Polluting the public discourse - "Don't Pee in the Pool"

After naively supposing that the myriad of fragmented arenas for discussion online in Facebook would go well for everybody, it has become clear that abuse is easy and harmful. For a few people it is a source of entertainment or heady facsimile of (fake) power, too. Witness the genocide of Rohinga Muslims near the Myanmar - Bangladesh border state; witness the student to student bullying in many countries via FB and the several other prominent forms of social media.

At present there is a built-in way for people who are offended themselves, or who foresee harm to others they care about, to flag a posted message or article so that the human reviewers at Facebook can scrutinize the instance. This screenshot shows the most frequent types of offense to flag.

pop-up menu item available for any given Facebook posting: reader warns FB team

Stepping back to an analytic viewpoint, this typology is a kind of mirror that reflects the historical moment that our societies occupy during times of change in the environment and our relationship to the ecosystem and to each other; indeed each person's relationship to the sense of self also may be subjected to changing foundational assumptions and scope of imagination for dreaming a future self.

NUDITY is an invasion of private/intimate/bodily space.
VIOLENCE is an excess that also concentrates on a body; ditto SUICIDE or SELF-INJURY.
HARASSMENT can be words or deeds, again a body-centric infringement of boundaries.
HATE SPEECH and TERRORISM may differ in degree, but have a family resemblance; pertaining to individual persons/bodies, but also with a mass or communal scale of consequence, too.
FALSE NEWS has some commonalities to HATE SPEECH, but normally is less personally specific.
SPAM and UNAUTHORIZED SALES have a falseness about them, too.

In the most abstract sense, all of these types of violation consist of breaking boundaries that separate and define one person or group or truth from another. Perhaps this stems directly from the catch-phrase for the ever greater connection of people, ideas, records, and locations through the Internet, "Information Wants to be Free." However, by providing answers to any search engine for the Internet, no matter how poorly formed the question or statement, the searcher is given a facsimile of expert knowledge, mastery, or confidence that they have solved a problem, simple or complex, with the touch of a few thumb-buttons on a portable screen or a keyboard or voice dictation. When all information is reduced to a uniform sameness, the distinction of reliability or accountability is ignored in the rush to arrive at an answer. The knowledge landscape is collapsed from 3 or 4 dimensions into just a flat 2-dimensional world, making all answers look and sound the same.

By this logic of sameness that makes information the same thing as knowledge, or its long-distilled form of wisdom, then the traditional boundaries between bodies of knowledge, experts, and institutions gradually erode. This typology of Facebook offenses therefore presents itself as each infraction flares up. Thankfully there are people who refuse to accept the normalization and bland sameness to make all things (falsely) equivalent to each other - truth as just another alternative to the other imagined or hallucinatory realities in a person's mind.

From another standpoint, in the eyes of a person never part of the Internet Age, these warning types perhaps seem odd, or as something belonging to shared propriety, community standards, and their customary Common Sense. Since everyone knows these boundaries, there is no reason for breaking them and no cause for offense. So Facebook has brought forth many things, both good and bad. This set of Feedback Flags is a rich country problem; it only belongs to societies riven with the social media juggernauts.