There are 7,100 official languages on planet earth, presumably all of them include language which can used to incite violence. If we hold Meta to a 'zero hate' standard, the only solution would be have native language speakers in every language, on call and ready to deploy in order vet every single advert before publication. Maybe Meta should indeed do this, but we can at least acknowledge that there are significant practical constraints involve to maintain a zero hate standard
The alternative is that they don't serve markets where they aren't willing to understand the language. Those markets are then served by companies who do and might actually put some effort into vetting what they're being paid to display.
I feel like most of the blame should be with the people who created the content, not with the people hosting it. I can go staple a call to violence on telephone poles, that doesn't make the phone company responsible imo.
They might very well be, if it weren't for Section 230. That can change. https://archive.ph/A5PEw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
> Or is it only ads?
Advertising has been regulated for a long time now, in print, radio & television, so it wouldn't be odd to treat them as special on the internet.
Yes, you should have to vet your publications before they are released. That is a thing that should absolutely be part of your processes. If you cannot service a language, do not offer anything in that language.
My opinion is that huge tech companies have always wanted their cake while taking the last bite - they want everyone in the world to be their customer, but don't want to actually have to do anything to ensure those customers receive a quality service.
So block messages in any languages other than the ones you officially support? I could imagine people getting up in arms about that.
I'm confused by what your actual argument is here.
People would rightfully call it linguistic suppression.
Spoiler - it's our current world. They have the resources. I cannot be convinced that native language support for all languages in the world isn't an option for companies that make literally hundreds of Billions of dollars annually.
If you want to make money on a language via selling ads, you should be able to moderate that content in that language. I have no idea why you're fighting against that argument.
If Facebook sells ad space, they 100% are responsible to vet that the ad meets their standards before publishing. Not being able to read it because it's in a language Facebook is incapable of reading means they either need to decline to publish it (and not take any money) or hire appropriate staff to vet it (and pay them using the money you get from selling the ad).
Can we also acknowledge that not every business idea is destined for success, and that enabling any business to be successful, regardless of consequences, just isn't one of the things that can be legitimately asked of our society?
If a company has a brilliant idea for a solution that enables you to convert nitroglycerin to food, thus ending world hunger, but it just doesn't have the capability to implement safe handling of explosives, then it's not allowed to operate until it can.
Similarly, if a company has a brilliant idea for bringing people together, but it just can't moderate it well enough to avoid frickin' ethnic cleansing, then maybe it shouldn't be allowed to operate until it can.
Sucks to be Mark but some things really just are too dangerous to be allowed without some safeguards in place. It's literally up to Meta to figure out how to place them. If they can't, well, tough luck, but I'm sure they can think of other ways to make money.
If they're capable of launching the platform in every language, they're capable of moderating it in every language.
Uhhhhh this does not follow at all. "If you're capable of launching feature set A, you're capable of launching expanded feature set B" is asinine.
Said differently, if they aren't capable of moderating in every language, they they aren't capable of launching in every language. At least not ethically.
When you are Facebook, it must be table stakes.
No, it's that they want to become the platform and medium for all of humanity's communications and they want to digest the entire social graph and mine every human interaction for a place to inject advertising in a bid to get even bigger.
They want to swallow the world, let them sit on the hot seat. Forgive them nothing, and point out their gross incompetence and hypocrisy at enforcing their moral standard while trying to push their top end numbers up and up and up.
You can't convince me that they were completely unaware that hate speech was proliferating on their platform until 2017, and here we are, 5 years, and not much has changed. We should absolutely expect and demand better.
There are roughly that many languages known to science, according to Ethnologue.
Does anyone happen to know if the advertiser has to tell Meta what languages are used in an advertisement?
The native language speakers don’t need to be on call either. Having a one business day turnaround for new advert approval is fine. They have longer turnaround times for similar things like WhatsApp message sending, so this is clearly acceptable responsiveness for them.
So Facebook’s decision is now: is there enough profit in publishing adverts in a particular language that it would justify hiring a native speaker of that language to review them? That seems like a perfectly reasonable cost of doing business, especially when the alternative is providing a platform for inciting genocide.
That's not how Facebook will see it though. The alternative for them really is slower growth and therefore lower profits. Facebook makes more money by jumping into foreign markets and spreading genocidal hate speech than otherwise. That's the cold hard truth. Because your excellent suggestion is really just common sense and being responsible. Why didn't they do your suggestion in the first place? Is it because no one at Facebook was smart enough think of your idea? No, of course they are smart enough. They just don't care.
It’s like saying “there’s X death because of cars in the US, let’s prevent all cars from driving”
Barbie said it best, "Math is hard, let's go shopping!"
It's like when you call 911 to report a murder in progress. They say "oh wow that sounds hard, sorry" and hang up.
Or you go to a doctor complaining of an irregular heart beat, and they say "that's going to be hard to fix, sorry."
Or you're writing an operating system, and you learn that scheduling is an NP-complete problem, so you stick with single-tasking.
Hard problems require investment of effort and resources. If facebook is profiting from its participation in genocide, it should suffer consequences for that. If they don't want to accept that responsibility, they should actively work to resolve the issue or stop offering the offending services.