Having a bunch of likely millenial aged individuals with limited life experience based in Menlo Park to have a say in discourse that crosses so many boundaries? What could possibly go wrong?
A millennial is going to be around 30. They're not children. In fact they likely have children of their own.
> demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.
It mentions various ranges, roughly 1980 at the earliest, 1996 at the latest. So a millenial according to that today would range from age 22 to age 38. That leaves us with "people under 40 with limited life experience".
They probably meant young people, sure, but the sentence makes sense either way, since under 40 is still kinda young to formulate rules for how to moderate political discussions anywhere on the globe. A person would have to study and travel and learn a lot, just about that, to have anything valuable to say about it at age 30. If you spend that time working at Facebook instead, to speak of "limited life experience" in this context is very kind either way.
The real kicker is that it's not even just about Facebook and their own limited life experiences though. From the article:
> Then the company outsources much of the actual post-by-post moderation to companies that enlist largely unskilled workers, many hired out of call centers.
The cool thing here is, since it's in the tree of their comment, the orginal commenter sees that, too.
To give an example, at a meetup hosted by a large game corp, some college children presented a project aimed at logging the speaking time of business-meeting participants based on superficial details (primarily sex, race), with the goal of equalizing the amount of speaking time based on such. The fact that my objection to such will be perceived as sexism/racism is my other objection.
I'm being downvoted into oblivion elsewhere on this site for suggesting this, but I feel like it's a very obvious move for tech companies that have this problem.
As I said in another post, companies also actually used to hire people outside the tech bubble to deal with things like categorization of websites, etc. That went away once they could achieve a certain percentage with cheap labor.
For example, documenting some sort of 'ideal' or 'pro/con' type lists of potential fallout. When architecting a system.. or in design/feature proposals.
Surely folks less in the weeds of technical requirements and actual implementation could help decide earlier on if something is 'good'.
Ironically it’s these graduates with the strongest opinions on what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to say. It’s not mechanical engineering grads freaking out on Twitter over cultural appropriation, tone policing, etc. They are the last people you would want to entrust with this power.