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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:It's a complicated issue (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:07PM

  by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:07PM (#1050098) Journal

  As far as your screen reader goes, I'd say that if the open source ones don't work and you don't want to code them to work, then perhaps you should go with Apple or some other business that has something that will work for you. It's a big world, and one size does not fit all.

  What a total cop-out. I pointed out just one of MANY examples where open source isn't even as old Windows 3.1 programs and this is your response? Totally fails to address the fundamental question of how open source is ever going to compete in many fields. Gaming ? Forget it - it's really really shitty. You can't give the games away. Same as most people who try Linux dump it. Again, you literally can't give it away.

  I used to get a few of my co-workers to use it, but I will never do that again. FreeBSD if you need something along those lines, or Apple or Microsoft. None of those has the problem with fragmentation Linux has. Thousands of distros, all different, all screwy in their own peculiar way. People don't want to waste their time fiddling with the nuts and bolts under the hood any more - this is supposed to be a mature industry.

  People are willing to pay money for programs that work. When Kylie came out, I would have paid a grand for a copy if it lived up to it's advanced billing - but it was totally shit. Why was it totally shit? It had to make compromises because no two distros are the same. Because there's no guarantee that what works with one works with another. And of course too many licensing problems using gpl code, and the gpl code that was available was crap, and building your own meant yet more problems maintaining compatibility . And the propriety toolkits that we're available suffered from the same performance-sapping problems.

  Because the display managers are simply not up to the job, even today, so the only way to get real performance is to take over the display entirely, which means other programs can't be allowed to access it at the same time. The same scenario with those old Win9x games that were actually DOS extender games under the hood, like Duke Nuken 3.

  Back in the 80s and 90s I could choose from aisle after aisle of software that did exactly what I wanted. When you say TANSTAAFL, you ignore the fact that I wasn't asking for a free lunch. I was quite happy to buy my operating systems, my compilers, my databases, my utilities, my office suites, and there were many options for each.

  I look at the free software available today and there's nowhere near the same quantity of good software. It might be "good enough " but it doesn't really do the job, so is it really good enough? Or have our expectations become so low because there's so little that would be worth paying for if you had to?

  And one thing I've learned is that Linux upgrades are risky. If your old version is no longer supported by more than 6 months, your machine will probably be in bootable. Got caught with that one a few times in the past 2 years. No upgrade path, and no updates available. Ubuntu shits itself. Opensuse shits itself.

  Even updates fail to reboot.

  It's pitiful. If Apple sold OSX separately, I'd slap it on it right away. Can't be any worse. Even though I hate the UI.

  Best reserved for server use where FreeBSD isn't an option.

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