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gwdope t1_j0iirtx wrote

Reply to comment by Lord-Octohoof in HTC plans to reveal its Meta Quest competitor next month by elister

They allowed the dissemination of hate speech specifically designed specifically to create a genocide. Think of them like the printing presses the Nazis used to produce anti Jewish propaganda. Now social media companies have conveniently deflected the responsibility for what ends up on their platforms by tricking courts into treating them like software companies when they are actually media companies, they make all their money on advertising after all. Their excuse is that they cannot possibly moderate so much content adequately to prevent such uses, yet when it comes to something like copyright, they can automate a system that instantly removes content.

So yeah, I understand exactly how they enabled genocide, as well as how they have accelerated the polarization of the political landscape with algorithms that specifically use anger and siloing to increase engagement.

So fuck Facebook or Meta or anything that Mark Zuckerberg ever touches.

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steveCharlie t1_j0io531 wrote

How do you catch and delete that hate speech when you have 2 BILLION people using your site everyday?

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gwdope t1_j0iqvug wrote

For instances as large as a government sponsored genocide? Pretty easily. Journalists were reporting on it in real-time, so there shouldn’t have been that big of a problem even if it needs to be done manually. You don’t need to view every single post. Just monitor trends and what your algorithm is promoting. Then it’s a matter of stopping keywords and banning the biggest offenders.

Take the anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theory cons that spread during the pandemic. 65% of anti vaccine conspiracy content originated from just 12 users, so a huge chunk of that could have been cut out by simply banning 12 people, yet Facebook did next to nothing, because that content was a huge driver of engagement. Facebook knew it and chose ad revenue over moderation because they weren’t liable for the content.

Social media is media. Letting the companies off the hook for the content they host was a huge mistake.

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Hatsune_Candy t1_j0j7els wrote

Sadly, corporations don't care about the impact they have on society, good or bad, as long as it makes them loads of money it's all the same to them.

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gwdope t1_j0j9gwt wrote

That’s absolutely true and actually not really a problem, the problem comes when those corporations convince a portion of the population that their own freedoms rely on the corporations being able to pursue their profit aims unconstrained by any oversight or regulation by the democratically elected government.

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Hatsune_Candy t1_j0jziwj wrote

That is definitely a problem, but I also wouldn't consider it the problem. The fact is there are a lot of problems with corporations, not one more important than the other. But, it comes to talking about social media giants in particular, I would like to point out, isn't a little absurd that we allow them to literally control how information spreads over the web? They essentially have an oligopoly over how we communicate over the web.

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