• eff-tagline 8 hours ago |
    I wonder if/when they will change their tagline. Current one seems behind the times:

    EFF: The leading nonprofit defending […] free speech.

    • freen 8 hours ago |
      How dumb does one have to be to fail to realize that kicking an asshole out of a party (read website/app/whatever) isn’t the government censoring you.

      Xkcd covered this in detail, what a decade ago?

      https://xkcd.com/1357/

      • freen 7 hours ago |
        Gonna hazard that if the above gets moderated/deleted, our new friend “eff-tagline” won’t complain that my freedom of speech is being impinged.
        • Over2Chars 6 hours ago |
          Yes, free speech advocates seem to lose enthusiasm for the freedom of speech they disagree with. Curious.
          • freen 37 minutes ago |
            They never seem to be grumpy about spam getting deleted.

            It’s always “why can’t I be mean to people without consequences?”

            Or, “I should be able to be racist/ableist/discriminatory and you have to host my vitriol or else you are violating my freedom of speech, private company!!”

      • eff-tagline 7 hours ago |
        I’m glad you’ve shared your opinion that “free speech” strictly refers to government censorship. I disagree.
        • beej71 7 hours ago |
          You're free to disagree. But you're not free to force me or HN or anyone else to host your disagreement. To do so would be a violation of their free speech.
      • readthenotes1 7 hours ago |
        I guess I'm pretty dumb cuz when I hear about the government asking Facebook to censor stuff and they do, sorry, when I hear about the government asking Facebook to kick someone they don't like out of the party because they're saying inconvenient things about the government and they do, it sounds like the government censorship.
        • verdverm 6 hours ago |
          FB was doing this on their own during covid, the government simply pointed FB towards content they found concerning w.r.t. public health policy during a global pandemic. FB then made their own calls for their content moderation policy
      • LightHugger 6 hours ago |
        The general idea is that social media platforms especially at the scale of twitter and facebook are not private parties but public squares, in which free speech must be protected. I think this is obviously true, but there is of course the question of how exactly to draw the line between a large public square and a small private platform. There are many good possible answers.

        It could be delimited by user count, by moderation style, by liability accepted (section 230 is frequently brought up as an option). In any case, if you think a billion user platform is a private party, you are plainly wrong.

        It's a bit telling that you think a a 6 panel comic is "covering it in detail". If you want an even more simplified version of how this can go, free speech is a human right, and given that you're against free speech we can limit yours and make everyone happy. I'm more than happy to let people play by their own rules in this case.

        • MattPalmer1086 4 hours ago |
          That is a line pushed by the owners of these privately owned platforms.

          But they really are not public squares. They are not publicly owned or managed in the best interests of the users. They are corporate money-making machines. Don't be fooled.

      • like_any_other 5 hours ago |
        A very good comic. But it would be even better and more accurate if it changed "the people" in

        "It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."

        to "the unelected multinational corporation". Anyway I'll go tell Human Rights Watch [1] that it's just free association in action and that if Palestinians want to have their stories heard they should just build their own competing media platform with global reach. And the EU Commission should also have a copy of that comic sent to them [2].

        [1] https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...

        [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/eu-energetically...

        • freen an hour ago |
          Unelected multinational corporation: still just a bunch of people.

          A bar, or a music festival is also possibly an unelected multinational corporation. Still can kick people out.

          I wonder, why can’t I go into the lobby of the Sony building in NYC and stand in my soapbox and rant about TimeCube?

          Technically, my blog is run by an unelected multinational corporation… I guess when I delete spam, I’m censoring, right?

          It’s just not that hard people.

          Facebook is t the government.

    • sapphicsnail 7 hours ago |
      It's not even free speech. It's directly targeting specific people while continuing to protect others. They already censor a ton of things.
  • freen 8 hours ago |
    To people with a heart, yes, that’s a bug.

    For everyone else? It’s a feature.

    The cruelty is the point.

  • influx 8 hours ago |
    The EFF is on the wrong side of history on this one. Sad to see it.
    • freen 7 hours ago |
      Yup: MLK’s moral arc of the history definitely bends towards making fun of disabled people.
    • beej71 7 hours ago |
      How do you figure?

      The only thing I see that's wrong about this is that I don't pay the EFF to tell private companies what to do. I pay them to stop the government from turning fascist.

      They're not wrong about Facebook being a POS and these new policies making it moreso, though.

      • Over2Chars 6 hours ago |
        The EFF won't stop anyone from turning fascist. That's not their mission. It sounds nice though.

        I wouldn't give the EFF a dime.

    • LightHugger 6 hours ago |
      For profit companies, especially facebook will just follow whatever is popular at the time, they have no morality at all. They had no morality when treating people like absolute shit under oppressive moderation and censoring people like crazy and they will have no morality while ignoring abuses on the platform while using current politics as an excuse to spend less on moderation.

      The EFF however is at least supposed to stand for basic human rights. Like free speech. At least it got a mention in the title, but frankly the author of this article doesn't care at all about it, and doesn't understand the basic principle of why it's important to protect the speech of people they disagree with. So taking a plain view, they're a hateful anti-human rights activist. Not sure why i'd listen to what an anti human rights activist has to say.

      • fzeroracer 5 minutes ago |
        > So taking a plain view, they're a hateful anti-human rights activist. Not sure why i'd listen to what an anti human rights activist has to say.

        You are posting this in a thread and a story about Meta literally saying a certain class of people are considered second class citizens and thus it's perfectly okay to sling slurs and harassment at them.

        You do realize this, right? Like you are saying that the company with zero morality telling it's users it's okay to harass people is better than the EFF calling them out. Like if you actually stand for human rights you should be horrified at Meta's actions.

  • Over2Chars 7 hours ago |
    How will it be any worse?

    2021 article on how FB's response to CSAM were inadequate: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59063768

    (2021) FB creates extremists, and that's OK with them? https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radical...

    (2024) drug sales https://nypost.com/2024/03/16/us-news/feds-investigating-met...

    and on and on. It's hard to believe their mitigations are anything more than legal facades to protect them from maximum culpability.

    The emperor may be choosing to wear no clothes, but it was a sheer nighty before.

  • Fricken 2 hours ago |
    The Rohingya genocide was fomented on Facebook. Facebook ignored dire warnings for years from human rights organizations including Amnesty international, Humanrightswatch.org and the UN.