Following a concerted campaign by Dallas attorney, Brian Cuban, brother of entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Facebook appears to have begun to take down some of the Holocaust denial groups about which Brian Cuban complained.
Brian Cuban pointed to five specific groups.
As of 8:30 a.m. PDT Monday, "Holocaust: A Series of Lies", "Holohoax," and "Holocaust is a Myth" were still live.
However, "Based on the facts...there was no Holocaust" and "Holocaust is a Holohoax" appear to have been taken down.
TechCrunch on Monday also weighed in on the issue, with a headline echoing last week's Q&A with Facebook spokesperson, Barry Schnitt here at Technically Incorrect.
In the Q&A, Schnitt drew a distinction between Holocaust denial and another recent Facebook controversy, images of breastfeeding. Michael Arrington's headline puts it in stark terms: "Jew Haters are Welcome at Facebook as Long as they Aren't Lactating."
I am waiting for confirmation from Facebook and, perhaps, a statement as to whether the site has, indeed, reconsidered its position of last week, which was that it was better to have these groups out in the open, even if their ideas were "controversial," rather than removing them from Facebook.
Cuban has called for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to personally comment on the situation, but it remains to be seen if that will happen.
On Monday, I wrote about the very difficult issues surrounding the presence of Holocaust denial groups on Facebook.
Questions were raised by Brian Cuban, Mark Cuban's brother and attorney, as to whether the existence of such groups contravenes Facebook's terms of service.
I had a detailed e-mail Q&A Wednesday with Facebook's spokesman, Barry Schnitt.
I'm publishing it here in full, as Facebook is honest enough to admit that the company itself is still battling with some of these difficult questions.
I first asked him whether he felt Facebook had replied to Cuban's questions:
Schnitt: We do our best to answer user questions. We are still a start-up of 800 or so employees (far fewer answering user questions) serving 200 million users. As a result, we admit that sometimes our answers may not be as comprehensive as users like and we honestly don't have the resources to engage in detailed policy debates on a one-to-one basis. My point is that he said he never heard anything and that is absolutely not true.
Q: You mention that you have "recently begun to block content by IP in countries where that content is illegal." Why only recently?
Schnitt: Facebook is only five years old and blocking individual content in individual markets is not a trivial technical challenge. Facebook started in the US, so this capability wasn't necessary initially. As we have grown internationally, we've begun building the infrastructure to support compliance with international laws.
Do you think Facebook should be clearer about what content is or isn't acceptable? Do you think you should publicize in some manner which hate groups (and in which specific countries) have been shut down?
Schnitt: Our focus is on working to get the content down in the country where that content is illegal. I don't think it makes much sense to divert resources away from that effort at this point to tell someone in Canada that the page they are looking at is not available in Saudi Arabia, for example.
Your reply might suggest to some that there may be illegal groups out there that are still active.
Schnitt: We do our best to remove content that violates our policies or the law as quickly as we can. We have an extensive technical infrastructure for reporting and a dedicated team of professionals reviewing these reports. However, we can't guarantee that there isn't any content that violates our policies and I don't know of any site hosting user-generated that makes this guarantee.
You see, given the Newsweek publicity over your "Porn Cops" and the previous publicity over the breastfeeding issue, it might seem to some that Facebook's position is that hate is OK (as long as it's not been expressed by a known terrorist organization and doesn't expressly threaten violence or harm), while breast-feeding and other relatively innocent (to many) activities are not. It seems that someone complaining about breastfeeding will immediately ensure that the content is removed. While this is not so with hateful messaging.
Schnitt: To be clear, the breastfeeding issue has been widely misreported. Our policy is against nudity and we feel strongly that policy is important to keeping Facebook clean. The small number of photos we have removed are of naked women who happen to be breastfeeding. We take no action on the vast majority of breastfeeding photos that remain on the site. I encourage you to take a look at all the photos in this regard that are on the site, including the protest group: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2517126532&ref=search.
The bottom line is that, of course, we abhor Nazi ideals and find Holocaust denial repulsive and ignorant. However, we believe people have a right to discuss these ideas and we want Facebook to be a place where ideas, even controversial ideas, can be discussed. Of course, we have some limits. I've discussed these previously and go into them again below.
One thing to consider that someone actually mentioned in the thread was the idea that there may be a benefit to having these ideas discussed in the open. Would we rather Holocaust denial was discussed behind closed doors or quietly propagated by anonymous sources? Or would we rather it was discussed in the open on Facebook where people's real names and their photo is associated with it for their friends, peers, and colleagues to see?
And how, precisely, do you draw the line between hate and threats? Do lawyers do that? Do the porn cops do that? It can't be easy.
Schnitt: You're right. The obvious cases are easy. Many cases aren't obvious, though and these cases can be very difficult. We have a cross-functional team from legal, user operations, policy, product, and communications that helps develop specific policies to anticipate or in response to difficult cases.
As I mention above, we have a policy against nudity but what constitutes nudity? We had meetings on that topic, consulted experts and looked at precedent from many sources including the FCC. In the end, we came up with silly-sounding but important rules like "the butt-crack rule," "the nipple rule," etc.
With hate and violence it can be even more difficult. We have some similar tests (e.g. Is the person in the photo just holding a gun or are they pointing it at someone or the camera?) but, in many cases, we have to rely on the user operations person reviewing the content to make a judgment call.
Thus, we have extensive programs to instill the proper skills, training, and expertise into these individuals to decide whether something crosses the line and also whether they might want to escalate to a lawyer or other person at Facebook to help them decide.
Having said all of that, we don't pretend to be omniscient and sometimes we make mistakes. However, we're committed to learning from them by developing new policies and reviewing the old ones.
One last question: I know there are some who would like to know whether you would permit the sale of Nazi memorabilia through a third-party Facebook app. I understand eBay decided to ban the sale of Nazi memorabilia even in the US, even though it is not illegal here.
Schnitt: It is a good question. Honestly, we haven't had to deal with it yet. I suspect we'll be having another one of those cross-functional meetings to discuss it soon.
Mark Cuban's brother and attorney for his companies, Brian, has written to Facebook demanding to know why the social-networking site allows Holocaust denial groups.
In a sustained and persuasive argument in his own blog, the Cuban Revolution, and his Twitter feed, Brian Cuban lays out his objections to five Facebook groups with names such as "Holocaust: A Series of Lies" and "Holohoax."
His opinion is that this is not a First Amendment issue.
"The belief that the First Amendment protects speech in the private social media arena or at your place of employment is a common misconception," he says.
Facebook is able, as a private entity, to choose its own rules with regards to free speech. However, he believes its terms of service very clearly limit the content that can be featured on any Facebook page.
You cannot "upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offense, violate the rights of any party, or that would otherwise create liability or violate any local, state, national or international law."
Although Holocaust denial is not illegal in the US, it is a crime in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Israel, Slovakia, and Switzerland.
To Cuban, any Holocaust denial group is clearly committing an illegal act in those countries. He has therefore written to Facebook asking the company why it permits the five Holocaust denial groups he has found on the site.
He says Facebook has not replied.
According to a tweet he sent Monday, Cuban suspects that Facebook's belief is: "if the countries in which H(olocaust) D(enial) is illegal do not complain, why do anything."
However, last week Facebook saw fit to remove a KKK group from the Isle of Man with 95 members.
So one might think it would have the manpower, legal judgment, and basic humanity to at the very least address the existence of these five groups that appear to have a total of 357 members, some from countries in which Holocaust denial is a crime.
Silence seems a very peculiar response indeed.
In five minutes, please walk away from your computer, take out your moral compass, and ask it for an update. Then, please tweet the results.
Yes, after the powerful and persuasive arguments of M'lady Greenfield of England--she who declared that Facebook was making us infantile--we now have further cause to worry about ourselves and our children.
Scientists at the University of Southern California have broken away from their task of finding the next 20 or so great football talents for the university to conduct research suggesting that Twitter may take the nerve endings out of our sense of morality.
Here's how researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang put it to CNN: "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for your morality."
The idea is that information is coming at us at such great speed that we don't have time to experience the pain or the joy that such information should engender.
Apparently, when scientists scan our brains, they find that we are pretty quick at responding to any sign of physical pain in another human. But we are painfully slow at showing such feelings as compassion or admiration.
In this particular piece of research, the scientists relied on telling people different kinds of stories, and then scanning their brains and asking them to recall the stories, and the emotions attached to them, to see what effect the storytelling might have had.
I have to say that, given my occasional skepticism about research, there were only 13 people who had their brain scanned for this study.
Your brain might, at this point, be scanning the thought that if all the subjects of this research were from Los Angeles, it might be surprising that the scientists found any moral compass at all.
Of course, I couldn't possibly comment on that. I have at least three friends who live there. However, isn't the more general point that the demands of western life seem to have tended toward greater speed for the last 100 years?
Every piece of technology somehow offers a greater speed of something--information, communication, healing, pleasure. Somehow, one has a sense that humans do adjust. (But should they? Should they?)
Surely, any moral compass that exists in our souls is still more heavily influenced by those perennial scourges, like parents, teachers, lovers, social environment and, naturally, reality television.
Sorry. Must go and check my tweets.
OK, I'm back. Mark Cuban just tweeted: "Thought of the Day: "You don't live in the world you were born into" - think about it #FB."
Seems like a pretty moral tweet to me.
Shaquille O'Neal and Mark Cuban are deeply confirmed Twitterers.
They have different styles but their fingers seem rarely to leave their keyboards. Perhaps one can even blame sore Twitter-finger for Shaq's poor free-throw percentage.
However, I have been following a bizarre Twitter exchange between the two NBA personalities, one that has now blossomed into strong rumors that Shaq wants to be traded to Cuban's Dallas Mavericks.
It all began on Saturday when Shaq, who has almost 600,000 followers, tweeted: "I'm lookin foor u mark cuban".
The Dallas Mavericks owner replied: "you know where i live.." Which he then followed up with: "And make sure to wear your best ShaqAlbert outfit to the arena tomorrow".
Well, Shaq then maintained a Twitter silence. While Cuban made the plot thicken during the game between the Mavs and Shaq's Phoenix Suns on Sunday by tweeting: "Gotta Love @The_Real_Shaq 's heart. dude never lets up."
It seems that a meeting between the two was then arranged, as Cuban tweeted to Shaq at 6:50 a.m. on Monday: "Not happy about it, but will be there." A couple of hours later, he tweeted again: "shaq found me. wish I could say what happened. I kept my cool."
I, too, wish I could say what happened between these two most engaging of characters. Did they have a row or a love-in? Did they have a free-throw competition? Why did Cuban need to keep his cool? Did Shaq claim he was a better tweeter?
However, just when I had decided that this must merely have been one weird conversation between the two of them, I noticed some deeply researched gossip suggesting that Shaq might, indeed, wish to continue his tweeting days in Dallas.
The first ever Twitter-brokered NBA trade? Stranger things have happened. But not many.
(Updated 12.23PST. Herewith Mark Cuban's latest Twittered news- with Dallas being smoked by Cleveland, Cuban tweeted: "just found out got fined25k by nba.) nice". Oh, Lordy.)
How can anyone not enjoy Mark Cuban?
A man who danced passably well on "Dancing with the Stars". A man who tends to say frightfully sensible things as loudly as possible in the hope that someone will hear. And a man who has been fined a total of $1.5million, some of it for complaining about NBA refs.
It seems as if he has been strangely quiet on that subject for a while. Until Friday, when he just couldn't take it any more. What does the modern human do when he just can't take it any more? He twitters.
A little context: Cuban's Dallas Mavericks aren't all that good this year. They might just scrape into the playoffs, but they wouldn't even scare the bobcat who walked into an Arizona bar last night.
On Friday they played the Denver Nuggets, a team that is slightly better, but also a team that has as one of its members, JR Smith. Regular Cubanists will know that the Mavericks' owner was fined $25,000 for walking onto the court in January and yelling at Smith.
Frankly, I've wanted to do that myself once or twice. The man's body is so dense with tattoos that it looks like a decaying English country house drawing room wall and he always seems to play with a little scowl. He also always plays well against my Golden State Warriors, so that might have something to do with it.
In any case, after a perceived Smith transgression, Cuban tweeted: "how do they not call a tech on JR Smith for coming off the bench to taunt our player on the ground?"
Which he then followed up with: "scary part of that play: Same crew chief from game in Denver where they missed call - last play of the game & 1st JRSmith/Wright issue."
Fights aren't scary. Crew chiefs are.
One can only imagine how the NBA, an organization that seems uncomfortable with Cuban largely because he's more intelligent than most of its members, will react to his modern form of heckling.
And just in case you were wondering whether it really was Mark Cuban doing the twittering, may I offer you his latest tweet: "just so you know, I dont use a "ghost twitter" like some folks do:)"
Oh, if only they'd make him commissioner of the NBA. What fun we'd all have. Basketball would be better for it, too.
This YouTube video was shot in Stockwell, London. (So were several innocent passers-by.)
But that's not what makes it just a teeny bit suspicious.
It features Devin Harris, the point guard of the New Jersey Nets, who happened to be in London last week on a promotional tour. (Part of which included the onerous task of playing the Miami Heat in a game that mattered not at all.)
Out of a seeming nowhere appears Englishman Stuart Tanner. He looks frightfully underdressed for the task at hand. His sweater and jeans are out of place next to Harris's Nets t-shirt and sweat pants.
Yet, in a miracle that defies logic, reason, credulity and eyesight, Tanner enters into 1 on 1 combat with Harris.
First, he feints Harris into an abject misdirection. Then, in an act of blindingly arrogant brilliance, he bounces the ball through Harris's legs (in European football, we call this a 'nutmeg'. Oh, don't ask me why) before sinking a perfect jump shot. It is all quite life-affirming.
If not exactly David and Goliath, this is certainly David Beckham being humiliated by something of a Holly Golightly.
Which is exactly what gives one pause to wonder.
Firstly, Mr. Harris takes his humiliation far too well. I know he was once part of Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks team, one that got used to winning every game but the big one. But still, his generosity is peculiar. A real pro would, like John McCain, wear his irritation on his lips.
Secondly, Mr. Tanner is a 28-year-old basketball coach who failed to make the Milton Keynes Lions squad five years ago. For American readers, this might be the equivalent of failing to make an intramural scrimmage. At Appalachian State. British basketball is little stronger than Fijian ice hockey.
Mr. Tanner would normally have as much chance of beating Mr. Harris as Mark Cuban has of becoming the Commissioner of the NBA.
So, as with so many of the more amusing, daring or just plain fascinating YouTube videos, one is tempted to be suspicious. One is tempted to wonder if it's an ad. And one is tempted to search for the money.
Could it be that this is the work of Adidas, the company that sponsored the coaching clinic that Mr. Harris attended?
Or could it be that Mr. Tanner somehow managed to outwit an NBA star not once, but twice, with moves that would have jerked Jack Nicholson's ample buttocks up from his Lakers courtside chair?
Mr. Tanner's brother, Greg, who shot the video, says that Stuart was a streetballing legend in the early years of this century. This was, he says on his blog, a genuine rekindling of his brother's 'old magic' at the expense of an NBA star.
The video has already enjoyed more than 3million views. Perhaps you could add to those numbers and let me know if you think it's an ad.
And then if all of you at Google could let me know if Mr. Schmidt charged Adidas for it. Thank you.
Those nice people at ESPN reported this week that Mark Cuban, who I am told, was given a lot of money by Yahoo for some gizmoid or other, is one of the finalists in the bidding to buy baseball's most charming, unlucky, losersome team, the Chicago Cubs.
There will be those on the waggy side of humorous who will claim that he is the perfect person to own the Cubs as his Dallas Mavericks team is one of the most charming, unlucky, losersome teams in the NBA.
(My prejudices. One, I have Golden State Warriors hats and shirts and have still not ceased to giggle at the thought of my lowly Warriors embarrassing the favored Mavericks in the playoffs in 2007. Two, I have publicly declared my admiration for Mr. Cuban's commitment to the televised jig.)
However, if there was anyone who was chemically and congenitally capable of taking Major League Baseball out to the 21st century ballgame, it is surely Mr. Cuban.
As an NBA owner, he is reputed to treat his players and staff extremely well. Despite those who believe him to be more mercurial than Courtney Love, he has shown Colin Powell-like loyalty to coaches.
And he has raised topics, such as the NBA's, um, mercurial refereeing standards, when others didn't have the courage.
Of course, his biggest obstacle may lie in persuading 75% of the strangely crustacean-like men who are MLB owners to accept him as one of their number.
Which would be a little like a Yale secret society accepting Fitty Cent.
First, though, Mr. Cuban must persuade the Tribune Group to sell. And at the moment he is said to be the highest bidder at $1.3billion.
I'm trying to imagine Mr. Cuban's interview with the Tribunal.
(Credit:
CC Mil8)
Somewhere, deep in my sporting areas, I am thinking the newspaper group knows that it should sell to someone who will grab Chicago's imagination, stroke it in the palm of his hand, and then ask it what it wants for Christmas.
Which is why they should only ask Mr. Cuban one question:
What will you do about Steve Bartman?
For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Bartman's plight of fancy, he is blamed for costing Chicago a place in the 2003 World Series. His sin was that, with the natural reactions of a human resources consultant, he attempted to save a flying ball from his seat in the stands, when it was thought that the Chicago left fielder, Moises Alou, would catch it. Fans claimed this, and not the players' mistakes, cost Chicago the game and the series. He has been a vilified figure in Chicago ever since.
Unlike the other bidders, who would probably offer the confused look of moneyfolk, I imagine that Mr. Cuban might give two possible answers to the Bartman question:
1. "I would go to Mr. Bartman's house, knock on his door and ask him to come with me. I would put him in the back of my limousine, give him some brand new Dallas Mavericks gear to wear- I'm big on marketing, you see- and make sure that he is taken to the very fine and efficient O'Hare airport of Chicago. I would ensure his plane was not delayed. And I would send him to the Canary Islands to live out the rest of his days. They say his curse has passed, my friends. But with curses, as with relief pitchers, you can never be too safe."
2. "I would make him a Senior Vice-President of the Chicago Cubs. One thing I have learned in my long life, gentlemen, is that you have to stand up to adversity, not hobble away from it on your artificial hips. Progress is inevitable and cures all ills. Soon YouTube will be little more than a pictogram in the history of art. Please remember that I was the one who said that the NBA's manager of officials wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen. And then I went out and proved that I could. So by making Mr. Bartman a Senior Vice-President I would be declaring that the past is there not to frighten us, but to strengthen us and to make the glory that will be ours all the more sweet. Two things you need to remember, gentlemen. One, the Red Sox finally got Bill Buckner back to Fenway and they haven't stopped winning. And two, Steve Bartman used to be a part-time coach for a 13-year-olds' baseball team in Niles, Illinois. That team, and I wish I'd owned them then, but I will buy them now and make them a Cubs Little League farm team, was called the Renegades."
Management is all about the decisions you make, the attitude you take, and the good fortune you fake.
And one decision Mr. Cuban has made is not to be neutral.
That is why I am convinced his choice of response to this one question would tell the Tribune Tribunal everything it needs to know about his qualifications as a potential owner of the team that the American Association of Psychiatrists has always longed to sponsor, but never had the wherewithal. (Please, just imagine Wrigley being renamed Freud Field.)
I, for one, wish Mr. Cuban the very best of luck. He is one of the finest ambassadors for the tech world's humanity.
And it is unquestionably time that some relatively alive human being showed baseball that sitting on your old-world assets is not what the future should look like.
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