You Will Anyway: Good with a caveat

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Good with a caveat

The caveat: It wasn't a ban. It was an indefinite suspension, something the Board says isn't in Facebook's rule book, so it sent the matter back to Zuckerberg...

Rather than accepting, or rejecting, the suspension, the oversight board referred the decision back to Facebook. Its rationale is well-argued: Facebook doesn’t have anything in its rulebook about “indefinite suspensions”, and so it clearly has not applied its rules to Trump at all.

[...]

The entire point of the oversight board was to insulate Facebook from the consequences of its power – and the entire point of that was to insulate Mark Zuckerberg from the consequences of his power. By creating the board, Zuckerberg ensured that the most controversial calls would be out of his hands, allowing him to wield sole control over the most important communications network in the world without taking sides on questions of what should be on that network.

Now, for a second time, Zuckerberg will find himself chairing a meeting to decide whether or not to ban Donald Trump from Facebook. For a second time, half of America will never forget his decision, whichever choice he makes. And for a second time, he runs the risk of whatever choice being overturned down the line by the independent body he set up to overrule him.

“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a statement just hours after the decision was announced by Facebook's Oversight Board.

“The People of our Country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process,” he continued.

The Hill

Again with the projection. Also, social media can't take away anyone's free speech.

Twitter has similarly banned Trump from posting on the platform, but that suspension is permanent.

Facebook should do the same.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

------
ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

------
GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

------
GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

------
PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.