Forum Censorship

People I know are being blocked and/or kicked off of Facebook and Twitter. I have not (yet) seen the offending posts, so I am guessing quite a bit here.

Facebook and Twitter are really not public forums. They are private entities, selling eyeballs to their advertisers, and possibly doing some data mining. They are accused of suppressing controversial political opinions, and they are accused of spreading misinformation. They don't want to offend users or advertisers, or the government. They don't want to be regulated. I see lots of right‑wing memes posted on Facebook, and I see no signs of the users being suppressed. I suspect that the line is being drawn at hatred and lies. Knowing the people I know, I suspect that internet memes are being forwarded.

Historically, governments have banned the interception and reading of other people's mail, and the tapping of telephones. Your post office and your phone company are not legally responsible for what you send through them. In law, the first point above makes the second point necessary. I do not know where electronic bulletin boards, internet service providers, and online forums fit into this system.

I do not know the legal status or the location of Facebook and Twitter's file servers. If something is posted on their message boards, can they be arrested, or sued for libel? Is it possible and practical for the authorities to capture hard drives? Facebook appears to be based in Ireland. If they don't get their stuff seized, they still face regulation. Ultimately, governments are in charge.

Forwarding Stuff

Before you forward something, take a good look at it. It is easy to detect lies and bad logic in something you disagree with. It is harder to catch it when you like the content. Ask yourself the following questions...

Is the article or meme factually accurate?

When someone forwards me a crazy article, I copy a substantial block of the text, and paste it into Google. Over and over again, I find myself on the urban legends site at Snopes.com. When I look things up carefully, I learn who originated it, and this turns out to be interesting. Often, I find important stuff omitted from the forwarded story.

Is it news?

News is something that happened last week, or maybe last month. If it happened several years ago, it is not news. If this is an important and current issue, why was a story selected from several years ago?

Are they cherry picking?

There are thirty five million people here in Canada. There are over three hundred million people in the USA, and something over seven billion in the world. Somewhere, someone is doing something stupid, evil and/or weird, that will back up whatever wacko idea somebody else wants you to believe. Anecdotes, if they are true, prove only that something is possible. They do not prove a statistical or social trend.

Are they pulling your chain?

Political organizations and other crusading types want to make you angry. Did the awful story really happen? Is it being exaggerated? Has important information been left out? Is it news? Is it something that happens a lot, or is it a one‑time event? Beware of purple prose. Learn to recognize dog whistles. Remember that their dog whistles are easier to spot than yours.

Is the origin of the story credible?

Forget Alex Jones and InfoWars. Could it be a satire site like The Onion or The Beaverton, or some extremist political or religious organization? The source for news ought to be a news organization or website local to where it occurred. Examine the URL. Remove all the crap after .com or .ca, and look at the site's landing page. Read the site's About page, and explore the other articles. If the site is telling lies, none of its articles are credible. You caught some of it, not all of it.

Did you write the story?

Is this your story or gag? NSFW rant: Are you a content creator? Maddox is complaining about spam and online listicles, but this can be applied to forwarded jokes and memes. Did you take the picture? Did you write the gag? If not, don't forward it. A lot of the articles written by Andrew Marlatt for SatireWire were forwarded as legitimate news articles, and/or were credited to John Cleese. If you did not write the thing, do not strip out or replace the author's name. If somebody else stripped out the author's name, don't forward it! If the article really is cool and you agree with it, write your own comment, and provide a link to the original source.

Is the meme's gag appropriate?

Political figures, especially women, are accused of being old, fat and ugly, and they are otherwise disrespected. Good looks are not a qualification for high political office. The former First Lady and Secretary of State of the USA is Hillary Clinton or Ms. Clinton or Clinton, not Hillary, Hitlery, or Killery. We are coarsening the discussion. So much criticism from trolls is personal, showing off hatred, contempt, and the tribe to which we belong. It does not introduce factual claims or ideas to be discussed and either proved or refuted. It is an excellent strategy for the demagogues who will destroy our democracy if we let them.

Troll Farms

As of 2021/10/11, Facebook is accused of enabling trolls. They are getting almost no criticism at the moment for censorship. Facebook may well be placing its profits ahead of social order and democracy, but it faces problems common to any form of online social media. People out there want to communicate with you. Some of them lack ethics and honesty, and they will conceal their identities and their agenda. It is easy to create accounts and groups on social media. If I want to set up an account of an imaginary person, all I have to do is download a picture from the internet, like the one to the right, and make up a name. If I set up an association or group, I can name it whatever I want. If I get too abusive, the social media provider can censor me or even shut down my account. I will have to start another one. The worst case is that I need a new gmail account. Eventually, I will learn precisely how abusive I can be without being censored.

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows — This article is from the MIT Technology Review. They give you a limited number of free reads, so give yourself adequate time before you click on the link. Basically, a lot of Facebook groups are run by Troll farms. Why do they do this? Your guess is as good as mine.

When you communicate online through anything other than video conferencing, assume that you do not know who or what is sitting at the other keyboard. Before you forward something or "like" it, make sure you know who posted it, and why.

Notes

Ad Fontes Media's Media Bias Chart — obviously, this is somebody's opinion, but take a good look at it. Where is the source of your story?

Wikipedia has a page on Reliable sources/Perennial sources. They need a general agreement on the reliability of sources, and this page is it. When you read Wikipedia articles on messy subjects, click on the Talk tab. The discussions often are very interesting. Ad Fontes Media, above, is listed as generally unreliable.

A Field Guide To Critical Thinking — by James Lett, professor of anthropology, Department of Social Sciences, Indian River Community College. This is an article from the Winter 1990 edition of the Skeptical Inquirer. Lett provides us the acronym FiLCHeRS, which stands for Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, and Sufficiency. Falsifiability is a popular concept within the scientific and skeptical community, originally proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. For any factual claim, there should be some fact or observation that will prove it not true. If a claim is not falsifiable, it probably has no useful meaning or relevance. Falsifiability is an excellent bullshit filter.

Search tools are your friend. Google, Duck Duck Go and Bing are the big ones. Million Short is a newer search engine, that often shows different results. For that friend who never fact checks their stuff, there is Let Me Google That For You. Send them the helpful link. In Google, click on Images. Google will search, and show you where your images came from, and who is using them.

A famous forwarded story was an alleged commencement address at MIT, credited to Kurt Vonnegut, in which everyone was advised wear sunscreen. The original article actually was written for the Chicago Tribune by columnist Mary Schmich, and entitled Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young. In addition to wearing sunscreen, we were advised to not read beauty magazines. Would a man, like Kurt Vonnegut, say this? I must admit I did not notice this at the time.

• Salon.com — Silicon Valley's puritanical war on sex
• Vice.com — The Companies Cleaning the Deepest, Darkest Parts of Social Media

The article on Salon is mostly about porn, but it discusses online censorship by social media websites. Advertisers do not want to see their stuff next to obnoxious content. Censoring is outsourced to contractors in the Philippines. False positives are very bad. False negatives are not much of a problem to Facebook and YouTube, however much you hate it.

The Vice article is a review of the documentary The Cleaners, which I have just watched. I was not impressed. I find the topic to be very interesting, but in an hour and a half of video documentary, I don't think there was much more information than you get from the Vice article. There were way too many long, lingering street scene shots in the USA and in the Philippines, with zero information content. The film makers interviewed a couple of artists whose work was being censored, and a right‑wing troll whose work was being censored. If companies are determined to remove obnoxious content, quickly and at low cost, they are going to remove content that is in marginal taste.

Dispatch from the Republican Meme Wars — from TheBulwark.com, an article about a new dog whistle. Expressions people use do not always mean what you think they mean. If you are going to engage in political discussions, you need to learn these things.

Howard Gibson — Email hgibson@eol.ca — Last updated: 2022/02/18