Listen to Radio Motherboard on Facebook’s Reckoning with American Nazis

Facebook has been pushing to change its public image after a series of scandals about hate speech and violence being promoted on it platform and user data being used to influence elections. While part of that has revolved around an aggressive public relations campaign, it has also included a push to re-educate Facebook and Instagram’s moderators on hate speech, racism, revenge pornm and what is or isn’t acceptable on their platforms according to site policy.

On this episode of Radio Motherboard, we discuss Facebook’s internal moderation guidelines around hate speech and what they can teach us about how the ubiquitous social media company thinks.

Radio Motherboard also spoke to Yuan Stevens, a human rights lawyer and cyberfeminist researcher at McGill University about regulating Facebook in the future and the role of Facebook as an essential service for purposes of regulation.

“Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Email, that connect us as humans are essential…The tool itself becomes essential but I don’t want that company to become essential” Stevens said. “Like with the GDPR in Europe, this stance of a state—or numerous states—of imposing positive obligations, that is things you should do rather than things that you should not to is going to become increasingly necessary.”

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