Facebook

I hear the founder is a bit of a youthful control freak. I guess that’s somewhat typical of startups.

Good point! I wonder how may people they lost thanks to that group…

Interesting that they didn’t back down on the F***k Islam group (with 75k signers) but they did on this one.

Variablast, as a European male in North America, your chances statistically of being profiled racially are virtually non-existent. Non-Europeans especially post-911 are victims of rampant discrimination and violent retribution under the guise of revenge for 911, American military losses in Iraq and Afghanistan and general White supremacist bias. A danger you are not likely to experience. Further, while you say that atheists are not likely to harm Muslims, you have to accept that people outside of that circle are not under the same ideological restrictions. Neo-Con gadfly Christopher Hitchens is a strong atheist and he has called for the imperialist damage to Islam in Western Asia on those grounds. At some point you and all of us have to accept responsibility for either being a part of the solution or a part of the problem.

And by the way, the people I work with are not “My pacifist Muslims”. Please consider how your choice of words come across.

You really need to take it easy. I said in my responses that I am not calling for your site to be shut down nor your freedom of speech to be abridged. Your beef with this particular religion seems to be personal. I am in no way trying to silence your dissent against Islam, but you are taking suggestions for a more polite discourse as personal slights. You are obviously feeling attacked, exactly what many people are trying to tell you Muslims feel when such semantics appear in popular media. You cannot divorce your kneejerk reactions to my comments from the sort of needless and possibly violent flak Muslims could potentially face from people who may feel justified in belligerence towards Muslims or people they may think are Muslims. The climate in the U.S. towards the “Other” is at a dangerously high level. For my own part I have only suggested that you think about how your title is affecting others, I do not want to join Facebook just to look at the page and stated in my text above that my commentary extends only to what you have mentioned here in this thread. I am only taking issue with the title, not you. I have already made it quite clear that I have not seen the page so therefore I cannot and have not commented on it. But your demeanor in this thread unnecessarily combative and I doubt that you did not consider the amount of animosity you were bound to develop. If you believe that you presented a logical reason for intentionally insulting an entire legion of people, you haven’t. This is a dangerous time for all of us, including the people who are living under intense socio-political stresses on the basis of their religion and it culture.

And before you make blanket condemnations abut my lack of productivity, visit Inteligentaindigena Indigenismo Novajoservo to see what I do. I work directly with the Muslim community and I can tell you from personal interaction with non-militant pacifist followers of Islam, they aren’t amused by the title of your page. They fear a violent backlash and they have every reason to be afraid.

I do not support censorship. However like the German and Austrian governments, I also take the position that hate speech should be stemmed and that like an American justice hold the position that with free speech comes responsibility. You simply cannot yell “fire” in a crowded movie house just because you feel like it.

I am not directly calling for the group or page to be banned simply because I have not had a chance to view it personally. But the title alone in the age of Emperor Bush the Second is a call for even more negative attention against Muslims, Arabs in general and those whom support freedom of religion and social tolerance. Really, its quite like the White youth who mimic stereotypes of African life in the U.S. and use racially provocative speech under the excuse that some Africans use these terms freely saying that its a matter of free speech. There is much more going on than an outsider realizes in such communication between members of the original group, mostly the historical causes for such behaviour.

What I am suggesting is that your choice of words is not helping anyone but the Ann Coulter’s of the world and teaching the Islamic faithful that they are little more than a blight on the American landscape. And you, or any of us, would be foolish to assume that there would be no animosity engendered by your semantics.

I find Jeff’s concern prudent here because as social networking becomes more commonplace, as we can see from sites like YouTube, intolerance has come out of the closet, and as a potential victim of such negativity, I also ask you to reconsider your approach. Because frankly at this point, it seems as of you are making a call to preserve a right to offend people, causes and creeds, a right that does not legally or morally exist. We all have a human right not to have to endure social animosity. And after WW2, we all should be heeding that lesson.

Here is my post on Slashdot:

One of the worst thing about all these advertising driven social networking sites is the potential for advertisers to use threats to suppress free speech.

The groups driving the suppression are seemingly well meaning but in actuality horribly evil. This one (person in this case) wants to suppress F**k Islam. One on LiveJournal (which LJ partially caved in to) wanted LJ to clear out any accounts that listed pedophilia as an interest. It is most distressing to me, and quite telling how one of the first things they try to go for is the advertisers.

I guess, like the bonsai kitty protesters of years past, they don’t really understand free speech or the full ramifications of their actions. I do not want to live with a whitewashed Internet, and I don’t think most members of the various groups in question do either. But they become blinded by hatred and intolerance towards one particular idea that they feel doesn’t deserve to be heard and they take the steps to make it so eventually no controversial idea will be heard.

And even worse, though it seems that the commenters here recognize this attempt at censorship for what it is, it doesn’t seem like the editors do.

You can argue that Facebook isn’t a government and shouldn’t have the same responsibilities. And you can disingenuously argue that people could post this on any old web page or blog and don’t need Facebook. But in reality many of these people might not have any other decent forum to post things in besides Facebook. And besides, Facebook is at least partially a commons and not really a private entity in the sense we’re used to. Attempting to bludgeon them into being editors and acting like a private entity in this way is hurtful to everybody in the long run.