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  • Geebo 10:15 am on August 23, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , hate speech,   

    New issues show Facebook’s loss of control 

    New issues show Facebook's loss of control

    Facebook has exploded into the news this week with a number of issues that show how problematic the popular platform has become. The first issue for Facebook was when they announced the deletion of a number of profiles and pages that were from Russia and Iran designed to spread false and inflammatory information into the US and other Western countries. Facebook says they deleted 652 pages, groups, and accounts. While it’s commendable that Facebook removed these accounts, this is only a symptom in a larger problem of continuous foreign influence in Western Democracy.

    Secondly, Facebook announced that, in a move similar to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, four million users may have had their personal data compromised. Facebook has banned an app called MyPersonality, a personality quiz as you can probably surmise. Even though four million users is a drop in the bucket of Facebook’s billions of users worldwide, that’s still a significant number of users whose personal information may have been exposed. While it’s an improvement over the 87 million accounts exposed in the Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle, Facebook seems like it’s still leaking like a sieve with our information.

    Lastly, and probably the most damning, the New York Times published an expose on a study that has linked Facebook use to anti-refugee violence in Germany. While the study doesn’t blame Facebook per se, it does allege that Facebook use paired with engagement into hate-filled rhetoric has resulted in a rise in hate-related violence. What concerns me most about this study is how much Facebook hate-crimes based on ethnicity or religion are coming closer and closer to the US. In today’s charged political climate, how long will it be before Facebook lynch mobs finally leave their keyboards and start taking to the streets?

    Facebook has become a virus that has escaped the lab and is creeping through the world’s population and by continuing to rely so heavily on it we’re willingly ignoring the cure.

     

  • Geebo 10:07 am on February 6, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Factmata, , hate speech,   

    Does craigslist’s founder really want to stop hate speech? 

    Does craigslist's founder really want to stop hate speech?

    (Disclaimer: This post will be discussing frank topics that may be disturbing to some readers)

    It was announced recently that a number of tech luminaries would be investing in a start-up called Factmata. Factmata’s purpose is to use artificial intelligence (A.I.) in order to “help social media companies, publishers and advertising networks weed out fake news, propaganda, clickbait, online bullying and hate speech.” Factmata’s founders were so confident in their product that they e-mailed billionaire investor Mark Cuban out of the blue and he liked it so much he was an initial investor in the start-up.

    One of the supposed tech heavyweights investing in the latest round of Factmata’s funding is craigslist founder Craig Newmark. We find this more than ironic as Newmark’s record on stopping hate speech and online harassment is laughable at best. If it’s hate speech you’re looking for, you can look no further than the rants & raves section from craigslist’s own beloved San Francisco Bay Area. On the off-chance that racist diatribe is flagged we’ve provided a screen shot below.

    Click to enlarge

    As far as online harassment goes, craigslist has long been wielded as a weapon by petty individuals looking to get revenge on unsuspecting victims including ads soliciting the rape of former romantic partners. Sadly, that’s not the only case of rape by proxy attempted on craigslist.

    That’s not even taking into account the number of child predators that roam throughout craigslist with ads so blatant you might wonder how they were allowed on craigslist to begin with. Here’s just a sample.

    Virgin? Would you like to lose it (M4W)” and “Hello HS and Virgin Girls.”

    “mothers who were looking for a guy to teach their daughter about the joys of sex.”

    “a little girl to play with for the night”

    Craigslist still relies on their so-called ‘community policing’ to flag such ads, but when your ads are being posted and read by sexual predators, then no one is going to flag any ad. This is the textbook definition of letting the inmates run the asylum. So you’ll have to excuse us if we’re just a little more than skeptical about Craig Newmark’s commitment to fighting hate speech and harassment.

    Factmata could in fact end up being a great tool to curb the rising tide of hate speech and online harassment, but when one of your major investors cares little about fighting those problems on his own website it severely hurts Factmata’s credibility.

     

  • Geebo 9:02 am on August 15, 2017 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Charlottesville, , hate speech   

    Craigslist creates safe space for hate 

    Craigslist creates safe space for hate

    As you probably know, tragedy struck the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend when a white supremacist protest descended on the college town. The so-called ‘alt-right’ was there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. This prompted counter-protesters to show up in support of the statue’s removal. Unfortunately, the protest turned violent when 20-year-old alleged Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr. reportedly plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters. He is said to have injured 19 people and killed 33-year-old Heather Heyer.

    In the wake of this tragedy, a white nationalist website made a post making light of Ms. Heyer’s death, to put it politely. Because of that, domain registrar GoDaddy told the website they have 24 hours to remove the domain from their service. The website then registered their domain name with Google who rejected the request for similar reasons. Many on the side of the ‘alt-right’ are claiming this is censorship, however, both GoDaddy and Google are well within their rights not to do business with hate groups. Rather than censorship, this is merely a case of content moderation. These businesses have terms of service which limit what content can be used with their platforms as most online businesses do.

    One website that doesn’t seem to mind the recent proliferation of hate speech is craigslist. If you were to go to the Charlottesville craigslist forum, it wouldn’t take long before you were able to not only find hate speech but tasteless jokes made at the expense of a homicide victim. We’re not saying craigslist are supporters of hate speech, however, it goes a long way in showing how unwilling they are to moderate the content on their site. Whether it be ads for obvious scams or illegal materials or the disparagement of a woman murdered in a hate crime, craigslist just doesn’t care.

     

  • Geebo 11:17 am on March 21, 2017 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: hate speech, ,   

    YouTube finds itself fighting controversy on two fronts 

    YouTube finds itself fighting controversy on two fronts

    When you have a virtual monopoly on user-generated video content like YouTube does, it’s difficult to please everyone all the time.Recently, YouTube found itself at odds with two groups that are very important to them, content creators and advertisers.

    The first controversy stems from the fact that some major advertisers didn’t like have their ads played before, or displayed next to videos that promote hate speech. While YouTube’s parent company, Google, has promised advertisers greater tools to limit where their ads are displayed, a few major advertisers have already pulled their ad dollars from the video platform.

    In the second controversy, many of YouTube’s LGBTQ content creators found their videos being restricted and filtered out as not being family friendly even though no explicit subjects were being discussed. In a statement YouTube said that it was due to a glitch in a parental control mode that it added to the service in 2010 and promised to do better. However, it seems like the damage had already been done when it appeared that YouTube was targeting such a specific part of its user community.

    While no company is perfect, both of these controversies show that Google still hasn’t ironed out all the bugs in YouTube even after having purchased it over a decade ago. With the cracks in YouTube’s armor that its shown over the years it’s surprising that a large competitor, for example Facebook, hasn’t tried launching its own video service to try to pull away creators from YouTube. Maybe that time is now, or at least soon.

     

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