Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

Related Post Roulette

7 Responses

  1. Philip H says:

    Seems to me the review board is forcing Facebook to decide whether it wants to foster unfettered speech, damn the torpedo’s, or whether its going to be a responsible corporate citizen.Report

  2. Sisyphus exhausted but forever pushing the rock up the hill, Tantalus starving with food just out of reach, Trump full of unexpressed malice but unable to tweet.Report

  3. CJColucci says:

    I’m probably not the only person who doesn’t have a Facebook account. The appropriate regulatory scheme for social media platforms — and, of course, there has to be one — would, nevertheless, be an interesting topic for discussion. But Facebook’s individual decisions under the current regulatory regime, well, I like gossip as much as the next person — as long as the gossipers treat it like the gossip it is.Report

  4. Burt Likko says:

    The board, which is less than a year old and had yet to decide a case at the time, was first conceived by Zuckerberg as a way to outsource the thorniest content moderation decisions without having the government intervene.

    When I was on the Editorial Board here, both before and during my time as EIC, I participated in decisions about what to do with undesirable content, in particular comments that were perceived as detrimental to the overall site culture. It was extraordinarily difficult. The current board surely wrestles with the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of competing pressures — balancing the desire for a good atmosphere in the community with the desire for a robust, open forum for many different ideas. In the end, I concluded for myself that there is no rule you can devise which realizes both goals. You can have completely free and uncensored speech, or not — and in reality, no one really wants completely free and uncensored speech. (If you do, you need to got to 8chan and wade through conspiracy theories, pornographically intricate screeds of racial slurs longer in column-inches than the sixteen-point-font reprint of Atlas Shrugged, and advertisements for trafficked sex slaves. Say whatever you want there, but that sort of thing was too much even for Parler.)

    There are differences of opinion on what kinds of comments poison a community’s atmosphere and what kind of a community is really wanted, but no matter what rule you try to make, someone will find a way to push right up to the edge of the rule without breaking it and say exactly the sort of thing that you don’t want said. Someone who wants to piss in the swimming pool will not only drink lots of beer first, they will then try hard to find a place you can’t effectively shoo them out of, and then take aim before letting go. And if you do shoo them away they’ll say it’s because you only want people who wear a certain color of swimming trunks, and pretend like they haven’t the slightest clue why you ever got the idea that they were doing anything wrong.

    At some point you have to make a judgement call, and if you’re not the government nor doing so at the government’s behest, you have the ability to do so arbitrarily if need be. Facebook is entirely within its rights to say, and frankly I think it would be just fine for them to say, “Did we ban Donald Trump arbitrarily? No, but if you insist on claiming that we did, so be it. We’re not letting him come back.”Report