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Facebook may be trying to censor hate-speech, but others are putting it to good use.
From CNN
Law enforcement agencies in Dallas and Florida on Thursday became the latest to announce they are investigating allegations some of their employees made offensive comments on Facebook after a watchdog group compiled screenshots of the posts and shared them in an online database.
The screenshots of the public posts, published in the Plain View Project's online database, purport to show officers or police department employees making hateful or racist remarks.
[...] Since its founding in 2017, the Plain View Project says it has compiled images of more than 5,000 social media posts and comments by more than 3,500 current and former police officers in eight jurisdictions throughout the US.
Researchers obtained rosters of police officers and then looked them up on Facebook, according to the project's website.After examining the profiles to confirm they belonged to police officers, they reviewed public posts and comments to see if they would "undermine public trust and confidence in police."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday June 21 2019, @04:15PM (6 children)
Well, to be fair, neither do the people the (US) police are abusing and shooting with relative impunity.
Given the levels of impact of the one vs. the other, I'd say that employing someone on a police force who has demonstrated publicly that they don't view people as individuals is the far greater evil.
There's nothing wrong with expressing yourself in and of itself. No one should be looking to take these posts down, for instance. But you are responsible for the consequences that come about because of the things you say that relate to your employment.
It makes no sense to employ someone who expresses attitudes that are entirely contrary to the entire spirit and intent of the organization doing the employing. In fact, as we now know, in the police forces anyway, it is dangerous to do so.
--
To quote Hamlet, act III, scene III, line 92: "No."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 21 2019, @05:02PM (5 children)
I would rather punish actions than opinions. it's the lack of punishment for cops that break the law that is the problem, not the fact that they're dicks.
If we do otherwise, we'll quickly be in a race to the bottom of the purity cycle, wherein nobody can be found to do the job, any job, because they said or did something once that outrage farmers can claim now is a firing offense. the thing they might have done could even have been non-controversial at the time.
Doing this kind of thing is also a serious escalation.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday June 21 2019, @06:28PM (2 children)
To a large degree, I agree.
As someone who strongly believes in freedom of expression, I do not believe that folks should be criminally or civilly liable for the things they think or say.
From a practical standpoint, expressing political statements, negative attitudes towards others and/or general unpleasantness and poor grammar/spelling are distasteful to me, but absolutely should be protected speech, in that the government should not prosecute them criminally or take civil action for such statements.
However, I just spent ten minutes or so looking through this database and was struck by something that disturbed me quite a bit: a significant portion of these posts are calls for police and others to engage in extrajudicial killings [wikipedia.org] and violence, advocating violence against people, not in self-defense, but as "payback" for inconveniencing the police.
If you were a store owner, would you want to hire (or keep as an employee) someone who advocated coming to your store and shoplifting, vandalizing the place, and/or harassing the customers and employees? I'm sure you can come up with other scenarios which are even more apropros.
While I certainly don't believe that the folks in this database should be (unless they do something that warrants it) subject to legal proceedings, even though many seem to think that's okay as long as it's not them.
I strongly believe that those who are *employed* (and no, you don't have a *right* to employment as you do expression) to enforce and uphold the law, should not be *advocating* breaking the laws they are paid to enforce.
I don't think I'm splitting hairs here either. As the introduction to the the database states:
Do we want the people we pay to enforce the law to believe in those laws and our legal process? I do.
Do we want people who advocate breaking those laws to be the ones tasked with enforcing them? I don't.
What say you?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 21 2019, @10:10PM (1 child)
You callin' me a thug? Hey, get a load of dis guy! Listen, ya mook, you keep out of my face and we won't have any trouble, you got it?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday June 21 2019, @10:20PM
What up troop? Who you callin' 'mook'? You best step off before I have to rough you up.
You feel me?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday June 21 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)
I think the fact that they're advocating serious criminal acts, while at the same time holding a job that is supposedly about upholding the law, suggests that they are in the wrong line of work, and I don't object to them being forced to change careers.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 21 2019, @10:08PM
Exactly! You [soylentnews.org] and the other commenter [soylentnews.org] have it dead right. If you advocate breaking the law, you need to work somewhere other than law enforcement.
Seriously, what are these people thinking -- that's what the legislature's for. Plus you don't even have to break laws -- you can just rewrite them to match your funding sources. A little bread and circuses, fud, and spin, all judiciously applied, then wait until something else dominates the news cycle, and there you go.