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Facebook 'Profits from Hate' Claims Engineer Who Quit

posted by martyb on Wednesday September 09 2020, @11:40PM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @06:21PM (#1049100)

    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.

    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.