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Facebook takes down main page of Myanmar military
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoalright well, I guess I have to say well done Facebook in this case.
- the-dude 6y agoAs long as it aligns with your views it is not slippery slope?
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoDo you have somewhere in my comments I've argued about slippery sloping in regards to Facebook?
- aerodog 6y agoAung San Suu Kyi oversaw a genocide against the Rohingya. Didn't see FB take down her page then
- mantap 6y agoShe did that before the capitol riots, which seems to be the inflexion point at which Facebook threw out their old dogma of political neutrality.
- fareesh 6y agoThe hallowed halls of insider trading were breached by a man in a Viking hat, surrounded by press photographers as he did so, while his minions rushed in to claim control of the country as they walked in an orderly line through the velvet rope turnstiles. Any fair minded person would see this as an legitimate attempt to overthrow the government, necessitating extraordinary intervention by a website.
- goodluckchuck 6y agoAnd yet here we are :-/
- kasperni 6y agoI'm not sure she has much of choice. Had she gone up against the the military (who were behind the genocide). They would most likely have deposed of her earlier rather than waiting until now. At least in power she might have been able to "soften the blow" somewhat.
- exacube 6y agoWell, here goes another thread about free speech vs. ethical discourse, where atleast one side uncompromisingly refuses to put themselves in the shoes of the other. Just to fast-forward this thread a bit for everyone: - Free speech doesn't exist on some for-profit company's platform. Communities should be moderated on some ethical standard for the benefit of peace - Free speech trumps ethics and peace -- without free speech, we have neither
- supergirl 6y agoindeed. and it's pointless anyway to discuss this from an ideological perspective. FB is only looking out for their financial interests. they just make a bet with the best expected return. in this case it's pretty safe to bet on the side of the US, EU governments who oppose the coup. and they do something rather than nothing maybe to regain some favors with western countries or they feel they need to do it to claim consistency with past actions.
- ben_w 6y agoI have an also-unpopular third option: The graph of freedom of speech versus personal liberty looks like the Laffer curve for government income vs tax rate. One end is zero for obvious reasons; the other end is also zero because it is a power vacuum, one which e.g. charismatic narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths exploit it to rise to power and they kick away the free speech ladder after they get it.
- fallingknife 6y agoSo are you saying that the current people in charge are the "charismatic narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths" who exploited the power vacuum that existed with the creation of the internet and are now kicking away the "free speech ladder?"
- ben_w 6y agoNope. The internet isn’t the origin of the idea of total freedom of speech without any constraints, and such personalities have been whipping nations to commit genocides since before my now-deceased parents were born.
- refurb 6y agoI for one welcome our Silicon Valley elite overlords who will protect me from dangerous speech.
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- EB-Barrington 6y agoThe argument regarding private platform freedom of speech/censorship isn't relevant for Facebook, where documented examples of the state/governments working with Facebook to censor opinions and restrict speech exist. The line between state/private is blurred at best, and disappearing.
- federona 6y agoFunny arguments go both ways depending on whether people like the censoring or don't. It's either it's a private company so it's their right or that it's the defacto platform therefore getting in the way of freedom of speech. In any case modern politics is a shit show and all parties are corrupt as hell each having there own methods and rhetoric that their public buys. In the end the West and its imperialism is as corrupt and full of shit as the east and its mostly local corruption because they don't have the power to exploit globally. West, lofty ideals backed up with little substance, East no ideals and hence no flowery rhetoric to cover up their misdeeds.
- op03 6y agoSo what happens if you are an FB grunt sitting in Myanmar? Do they have people there? Does that local manager have experience dealing with tanks driving into the parking lot?
- kkoncevicius 6y agoThe outrage people have about censorship wouldn't be that big if those companies simply stated "we censor opinions we don't like, and we censor for political reasons" in their terms of service. Instead they create the outrage by having vague rules about what is allowed and not allowed on the platform and then, on top of that, start enforcing those rules selectively.
- daniellarusso 6y agoAh, managing expectations seems to be a dying art.
- goodluckchuck 6y agoThey won’t do that, because “we want to hide this” is a lot less persuasive than “this is false, fringe, propaganda, etc.”
- SonicScrub 6y agoThey won't because the Social Media platforms prerogative for bans isn't ideological, or to be consistent. Their sole purpose to do what's best for themselves. Therefore they benefit from having vague, ill-defined rules that allow for selective enforcement.
- georgebarnett 6y agoI remain convinced that Facebook is incrementally scrubbing news and politics from their platform.
- freeburma 6y agoAh yes, the travesty of murderous thugs shooting their own citizens having their Facebook page taken down. What ever has the world come to.
- wutbrodo 6y agoI love this comment. It captures the current political moment like lightning in a bottle, dominated by simpletons who think every action exists in its own sandboxed parallel universe and can be judged without reference to weakening norms or downstream effects in a dynamic system. Truly a work of art.
- georgebarnett 6y agoYou appear to be reading a sentiment into my comment thats not there. Facebook can do whatever they want (within the law) because it's their platform and thus their rules. I'm merely commenting that I'm reasonably convinced they're (in general) removing news and politics from the platform because its _in their interests_ to do so. Considering the wider issue faced in Australia at the moment, its fair commentary and sarcastic responses don't contribute to the discourse.
- hshshs2 6y agothey’ll continue incremental changes until the heat is off and then go back to not caring
- jtdev 6y agoMore like selectively scrubbing news and politics, this case in point being one more example to add to this troubling trend.
- georgebarnett 6y ago
- aminozuur 6y agoWhat about the US military's FB page? Didn't they cause thousands of innocent deaths in Iraq? I'm sure some Americans can somehow justify it, but I doubt the grieving Iraqi's will accept it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massa...
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- wil421 6y agoWhy even bring this up? Whataboutism is a very shallow argument.
- vermilingua 6y agoBecause it may be shallow, but when discussing the criteria by which they decide what is worth taking down, it is also a very valid argument.
- qart 6y agoWell, aminozuur is pointing out hypocrisy. Facebook is not applying the same rules to everyone. That is bad. That aside, my own views are similar to sep_field's... with the exception that I would silently prefer Facebook to go away, without explaining why I'd like that.
- vmception 6y agoGiven that “Whataboutism” really means “hypocrisy in a geopolitical context” I think the entire definition should be updated to reflect it as a very valid observation, instead of the assumption that it is a weak argument because in my experience it usually isnt, even during the height of the cold war the Soviet Union’s observations about the US were accurate.
- f6v 6y agoAn American company will always be a mouthpiece for American propaganda. Not saying whether it’s right or wrong, it’s just the way it is.
- sep_field 6y agoI'm in favor of Facebook taking down absolutely any page, whether it agrees with my political views or not. Why? Because Facebook's power comes from network effects. The more people, across the political spectrum, find their interests to be blocked on Facebook, the less people will find value in Facebook in general. Over time, this means Facebook is committing suicide. This is the best possible outcome for humanity. Die Facebook, die.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoI'm not sure this is a realistic worldview though. This supposes there will be a facebook competitor. As the decades march on, perhaps there will be, but it might not be till we're long gone. There still isn't a competitor to Google, for example. Parler was a competitor to Twitter, and you saw how that played out. The next competitor is going to have to deal with that quandary.
- ginko 6y ago> This supposes there will be a facebook competitor Why does there have to be a competitor? I think we will do fine without social media.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThose on social media are more powerful than those off it. The most obvious example is that large Twitter audiences can be monetized, whether by selling a book or asking for Patreon subscribers. That seems to imply social media is here to stay, in one form or another. It's a bit of a "rules for rulers" paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGrey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGr... in the sense that power structures exist independently of whether we like them or not.
- grumple 6y agoMore powerful in some ways. When I deleted my Facebook account, I certainly lost a platform for communication with a few thousand friends. But I gained so much time. I regained mental energy and focus. I basically immediately gained time to study and doubled my income (which is a more useful form of power in my opinion). From another perspective, I also think the benefits of Facebook are ephemeral. Yes, many people use these platforms right now for turning themselves into commodities; but other platforms and methods certainly exist, are longer lasting, and you don’t have to worry about a sudden ban.
- 5tefan 6y agoI try to understand how this decision came to be and I have no idea? A standardised set of rules would surely lead to many many more pages being taking down. And why now and not last week?
- freeburma 6y agoBecause Myanmar people lobbied for it. The military is shooting its own people, kidnapping them in the middle of the night, and torturing them. Over 10 protestors dead and 50+ injured, as they are using live rounds on protestors. Over 500+ disappeared or kidnapped. Protestors killed include two teenagers shot in the head, one of them a medic. They also shot at ambulance. They’ve threatened to kill doctors. Stole the covid vaccination after beating doctors trying to stop them. Last night they shot a neighborhood watchman in my neighborhood.
- freeburma 6y agoFor all the people oblivious to why Facebook did this: Because Myanmar people lobbied for it, and because the Myanmar military is terrorizing its own people, then lying about it. The military is shooting its own people, kidnapping them in the middle of the night, and torturing them. Over 10 protestors dead and 50+ injured, as they are using live rounds on protestors. Over 500+ disappeared or kidnapped. Protestors killed include two teenagers shot in the head, one of them a medic. They also shot at ambulance. They’ve threatened to kill doctors, and kidnapped many of them. Stole the covid vaccination after beating doctors trying to stop them. Last night they shot a neighborhood watchman in my neighborhood (we have neighborhood watch to try and prevent late night kidnapping/disappearing by military). We lobbied hard to get Facebook to take down this page and others where the Tatmadaw are attempting to cover up the truth.
- johnsmittyson 6y agoWell, brother, I hope you don't log into the wrong account while posting "free" stuff about hk, belarus, myanmar and so on. I guess all is good as long as they don't touch the baby incubators, right?
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- nix23 6y agoIt's interesting, Aung San Suu Kyi (with a freedom nobel-price) is/was responsible for the expulsion, killing and raping of rohingya's. But when the military takes over that's a big nono. BTW: Hitler was also democratically elected, wouldn't have been the worst thing if the Wehrmacht made a coup then, like for example "operation valkyrie".
- freeburma 6y agoShe was not. AASK never had any authority over the military. At all. Military was legally above elected government before the coup, controls all the courts, legally guaranteed 25% of the legislature, wrote the constitution, and the comander-in-chief was never appointed by elected government. Military never answered to AASK or took orders from her or the president. At best, you could call AASK an apologist for military. But that ignores that she was really their prisoner even while “free”, and the delicate negotiation she engaged in an attempt to build a civilian government, as flawed as it was.
- nix23 6y ago>At best, you could call AASK an apologist for military. Ah yes, then shes definitely not responsible...irony off. >>she took the podium on Wednesday at the United Nations’ highest court to defend her homeland against accusations of genocide, arguing that there had been no orchestrated campaign of persecution. >>Instead, she insisted that what foreign observers have called an organized, years-long campaign of atrocities against the Rohingya has been exaggerated and misconstrued. 2019/12/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-myanmar-genocide-hague.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-k... 2018/07/07 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-rape-refugees-childbirth.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/world/asia/myanmar-rohing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
- freeburma 6y agoI don’t feel like arguing with people who don’t really know anything about Burma or her situation. She had no involvement in the military’s decisions in Rakhine state. Yes, she defended the perpetrators at ICJ, either as part of a political strategy of reconciliation with military, or because she just felt like defending them because she secretly likes what happened. You guess which explanation is more likely.
- williesleg 6y agoWhat's facebook? Oh right, the pot stirrers.
- ahmedfromtunis 6y agoFacebook takes down main page of Myanmar Military. Myanmar Military takes down main service of Facebook (eventually, if they didn't already do.) The question here is: would (some) misinformation be worth it to avoid total blackout. And I mean this places other than North America and Western Europe. In huge swathes of the world, internet and facebook are interchangeable. And where democratic values are strong enough, any government can take down the main channel of (free, non-governmental sanctioned) information for a whole country.
- dagorenouf 6y agoFacebook should really come down from their high horses and let legal entities decide of stuff like this. They're a utility. (not saying that in a bad way, becoming a utility is the ultimate startup achievement)
- wutbrodo 6y ago>Facebook should really come down from their high horses and let legal entities decide of stuff like this If you've followed this conversation at all for the last 5-10 years, there's no way it makes sense to think that these decisions are somehow driven by Facebook'(or any tech company's) desires. Leaving aside the intense liberal values personally held by Zuckerbeg, Page, Brin, Dorsey, et al, the responsibility for speech policing is a can of worms that the tech platforms have been consistently and loudly opposed to. It's the baying of illiberal lunatics (primarily on the left, in recent years) and the associated PR and regulatory threats that have forced them into this position.
- dagorenouf 6y agoThanks, I didn’t realize that. I guess that’s why Dorsey wanted to create an open protocol that would be free from these.
- ergocoder 6y agoIf you follow this topic, it has been clear that FB and Twitter do not want to be the decider of truth. They want to be a utility for communication. They would much prefer government decide it. But many people are like "government being the decider of truth" is bad. So this is where we are at; the private companies can ban whomever it wants and play the decider of truth.
- AwaAwa 6y agoBeing a utility comes with (some) regulation. I think it is far past time that this occurred.
- baybal2 6y agoI doubt this exonerates Mark Zuckerberg. It's a man who proposed Xi Jinping to name his firstborn. Him attacking some minor military junta is barely symbolic.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agoturn the tables to consider actual reality: if a country like the US would be at the receiving end of meddling and influence by a Myanmar social media business at the scale of facebook, then any key-employee of the company would have been declared a terrorist, taken to black sites or murdered by drones. That's about the level of hypocrisy that we deal with when discussing Facebook's actions in Myanmar over the past years. It's horrible injustice Americans not only get away with war crimes and aren't held accountable by the IIC, but also technocrats and buerocrats working for these public companies are able to do so with impunity.
- notahacker 6y agoFacebook's "interference" in Myanmar consists of hosting comments supportive of the government whilst it was committing genocide and being criticised internationally for not intervening, and choosing to take down a single government propaganda outlet after a military coup. Facebook has "interfered" more against the interests of sitting US presidents without a single black ops operation against its staff.
- dilap 6y agoA side-effect of actions like this is it makes it much easier for governments themselves to justify censorship or internet restrictions. See, e.g., this interview by Der Spiegel w/ the president of Uganda: > DER SPIEGEL: Observers complain that they have been denied access to social media. > Museveni: If you're talking about the all-powerful rulers of Facebook, I can tell you it was the other way around. Facebook blocked my party's accounts. Is that freedom of expression? If the people at Facebook think they're silencing me, they're wrong. > DER SPIEGEL: It wasn't just about Facebook. The entire internet was blocked in Uganda for days. > Museveni: That was done for security reasons. The internet was misused to stir up trouble. The opposition spread misinformation about the election results. The block has long since been lifted. https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ugandan-president-museveni-the-europeans-suffer-from-arrogance-a-3fd99df3-10f4-4ff4-aa5f-d5b0c68395e4 https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ug...
- notahacker 6y agoGovernments have been justifying internet restrictions since before Facebook was an idea. If Facebook had a policy of absolute tolerance of political speech in Uganda it would have been just as easy a segue to "security reasons... misinformation". Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.
- dilap 6y agoSure, there has always been & always will be a tug-of-war, but I think the dominant social media institutions quite blatently engaging in political censorship certainly has to be a help to those tugging for the censorship side. It's true without FB's actions, Museveni could've immediately started with "security reasons & dsinformation", but that would've been a far weaker answer. > Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech. The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.
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- fallingfrog 6y agoIt really does seem that this time, it wasn’t the United States that was responsible for the coup. If we were responsible you would see a lot of high level politicians on both sides saying that they were pleased that the people of Myanmar had overthrown a terrible despot (we do this even when, and especially when, the previous “despot” was democratically elected). And then you would see previously unavailable resources being opened up to the west. But this is not what is happening here; it looks to be just a power play by Myanmar’s military leadership. Interestingly, Costa Rica went as far as to disband their entire army because in a poor and unstable state, having any military can actually be a big liability in terms of having frequent coups.
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