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Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:
While
in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be
lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European
countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such
content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available
to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently
subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force
to some 30,000.
The
document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion
group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the
company due to disagreements over content policing.
“I’m
glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the
company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the
Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see
people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the
‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective
approach to promoting the truth.”
The
core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their
insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.
“Hate
speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so
it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic
misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free
expression.”
Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that
ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for
the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently
enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it
spreads out to the world.
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