It took two years, but a campaign to make Facebook aware of its failure to ban misogynistic pages -- when it has pulled pages where women have posted breastfeeding or mastectomy photos -- finally hit critical mass this past week. Those 5k+ emails, 225k signatures on a change.org petition and 60k Twitter posts with the hashtag #FBrape convinced Nissan and a dozen other advertisers to pull their Facebook ads.
On today's "This Week in Startups" news roundtable with author and investor James Altucher (@jaltucher) and LittleBird CEO Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk), I said I believe Facebook's inconsistent enforcement of its "no hate speech" policy lies squarely with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- specifically his lack of any understanding of human decency.
Marshall disagreed, pointing out that Facebook has people throughout the company "working in good faith" and that they are dealing with a lot of complexity and subjectivity. To him it sounds like a mistake, and he hopes they will deal with it well.
James noted a legal precedent dating back to the 1990s (anti-Semitic posts on Prodigy): if you pull down one thing, you pull down everything. Facebook is trying to straddle the middle, but they have 1B users -- a clear scalability issue. "You can't straddle the middle line here, there is no easy answer here," he said.
We also talked about Apple working on what I call an "iBangle" (hint: see Wonder Woman) and how checking your wrist would be so much less offensive than wearing Google Glass. And yes, I ranted.
No comments:
Post a Comment