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View Poll Results: Should Public Entities be permitted to Censor on Social Media?
Yes, it's their site and account 10 55.56%
No, it's censorship 6 33.33%
Only if they are censoring hate speech 0 0%
Not sure / Don't care 2 11.11%
Voters: 18. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 09-06-2018, 06:04 PM
 
Location: Home, Home on the Front Range
25,826 posts, read 20,653,757 times
Reputation: 14818

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Quote:
Originally Posted by MJJersey View Post
I've noticed that more and more public entities are setting up accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Should a public entity be permitted to censor comments and reviews on their own social media site? For example, let's say that a local township or cities has a Facebook page that allows people to comment. Should they be able to block certain people? Delete some comments and not others. "Unfriend" certain members who make comments the don't like?
If the comments violate the TOS of the hosting service - yes.
If the comments could result in the public entities having their accounts suspended - yes.
If the comments could be construed as threatening to anyone working for or otherwise involved/attached to the public entity - yes.
If the comments are irrelevant to the purpose and/or vision of the public entities account - yes.
...

Every group account/page is administered under certain guidelines.
I belong to several groups that are pretty strict about what sort of comments they permit.
Their ballgame, their rules.
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Old 09-07-2018, 04:19 AM
 
41,815 posts, read 50,920,524 times
Reputation: 17863
Quote:
Originally Posted by TigerLily24 View Post
If the comments violate the TOS of the hosting service - yes.

Based on the ruling about Trump's tweets you would have a Constitutional right to comment if it's a government entity using the service. While the site has no obligation to uphold your rights the public entity does. If the actions of the private site can be deemed to be infringing on your rights I would see no choice but for the public entity to abandon the use of the service or not allow comments. Moving this to government operated site is no better and probably worse because they would not have the data like a Twitter that would help identify abusers and would be even less free to block registrations etc.



This is a very big dilemma, modern communication platforms that would allow the population to engage with their government become useless. They are wide open for abuse especially with that pesky first amendment thing. Nobody should ever be denied their right to free speech by a government entity but the practicality of that on modern communications platform becomes highly questionable.
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Old 09-07-2018, 06:59 AM
 
45,135 posts, read 26,317,877 times
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Private property; Whoever owns the platform controls the content.
Publicly owned (which really should never be the case); means we collectively own the content and thus never subject to any censorship.
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Old 09-07-2018, 07:16 AM
 
4,668 posts, read 3,882,037 times
Reputation: 3437
Absolutely. If you walk into a public building and start screaming profanties, how long until they kick you out or you get arrested. If one goes into a public facebook page, same rules apply.

If one goes in with legitimate concerns then of course you shouldnt be kicked out or deleted.

Only a nutjob would believe in absolute free speech. If someone goes on facebook and say they are going to murder someone, then it should be reported to the police and post deleted. Once you understand free speech isnt an absolute, then you will understand there are greyish areas and sometimes whats free speech wont always be clear. You cant always know someones motives and sometimes someone in charge will have to use their responsibilities and make a judgement call.

The internet isnt an alternate reality where anything goes.
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Old 09-07-2018, 07:45 AM
 
41,815 posts, read 50,920,524 times
Reputation: 17863
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattks View Post
Absolutely. If you walk into a public building and start screaming profanties, how long until they kick you out or you get arrested. If one goes into a public facebook page, same rules apply.
Trump is not allowed to block comments on his Twitter account.


Quote:
If one goes in with legitimate concerns then of course you shouldnt be kicked out or deleted.
Supposing Trump could block comments the next issue that arises is defining a legitimate concern.





Quote:
The internet isnt an alternate reality where anything goes.
It poses some unique problems. If we have two groups of people outside city hall protesting at the very least we know these are real people. If each someone in each could clone themselves 1 million times the legitimate protesters have effectively had their rights stripped because they are buried in avalanche of fraudulent clones.


This is the unique problem the internet presents, Twitter or whoever can ban anyone they want. When the governement does it they run the risk of infringing on someone's rights.



What it boils down to is how to insure people's right to free speech but prevent this from happening:
Quote:

FCC Net Neutrality Online Public Comments Contain Many Inaccuracies and Duplicates | Pew Research Center

  • Many submissions seemed to include false or misleading personal information. Some 57% of the comments utilized either duplicate email addresses or temporary email addresses created with the intention of being used for a short period of time and then discarded. In addition, many individual names appeared thousands of times in the submissions. As a result, it is often difficult to determine if any given comment came from a specific citizen or from an unknown person (or entity) submitting multiple comments using unverified names and email addresses.
  • There is clear evidence of organized campaigns to flood the comments with repeated messages. Of the 21.7 million comments posted, 6% were unique. The other 94% were submitted multiple times – in some cases, hundreds of thousands of times. In fact, the seven most-submitted comments (six of which argued against net neutrality regulations) comprise 38% of all the submissions over the four-month comment period.
  • Often, thousands of comments were submitted at precisely the same moment. On nine different occasions, more than 75,000 comments were submitted at the very same second – often including identical or highly similar comments. Three of these nine instances featured variations of a popular pro-net-neutrality message, while the others promoted several different anti-net-neutrality statements.

If you cannot prevent this from happening it's a useless medium for communication and all levels of government might as well shut down all public comments.
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Old 09-07-2018, 07:55 AM
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6,323 posts, read 6,997,335 times
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I think the more significant issue is that public agencies should NOT have Facebook accounts.

In my county, Emergency Services is posting emergency information ONLY on Facebook!
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