Alexander Hall
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A recent gaffe at YouTube has proved that human censors can be just as bad as robots at distinguishing between hate speech and satire. This past Wednesday in November 2018, Youtube had to undo the removal of a satire video dating back to the second World War.
“Go create your own website” has been a common reply to conservatives concerned about Big Tech censorship, but now Leftists can shut them down even when they do that.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has butted heads with other big tech CEOs over tax policy. Now he wants big tech regulated. Benioff doubled down on his recent critique of Facebook being as dangerously addictive as cigarettes, suggesting that it must be regulated to make sure it serves the public good.
Facebook will permit countries in European unprecedented level of access to how it controls content. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that in 2019, French regulators will be given access to Facebook’s content moderation process and allowed to study its attempts to control “hate speech.”
Google has been under fire for complying with foreign governments’ totalitarian policies. In an New York Times interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried to combat internal and external backlash against the company’s accomodations to China’s communist government by saying "we are censoring search results because we're complying with the law."
The French government and U.S. tech giants are pushing for a worldwide initiative to regulate the internet — including the issue of hate speech. The new declaration from the French government titled the “Paris Call For Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” is part of an international effort to crack down on cyber attacks, foreign interference, and hate speech, according to the organization that drafted the document.
Is YouTube safe for your children? 61 percent of users claimed their children have encountered unsafe/unsuitable content there, according to recent PEW Research studies.
Tech in Silicon Valley has an increasingly troubled relationship with free speech. Tech writer and former editor Jason Pontin recently gained attention because he was quoted no less than nine times in Google’s leaked “The Good Censor” memo.
Facebook wants to be militant about removing “hate speech.” However, it keeps deleting the wrong content. The site removed a rabbi’s harrowing account of harassment by Rev. Louis Farrakhan supporters, only to say later that the action was done “mistakenly.” The viral post has since been restored after public outcry, according to Jewish Journal