Oh god the removal/disabling of comment sections from news sites/FB pages would be great. I live in a pretty small town and the paper here does either not have time/manpower or just doesn't give a...
Oh god the removal/disabling of comment sections from news sites/FB pages would be great.
I live in a pretty small town and the paper here does either not have time/manpower or just doesn't give a fuck about moderating its facebook comments. The loonies end up dominating the comments because regular people have better things going on in their lives than soap boxing into the void on every news article that gets posted.
This seems completely illogical. Does the court just not realise how Facebook works or am I missing something?
The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments.
This seems completely illogical. Does the court just not realise how Facebook works or am I missing something?
A publisher receives text from an author, and then distributes that text to readers. In book publishing, they do this by receiving a manuscript from an author, and then printing a book to...
A publisher receives text from an author, and then distributes that text to readers. In book publishing, they do this by receiving a manuscript from an author, and then printing a book to sell/give to readers. In social media, they do this by receiving a comment from an author, and then displaying that comment on their Facebook page. In both situations, they're acting as a distributor of someone else's writings.
But, importantly, they also act as a gatekeeper for those writings.
There is no requirement for a publisher to print an author's book, and publishers have occasionally rejected books for being too offensive or controversial. Similarly, a media company is not required to display a user's comment on Facebook - especially if they have moderators reviewing their Facebook page. They can reject a comment if it's too offensive or controversial.
Specifically, they could have blocked the racist and otherwise insulting comments about Dylan Voller on their Facebook page, but they chose not to. They chose to publish those commments on their Facebook page. That makes them at least partly responsible for the impact of those comments on Mr Voller.
As long as it's in a space on facebook that the company can moderate, I'd rather have them required to moderate it than not. The big social media sites are horrible about moderating their...
As long as it's in a space on facebook that the company can moderate, I'd rather have them required to moderate it than not. The big social media sites are horrible about moderating their communities, and the general way of doing things seems to be to "federate" that problem, i.e. create smaller communities (subreddits, FB groups) that moderate themselves.
Of course, there's something there about what reasonable standards of moderation you'd expect, in particular wrt. black/whitelisting and the expected response time. We'd have to lower expectations for your town's woodworking group, as the mods there have other duties. A big corporation with full-time social media people? Different expectations. Don't like it, disable comments.
I dunno; I mean, someone has to moderate that shit. Either we put the responsibility on facebook and kill the business model of FB, twitter, instagram and reddit in one go (good riddance?), or we decentralize it and put it on subreddit mods, FB group/site owners, etc; according to the standards of moderation we can reasonably expect from the relevant mod/place.
Facebook is merely the printer. The publisher sends the manuscript to the printer to make printed copies for people to read; the publisher sends the comment to the social media site to make...
But how is the media company the publisher and not Facebook?
Facebook is merely the printer. The publisher sends the manuscript to the printer to make printed copies for people to read; the publisher sends the comment to the social media site to make digital copies for people to read. We don't hold the printer responsible for the final book. The editorial decision to publish or not to publish was made by the publisher, not the printer or the website.
They know how Facebook works. It becomes a toxic wasteland of unmoderated garbage. This change should get news orgs to turn off comments or start moderating them. Both options sound like an...
They know how Facebook works. It becomes a toxic wasteland of unmoderated garbage. This change should get news orgs to turn off comments or start moderating them.
We'll see how this develops.
Oh god the removal/disabling of comment sections from news sites/FB pages would be great.
I live in a pretty small town and the paper here does either not have time/manpower or just doesn't give a fuck about moderating its facebook comments. The loonies end up dominating the comments because regular people have better things going on in their lives than soap boxing into the void on every news article that gets posted.
This seems completely illogical. Does the court just not realise how Facebook works or am I missing something?
A publisher receives text from an author, and then distributes that text to readers. In book publishing, they do this by receiving a manuscript from an author, and then printing a book to sell/give to readers. In social media, they do this by receiving a comment from an author, and then displaying that comment on their Facebook page. In both situations, they're acting as a distributor of someone else's writings.
But, importantly, they also act as a gatekeeper for those writings.
There is no requirement for a publisher to print an author's book, and publishers have occasionally rejected books for being too offensive or controversial. Similarly, a media company is not required to display a user's comment on Facebook - especially if they have moderators reviewing their Facebook page. They can reject a comment if it's too offensive or controversial.
Specifically, they could have blocked the racist and otherwise insulting comments about Dylan Voller on their Facebook page, but they chose not to. They chose to publish those commments on their Facebook page. That makes them at least partly responsible for the impact of those comments on Mr Voller.
But how is the media company the publisher and not Facebook? Am I legally responsible for content commented on my Facebook page?
As long as it's in a space on facebook that the company can moderate, I'd rather have them required to moderate it than not. The big social media sites are horrible about moderating their communities, and the general way of doing things seems to be to "federate" that problem, i.e. create smaller communities (subreddits, FB groups) that moderate themselves.
Of course, there's something there about what reasonable standards of moderation you'd expect, in particular wrt. black/whitelisting and the expected response time. We'd have to lower expectations for your town's woodworking group, as the mods there have other duties. A big corporation with full-time social media people? Different expectations. Don't like it, disable comments.
I dunno; I mean, someone has to moderate that shit. Either we put the responsibility on facebook and kill the business model of FB, twitter, instagram and reddit in one go (good riddance?), or we decentralize it and put it on subreddit mods, FB group/site owners, etc; according to the standards of moderation we can reasonably expect from the relevant mod/place.
Facebook is merely the printer. The publisher sends the manuscript to the printer to make printed copies for people to read; the publisher sends the comment to the social media site to make digital copies for people to read. We don't hold the printer responsible for the final book. The editorial decision to publish or not to publish was made by the publisher, not the printer or the website.
They know how Facebook works. It becomes a toxic wasteland of unmoderated garbage. This change should get news orgs to turn off comments or start moderating them.
Both options sound like an improvement.