Resignation letter from Facebook engineer Ashok Chandwaney undermines the company’s rationalizations

Resignation letter from Facebook engineer Ashok Chandwaney undermines the company’s rationalizations

When it comes to hate, does Facebook believe in what it says it does? According to engineer Ashok Chandwaney, not even close. The Washington Post published the departing employee’s resignation letter, which had been posted on Facebook’s internal message board. Let’s take a close look at the accusations. Analyzing Chandwaney’s resignation letter The resignation letter…

Facebook pollutes discourse. Nick Clegg bloviating can’t change that.

Facebook pollutes discourse. Nick Clegg bloviating can’t change that.

Facebook’s advertisers are bolting — check out the activity on the #StopHateForProfit hashtag. The company’s VP of Communications, Nick Clegg, says Facebook is doing a good job stopping hate and doesn’t profit from it. Is his defense believable? I wrote about this on Monday and published an op-ed in the Boston Globe about it today….

Sri Lanka shuts down Facebook. Can we stop the spread of hate permanently?

Sri Lanka shuts down Facebook. Can we stop the spread of hate permanently?

After the bombings, Sri Lanka’s government shut down Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and another social application, Viber. Apparently these applications are toxic in crises. (Also at all other times, but especially in crises.) According to government spokesman Harindra B. Dassanayake, as quoted in the New York Times, “These platforms are banned because they were spreading hate…

The Milo Yiannopoulos whine is the endpoint of a troll’s lifecycle
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The Milo Yiannopoulos whine is the endpoint of a troll’s lifecycle

Milo Yiannopolous is a provocateur. A British national stirring up American politics, a gay icon of the alt-right, he takes hateful positions on race and politics that have earned him wrath and protests wherever he appears. He advocated for sex with 13-year-olds. He cheered on Gamergate’s harassment of women. As a result, now, his life…

Facebook’s rationale for booting Alex Jones and InfoWars: you can lie, but you can’t be hateful
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Facebook’s rationale for booting Alex Jones and InfoWars: you can lie, but you can’t be hateful

Facebook has joined Apple, Youtube, and Disqus in banning Alex Jones and yanking his InfoWars pages. Jones and his supporters are livid, claiming free speech violations, while liberals are wondering what took so long. The challenge here is that lying on Facebook is perfectly fine; only “hate speech” will get you banned. Let’s take a…

The challenge with how Reddit is shutting down violent speech

The challenge with how Reddit is shutting down violent speech

Reddit clarified its policy to ban speech that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm.” Sounds great, but as always with free-speech issues, the lines between acceptable and awful are fuzzy. Reddit has a challenging history to deal with. Among mainstream public social platforms, it has been the most tolerant of extreme…

The Daily Stormer, which wasn’t hacked by Anonymous, must think its readers are stupid
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The Daily Stormer, which wasn’t hacked by Anonymous, must think its readers are stupid

The Daily Stormer — the site that sponsored the white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend — has apparently been under attack. It appeared that the hacker collective Anonymous took it over, then the site owners regained control, and then GoDaddy cancelled its domain registration. The GoDaddy part is true, but as I’ll show, the…