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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2020, @11:13PM (2 children)
I can't tell you what the engineer quoted in the article is referring to by "profiting," but there's more to profiting than the literal amount of dollars they bring in from PPC/PPV ad revenue. Even if the content in question is itself largely not monetizable there's still soft benefit from remaining the dominant platform where people people of certain political bents share the monetizable parts of their lives, and this leaves Facebook with an incentive to tread lightly in certain areas to avoid pissing people off.
That being said, yes, let me get out of the way that deep down inside I am less concerned with the profiting than simply the enabling.
I too don't know what the time frame for the removal of "millions" of posts might be, but even if you assume that's Facebook lifetime total it suggests a scale that smaller platforms or forums might not have the pleasure of ever hosting for their entire existence. We also don't know the time frame that actual posts lived before they were removed... not every removal is equally valuable if it's already been consumed by almost everybody who will ever consume it.
This leads me to network effects. The echo-chambers of Facebook are absolutely a cause for concern as a huge distribution medium (if not the literal event-planning platform) for the thinking and strategizing that goes on in the "other places." This is really the crux. Even if the other places on the internet are largely the "source," people who wouldn't ever venture to, or have heard of, the other places can to an extent get their radicalization in the same app they get their baby pictures.
Your continual rehashing of hate content's relatively small place within the Facebook corpus, makes understandable why you view it as a non-issue. I'm both highly skeptical that there's so little profit derived from this... but as I said earlier, I am primarily concerned with Facebook's impact on society, largely due to the scale of the platform.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday September 11 2020, @12:55AM (1 child)
It's not that I like or feel some great urge to defend Facebook, I think they are a pox on society in general. That said I have serious doubt, as noted, that they are profiteering from hate or hatemongering -- unless you have a very wide definition on what constitutes as hate and profit etc in which case it could be pretty much anything and then it would just be ridiculous.
If radicalization is the issue then that is as far as I am concerned another issue. In that way I'm sure that Facebook can act as some kind of gateway or point of exposure. Even tho I don't think it's where the "interesting" things happen. I just don't think there are many advert dollars in hatemongering on Facebook or in general as the corporations with money are not that interested in having their precious image tarnished by such content. But sure it would be interesting to see some kind of actual breakdown, even tho I don't think Facebook will or would ever provide one to us.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 11 2020, @02:48AM
It is difficult to monetize racial grievance unless you use a very, very broad definition of bias. At this point in time we have reached about the maximum possible definition of bias, and it has been monetized with alacrity by bias counselors, pundits, and all those who make bank on selling the idea that we're all biased and that that can ever change. Look at what the ADL and SPLC do on a regular basis, with their interpreting absolutely every mishap and crime that ever occurs to a non-white, non-male person as a HATE CRIME!!! Their entire existence as organizations depends on priming that primal pump every six months or so.
In other words, it's a scam. Whenever the Sierra Club or Greenpeace officers in DC feel they need a raise to afford that cute summer home on the Chesapeake, they float stories in the media about some overwrought climate disaster. Whenever the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists needs to rake in cash to meet their bottom line, they pick some random tidbit in the world news and ADJUST THEIR CLOCK CLOSER TO MIDNIGHT!!!
Washington DC delenda est.