’ll be banned there.

Funny how it didn’t violate their terms when those ANTIFA fuck head losers posted Tucker Carlson’s home address and went all terrorist screaming we know where you live. We know where you sleep. Broke down his fucking door. Terrified his wife. Thank God his kids weren’t home. I don’t even think they got any charges brought up on them.

ISIS still has a verified Twitter account last I checked. But lopping off heads and tossing gays off buildings doesn’t violate their fucking terms.

People tried to go to all these different platforms, but since they have a monopoly on them all that doesn't work. Fuck their private company. Would y’all still be saying that if they banned gays or brown people because they didn’t like their speech? Imagine if all these social media assholes weren’t far left, but instead we’re far right and banning people for speaking about gay rights. Would you still sing that tune? That’s why I don’t have any FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat etc. accounts. They’re just starting with these people. Pretty soon that shoe is going to be on your foot. If they can do it for you, they can do it to you. History has shown what happens when you allow power to go unchecked. These people have a lot of power. They bend to the will of communism. They are a threat to our democracy. They helped China with their social credit score bullshit. You say something they don’t like and you can’t fly, can’t ride a bus, can’t buy groceries, can’t leave your fucking house! Their friends and family abandon them because they’re too afraid to live the same fate.
First they came for the conservatives and you said nothing. By the time they get to you there won’t be anyone left to say anything. Do y’all even realize that Chase and Bank of America have closed down the personal savings and checking accounts of some conservatives? One of which is a fucking veteran! You can sit there and say “Oh go somewhere else.” How long until that isn’t an option? Anyone that has ever had to deal with the VA knows you can’t easily get them on the phone let alone have your check rerouted to a new bank account. Fuck every last one of them and their 1984/Fahrenheit 451 wannabe bullshit!

I say shut down all the social media platforms . Fuck it. Everyone is so addicted to it. Even the people that make all this shit came out and said the frame rates and news feed are literally geared toward making you depressed. If people weren’t happily handing over their detailed personal info to them, and therefore the government, then the shit would’ve been shut down already. They sell your information to China and ad companies. They are a detriment to our society. They are penis faced, manipulative mother fuckers that sit in their offices like they’re fucking Mr. Burns plotting their way to our demise! Then they have the mother fuckin’ balls to get on the Cunt News Network and say it’s a conspiracy theory that conservatives are being banned! Are you fucking kidding me you fucking gashes?!
 
This is fucking stupid. FB is lying their fucking asses off just like Twitter. FB owns Instagram so of course they’ll be banned there.

Funny how it didn’t violate their terms when those ANTIFA fuck head losers posted Tucker Carlson’s home address and went all terrorist screaming we know where you live. We know where you sleep. Broke down his fucking door. Terrified his wife. Thank God his kids weren’t home. I don’t even think they got any charges brought up on them.

ISIS still has a verified Twitter account last I checked. But lopping off heads and tossing gays off buildings doesn’t violate their fucking terms.

People tried to go to all these different platforms, but since they have a monopoly on them all that doesn't work. Fuck their private company. Would y’all still be saying that if they banned gays or brown people because they didn’t like their speech? Imagine if all these social media assholes weren’t far left, but instead we’re far right and banning people for speaking about gay rights. Would you still sing that tune? That’s why I don’t have any FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat etc. accounts. They’re just starting with these people. Pretty soon that shoe is going to be on your foot. If they can do it for you, they can do it to you. History has shown what happens when you allow power to go unchecked. These people have a lot of power. They bend to the will of communism. They are a threat to our democracy. They helped China with their social credit score bullshit. You say something they don’t like and you can’t fly, can’t ride a bus, can’t buy groceries, can’t leave your fucking house! Their friends and family abandon them because they’re too afraid to live the same fate.
First they came for the conservatives and you said nothing. By the time they get to you there won’t be anyone left to say anything. Do y’all even realize that Chase and Bank of America have closed down the personal savings and checking accounts of some conservatives? One of which is a fucking veteran! You can sit there and say “Oh go somewhere else.” How long until that isn’t an option? Anyone that has ever had to deal with the VA knows you can’t easily get them on the phone let alone have your check rerouted to a new bank account. Fuck every last one of them and their 1984/Fahrenheit 451 wannabe bullshit!

I say shut down all the social media platforms . Fuck it. Everyone is so addicted to it. Even the people that make all this shit came out and said the frame rates and news feed are literally geared toward making you depressed. If people weren’t happily handing over their detailed personal info to them, and therefore the government, then the shit would’ve been shut down already. They sell your information to China and ad companies. They are a detriment to our society. They are penis faced, manipulative mother fuckers that sit in their offices like they’re fucking Mr. Burns plotting their way to our demise! Then they have the mother fuckin’ balls to get on the Cunt News Network and say it’s a conspiracy theory that conservatives are being banned! Are you fucking kidding me you fucking gashes?!
You and me both, we're part of a very small group of non social media engagers ..
For some idiotic reason ppl think others want to know all their business, all the time ..

Just bought a new car
Back from dinner at Red Lobster
Just heading out to walk the dog


Who gives a fuck ..
 
You and me both, we're part of a very small group of non social media engagers ..
For some idiotic reason ppl think others want to know all their business, all the time ..

Just bought a new car
Back from dinner at Red Lobster
Just heading out to walk the dog


Who gives a fuck ..
Right!!!! Yes! Tell them where you’ll be and when you’ll be there! That way they can round your ass up!
 
Right: "Everyone should be allowed to speak".

Left: "But muh 'private companies!, but muh 'hate speech"!, but 'raysis'!!, censorship CAN be a good thing!"
 
Snoop Dog should be ashamed of himself for punking his followers, because he sure as fuck didn't post that shit on his page and get banned himself.

 
[....]
According to the complaint, over a five-month period last year, researchers monitored pages by users who affiliated themselves with groups the U.S. State Department has designated as terrorist organizations. In that period, 38% of the posts with prominent symbols of extremist groups were removed. In its own review, the AP found that as of this month, much of the banned content cited in the study — an execution video, images of severed heads, propaganda honoring martyred militants — slipped through the algorithmic web and remained easy to find on Facebook.

The complaint is landing as Facebook tries to stay ahead of a growing array of criticism over its privacy practices and its ability to keep hate speech, live-streamed murders and suicides off its service. In the face of criticism, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken of his pride in the company’s ability to weed out violent posts automatically through artificial intelligence. During an earnings call last month, for instance, he repeated a carefully worded formulation that Facebook has been employing.

“In areas like terrorism, for al-Qaida and ISIS-related content, now 99 percent of the content that we take down in the category our systems flag proactively before anyone sees it,” he said. Then he added: “That’s what really good looks like.”

Zuckerberg did not offer an estimate of how much of total prohibited material is being removed.

The research behind the SEC complaint is aimed at spotlighting glaring flaws in the company’s approach. Last year, researchers began monitoring users who explicitly identified themselves as members of extremist groups. It wasn’t hard to document. Some of these people even list the extremist groups as their employers. One profile heralded by the black flag of an al-Qaida affiliated group listed his employer, perhaps facetiously, as Facebook. The profile that included the auto-generated video with the flag burning also had a video of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urging jihadi groups not to fight among themselves.

While the study is far from comprehensive — in part because Facebook rarely makes much of its data publicly available — researchers involved in the project say the ease of identifying these profiles using a basic keyword search and the fact that so few of them have been removed suggest that Facebook’s claims that its systems catch most extremist content are not accurate.

“I mean, that’s just stretching the imagination to beyond incredulity,” says Amr Al Azm, one of the researchers involved in the project. “If a small group of researchers can find hundreds of pages of content by simple searches, why can’t a giant company with all its resources do it?”
[....]
Facebook concedes that its systems are not perfect, but says it’s making improvements.

“After making heavy investments, we are detecting and removing terrorism content at a far higher success rate than even two years ago,” the company said in a statement. “We don’t claim to find everything and we remain vigilant in our efforts against terrorist groups around the world.”

Reacting to the AP’s reporting, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee expressed frustration that Facebook has made so little progress on blocking content despite reassurances he received from the company.

“This is yet another deeply worrisome example of Facebook’s inability to manage its own platforms — and the extent to which it needs to clean up its act,” he said. “Facebook must not only rid its platforms of terrorist and extremist content, but it also needs to be able to prevent it from being amplified.”

But as a stark indication of how easily users can evade Facebook, one page from a user called “Nawan al-Farancsa” has a header whose white lettering against a black background says in English “The Islamic State.” The banner is punctuated with a photo of an explosive mushroom cloud rising from a city.

The profile should have caught the attention of Facebook — as well as counter-intelligence agencies. It was created in June 2018, lists the user as coming from Chechnya, once a militant hotspot. It says he lived in Heidelberg, Germany, and studied at a university in Indonesia. Some of the user’s friends also posted militant content.

The page, still up in recent days, apparently escaped Facebook’s systems, because of an obvious and long-running evasion of moderation that Facebook should be adept at recognizing: The letters were not searchable text but embedded in a graphic block. But the company says its technology scans audio, video and text — including when it is embedded — for images that reflect violence, weapons or logos of prohibited groups.

The social networking giant has endured a rough two years beginning in 2016, when Russia’s use of social media to meddle with the U.S. presidential elections came into focus. Zuckerberg initially downplayed the role Facebook played in the influence operation by Russian intelligence, but the company later apologized.

Facebook says it now employs 30,000 people who work on its safety and security practices, reviewing potentially harmful material and anything else that might not belong on the site. Still, the company is putting a lot of its faith in artificial intelligence and its systems’ ability to eventually weed out bad stuff without the help of humans. The new research suggests that goal is a long way away and some critics allege that the company is not making a sincere effort.

When the material isn’t removed, it’s treated the same as anything else posted by Facebook’s 2.4 billion users — celebrated in animated videos, linked and categorized and recommended by algorithms.

But it’s not just the algorithms that are to blame. The researchers found that some extremists are using Facebook’s “Frame Studio” to post militant propaganda. The tool lets people decorate their profile photos within graphic frames — to support causes or celebrate birthdays, for instance. Facebook says that those framed images must be approved by the company before they are posted.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises the Counter-Extremism Project, a New York and London-based group focused on combatting extremist messaging, says that Facebook’s artificial intelligence system is failing. He says the company is not motivated to tackle the problem because it would be expensive.

“The whole infrastructure is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “And there’s very little appetite to fix it because what Facebook and the other social media companies know is that once they start being responsible for material on their platforms it opens up a whole can of worms.”

Another Facebook auto-generation function gone awry scrapes employment information from user’s pages to create business pages. The function is supposed to produce pages meant to help companies network, but in many cases they are serving as a branded landing space for extremist groups. The function allows Facebook users to like pages for extremist organizations, including al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and the Somali-based al-Shabab, effectively providing a list of sympathizers for recruiters.

At the top of an auto-generated page for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the AP found a photo of the damaged hull of the USS Cole, which was bombed by al-Qaida in a 2000 attack off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 U.S. Navy sailors. It’s the defining image in AQAP’s own propaganda. The page includes the Wikipedia entry for the group and had been liked by 277 people when last viewed this week.

As part of the investigation for the complaint, Al Azm’s researchers in Syria looked closely at the profiles of 63 accounts that liked the auto-generated page for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a group that merged from militant groups in Syria, including the al-Qaida affiliated al-Nusra Front. The researchers were able to confirm that 31 of the profiles matched real people in Syria.
[....]
Facebook also faces a challenge with U.S. hate groups. In March, the company announced that it was expanding its prohibited content to also include white nationalist and white separatist content— previously it only took action with white supremacist content. It says that it has banned more than 200 white supremacist groups. But it’s still easy to find symbols of supremacy and racial hatred.

The researchers in the SEC complaint identified over 30 auto-generated pages for white supremacist groups, whose content Facebook prohibits. They include “The American Nazi Party” and the “New Aryan Empire.” A page created for the “Aryan Brotherhood Headquarters” marks the office on a map and asks whether users recommend it. One endorser posted a question: “How can a brother get in the house.”

Even supremacists flagged by law enforcement are slipping through the net. Following a sweep of arrests beginning in October, federal prosecutors in Arkansas indicted dozens of members of a drug trafficking ring linked to the New Aryan Empire. A legal document from February paints a brutal picture of the group, alleging murder, kidnapping and intimidation of witnesses that in one instance involved using a searing-hot knife to scar someone’s face. It also alleges the group used Facebook to discuss New Aryan Empire business.

But many of the individuals named in the indictment have Facebook pages that were still up in recent days. They leave no doubt of the users’ white supremacist affiliation, posting images of Hitler, swastikas and a numerical symbol of the New Aryan Empire slogan, “To The Dirt” — the members’ pledge to remain loyal to the end. One of the group’s indicted leaders, Jeffrey Knox, listed his job as “stomp down Honky.” Facebook then auto-generated a “stomp down Honky” business page.

Social media companies have broad protection in U.S. law from liability stemming from the content that users post on their sites. But Facebook’s role in generating videos and pages from extremist content raises questions about exposure. Legal analysts contacted by the AP differed on whether the discovery could open the company up to lawsuits.

At a minimum, the research behind the SEC complaint illustrates the company’s limited approach to combatting online extremism. The U.S. State Department lists dozens of groups as “designated foreign terrorist organizations” but Facebook in its public statements says it focuses its efforts on two, the Islamic State group and al-Qaida. But even with those two targets, Facebook’s algorithms often miss the names of affiliated groups. Al Azm says Facebook’s method seems to be less effective with Arabic script.

For instance, a search in Arabic for “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” turns up not only posts, but an auto-generated business page. One user listed his occupation as “Former Sniper” at “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” written in Arabic. Another user evaded Facebook’s cull by reversing the order of the countries in the Arabic for ISIS or “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”
[....]
Farid, the digital forensics expert, says that Facebook built its infrastructure without thinking through the dangers stemming from content and is now trying to retrofit solutions.

“The policy of this platform has been: ‘Move fast and break things.’ I actually think that for once their motto was actually accurate,” he says. “The strategy was grow, grow, grow, profit, profit, profit and then go back and try to deal with whatever problems there are.”

https://www.apnews.com/f97c24dab4f34bd0b48b36f2988952a4
 

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