Fair enough, up to a point. Facebook is a private company and they publish
terms of service. I complied with those terms, but someone mistakenly
thought otherwise. When Wikipedia makes a mistake there's a means of appeal
(sometimes faulty, but we do remain open to the idea that our decisions are
open to revision). Not with Facebook. And not, by commonsense
understanding, with IWF either. Both organizations operate from a
presumption that all of their decisions are correct, and minimize the means
for appeal.
Think about it. Do you really suppose that none of the other 10,000
censorship decisions IWF made in the last year were less than perfect?
Proper feedback loops don't exist. And they should.
-Durova
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Durova
<nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
Yet Facebook provided no means of appeal, and my
own efforts to contact
them
and seek reconsideration fell on deaf ears.
The problem is bigger than IWF.
http://durova.blogspot.com/2008/12/who-watches-watchers.html
Facebook is a private company. They can do what they want. The same
ability that allows them to censor your gallery allows Wikipedia to
give Archimedes Plutonium the boot. If you don't like it you can
leave or fork.
Oh wait. You can't fork. The data you and your friends have submitted
into Facebook is stuck there. You don't have a realistic choice, just
like most UK residents don't have a realistic choice to choose an
uncensored ISP.
I don't have a solution for the UK's censorship other than to point
out that perhaps sites like ours ought to find ways to be more
friendly to user-controlled truly voluntary filtering if we want to
avoid outright censorship.
But for facebook, there is a path out of that:
http://opendefinition.org/ossd?action=show&redirect=osd
I don't have a high opinion of facebook, so I can't suggest an open
alternativeā¦ there may not be one yet. I know there is identi.ca vs
twitter.
Of course, an open service doesn't change the fact that you are
already invested in facebook, nor does it resolve all the problems,
but it's a necessary start. The [[network effect]] of sites like
facebook means that breaking from them is hard, but when you use it
you're adding to the problem, compelling others to join in giving up
control to the faceless-website-company. Butā¦ Change has to start
somewhere, someone needs to raise concerns and advocate it. To me it
looks like facebook as nominated you.
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