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BBC:
A Facebook engineer has quit the firm, saying they "can no longer stomach" being part of an organisation "profiting off hate".
Ashok Chandwaney is the latest employee to go public with concerns about how the company deals with hate speech.
The engineer added it was "choosing to be on the wrong side of history".
Facebook responded by saying it had removed millions of hate-related posts. Another of its ex-engineers has also come to its defence.
The thrust of the post by Ashok Chandwaney - who uses "they" and "them" as personal pronouns - is that Facebook moves quickly to solve certain problems, but when it comes to dealing with hate speech, it is more interested in PR than implementing real change.
Can [or should] Facebook successfully purge its platform of speech it considers harmful?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 10 2020, @12:30AM (19 children)
We'd be much better off sending our pictures of food and cats to our friends and family as e-mail attachments.
Yeah, except people barely read personal email any more, largely because of spam. The initial draw of FB (after it reached the masses, it was really for Mark's buddies hook up with college girls, hence the name) was to be a place to have a list of all your friends, and be able to share those food and cat pictures with them easily, instead of having to mess around with email attachments and the sheer annoyance of email, plus being able to have a group chat about whatever silly thing was shared. Face it, email just isn't any good at all at group communication, and it's not even very good at a running conversation with someone that lasts days, weeks, or months. There's a reason that chat apps have become so popular in the last 15 years, and that email has faded out for personal communications and is really only used for things like business communications, getting notifications from your bank or insurance company, etc.
but social media is a social hate machine.
I'd say it's really more of an echo chamber. Like-minded people (like white supremacists) get together on it and create a positive feedback loop, reinforcing each others' opinions.
The problem with FB is that they profit off of people using the service, and these days who still uses FB for actually posting stuff, besides Gen-X and older people? A bunch (majority?) of their users are older and conservative, and a subset of those are obviously going to be racists, neo-Nazis, etc. The teens and 20-somethings don't use FB any more, except for keeping in touch with their grandparents. I see it in my own family; their conservative friends and relatives are constantly posting stuff about blue lives matter, Jesus, etc., while there's a small contingent of liberals. I've had to "mute" family members so their crap doesn't show up on my page or generate emails to me, and they aren't even all that conservative, and certainly not white supremacists. (Other family members I've simply declined friend requests from.)
FB doesn't want to just cut all the racists out because it would mean a big revenue hit. Given the likely demographic of the engineers working at FB, I'm not surprised to see people like these quitting and publicly saying why: these tech workers are fundamentally at odds with a significant portion of the FB userbase.
What is interesting, and I believe to be true, is that FB has enabled the racists to find each other and reinforce each others' views and make them worse, and now we're seeing in American society growing polarization as a result. 2-3 decades ago when I was younger, it seemed like blatant racism was largely a thing of the past or confined to rural Appalachia or parts of the South, and I think this was because society had trained us to keep these views private and not share them much or risk being ostracized. This seems to be changing now; with more blatant racism becoming evident. FB probably had a lot to do with the election of Trump too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday September 10 2020, @01:10AM (12 children)
2-3 decades ago here, immigrants were few and not object of a mafia business or protected by the state to the detriment of resident citizens, and i am not talking about 'stealing our jobs' or other socioeconomic theory, I am talking about getting introduced to drugs and/or raped as young teens. Now, those who say "wtf is happening" instead of "refugees welcome" are labeled neonazis. Those who remind people of the precedents of the clashes with islam are haters. and so on. Problem being, if you go back some years, and see what 'nazi' wrote and what illuminated progressive wrote, you will see who was right and who was the real denialist.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:08AM (11 children)
What a load of utter horseshit.
Most of the people living in the USA today are descendants of immigrants.
Except for the slaves - they didn't exactly have a choice. They were property.
The native Americans would have a different opinion as to who the obnoxious immigrants are.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:14AM (1 child)
Bot (3902) is Italian, allegedly. Hence the mafia reference.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:12PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:01AM (1 child)
He's Italian and he's correct. The mobs had a code of honor and avoided direct involvement with drugs and prostitution until Maria Licciardi became first female boss of the Camorra. [wikipedia.org]
Europe is now full of unemployable "migrants" [rmx.news] that the native populations never invited.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @07:12AM
Yeah, you say! But, they would buy the American whore for $50, due to lack of quality and education. Last thing any client wants, is a stupid whore, or a khallow.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Thursday September 10 2020, @07:18AM
It's turtles all the way down [stonetoss.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @01:10PM
The at least two and possibly three or more waves of pre-Clovis people to settle in the Americas would no doubt have their own opinion on the subject, had any of them survived the Clovis invasion.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:30PM (4 children)
Isn't it interesting and informative that the Social Justice Warriors have not taken up the plight of American Indians, who by far have been most wronged in America, and instead are throwing all their time, effort, and money into the BLM group? Is it not because of social justice or equity at all but because American Indians do not constitute an important voting bloc that the Left must win?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:55PM
We do both. You'll notice the removal of the fake history of Columbus has resulted in a few victimized shrieks lately...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @02:46AM
It probably has a lot to do with the American Indians not rioting, looting, and burning shit down too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @07:52AM (1 child)
Oh right, like the Dakota pipeline?
Sheesh you get stupider by the day.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 13 2020, @01:13AM
He's becoming radicalized in real time. He's a year or two behind Runaway in this particular death spiral but he's following the pattern almost exactly. It's sad, but he's *choosing* this; watching someone willingly throw their own soul into Moloch's burning arms is somewhere north of incomprehensible and barely south of Cthulhoid.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday September 10 2020, @04:17AM
The good thing about Facebook is that some people are using the service to make a profit. Facebook is your personal billboard. Maybe you can get elected too.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @03:10PM
Yeah, I see that with "progressives" claiming that white people are not allowed to do things that are "stereotypically black", that supposedly being "cultural appropriation". Or that black people should get better access to jobs than whites. Or that black people are somehow owed "reparations" from whites who themselves escaped economic exploitation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @06:21PM
I dont' understand how email should be bad at communication and it is certainly better at group communication in my opinion, it has threads and you can fine-tune who your replies are sent to and lengthy conversation? It's perfect for that. What I can agree on is that must people don't use it for their communication, but I don't think spam is a good argument anymore. E-Mail now has much better ways of filtering out bad actors with DKIM/SPF. I think the real problem is bad clients, specifically webclients and my take on why the initial change to social media happened it was because facebook could connect you with people you know, but didn't know you wanted to talk to. If you have a good tool to manage your mail, it's very efficient and easy to use.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 11 2020, @02:38AM (2 children)
That is not what happens. The same thing happens with those groups that happens with ideologues on the Left like Antifa or BLM (no, not the Bureau of Land Management, sadly)--they begin a purity spiral. One white supremacist will say something that another white supremacist agrees with, and they might initially rejoice that somebody else shares their warped perspective. Then eventually one will say something like he ate at Chili's and the other one will go after him for eating Beaner food. Jabs will be traded, and then escalate, and they'll wander off in renewed silence and bitterness.
Just go and lurk on Stormfront sometime. It's pitiful and laughable at the same time. But one thing it absolutely will do is put the lie to the Democratic/MSM mantra that "white supremacy is the greatest threat to the nation!!!"
Zealots cannot tolerate variance from their true faith. That inflexibility is what makes them zealots in the first place.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @03:48AM
Explains a lot that you would lurk on stormfront. Do not give such hate your attention, it will only stain your soul.
Peace my brother,
apk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 13 2020, @01:11AM
The irony of those last two sentences coming from you is so thick you can cut it with a knife and spread it on bread :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...