Veilbook

NHS privatisation gains its craggy taloned footing on a crucial moss-slicked stepping stone this week, in the context of under-reporting and misleading reporting by both the BBC and fully marketised news media.

"Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too. We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited" (Scriptonite).

Does Facebook censor political content? 

Yes and no is my best guess. It's worth trying to imagine, in concrete detail, how censorship might be embedded in Facebook's operations. Not that there aren't Evil Corporations (there basically are), but we shouldn't lose sight of the various org hierarchies and processes and codes of conduct of that Evil, how that Evil is embodied in the lives of various individuals committing various individual acts, according to narratives which let them sleep at night. Like, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for evil people to do nothing."

(a) Say there's always somebody in a Facebook office ready to field calls from Key Stakeholders about their publicity concerns. Maybe you can get on that list by holding a lot of shares, buying a lot of FB ad space, a personal recommendation from senior management, etc. So there would be a phone call from time-to-time, raising concerns that a particular viral item is without factual basis, is libellous, or violates copyright. No proof would be necessary: just a plausible enough complaint to lead to a temporary (i.e. permanent) take-down. I can just about credit such an arrangement existing. It doesn't seem a particularly good fit for the events Scriptonite describes though. Who would have made that call? What would the pretence have been? I wouldn't quite rule it out, but ...

(b) More likely, we the public censored the article when creeps among us clicked "Report Story or Spam." We abused that function, because some of us, for a variety of reasons, get enraged by the wrong things. It is possible that Facebook employees then undertook sort of evaluation as to whether the content violated the Terms of Service. But I wouldn't be surprised if the take-down kicked in automatically, when some reporting threshold was reached.

We could try to generalise, BTW, about what kinds of item tend to get zotzed in this way. Something which is in principle incredibly divisive and vitriol-a-genic could rattle around safely inside a stovepiped network for ages, only being shared among people who can tolerate it. In other words, an exemplary risk would be an item which angers your friends, not just your foes. (I do find it difficult to get inside the psychology that wrathfully marks as spam rather than de-friends, a hint I might not have this quite right). I wonder if there were a lot of take-downs during during the 2011 riots? Also: I suspect these processes are pretty resistant, but not impervious to monetisation. Malicious reporting could be part of someone's job.

Anyway, the key thing is: it's still Facebook's responsibility to stop this from happening. But it's not a case-by-case responsibility (or not only a case-by-case responsibility). It's a matter of systems design. Facebook needs to work out the signature of political speech and/or divisive speech being misreported as spam and find ways to protect it. Their systems no doubt put a lot of weight on a list of stipulated trusted sources (The Guardian, The Mail). That's papering over the cracks. In fact it's not even paper. It's some kind of nang guacamole. Instead, Facebook need to design an architecture within which we can correctly crowdsource the initial judgment as to whether some particular item is legitimate or not, regardless of its domain. One complementary possibility is a transitional status for an item that is suspected of being spam, letting the self-identified digitally literate make up their own minds. If something is taken down, there needs to be obvious, effective appeal functionality, and there need to be swift, bold humans evaluating those appeals and giving reasons for their decisions. Of course in a crisis, Facebook is completely unreliable. But for day-to-day stuff, it's an amphitheatre worth fighting for. It's a Great Space.

(c) It's some kind of weird glitch which affected that article at random. Maybe stuff disappears all the time and we tend to notice more when we can attribute it to the actions of a vigilant antagonist. I think it's perfectly possible to prefer this option to option (a) whilst still having my distrust of corporate communications, corporate activities and corporate ideology and culture set to maximum.

UPDATE: Horrible Telegraph article by Willard Foxton makes queasy cause with me: "a small amount of code that Facebook's anti-spam algorithms recognised as spam embedded in her site; hence, people received a warning that the link was potentially dangerous by clicking on it. When enough people clicked "report spam", the post was automatically taken down."

From Schiller's letters on aesthetics

"... when reason brings her moral unity into physical society, she must not injure the manifold in nature. When nature strives to maintain her manifold character in the moral structure of society, this must not create any breach in moral unity; the victorious form is equally remote from uniformity and confusion. Therefore, totality of character must be found in the people which is capable and worthy to exchange the state of necessity for that of freedom."

From Schiller's letters on aesthetics

"It is only when a third character, as previously suggested, has preponderance that a revolution in a state according to moral principles can be free from injurious consequences; nor can anything else secure its endurance. In proposing or setting up a moral state, the moral law is relied upon as a real power, and free-will is drawn into the realm of causes, where all hangs together mutually with stringent necessity and rigidity.

[...] All improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling of the character. But, subject to the influence of a social constitution still barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It would then be necessary to seek for this end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption."

From Schiller's letters on aesthetics

"But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given him by any experience, but established by the necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he attributes to this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not cognizant in the actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice of which he was not capable before, and sets to work just as if he were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state of bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete insight and of his free decision. He is justified in regarding this work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild and arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with a halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no authority before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in his personality."