Ted Cruz clearly showing that he's a partisan hack. Didn't give a crap about users' privacy or the issues at hand, he had to make it about 'liberal Silicon Valley' and 'conservative persecution'. What a joke.
I believe others had been covering privacy pretty well. When it comes to 20k people manually policing content - it is probably good that the group be neutral.
Yet he only asked about conservative causes and people that were affected by Facebook policies. It gives the appearance that Facebook is only policing conservative content. I'm sure if one looked, you could find liberal causes and people that were policed as well.
Zuck had himself just said that people living in silicon valley are overwhelmingly left leaning. So when he says they have 20k back home policing content it would makes sense to assume those 20k people are included in the group Zuck summarizes as overwhelmingly left leaning. Worth asking about.
He also emphasized that the majority of their users are not speaking English or in the US, so their foreign workforce would not reflect the political views of SV nor the US.
> so their foreign workforce would not reflect the political views of SV nor the US.
However, at a minimum, the Facebook employees setting the polices those foreign workers follow will be in both the US and SV, so you can't assume their actions will be aloof from American politics.
There was something I read last year that interviewed outsourcing content monitors - a sizeable percentage of monitors were in the Philippines for US/UK English Facebook posts.
The people laying down the policies, managing the remote workers output, checking potentially controversial policing, etc are presumably at some point in the chain landing in SV.
Presumably, the decisions aren't being left solely to the discretion of the grunts.
I was very surprised by the poignancy of Sen. Hatch's interview questions around Facebook's clear intentions of harvesting data vs. its lack of transparency in its agreements and such. Of course, as a Republican, he stopped short of suggesting regulation around making EULAs under 50 words and written at a 6th grade level... too bad.
His line of questioning was designed to expose discrepancies in stated policies versus actual implementation, with the goal of eroding trust of Facebook in that half of electorate. Eroding trust was the whole point that the hearing was called, and in that regard Cruz probably had the best questions. His questions were met with denials rather than "I'll get back to you on that".
>Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender.
So if I say frat bros are idiots am I guilty? There are grey areas.
Not really, if you use the definition of hate speech that commonwealth countries have written legislation about. I don't buy at all that it's dangerous.
I think a certain part of the far left can engage in hate speech against those who they view as intolerant of other's cultures or lifestyles (e.g. transgendered issues), and/or those who say things which they deem offensive (e.g. pronouns, triggering, rights movements, gender identity vs biology).
At the risk of stepping on a landmine given the thread above, consider using 'transgender' or 'trans' instead of 'transgenedered'. The two are subtly different, but that difference is important to some trans people.
Transgendered implies something happened to someone, rather than transgender, which is an attribute someone has. Many trans people consider the transgendered offensive, e.g. "No one/No thing transgendered me, I was always this way. It's who I am."
When someone says, "Hey, I prefer X for myself", I generally make an token effort to acknowledge and accommodate that preference because it seems like the sort of thing a decent human being does.
Right, but no one actually said to great_kraken, "I'd prefer it if you to say 'transgender' to 'transgendered'."
You just went full speech police because you felt so empowered. And what I'm telling you is that your dismissive attempt to shutdown discourse in the way you did is toxic.
What do you mean? Is the left jailing people for talking? That's news to me.
As far as I know, people are still free to say what they want? Doesn't mean they don't get any consequences though. Or that other people are forced to give them an ear.
Take Laura Ingraham. She's free to make fun of the Parkland survivors and she did. She's also losing her advertisers as a consequence of being a poor excuse of a human being. Also I would never invite her to come talk to anything I would organize (if I was organizing stuff). Would I be infringing on her free speech then by not giving her a platform? Why would I be obligated to give her a platform?
In the free society I want to live in, we ought to let people voice their opinions even when we disagree. There are limits to freedom of speech besides those put in place by the state.
Taken to an extreme for purely rhetorical purposes: if you get fired, black-balled, and publicly shamed for voicing any opinion, then do you live in a society with freedom of speech?
If you live in a society where thoughtful, rational discourse is drowned in a sea of shouted opinions, then you do not have free speech either. Free speech is not the freedom to say anything you like, but the freedom to express any idea you like. You are not free to express it how you like to whoever you like.
And there aren't many liberals willing to censor people for controversial opinions presented in a self-aware, carefully worded, and relevant manner abounding in due consideration for the facts. They do censor people who like to peddle propaganda and wave their victimhood around like pariahs.
No you aren't obligated to give her a platform. But if you go stage a protest so unruly that you block her from speaking at a College Campus for instance you have effectively negated her right to free speech. Are you really so infantile that hearing her words will ruin your life? Are they really so dangerous that you can't engage in a debate instead? I am a staunch liberal and the arguments about this coming from the left are truly mind boggling and very troublesome.
How may one speak to your children when you're not around? In other words, nearly every moment on the web...? Where is the red line? I think people are realizing just how much the web is shared.
Far left very much engages in hate speech. Kill all white people etc etc. You can try to true scotsman that, but you can do the same for the far right.
And before you say it wasn’t meant literally - very obviously what Nugent says isn’t literal either. He’s a crazy old man, but he said if you see a coyote you shoot it and allegorically compared this to verbally shutting down Democrats rather than engaging with them. In no way did he suggest shooting Democrats.
I feel fairly confident I don't need to use 'no true scotsman' to argue the fact that no one with a "D" after their name asking Zuckerberg a question today has ever said "Kill all white people."
On the other hand, Cruz wasted our time, and more importantly, the time any other member of Congress would have had to ask something important, asking Zuckerberg about a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page that was deleted for 12 hours, yet failed to mention the words "Cambridge Analytica." Hmmmm.
> Ted Cruz clearly showing that he's a partisan hack. Didn't give a crap about users' privacy or the issues at hand, he had to make it about 'liberal Silicon Valley' and 'conservative persecution'. What a joke.
Feel like there's a few different things going on in your comment, but I'll focus on -- who are you blaming for "shifting the goalposts"? I believe I'm trying to return focus on the "pure context" of the grandparent; it seems disingenuous to argue I'm, at the very least, the only one shifting the goal posts.
No? The hate speech by the left doesn’t have to be against the right. In fact I believe much of hate speech by the extreme left is targeted onto people who consider themselves on the left too; generally hate speech targets the vulnerable or at least the locally unpopular; no reason to think that skews left or right.
The far left does not hate speech, it just hates on speech, any speech - narrowing the cone on what is discusable, until all things are disgusthings. A controllfreak in denial is really so preferable to a out of controll freak - declaring its gut feelings to be a irrefutable, god-selected for truth?
Can i want to have none of these? Is there a third option, that opposes both?
He's a good representative to show how Facebook actually are politically bias to some degree, where they absolutely shouldn't be. I'm sure there are examples of similar actions to the 'left' also, and if there aren't now there might become in the future when the political winds change.
I think Cruz played his role as partial acknowledged politician very well.
