As we all know, it has been questioned whether the victory of our new president, Donald Trump, has helped people show their true feelings towards other people of a different race as them. In other words, since Donald Trumps victory their have been more racist incidents, or at least that’s what some people would describe them as. So who is right? What is hate? What is racist? What is unfair? I think we can all agree that agreeing to something of this degree is exhausting. Agreeing to something and sometimes anything is impossible due to the fact that everyone is raised different and their culture, beliefs, and laws are also different. What may seem good to me might seem bad to you.
This is the same problem Facebook claims to have in Facebook Struggles to define Hate Speech. The audio describes two incidents. One incident where a black man is shot and killed that was taken down by Facebook and another incident where a black man slits a white cops throat, which was surprisingly NOT taken down. While there may be a lot of reasons why Facebook decided differently to these chaotic and inappropriate for general audiences videos, it seems as they might be on the same boat as racist and inconsiderate people. However, according to a Facebook engineer, who specifically works in the area of taking down posts that seem inappropriate, stated that the way they decide to either take down a post or not is through intentions. So, what were the intentions of the person who shared a video? Where they bad? Were they trying to share awareness or were they trying encourage crazy ideals and racism.
Although the way they decide seems fair, we would have to ignore the comments of the video and the way others are re-sharing the video. Ignoring comments and re-shares would defeat the whole purpose of trying to avoid hate speech and getting rid of it. I know defining hate speech is something hard, especially in a huge service that Facebook provides. Millions of things get shared on Facebook, so it makes sense that it can be hard to define what is hate speech post or an awareness post.
So, I believe since defining hate speech can be hard, then why even try to define it at all? Why not just either take off all post that are flagged “inappropriate” or leave them there. Most of these videos will be seen by millions anyway. What’s the point of taking them off? If you do not want to see it close your Facebook account. The point of Facebook it to stay informed and connected and if you only want to see things that make you smile, then Facebook is not for you.
Instead of defining hate speech or trying to decide whether something is, why don’t we start by doing things that make unite us. Activities or communal things that bring us together because of our differences and our similarities.
As individuals we should ask ourselves, what I am about to say, is it going to target certain people? If so, you are setting yourself apart. You should not set yourself apart, instead integrate yourself in the human race. Because we are all humans, we all have a heart, we are all same and different in our own ways.
Ethics with Group 5 