Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday, following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
Like so many others, you’ve mixed up general society with law enforcement. We defend the right for the Nazis to say their piece without being imprisoned. Running a business profiting from letting Nazis publish their speech is a choice, and not a necessary one. Using and supporting the social relevance of a social network that voluntarily publishes hate speech for profit is a choice, and not a necessary one.
A social site doesn’t publish anything, it’s just a medium for users to communicate.
Sounds like you’re the one mixing it up.
And that’s exactly what the user you’re replying to has been saying all along.
This post is about the UN, as in, a governmental authority. The whole discussion here is that moderation isn’t something for the government to do (outside of prosecutable crimes), it’s for private entities to do. Meta can moderate its platforms however it chooses, and users can similarly choose to stop using the platform. Governments shouldn’t force Meta to moderate or not moderate, that’s completely outside its bailiwick.
Meta pushes opinions, advertisements, and engagement. The government can and should regulate their bullshittery. Our privacy has been violated along with our rights.
Your view of these platforms and what they do is completely disconnected from reality. They are advertising platforms that are used to influence elections not a “platform for speech”.
You can’t ignore the reality of what they have already done and we are past pretending it is in any way altruistic.
There is no moving onto other platforms when they they use their profits to buy up all their competitors. You can look at the current dating site situation to see how without government regulations monopolies have formed.
Your hands off approach is unetainable and also ignores that other free countries have things like anti-hate laws and they are doing way better than we are.
The solution is to fix the government and then regulate the hell out of these fuckers. This is the way.
And we should have laws protecting that. Ideas:
Why would we pretend that? They’re a business and they exist to make money, and it turns out it’s profitable to impact elections.
I think this is a symptom rather than the problem. The root is that elections are largely determined by the candidate with the most funding and media exposure, not the candidate with the most attractive ideas. There are a lot of ways to address that, and giving government power (and platforms justification) to silence critics ain’t it.
To solve the problem of election interference, we need to get money out of politics. That’s hard, but it’ll be a lot more effective than regulating something as nebulous and abusable as “hate speech.” I say we ban all advertising for candidates and issues within 6 months of an election and force candidates to rely on debates (which would be fact checked; each candidate would select a group). We should also have public funding for debates, where the top 5 candidates who are registered in enough states to win are allowed to debate.
Depending on your definition of “fix,” you’ll probably just give ammunition to the next opposition administration. Be very careful about this.