Dear Facebook, I Don’t Need You to Protect Me from Hate Speech

Dear Facebook,

I’m actually an adult. I realize that not everyone on your site is–but really, it’s where us old fogies hang out. As such, I don’t need a parent, or a teacher, or a human resources manager to monitor things for me.

See, it’s totally creepy when you started asking if every post was hate speech. My nephew’s fly away Count Olaf style hair, for instance, is hilarious, but not hate speech.

And this article by Braden Bell, about how we should be nicer to each other on the internet, is really not hate speech. And kind of ironic that you would ask.

To keep reading, click here: Dear Facebook, I Don’t Need You to Protect Me from Hate Speech

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5 thoughts on “Dear Facebook, I Don’t Need You to Protect Me from Hate Speech

  1. I haven’t seen this on posts, and a couple of people have noted that they only saw it briefly – so hopefully this was just a test and they backed off.

    1. I can only see it when I am on my computer, not on my phone and I just noticed it today. I do not like it and hope they remove it.

  2. I believe their real goal is to see if they can train an AI to identify stuff that people complain about. (Not actual hate speech by any reasonable definition, just what people complain about.) Zuckerberg is among those who believe that AI technology is a lot more advanced than it really is, and that we are on the threshold of computers being able to think like people (we’re not, nowhere even close, and very likely no on alive to day will live long enough to see that – we’re barely able to build an artificial stupid right now).

    But really, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The incentive for this is that if they don’t (and when they didn’t) try anything at all, they get raked over the coals for allowing offensive (and even dangerous) stuff (like recruiting by terrorist groups), but there really isn’t any way for them to filter it out effectively. So they have to try *something*, and this is the best idea they could come up with. (Not the best idea to actually filter stuff, just the best idea to look like they’re trying to.)

    They know it’s a bad idea, and won’t work, but it does let them say with a straight face “We’re trying our best, because people complained when we didn’t try at all.”

    In other words, it’s a small step in a larger marketing plan.

  3. It’s been reported that this was done in error and has now been removed. To the best of my knowledge, it never appeared on my FB feed.

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