Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59486397

by lxm • 5 years ago

167 284 5 years ago

rayiner3• 5 years ago

Facebook said it would "still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha". But "we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse", a spokesperson said.

To be clear, for a year, Facebook banned content that would have been consistent with what an impartial jury ultimately found about the case. Which would have corrected a misleading media narrative about the situation.

The NYT has a good video of what happened with Rittenhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007409660/kyle-ritten.... Apart from the voice overs, it’s nearly identical to the pro-Rittenhouse videos circulating back in 2020. If you watched these videos, the jury verdict would have been totally unsurprising to you.

uncoder0• 5 years ago

Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society and this is just further evidence of it all. If Facebook employed an even remotely accurate sample of the population based on political leanings and backgrounds for their content policy team this would have never happened. I think the amount of blame the left and media placed on Facebook for the 2016 election of President Trump are to majorly to blame for the whole situation.

lostlogin• 5 years ago

Facebook is very damaging to the fabric of society

If you had left it at that, you’d have had a lot of agreement.

stjohnswarts10• 5 years ago

So are tiktok, twitter, instagram, reddit, fox news, and a host of lesser knowns. Are you going to make social media/"news services" illegal?

Benjammer4• 5 years ago

Somehow I watched 1 or 2 videos on twitter right at the time, and got a good sense of what happened, that ended up being consistent with the jury ruling. These weren't even political posts, just some OSINT people I follow. I was not aware of any "misleading media narrative," since I don't consume any mainstream media outside of occasional twitter posts. Once the trial started I was actually very surprised how many people had zero clue what really happened, yet had strong opinions one way or the other.

This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.

baryphonic4• 5 years ago

Imagine you were wrongfully accused of a heinous crime, and were being dragged through the mud in the court of the press. You may have an option to present your side of the story, one which is highly persuasive. Yet this is actively suppressed on the town square of today, Facebook and Twitter. You aren't even allowed to raise funds on platforms like GoFundMe.

As a result, the general public's first impression of your story is never challenged, and it becomes accepted as truth, despite being blatantly false.

Does Facebook have no obligation, even if only a moral one, to let you at least defend your own reputation when it allows literal defamation about you to be published unmolested?

burlesona• 5 years ago

Having a strong opinion based on zero knowledge is like American politics 101.

stjohnswarts10• 5 years ago

On the flip side facebook absolutely should be able to control what's on their platform as a private company. You can't have it both ways. They have freedom of speech as well as to the right to control their property and do business with whom they choose. I can't stop someone from spouting nonsense on the public sidewalk in front of my store, but if they try it inside my store then I can absolutely kick them out.

baryphonic4• 5 years ago

I had followed the case since the beginning. Having watched the videos, it was plainly obvious that in each case, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense. (Intriguingly, many pro-Rittenhouse voices were arguing that he was guilty of the gun charge, though some were a bit more eagle-eyed and read the statute the way the judge ultimately did when he dismissed it.)

The interesting thing about Rittenhouse is that even despite the NYT telling the truth through their video analysis, the rest of the press and tech monopolies ratcheted the story in one direction: that Rittenhouse was a "mass shooter" who was carrying out a white supremacist terrorist attack.

During the trial, my overlapping bubbles either had seen the videos and/or watched the trial and believed him innocent, or had only read the media reports, and believed him guilty.

Given the weird nature of this case, and how only one viewpoint about it was allowed on social media, I wonder if that constitutes defamation on the part of the social media companies, since they were in practice making an editorial decision that he was bad.

That said, I doubt any courts would ever actually find that section 230 does not shield tech monopolies when they do this, but I am curious.

GhettoComputers15• 5 years ago

I’m really susprised if they didn’t watch the videos and read about the case. Most people watch video now so is it possible they avoided all videos or they just didn’t believe the videos? Nobody I know didn’t watch the videos.

judge20202• 5 years ago

is there case law that shows defamation for omitting facts? It sounds like such a precedent could make anyone guilty of defamation if they only cover news when it’s first announced and not when more info comes out about the news.

BobbyJo2• 5 years ago

Not a lawyer, but I find it highly improbably that section 230 would shield them in this case. It's trivial to think of a scenario where the removal of information constitutes the production of a message, and in that scenario, the information is not itself produced by third parties using a platform, but by the platform itself.

Like, if I write a note that reads: "The President of the United States should morn those that die of COVID." And the note is posted by someone else with "morn those that" removed, they can no longer point to me as the producer of the message. Likewise if video footage is edited to show a different story than reality, the person that did the editing is culpable for the resulting hoax, not the videographer. I think the same applies to editing information produced by multiple other people. The moment you edit information to conform to a certain narrative, you are then the source of that new narrative. In that way, I think Facebook, though they were editing the information available on their platform, are in fact the source of a new narrative that exists in the negative space of their editing.

It would indeed be super interesting to see this argued in court. It would make a really good balance to the free reign that platforms have now to curtail certain messages or information. If they were responsible for the story the surviving information creates, it would make them tread more carefully when censoring users.

gpm4• 5 years ago

Given the weird nature of this case, and how only one viewpoint about it was allowed on social media, I wonder if that constitutes defamation on the part of the social media companies, since they were in practice making an editorial decision that he was bad.

You yourself acknowledge that it is a "viewpoint", or the term more common in law an "opinion". Opinions are protected speech by the first amendment (not section 230) and as such Facebook cannot be liable in any way for promoting one or silencing another.

To be liable for defamation, you would need to be stating false facts with reckless disregard for the truth (or malice, if Rittenhouse counts as a public figure), not just promoting an opinion. This is regardless of section 230 (which might or might not provide them further protection).

TrispusAttucks• 5 years ago

It appears he has a great case against CNN and perhaps even the POTUS. Expect CNN to lose yet another court case for defamation and misinformation with a huge payout.

Social media and corporate news outlets should let the courts do their job. They are constantly wrong and can't even get basic facts right.

It's all about the narrative and the party line backing up the benefactors.

How did they become arbitraters of truth?

trhway6• 5 years ago

Having watched the videos, it was plainly obvious that in each case, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense.

my understanding is that you can't claim self-defense if you initiated violence yourself. Threatening unarmed people with a gun, pointing it at them is a credible threat of violence that the people have the right to defend themselves from, and that is what they tried to do in particular by chasing that gun wielding moron away. Unfortunately that aspect seems to have been totally overlooked.

joshuamorton2• 5 years ago

This is an interesting conclusion, because as I understand it this is only really true in some states. Wisconsin's self defense law is more permissive than many, and so Rittenhouse probably couldn't have used the same defense as easily in many states.

In other words, it's not "plainly obvious", and this comes down to the context beyond the moments before he shot people. Wisconsin law says you can ignore that context, and that self defense is self defense even if you create the situation that requires deadly force or are the aggressor.

Wisconsin law has exceptions to this, that allowed Rittenhouse to use self defense despite having himself escalated.

This is a bad thing for a few reasons (two people who both shoot each other can legitimately claim self defense, taken not much further and Ahmaud Arbery's killers could claim self defense after he reached for their gun to defend himself), and anything but "obvious".

d1sxeyes28• 5 years ago

Rittenhouse shot and killed 2 people, and shot and injured a third.

Both of the men Rittenhouse killed were unarmed.

I accept that every shot Rittenhouse fired fell within the framework of self-defence under the law. I also accept that he did have a legal right to be in Kenosha.

Whether he had a legal right to be carrying the gun or not is a little more contentious. Although his possession of the gun was in line with the letter of the law, it seems likely from the wording that the exception was intended to apply to minors hunting and is poorly written, rather than an intentional decision to allow 17 year olds to carry AR-15s. Poorly worded laws are read in favour of the defence, which is why the gun charge was dropped. He likely would not have been allowed to buy or possess the gun in his home state.

But whatever the legality, I don't think it's right that a guy can go tooled up to another city, kill two unarmed people, and pose for celebratory photos with white supremacists afterwards.

The flow of information today is too fast to wait for definitive, legal judgements on every case, and balancing free speech, opinion, and commentary against spreading false news and inciting hatred is an incredibly challenging task. In the aftermath of the shooting, it seems Facebook implemented their 'mass shooting' playbook, which is, from my perspective, completely reasonable.

Facebook choosing not to allow praise or support for a killer is, in my opinion, sensible and logical. Once it became clear that the killings were not illegal, then Facebook removed these restrictions. I'm not exactly an ardent defender of Facebook's policies, but in this case, especially given that none of the facts are in contention, I think Facebook did the right thing.

mc32• 5 years ago

A very curious part of this is the president of the US calling him a white supremacist before the verdict is reached and the press secretary defending that portrayal [he shot three white guys]. A president who promised to 'bring normality back to the whitehouse'. That cavalier attitude toward justice creates unnecessary tensions in the community ['if the president says so, it must be true, and if the accused is acquitted then justice is broken and we can take it into our hands']

umvi2• 5 years ago

Also the president immediately expressing disappointment on Twitter at the jury's decision... what a slap in the face to due process

siva72• 5 years ago

This case is so weird from a european pov. Rittenhouse would be certainly convicted of murder in countries like germany. The self-defense argument would get you some laughs at the trial.

Benjammer4• 5 years ago

Are you not allowed to shoot someone in Germany if they fire a gun into the air and then point it at you? What about if someone is swinging a blunt object violently at your head? Is there just not such a thing as "self defense" in Germany?

I feel like I sound like one of the right wing sympathizers but I'm honestly just curious how things work over there, are you willing to explain?

spurgu2• 5 years ago

Meh. Not if you take into account the US constitution and the right to self-defence and bear arms (which makes sense if you think about it). You can't really compare to a European country where you'd get prosecuted simply for carrying a firearm.

umanwizard5• 5 years ago

The German definition of self-defense (“Notwehr”) sounds quite comprehensive to me:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__32.html

What makes you think the case would’ve been adjudicated differently in Germany?

Edit: to be clear, certainly bringing a gun to a protest at all is illegal in Germany, so he could presumably be prosecuted for that, but it's not at all clear why he'd have been guilty of murder.

GhettoComputers15• 5 years ago

Would anyone laugh at anyone attacking someone with a semi automatic gun with a skateboard?

stjohnswarts10• 5 years ago

Well the laws are different here. The jury decided what they thought given the laws of the state, not what they wanted to rule. That's the way jury trials work. It's not a morality trial, it's a "did he break the law" trial

dudul4• 5 years ago

So if you get assaulted in Germany you're supposed to just let them beat you up without making a move?

Aren't there any acceptable scenarios were lethal self defense can be applied?

inputvolch• 5 years ago

This case is also weird if you reimagine all of the participants as penguins in Antarctica. Since that didn't happen, it would be a waste of time to speculate what would happen in a completely different scenario.

rayiner3• 5 years ago

As far as I can tell that’s not because of a real difference in self defense law, but because of a difference in gun laws. But the gun laws in America are what they are. Many people at this riot were armed: https://vimeo.com/461063053. Listen to all the gun fire at the end of the video.

Judging Rittenhouse as if he was in Germany makes no sense. Watch the video—this wasn’t Germany, it was Iraq. In Germany, the police would never have allowed armed rioters to burn down multiple city blocks over two days.

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure German law would find Rittenhouse acted in self defense, given the facts of the case. The people he killed were attacking him with weapons, one had threatened to kill him, he had a gun pointed at him, he was in reasonable fear for his own life, and he attempted to retreat before resorting to his gun. Remove all the media hoopla and it's not even a little bit unclear - put most people in that situation and they'd find it reasonable to use deadly force to defend yourself.

RC_ITR3• 5 years ago

I mean I agree with you on the technicality, but the uniquely American view that someone can take a gun to a protest and not be looking for trouble is a very interesting one.

dudul4• 5 years ago

He took a gun to a protest because he had the right to do so. He can take a gun to home depot if he wants to. Doesn't matter if he was "looking for trouble", he had the constitutional right to do that.

neartheplain2• 5 years ago

He took a gun to a small business at the owner's request, per police investigation, photo and video evidence, and the sworn testimony of numerous witnesses. The riot came to him.

boppo12• 5 years ago

"Protest" is an incomplete characterization. The night he was there was the second night of wanton destruction. It was something between a riot and a protest. I have a hard time grasping the racial justice achieved by destroying property owned by people of color.

Akronymus6• 5 years ago

... view that someone can keep a guard dog on a property and not be looking for trouble is a very interesting one.

That's IMO essentially the same statement. Why shouldn't you have deterrence?

finite_jest2• 5 years ago

I really think we should bring back a version of fairness doctrine [1] or right of reply [2] targeted at platforms like Facebook or Twitter. This is not really my area of expertise, but I suspect that might be more effective and practical than repealing Section 230 for addressing blatant censorship like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply

GhettoComputers15• 5 years ago

Remember when Twitter promised it was the free speech sms of the Internet? I forgot until recently.

tarsinge3• 5 years ago

I am not American and I didn’t follow these events but sorry for me after watching that video it’s still complicated: the self-defense seems justified, but the initial issue of protecting property with guns is not: material possession and private property is not on the same level as human life. I understand a law allows it in that state hence the jury logical decision, but that doesn’t make it right, just legal. Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me. So in the end I surprisingly understand Facebook choice.

muzz10• 5 years ago

Also being not an American, I'm puzzled as to how there is apparently no requirement to report self-defense killings to the police. I guess when they find dead bodies in the street, they just assume it was self defense?

MaxikCZ• 5 years ago

The path from protecting property to protecting lives might be shorter than one wants to believe. People usually are not destroying property of others because its moral compared to taking lives, they do so because they left the morals of our society behind in the first place. Wanna take a bet that the guy running at you and screaming just want to tear your shirt?

Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today

Had the victim not defended himself the offender could still offend today. I don't understand this victim-blaming, I really don't. If I see a guy with a rifle protecting his property, somehow its his fault I get shot after I charge at him?

polartx4• 5 years ago

That’s what separates America from many places. While you say to the property owner, “property is not worth a human life”. We say to the burglar/arsonist, “is property worth [your] human life?”

Also assault rifle isn’t a thing. The term is a made up classification of a weapon.

stjohnswarts10• 5 years ago

We believe also that you're responsible for your own actions. That include sthe guys who attacked him while holding the gun. It is also entirely stupid to attack a person with a gun rather than backing away slowly and moving elsewhere. You won't win in the situation 99/100 times so you should extract yourself from the situation. He was not breaking the law by being there with a gun. If he was this court trial would have had a completely different verdict. As with most things in life there are two sides to the same story and two sets of responsibility and expectations.

marcusverus• 5 years ago

Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me.

So basically Rittenhouse 'morally accountable' for not foreseeing the unforseeable. How silly.

Rittenhouse attended a protest while legally carrying a firearm. 2020 had seen tens of thousands of people do the same. How many people were forced to fire their guns in self-defense at a protest? I can't think of a single one. Any risk he was incurring would have been remote and purely hypothetical. For that you hold him morally responsible for these men's deaths?

What about the actions of those men who he killed? Unlike Rittenhouse's attendance at the protest, their decision to attack Kyle Rittenhouse was decidedly not legal. Unlike Rittenhouse's choice to attend the protest, which carried only hypothetical danger, his attackers would have had no doubt that attacking a man with a gun carried risks that were neither remote nor hypothetical.

Remember, when conflict seemed imminent, Rittenhouse ran away, attempting to avoid conflict. His attackers chased him down and forced the issue.

joshuamorton2• 5 years ago

Which content is that? Saying "Rittenhouse acted in self defense" didn't violate the FB policy, so what, specifically, could you say that is consistent with the jury that Facebook would remove?

The jury didn't conclude that Rittenhouse is a good person, or that his victims deserved to die, or that they were bad people or looters. The jury didn't conclude that America needs more people like Rittenhouse, or that we should celebrate his actions.

The jury concluded that he wasn't guilty of murder. That's all. You're a lawyer, you know that.

idontwantthis• 5 years ago

I praise all censorship and all inconsistency by Facebook. Poison discourse to the point that it stops happening. Facebook is a platform for manipulation not for communication.

GhettoComputers15• 5 years ago

That would make sense if people weren’t easily fooled by Facebook.

npteljes• 5 years ago

Fail-fast attitude can be attractive until you realize that the failing is not happening in the way you imagined. What if Facebook censors very inconsistently, AND people end up being indifferent toward it? Then Facebook will be a successful platform for manipulation, the polar opposite of what the fail-fast fantasy would project.

qqtt• 5 years ago

Definitely gives me pause to hear things like Facebook disallowing support of an individual embroiled in a hostile media environment and dubious criminal charges. Where would figures like Amanda Knox be if a similar wave of thought-crime style censorship were deployed at scale?

Of course large companies setting narratives is not a new problem for us - large media conglomerates have done similar things for decades. But the scale at which Facebook operates and the reach it has, to say that support of Rittenhouse was disallowed as an opinion on the entire platform - just gives me serious pause.

esyir12• 5 years ago

I think the big question that we have to ask ourselves is, in the contest between the right of speech of the individual and that of private corporations; Where, if ever, do we draw the line when the latter erodes that of the former.

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

Meta will have a new young owner before this is done.

mensetmanusman2• 5 years ago

No one is safe in meta: https://youtu.be/-XWedbTIcV4

MaxHoppersGhost• 5 years ago

I hadn’t heard of this policy. It makes sense to me how people were so uninformed about what happened that night if Facebook was banning videos supporting Kyle and most of the media wasn’t being impartial. Anyone who spent time watching the videos wouldn’t be surprised by the verdict.

vineyardmike• 5 years ago

Considering Kyle killed people, at a very contentious and politically sensitive time, its understandable that the story was banned.

I've heard some very bad hot takes that basically amount to "he should have killed those people". Advocating for killing people is way less controversial than whatever "nuance" people want to assign to the case regarding legal standing of guns and various self defense laws.

Its not crazy to imagine someone thinking to just ban that whole discourse from a platform, even if takes some "genuine" and not-murderous conversations with it - simply to avoid people advocating death.

Mountain_Skies5• 5 years ago

Individual right don't disappear because some groups have created a very contentious and politically sensitive time.

oh_sigh2• 5 years ago

The story wasn't banned. His name was banned from searches, as one does for mass murderers. And statements of support for Rittenhouse were banned, as one does for mass murderers - but anything you wanted to say about "the events in Kenosha" which was against Rittenhouse were allowed.

ctdonath3• 5 years ago

The whole self-appointed "fact checker empowered to cancel" movement has to stop. Far too much fair disagreement, and objective truths, have been maliciously "cancelled" for not adhering to a given narrative on public forums.

I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.

No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.

ctdonath3• 5 years ago

You omit the qualifications for that exemption, which speak heavily toward good faith and minimal impact, which FB/T/etc are going way beyond and will likely have to defend in court with difficulty.

Mountain_Skies5• 5 years ago

Facebook fact checked a friend's locket that her mother gave her. It was bizarre. She posted a photo of the locket, Facebook blurred the photo and added a 'Independent fact checkers have determined this is false information' warning. The problem? The locket has a quote on it by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Apparently independent fact checkers are unable to verify that Emerson ever said the quote so it had to be blurred for our protection. Whether the quote is accurate or not, it's strange that Facebook is now policing gifts people give their children.

koolba• 5 years ago

Between Facebook banning any support, President Biden labeling him a white supremacist, and the Democrat head of the judiciary committee Rep. Jerry Nadler suggesting a unanimous jury verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” which needs to be investigated, Rittenhouse is going to a busy man.

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

Most likely not. As was pointed out by a lot of lawyers who followed the case (that I watched on YouTube), defamation lawsuits after a criminal prosecution are very hard to pursue. Also public officials enjoy anti-diffamation protections generally, especially the president and member of congress and members of the senate.

zdragnar• 5 years ago

At the very least, Biden was not an elected official when he made his first remark, merely running for office I think. Several highly public figures have also made comments after the trial, continuing to call him a murderer (and white supremacist) even though he was found not guilty.

I am fairly certain that he isn't considered a public figure, aside from the trial itself, so the bar for libel and slander is much lower than if he were a celebrity.

Nick Sandmann got absolutely massive settlements; I am curious as to the extent that the situations are similar or different.

thumbellina2• 5 years ago

I fully accept that FB is free to run itself how it pleases.

That said, it's clear they are not in a position to act as a neutral platform for civic discourse.

I try to support technologies and platforms that provide a voice to all. Decentralized over centralized.

I try to curate my own list of sources, rather than rely on third-party curation.

How else can I ensure a healthy and diverse information perspective?

chii2• 5 years ago

The problem isn't you, but others who do not try to curate their own diverse sources. When time comes to make democratic decisions, if those who are influenced outnumbered people like you, there'd be no way for you to make your case and convince the others of your correctness.

esyir12• 5 years ago

Is it really a healthy democracy if the flows of information are controlled from the top down? If I provide you with a tuned set of information in which everything says what I cant, I can get you to believe whatever I want.

This is just changing the source of said influence, not removing it.

thumbellina2• 5 years ago

I suspect many, perhaps even most, are aware of the bias they are exposed to.

I don't expect I'm particularly resistant to it.

I am keen to learn more about what I can do.

An alternative might be to focus on local community matters. I think this is common in practice.

Mountain_Skies5• 5 years ago

Orgs like Facebook who use "Independent Fact Checkers" need to reveal their sources otherwise there's no reason to believe the "Independent Fact Checkers" aren't Facebook employees making arbitrary or even ideological rulings on what is true and what is false.

cm2187• 5 years ago

Don't think they are facebook employees but fact checking orgs are pretty much all political activists.

slibhb2• 5 years ago

The funny thing about social media companies censoring is how they keep making the case for free speech over and over again without realizing it.

Mill:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

The last point is the least obvious. Pro-Rittenhouse views were "held in the manner of a prejudice" by those who had them because they were censored. When those views aren't censored and there's a healthy back-and-forth, moderacy tends to prevail.

stjohnswarts10• 5 years ago

Facebook can choose to host whatever opinions they like as they own the platform. Obviously as long as those "opinions" are legal and not such things as terroristic threats, etc. That also is free speech and the right to with your property as you like.

slibhb2• 5 years ago

Everyone is well aware that the first amendment does not apply to Facebook. The question is whether Facebook should censor not whether they legally can. The passage I quoted from Mill is an argument for free speech in general, not only with respect to the government.

hasdf• 5 years ago

Gofundme did the same thing. They killed the gofundme for Kyle's legal defense and then after it didn't matter anymore they "reversed the decision".

this article talks about a post the family of a recent school shooter made praising/defending him on facebook - so obviously facebook is applying this rule very selectively. I think it would help their credibility if they had examples of other times they apply these rules - but it seems more like they make up the rules on the spot and apply them based on their internal politics.

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article25...

NoRelToEmber• 5 years ago

The BBC does not mention it, but Rittenhouse's ability to raise funds for a legal defense was also hindered on many levels, including blocks by Twitter, GoFundMe, and the Discover payment processor: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-blocks-givesendgo-kyle-ri...

Perhaps if their blocks were successful in preventing his legal defense, they could now claim to be justified by a guilty verdict..

native_samples• 5 years ago

Yes. The tech industry has made itself look exceptionally bad here. Facebook did something deeply unethical and now it's blown up in their faces. They will not admit that's what they did, but it was. They have directly contributed to the erosion of the principles of justice for no better reason than to appease radical employees.

anshumankmr3• 5 years ago

Might be downvoted but there was a fact checker website that denied at the time President Trump’s claim that Kyle had acted in self defense. This was a year ago and I saw it for myself as still being up a few weeks ago. I am not an American and I really see both sides here. The jury system worked as per the law defined in the US (and I am not a pro 2A person ) but I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru...

It is still up.

anshumankmr3• 5 years ago

It is still up as of now.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/01/donald-tru...

hagbard_c2• 5 years ago

I also agree that most likely increase vigilantism which will be good for no one.

If the alternative to vigilantism is mob rule I'll choose vigilantism. The real issue here is that this should not be an issue for those living in a western-style representational republic or democracy to deal with, this being the task of the police.

If the monopoly on violence - i.e. the police - is not used to keep the violent at bay others will have to take up that task or the violent will rule - there are plenty of examples in the world where this has been and /or still is the case. That those "others" can end up resembling those they were formed to keep in check is an unfortunate aspect of that type of society and one of the reasons why the monopoly on violence was created. The solution to this conundrum is therefore to refrain from unilateral pacification when confronted with violent opponents. It also means that those politicians who acted upon and/or instigated the "de-fund the police" sloganeering have a lot to answer for, this being as stupid as de-funding the fire brigade when the city just caught fire (which it, incidentally, did in a number of cases).

anshumankmr3• 5 years ago

I agree "defunding the police" is such a vague term and is pure political poison.And that is why almost no one apart from a small vocal minority consider it as a policy worth pursuing.

Vigilantism is not good. Sure, if you are under threat or the ones you care about are under threat, you have every right to protect yourself.But you can read about Ahmaud Arbery's shooting to consider where vigilantism was at play and he was shot to death.

I fear if more people are emboldened by the court's decision to acquit Kyle to take the law into their own hands especially in cases where the self defense angle is not justified, it is a slippery slope to be on. Ahmaud Arbery's case is one such example also.

Jtype• 5 years ago

The increased vigilantism is directly related to the media demonizing the police and misrepresenting facts. If the police are demonized and told to stand down by mayors during times of riots then someone will fill that vacuum. If you don't want vigilantism then you need police and politicians to do their jobs.

In my opinion, this and many other issues in the past few years are due, almost exclusively, to reporters viewing themselves as activists instead of reporters of fact. This specific case has too many examples of this to be coincidence, from the way the Jacob Blake story was reported initially( failing to report on the knife), to the intentional misrepresentation of the facts in the Rittenhouse case.

hagbard_c2• 5 years ago

Add the tendency of the press to fail to report on anything which doesn't fit the required narrative, e.g. the recent example of multiple vehicular homicide in Waukesha where a casual reader would conclude that a self-driving SUV went rampant, the way the school shooting in Timberview and the subsequent release of the shooter (including a festive reception by his family) was buried [1] and far too many other examples of what is clearly an agenda. What those media seem to fail to realise is that they have lost nearly all trust among the general population - i.e. they are preaching to their own activist choir.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/did-media-bury-mass-shooting-becaus...

HNTA_1• 5 years ago

Wow. This is one of the most chilling things I've seen in a long time. So divorced from reality (suffering from TDS) that they're on the "war is peace, ignorance is strength"-level of delusion. They're the ones who have elected themselves as the arbiters of what is "fact", what is "truthful". Orwellian is underselling how insane this is.

HumanReadable• 5 years ago

I really don't think Facebook should be in charge of making speech moderation at this level of specificity.

Social media platforms have become the public squares of the 21st century, and as such we need to treat the right for free speech on those platforms as important.

That doesn't mean we can't change these platforms to favour desirable engagement. If our physical public square were very small, everyone might be reduced to yelling to hear each other. So we make our physical public squares large and open! Maybe if we put a tree in the middle, it will calm us down and help us engage with each other.

But we will never appoint a public square moderator who arbitrarily decides what can and cannot be said. Neither should Facebook.

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

Something that blew my mind. https://www.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-says-andrew-yang...

Rittenhouse stayed out of the politics for the trial(very smart) and later he revealed that he was in the "Yang Gang"

"I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but I was a pretty big Andrew Yang supporter before all this,"

He was far left and the left wing are who attacked him as white supremacist and all that.

Just goes to show how the media is just completely full of shit.

Mountain_Skies5• 5 years ago

He also supports BLM.

Facebook reverses Kyle Rittenhouse policy

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