Facebook excempts politicians from rules that ban "hate speech" and "false news"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/25/facebook-excempts-politicians.html

Did I miss it, or did the stupid ass forget to define what they mean by politician? Poof! Every far-right hate monger is now a politician!

Even with a reasonable definition of politician in place…

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Psshaw! What major UK politician can’t say as much these days?

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Apparently, Facebook is one of those entities eager for a repeat of 2016.

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You mean a repeat of the year when Facebook’s revenue increased by more than 50%? Yeah, they most definitely want a repeat of 2016. Anything that accompanies that, whatever governments fall or are elected, or any real-world consequences to their business model, are wholly beside that point for them.

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Your headline could use some spell checking…

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Well, it’s an internal policy of Facebook so whether there is any gaming of the system is totally up to them. I mean, they can just say, “Nah, Billy Joyce, you’re not a politician in our books.” If they want to let every yahoo skirt their rules they can obviously do so, but my guess is by politician by them “someone who looks like a politician to us” which probably includes people who are actually elected and people running for major parties.

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Sounds like a business model for small towns in the middle of nowhere. For $SOME_AMOUNT payable to the town you’re entered into the election for a position with an official sounding title that has rights and responsibilities that boil down to “You can call yourself a politician or an elected official but if you do something idiotic / illegal you aren’t associated with us, we don’t know you, and never had this conversation.”

Alex Jones, Chief Soil Enrichment Material Provider for the town of Littletown, Wyoming? [He provides fertilizer of a sort to the town, I suppose?]

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There’s Speech and Debate Clause un the US and other constitution, but isn’t for all politicians.
Now it’s another interesting case of “private justice” where the judicial system is defeated by a private monopoly. The solution is of cause to break up the private monopoly.

But Billy Joyce is running for a national political party, with one sitting member, and a fair possibility of electing a couple seats in a minority government situation. (Shoot me now!)

They could probably block the Canadian Nationalist Party without much complaint, but the People’s Party could be a problem. (Even if there is a lot of overlap.)

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I’m not doing my homework today. I assumed Joyce was a random. But of course the PPC is scraping the bottom of the deepest barrel to find people to run for them. Renata Ford is their star candidate.

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Sets a stunningly low bar. You can be a “politician” by running a zero-chance, zero-cost campaign for city council, then be as hateful as you want.

That, and some of the news headlines related to offensive posts have involved local politicians: county officials, state legislators etc.

OTOH this has (at least sometimes) led to said officials being shown the door.

Came to make similar comment. Not on Fuckbook, but if I were I’d be claiming to be a politician and ranting hate and abuse about politicians and right wing arseholes.

How does one register to become a politician? This is crazy.

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No it’s a spoof. “Excempt” is an example of fake news.

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