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Facebook 'Profits from Hate' Claims Engineer Who Quit

posted by martyb on Wednesday September 09 2020, @11:40PM   
from the $$$ dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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Original Submission

• Re:I see (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:21PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @02:21PM (#1048957)

  Technically he doesn't use "they" and "them" as personal pronouns, he used "I" and "me".
  
  He simply requests that others refer to him, when he's not a party to the conversation, using those terms. However, behind his back, I really don't think he has, or should have, any control over how people refer to him. If they want to refer to him as "that stupid whiny fuckface", that's their right. He's probably too feeble of mind to realise that the more he asks for "they/them", the more people are likely to use "stupid whiny fuckface".

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