As a general trigger warning, the first section of the post shows some examples of the content Meta is ignoring: transphobia, homophobia, etc.
If they actually did this correctly, it would be great. Whether or not it’s possible, or even desirable to eliminate all hate speech, it should be possible to minimize the harms.
When somebody mutters some hateful comment to themselves, do we care? Not really. We care that the hateful comment gets repeated and amplified. We care that someone might take that hateful comment. We care that someone might take harmful actions based on the comment.
If those algorithms successfully let these comments die in ignominy they’ve done their job. My fear is that they won’t really do this though. Instead they’ll mostly hide these comments and “accidentally” let them slip out when the company thinks they need an “engagement” boost.
No, it wouldn’t be great.
The article is about not letting you see it, through curation. The people who do still see it, are the people who like it. They are the people we most need to prevent from seeing it.
You not knowing something is on there doesn’t change that.
Facebook has been clearly implicated in two genocides so far.
The Amnesty International report “A Death Sentence For My Father” details how an Ethiopian doctor who didn’t even have a Facebook account was murdered directly because of incitement on that platform.
In my experience. Posting racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia is fine. Calling out those traits or swearing is abuse.
My wife was the same for while. She’d argue vehemently against crowds like the antivax and the anti-choice on fb and she’d get routinely temp banned for it.
Exactly, but what, personally, I feel is worse is that they let those comments feed to each other, like-minded bigots. Allowing it to fester together and create a rot in the forest that eventually spreads outward taking the woods down with it.
And this is why they must be treated as a journalism platform. Especially ads. There’s no reason they can’t monitor every single ad.
