Why free speech is sometimes a curse


John Oliver rips into the Republican efforts to prop up Kavanaugh in the first 9 minutes, but go ahead and watch the rest where he describes Facebook as a toilet. A lot of it is spent on how Facebook blithely allowed inflammatory hate speech to flow in Myanmar, with the excuse that they didn’t have enough people fluent in the language to police it, but I have to say — they allow it fo flow pretty freely in English, too.

Comments

  1. mathymathymathy says

    For some reason, only the first 38 seconds of this video appears for me. I presume it was supposed to be longer.

  2. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re @1″ same here. it cut off after the lead in, and cut at the instant Oliver said “Kavanaught”
    — listening Freethoughtblogs admins?

  3. consciousness razor says

    Meh… Oliver served some weak sauce this time. He didn’t even begin to address its myriad problems, and the few solutions that were on offer, like hiring some more Burmese-speaking moderators, evidently wouldn’t help much. I mean, how many English speakers are out there doing it? Quite a number of them, I bet, yet nobody could credibly claim the situation in our little gated community is acceptable. How about, I don’t know, some kind of a plan where it doesn’t keep growing and we’re not depending on farcebork to fix itself? Treat it like a fucking oil company that routinely dumps its shit into our oceans, as if that was its biggest “product.”

    PZ, if you wanted to stop using it on FTB or Pharyngula specifically, that could happen. It would not be the end of the world. I swear, it’s so often like hearing Catholics drone on about how much they wish their clergy would be better, any day now, in a few more centuries maybe, whenever somebody else finally does something about it … and let’s try to keep it as an internal matter, shall we? As they say, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

  4. F.O. says

    @PZ
    By conflating “free speech” with “right to platform” aren’t you doing your enemies’ job for them?

    Until we discuss arresting someone for what they say, it’s not a free speech issue.

    (For the record, I’m very open to arresting people for hate speech.)

  5. says

    Even what you report some of the worst kinds of hate speech in English on Farcebook the reply is usually that it doesn’t violate community standards. Facebook has no standards.

  6. zetopan says

    “Facebook has no standards.”

    That is NOT TRUE! Facebook’s primary standard is to make Zuckerberg even richer and controversy attracts more viewers so the sociopath that is named Zuckerberg is all for it. As long as facebook makes money there are no actual problems.

    Remember when Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook did not find any evidence of Russian troll postings? Yet they were being paid in rubles by a known Russian propaganda organization at that time, and even before then.

    http://time.com/money/5333325/mark-zuckerberg-just-passed-this-iconic-billionaire-to-become-the-3rd-richest-man-in-the-world/
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-targeting/?utm_term=.fe1dfd61c0f7