Germany investigates Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook over failure to remove hate posts

[Haystack]

Actually, they do.
Ideas propagate because people read about them and decide that other people like them believe them. The whole point about Facebook is that it is an echo chamber, not a free market in ideas, and it shows its readers what they want to be shown. No critical thinking involved. It hypes people up because the more extreme stuff they look at, the more extreme stuff they get shown.

And don’t talk to Germans about learning from history. They have done so rather more successfully than the US, and as a result have a more cohesive and equal society. Germany has gone from the scourge of Europe to being the country that does the most to unite Europe. The US, meanwhile, is by far the biggest destabilising influence in the world with its constant wars in the Middle East, and is still unable to come to terms with its past of slavery. I’m not German, but I admire what they have achieved.

People will see what they want see, on FB or elsewhere. They’ll download the files they want to download, they do the drugs they want to do (or find substitutes). You can inhibit that through censorship to a limited degree, but by doing so you also endanger your own free speech rights.

I’m not comparing the US and Germany, I’m pointing out that if you have to pass a law to suppress something, then clearly you still have a problem with that thing, and I would argue that force is the least effective way to deal with it. We all patted ourselves on the back for purging the Confederate flag, but here we are with Donald Trump within striking distance of the White House.

You don’t measure social progress by what you prohibit. You measure it by what you can afford to allow.