Facebook meets racism and hate speech
One of the things about social networks is that it attracts all sorts of people, good honest plain folk who want to get along with everyone, and the darker side of human experience like racism. While it is not limited to facebook, facebook has a terms of service that points out that hate speech is not allowed, in fact there are a lot of laws about hate speech, and against crime caused by sex, religion, creed, and a whole lot of diversity issues that we deal with on a daily basis.
Yet, this sort of thing isn’t new to Facebook. Freydblog wrote about finding more than 50 groups emphasizing hate against elderly people including groups named Kill the Elderly, Fuck old people and their stupid grey hair, Fuck old people, F*CK** OLD PEOPLE, Asking old people for a quarter then throwing it in there face…..hahaha! and I Beat up old people. In, Facing Up to Facebook Racism, Mythili Rao wrote about a facebook group called, “‘Asian women are truly the most scrumptrillescent delicacy abroad.’ The group’s purpose was ‘to bang out Asians. Bang hard or go home. Yes, even the ugly bitches.’” Mideast Youth reported on a group called, I hate Iraqis (also still active) regarding Iraqi refugees flooding Jordan to flee violence in Iraq. Source: Jeff’s news cloud
Facebook is not alone in this, they are just going to be the next target, and since they have a TOS, they need to live up to the target TOS. Most sites have simple profanity filters to keep out the most common swear words, why facebook has not implemented such a filter is beyond comprehension. With the addition that facebook is going to allow public access to profiles unless users ratchet down the privacy settings, facebook searches are going to pop very high in Google and other search engines for hate speech.
Hardly something that any company under any socially aware position wants to be involved in.
Even MySpace gets this one.
While Facebook pulled down the “F Islam” group after Jeff News Cloud reported it and slashdotted it, he points out that there are still many groups with the word “F***” in it, let alone other swear words.
The interesting part is when employers start trolling those sites and looks in those groups and checks the membership against employees they might have, and what was written by said employee. The last thing any employee needs is to be affiliated with a hate group, the last thing any company wants is anyone who is affiliated with a hate group. We see a rash of firings for blogging or membership is various hate groups on facebook once the data becomes public.
This is not going to go over well.
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