On Facebook, it's OK to be anti-you and your beliefs
An article about Facebook published last summer is a great read, but the reason why it is great may not be immediately evident:
The article is “Facebook’s secret rules mean that it’s OK to be anti-Islam, but not anti-gay”.
The real issue that that article highlights is not whether it’s OK to be anti-Islam, or anti-gay, or any combination of those “anti-”.
The real issue is that who really decides what should be OK to speak against (a.k.a. freedom of speech, right?), and implements those policies without any possibility for really independent control is a very restricted group of managers of one private corporation.
Maybe, today those managers have your same views about what should be OK to be against. However, even if that is the case now, you have no solid basis at all to be confident that things will stay the same. What’s worse, should things change, you may not even notice that you are being censored. Not until you remain inside a black box like Facebok, or any other social network working in the same way.
Oh, and don’t think for a moment that nationalizing Facebook, or mandating government control of its computers could ever be a good idea.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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