> Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?
Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.
> Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways
A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.
> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.
Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.
> Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways
A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.
> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.