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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: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:27PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:27PM (#1050105) Journal

    I don't think OSS and "small developers who made money selling closed source code to businesses" are mutually exclusive. If you want to be such, go do such and may you enjoy a long and fruitful career

    It's me going back to what worked in the previous century. The promise of open source didn't pan out. There is no bazaar.

    And people who don't want to pay for software are not a viable market. Same reason shareware died. People would rather keep trying the next free thing than actually pay for something.

    So innovation died. Except among those who didn't give it up for free. The nice thing was that those who paid for it also expected to pay for improvements and new features. The second sell is always easier. Same as when you go to the store and you really like your adidas or sketchers, you're going to buy another pair.

    So what happens when there's nobody willing and able to work for free on OS software who actually knows how the current systems work ? We couldn't clone Larry Wall, so there's not much to expect from Perl7 after the Perl6 fiasco. Same with most utilities - they're feature complete, have been for a decade or two, and when they finally can no longer run on the most recent OS version there won't be anyone familiar enough with them to fix them.

    The OSSocalypse is going to be ugly 20 years from now. Because the bazaar, with the promise of innovation, never happened. And there's nothing to do about it because of the GPL.

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