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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

The people running Facebook don’t live in Spain, that’s 100% why.

Spanish is the second language with more native speakers in the world (and FB is banned in China). It is the main language in Latin America, Spain, Guinea Ecuatorial and other places.

Maybe I misunderstood you message, but I was quite surprised to see Spanish as the second most spoken language in the world.

I just looked it up and the rankings are a little less black and white than I expected too.

A lot of the numbers seems to be from older rankings and the explosive growth of some languages in recent years makes them vary wildly.

All in all, it seems Chinese is first, with Spanish coming in just after Hindi+urdu, English, and Arabic.

Interesting stuff.

Which language is the top one depends on your criteria. Do you only consider first language or also non-first that people are native speakers of, what about non-native but fluent?

But either way you count Spanish is not #1, but one of the top few.

Spanish isn't the second most spoken language overall. It's the second most common native(a person's first) language. English is taught and used by huge swathes of Asia and is almost as common as Chinese. I can't even remember the last time I met an asian immigrant who didn't speak english.

it speaks to the greater problem with all of these companies - they dodge responsibility by automating 99% of the work they should be doing to moderate content. i bet youtube, insta/fb, and twitter's actual human employees doing this work are >90% solely english speakers. their insane profitability and aversion to responsibility comes at an obvious cost

Spanish/latin culture also doesn't have the whole politically correct thing that we do.

I heard a reporter on NPR actually say the word "latinx" the other day, threw me for quite the loop.

This is a proposed gender-neutral alternative to latino/latina. According to native Spanish speaking comedian Tom Segura, a Spanish speaker would laugh in your face if you tried to say such a thing to them. The whole language has a masculine/feminine distinction.

I don't think he's talking about Spain here.

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