Friday, August 9, 2019

Facebook Jailed... for Quoting James Baldwin

Apparently Facebook believes I cannot quote among the most prominent activists and authors, himself a black man who used the n-word to interrogate its meaning and use, without being put in Facebook jail?

If my comment directly quoting James Baldwin is "hate speech," is IMDb prominently publishing this quote also "hate speech?"  Is the documentary itself from which this quote was derived also "hate speech?"  🤔🤔🤔

Likely this entire process was automated without any Facebook employee oversight and is the equivalent of an AI axe doing the more careful work of a human scalpel.  Devoid of evaluating purpose, context, intent or effect, the banning of words regardless of their application represents a serious problem for public discourse on popular media platforms.

So this is an information flow challenge which Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. clearly has't effectively addressed.  The "automate everything" Silicon Valley types still seem to believe they can mechanize away all the context-dependent administrative and curation duties necessary for running giant websites which serve billions of users each day... but it turns out we still need humans to really understand what humans are saying and Facebook clearly isn't equipped to monitor that.




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