IMAO:
“Facebook opposes hate speech,” said Zuckerberg. “Also hate agents, hate statements, hate signals, hate ideologies, hate entities, hate symbols, hate slogans, hate paraphernalia, and neutral statements about the aforementioned hate items. However, until now, all we’ve been able to do is deplatform violators. But then they just go to Gab and go right on hate-speeching, because the stupid government won’t let us control everyone’s speech even though it’d be best for everyone.”
“Then I thought, well, they sure couldn’t do what they wanted if they were in prison. Epiphany! I’ll just buy a prison and put all the people I don’t like in it.”
As a famous blogger says, It’s parody but is it really? Worth reading.
I haven’t been put into Facebook Jail yet. I wonder what I am doing wrong…
Just wanted to say thank you for linking IMAO :-)
In short, Facebook hates hate speech, and hates people who engage in hate speech, as defined by whatever Facebook considers hate speech at a given moment.
I expect Facebook to go the way of MySpace in the next few years. The first sign will be when instead of trying to remove “objectionable” content, new posts are held for vetting before they are allowed to be visible. That will mean that the cost of playing whack-a-mole is starting to exceed the value of the content to Facebook.
Maybe natural language AI will come to the rescue. Right now it’s probably only good enough to raise the cost of moderation enormously while missing most of what they’re after.
Then there’s the problem of having to follow all of the laws in different countries. I wonder how long you will be able to sign into Facebook through a VPN? It used to be a point of pride in the West that it was the totalitarian countries where typewriters and carbon paper were more tightly controlled than guns. It took less than 30 years for the free world to become more frightened of ideas then the commissars ever were.
Outside the U.S. with DMCA Facebook just doesn’t scale.