9 ms·

Facebook Execs Nixed Employees' Plan to Quell Hate Speech: Report

51 points by elorant 5y ago

neurobot123 5y ago
“FB nixed plan to censor speech they hate”
rightly 5y ago
"Hate speech" doesn't exist. It's not real. They made it up to shut you up.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Aren't all words just made up?
- ohhhhhh 5y ago
  "hate speech" is speech you are offended by, duhhh
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Neither does "poetry" or "obscenity" insofar as these are just labels for different styles/uses of language. That doesn't stop them from being useful.
robobob5000 5y ago
"The researchers proposed a tweak so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system." Hmm I just read another article on this which said the proposed tweak was actually to STOP automatically blocking hate speech against white people. I guess in light of that you can see how the quote is factually correct but worded in such a way to completely misrepresent the nature of the proposal
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Which one is the accurate one? Seems like both are correct
- mzs 5y ago
  from the original source: >They were proposing a major overhaul of the hate speech algorithm. From now on, the algorithm would be narrowly tailored to automatically remove hate speech against only five groups of people — those who are Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim or of multiple races — that users rated as most severe and harmful. (The researchers hoped to eventually expand the algorithm’s detection capabilities to protect other vulnerable groups, after the algorithm had been retrained and was on track.) Direct threats of violence against all groups would still be deleted. >… >But Kaplan and the other executives did give the green light to a version of the project that would remove the least harmful speech, according to Facebook’s own study: programming the algorithms to stop automatically taking down content directed at White people, Americans and men. The Post previously reported on this change when it was announced internally later in 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...
viggity 5y ago
I think preciously few people necessarily dislike the idea of quelling hate speech. The real problem is who gets to decide what classifies as hate speech. When there is a large contingent of america chanting nonsense like "silence is violence" one moment and "punch terfs" the next moment, I'd rather that nobody gets to make the decision of what does and does not constitute hate speech.
- ohhhhhh 5y ago
  Thank you
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  I think there's a minority, but still substantial number of authoritarians, who absolutely do like the idea of quelling what they view as hate speech. The classification problem is not one that can ever be agreed to though as you point out, so I'd rather that larger platforms like Facebook simply provide tools to choose and mark the kind of content you'd prefer to see rather than blocking comments that a vocal group dislikes. The real solution to this problem was found many decades ago, and is of course ignored. Go back to teaching children stuff like the following rather than making victimhood into a currency. > Sticks and stones may break my bones, > But words can never hurt me.
  - hairofadog 5y ago
    What qualifies as hate speech and what to do about it is certainly arguable, but the underlying issue is that in both the U.S. and rest of the world there's a long history of powerful social groups fomenting actual, measurable, real-world violence and suppression of minority social groups. It's true that social media is full of pearl-clutching, and that's what you propose to remedy with your "sticks and stones" curriculum, but it doesn't address the real problem of hate speech. And again, I can't stress this enough: I'm not saying that Facebook deleting posts is any kind of answer; what I'm saying is it seems you think the question of hate speech has to do with people being offended rather than people being actively harmed. Given the hyperbole in the media (social or otherwise) it's understandable why you would think that was the case, but social media isn't the best place to get your information.
hirundo 5y ago
A better way to quell hate speech is to provide the tools for individuals to do it, however they want to define it. Call it a bubble construction kit. If you think a post is hate speech, mark it as such to exclude it and its creator from your bubble. Allow other users to subscribe to your bubble, and visa versa, such that you share your include/exclude lists with them, out to a given degree of separation, with any exceptions you might list. So I could add ACLU, NPR and SPLC and various friends, celebrities, and polticians to my bubble and share their exclusions, and you could add NRA, FOX, FedSoc, etc., to yours. We effectively each get our own bespoke hate speech filters while hosted on a common carrier. This is decentralized, scalable, hyperdemocratic moderation. People of all ideologies can peacefully share the same platform, singing Kumbaya in harmony.
- harpiaharpyja 5y ago
  People should be empowered to create their own communities. The community aspect is really important and seems to get overlooked by the big social networks.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    The big social networks aren't "overlooking" community. Communities with constructive relationships between humans who know each other on a personal level are _competition_ for the social networks whose goal to profit off being the middleman in every social transaction. - If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them. - If you need to buy a car, and you know somebody who is selling a car, you don't need to go to Facebook Marketplace and use them as an intermediary to buy a car from a stranger - If politicians and businesses are interacting directly with constituents/customers in their community, they don't need to pay Facebook to boost their political ads. It's not at all surprising, then, that social media companies (particularly Facebook) have done everything they could possibly do to undermine any community that risks drawing people away from the newsfeed.
    - gretch 5y ago
helen___keller 5y ago
> like a user who posted an image of a chimpanzee with the caption, "Here's one of Michelle Obama." Anecdotally, I’ve seen these sort of images shared across Facebook many times and it was a large part of a decision to step back my usage of the product around 2016, including having my account deactivated for several years This topic is commonly viewed in a political lens (free speech, etc) but I view it in a free market lens: Facebook.com is full of garbage and Meta can ignore user experience issues, such as flamebait and hate speech, to their own detriment. It’s actively difficult, from my experience, to use their product in just about any way without running into heaps of inflammatory garbage.
- ohhhhhh 5y ago
  and you survived to tell the story. the "hate speech" didnt kill you
  - afavour 5y ago
    The OP is talking about this from Facebook's perspective, not their own, hence the "free market" angle. A user deactivating their account is a negative for Facebook. Anecdotally I've long felt the same way: I have an active account still but very rarely log in because whenever I do my news feed is largely filled with nonsense I have little interest in seeing, rather than actual updates from friends and family. I see it as similar to an e-mail provider that doesn't try to tackle spam: it's a difficult problem to solve and they're welcome to ignore it. But if they do they'll find more and more users abandoning their service.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    If you’re trying to make a point, please state it clearly instead of providing a snarky one liner, which is against HN guidelines
  - Lucasoato 5y ago
    There are a lot of people suffering of depression, I don't think that what you implied there is valid.
- 5y ago
rayiner 5y ago
> so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system And what happens when the system takes down quotes from the Quran--which Muslims believe to be not only the inspired, but perfect word of God--as "hate speech."
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  I dont think people disagree that antiquated religious texts do contain a lot of hate speech
  - chrismeller 5y ago
    The majority of the population of Earth does, but ok…
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Which "people?" The secular descendants of white protestants--people who, despite maybe no longer being believers, retain distinctly protestant views of religious authority and interpretation? Yes. But certainly not, say, virtually all Muslims. I'm not disagreeing with the approach--I'm just pointing out that societies can't help but encode their religious and quasi-religious views onto putatively secular rules. What Twitter or Facebook deem "hate speech" is invariably dictated by what white Americans,[1] think that means. [1] Or others socialized into that culture. The practice of Islam here in America has a distinct influence of mainline Protestantism quite absent from the practice in Bangladesh. I was at an Islamic wedding for a family member several years ago, and the imam was narrating over passages from scripture to conform it to how Americans view things.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      Most religious people are not zealots. I don't think they condone slavery, women's subjugation etc just because they go to church sometimes. You think they hang gays in Turkey? Besides, the overreliance on the writings of scriptures is a distinctly protestant characteristic
spfzero 5y ago
It seems this falls into the category of: Company has idea, investigates it, decides not to go ahead for the time being. Big deal. This is what all businesses do all the time. They task some employees to come up with a plan or to research a possible plan. Then they consider it from various angles, then they might decide to go ahead with it as is, modify it, or table it. It is always an "Employees' Plan" because the people tasked with doing it are obviously employees, or sometimes consultants. The people making the decision are always "Execs" because they are executing a decision. This headline is designed to transmit a disturbing message, with nothing actually notable behind it.
- mzs 5y ago
  There is something notable, that a conservative VP protected those users at the expense of more vulnerable ones again. >Kaplan, the company’s most influential Republican, was widely known as a strong believer in the idea that Facebook should appear “politically neutral,” and his hard-line free speech ideology was in lockstep with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Facebook recently changed its corporate name to Meta.) He bent over backward to protect conservatives, according to previous reporting in The Post, numerous former insiders and the Facebook Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...
  - david38 5y ago
    At the expense of vulnerable ones? You can literally use that sentence to quell any free speech just by saying I’m triggered. If your feelings are hurt, stop reading a particular platform. There are enough groups online you can isolate yourself from any opinion you don’t like.
    - locopati 5y ago
      that'd work except that the effects aren't limited to the platform - harmful information has realworld effects on people's material lives
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
This article's reporting is false. They say "The researchers proposed a tweak so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system.", but the original Washington Post article they're summarizing (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...) says that the automated hate speech detection system already exists; the proposed tweak was to disable that system for hate speech against any groups other than the listed five, turning it back on only as an aspirational future goal when the algorithm "had been retrained and was on track". This is because the researchers weren't just aiming to quell hate speech in general - they wanted to change the fact that Facebook is (they concluded) "better at cracking down on comments that were harmful against White People".
varispeed 5y ago
So if you see a racist post, making derogatory remarks against your race and you report it, Facebook reviews it and says it meets community standards, then you send it for reconsideration and nothing happens for weeks... What are the next steps? Do you report Facebook to the Police or are they immune? I read many times that someone posted something on Twitter and police raided their home the next day. Can they do the same with Facebook for spreading racist messaging?
- nradov 5y ago
  That would entirely depend on the local laws in your jurisdiction. In the US there is no law against creating or publishing racist content. (I'm not claiming that it's morally right to do that, but it's not illegal.)
  - varispeed 5y ago
    In my country it is illegal, so I would expect at very least an order to block the site if they are not going to comply with the law.
- mdoms 5y ago
  The next steps are you move on. Dwelling on a Facebook post for weeks is not healthy.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    I am trying to establish whether indeed we are living in a two tier society, where laws mostly only apply to the poor.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      Which laws?
      - varispeed 5y ago
        Hate crime
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
The headline’s framing is absolutely yellow journalism.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Good. "Hate speech" is a false label. All it amounts to is speech that some subset of society finds disagreeable and seeks to suppress. Some things that are classified as "hate speech", like explicitly racist content, are disagreeable to most of society. Even in those cases, I prefer upholding a universal right to free speech rather than suppressing open discourse. The ACLU of old became famous for defending civil liberties even when it came to disagreeable groups like the KKK. Even though the ACLU has since abandoned their classically liberal mission (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disintegration-of-the-aclu-james-kirchick https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disinte...), I think it is worth thinking back to how Ira Glasser ran the ACLU previously, in a principled manner where it was important to defend those rights at all times. For the modern world, I think it is important to expect that giant private conglomerates uphold the civil liberties given to us under law in those private spaces they control. After all, they function more like a public utility and common carrier. Otherwise, they will abuse those powers in various ways, for example if their employees have a particular set of biases. It is unacceptable for our most basic and ubiquitous forms of communication to be controlled by tech giants that ignore fundamental societal values like free speech. I also want to point out that not everything that is labeled "hate speech" is clearly bad. For example, Ibram X Kendi defines "racist" as anything that perpetuates inequities across racial groups, meaning differences in outcomes (rather than differences in opportunity). I think most people would not consider a difference in outcomes to be racist, but under Kendi's definition (which is part of the "anti-racist"/CRT movement), even something like an objective standardized test can be viewed as racist. So should speech defending standardized testing be censored on social media? What about speech defending Kyle Rittenhouse, which Twitter/Facebook/etc. have been censoring under their policy around violence/dangerous individuals, despite the recent ruling? Similarly, gender identity and trans issues are highly controversial and there is significant debate on how to deal with it. Does it really make sense to censor open discussion of this issue while it is so current? In all these instances we already have a tried and true solution - let the speech happen, let debate run its course, and avoid simply letting those in power control speech and other outcomes. I'm not sure why that ever became controversial.

51 points by elorant 5y ago

neurobot123 5y ago

“FB nixed plan to censor speech they hate”

rightly 5y ago

"Hate speech" doesn't exist. It's not real. They made it up to shut you up.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Aren't all words just made up?
ohhhhhh 5y ago
"hate speech" is speech you are offended by, duhhh
AlexandrB 5y ago
Neither does "poetry" or "obscenity" insofar as these are just labels for different styles/uses of language. That doesn't stop them from being useful.

robobob5000 5y ago

"The researchers proposed a tweak so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system." Hmm I just read another article on this which said the proposed tweak was actually to STOP automatically blocking hate speech against white people. I guess in light of that you can see how the quote is factually correct but worded in such a way to completely misrepresent the nature of the proposal

rdtwo 5y ago
Which one is the accurate one? Seems like both are correct
mzs 5y ago
from the original source: >They were proposing a major overhaul of the hate speech algorithm. From now on, the algorithm would be narrowly tailored to automatically remove hate speech against only five groups of people — those who are Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim or of multiple races — that users rated as most severe and harmful. (The researchers hoped to eventually expand the algorithm’s detection capabilities to protect other vulnerable groups, after the algorithm had been retrained and was on track.) Direct threats of violence against all groups would still be deleted. >… >But Kaplan and the other executives did give the green light to a version of the project that would remove the least harmful speech, according to Facebook’s own study: programming the algorithms to stop automatically taking down content directed at White people, Americans and men. The Post previously reported on this change when it was announced internally later in 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...

viggity 5y ago

I think preciously few people necessarily dislike the idea of quelling hate speech. The real problem is who gets to decide what classifies as hate speech. When there is a large contingent of america chanting nonsense like "silence is violence" one moment and "punch terfs" the next moment, I'd rather that nobody gets to make the decision of what does and does not constitute hate speech.

ohhhhhh 5y ago
Thank you
logicalmonster 5y ago
I think there's a minority, but still substantial number of authoritarians, who absolutely do like the idea of quelling what they view as hate speech. The classification problem is not one that can ever be agreed to though as you point out, so I'd rather that larger platforms like Facebook simply provide tools to choose and mark the kind of content you'd prefer to see rather than blocking comments that a vocal group dislikes. The real solution to this problem was found many decades ago, and is of course ignored. Go back to teaching children stuff like the following rather than making victimhood into a currency. > Sticks and stones may break my bones, > But words can never hurt me.
- hairofadog 5y ago
  What qualifies as hate speech and what to do about it is certainly arguable, but the underlying issue is that in both the U.S. and rest of the world there's a long history of powerful social groups fomenting actual, measurable, real-world violence and suppression of minority social groups. It's true that social media is full of pearl-clutching, and that's what you propose to remedy with your "sticks and stones" curriculum, but it doesn't address the real problem of hate speech. And again, I can't stress this enough: I'm not saying that Facebook deleting posts is any kind of answer; what I'm saying is it seems you think the question of hate speech has to do with people being offended rather than people being actively harmed. Given the hyperbole in the media (social or otherwise) it's understandable why you would think that was the case, but social media isn't the best place to get your information.

hirundo 5y ago

A better way to quell hate speech is to provide the tools for individuals to do it, however they want to define it. Call it a bubble construction kit. If you think a post is hate speech, mark it as such to exclude it and its creator from your bubble. Allow other users to subscribe to your bubble, and visa versa, such that you share your include/exclude lists with them, out to a given degree of separation, with any exceptions you might list. So I could add ACLU, NPR and SPLC and various friends, celebrities, and polticians to my bubble and share their exclusions, and you could add NRA, FOX, FedSoc, etc., to yours. We effectively each get our own bespoke hate speech filters while hosted on a common carrier. This is decentralized, scalable, hyperdemocratic moderation. People of all ideologies can peacefully share the same platform, singing Kumbaya in harmony.

harpiaharpyja 5y ago
People should be empowered to create their own communities. The community aspect is really important and seems to get overlooked by the big social networks.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  The big social networks aren't "overlooking" community. Communities with constructive relationships between humans who know each other on a personal level are _competition_ for the social networks whose goal to profit off being the middleman in every social transaction. - If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them. - If you need to buy a car, and you know somebody who is selling a car, you don't need to go to Facebook Marketplace and use them as an intermediary to buy a car from a stranger - If politicians and businesses are interacting directly with constituents/customers in their community, they don't need to pay Facebook to boost their political ads. It's not at all surprising, then, that social media companies (particularly Facebook) have done everything they could possibly do to undermine any community that risks drawing people away from the newsfeed.
  - gretch 5y ago

helen___keller 5y ago

> like a user who posted an image of a chimpanzee with the caption, "Here's one of Michelle Obama." Anecdotally, I’ve seen these sort of images shared across Facebook many times and it was a large part of a decision to step back my usage of the product around 2016, including having my account deactivated for several years This topic is commonly viewed in a political lens (free speech, etc) but I view it in a free market lens: Facebook.com is full of garbage and Meta can ignore user experience issues, such as flamebait and hate speech, to their own detriment. It’s actively difficult, from my experience, to use their product in just about any way without running into heaps of inflammatory garbage.

ohhhhhh 5y ago
and you survived to tell the story. the "hate speech" didnt kill you
- afavour 5y ago
  The OP is talking about this from Facebook's perspective, not their own, hence the "free market" angle. A user deactivating their account is a negative for Facebook. Anecdotally I've long felt the same way: I have an active account still but very rarely log in because whenever I do my news feed is largely filled with nonsense I have little interest in seeing, rather than actual updates from friends and family. I see it as similar to an e-mail provider that doesn't try to tackle spam: it's a difficult problem to solve and they're welcome to ignore it. But if they do they'll find more and more users abandoning their service.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  If you’re trying to make a point, please state it clearly instead of providing a snarky one liner, which is against HN guidelines
- Lucasoato 5y ago
  There are a lot of people suffering of depression, I don't think that what you implied there is valid.
5y ago

rayiner 5y ago

> so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system And what happens when the system takes down quotes from the Quran--which Muslims believe to be not only the inspired, but perfect word of God--as "hate speech."

cblconfederate 5y ago
I dont think people disagree that antiquated religious texts do contain a lot of hate speech
- chrismeller 5y ago
  The majority of the population of Earth does, but ok…
- rayiner 5y ago
  Which "people?" The secular descendants of white protestants--people who, despite maybe no longer being believers, retain distinctly protestant views of religious authority and interpretation? Yes. But certainly not, say, virtually all Muslims. I'm not disagreeing with the approach--I'm just pointing out that societies can't help but encode their religious and quasi-religious views onto putatively secular rules. What Twitter or Facebook deem "hate speech" is invariably dictated by what white Americans,[1] think that means. [1] Or others socialized into that culture. The practice of Islam here in America has a distinct influence of mainline Protestantism quite absent from the practice in Bangladesh. I was at an Islamic wedding for a family member several years ago, and the imam was narrating over passages from scripture to conform it to how Americans view things.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Most religious people are not zealots. I don't think they condone slavery, women's subjugation etc just because they go to church sometimes. You think they hang gays in Turkey? Besides, the overreliance on the writings of scriptures is a distinctly protestant characteristic

spfzero 5y ago

It seems this falls into the category of: Company has idea, investigates it, decides not to go ahead for the time being. Big deal. This is what all businesses do all the time. They task some employees to come up with a plan or to research a possible plan. Then they consider it from various angles, then they might decide to go ahead with it as is, modify it, or table it. It is always an "Employees' Plan" because the people tasked with doing it are obviously employees, or sometimes consultants. The people making the decision are always "Execs" because they are executing a decision. This headline is designed to transmit a disturbing message, with nothing actually notable behind it.

mzs 5y ago
There is something notable, that a conservative VP protected those users at the expense of more vulnerable ones again. >Kaplan, the company’s most influential Republican, was widely known as a strong believer in the idea that Facebook should appear “politically neutral,” and his hard-line free speech ideology was in lockstep with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Facebook recently changed its corporate name to Meta.) He bent over backward to protect conservatives, according to previous reporting in The Post, numerous former insiders and the Facebook Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...
- david38 5y ago
  At the expense of vulnerable ones? You can literally use that sentence to quell any free speech just by saying I’m triggered. If your feelings are hurt, stop reading a particular platform. There are enough groups online you can isolate yourself from any opinion you don’t like.
  - locopati 5y ago
    that'd work except that the effects aren't limited to the platform - harmful information has realworld effects on people's material lives

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

This article's reporting is false. They say "The researchers proposed a tweak so that hate speech against Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim, and multiracial people would be taken down through an automated system.", but the original Washington Post article they're summarizing (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/facebook-algorithm-biased-race/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...) says that the automated hate speech detection system already exists; the proposed tweak was to disable that system for hate speech against any groups other than the listed five, turning it back on only as an aspirational future goal when the algorithm "had been retrained and was on track". This is because the researchers weren't just aiming to quell hate speech in general - they wanted to change the fact that Facebook is (they concluded) "better at cracking down on comments that were harmful against White People".

varispeed 5y ago

So if you see a racist post, making derogatory remarks against your race and you report it, Facebook reviews it and says it meets community standards, then you send it for reconsideration and nothing happens for weeks... What are the next steps? Do you report Facebook to the Police or are they immune? I read many times that someone posted something on Twitter and police raided their home the next day. Can they do the same with Facebook for spreading racist messaging?

nradov 5y ago
That would entirely depend on the local laws in your jurisdiction. In the US there is no law against creating or publishing racist content. (I'm not claiming that it's morally right to do that, but it's not illegal.)
- varispeed 5y ago
  In my country it is illegal, so I would expect at very least an order to block the site if they are not going to comply with the law.
mdoms 5y ago
The next steps are you move on. Dwelling on a Facebook post for weeks is not healthy.
- varispeed 5y ago
  I am trying to establish whether indeed we are living in a two tier society, where laws mostly only apply to the poor.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Which laws?
    - varispeed 5y ago
      Hate crime

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

The headline’s framing is absolutely yellow journalism.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Good. "Hate speech" is a false label. All it amounts to is speech that some subset of society finds disagreeable and seeks to suppress. Some things that are classified as "hate speech", like explicitly racist content, are disagreeable to most of society. Even in those cases, I prefer upholding a universal right to free speech rather than suppressing open discourse. The ACLU of old became famous for defending civil liberties even when it came to disagreeable groups like the KKK. Even though the ACLU has since abandoned their classically liberal mission (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disintegration-of-the-aclu-james-kirchick https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disinte...), I think it is worth thinking back to how Ira Glasser ran the ACLU previously, in a principled manner where it was important to defend those rights at all times. For the modern world, I think it is important to expect that giant private conglomerates uphold the civil liberties given to us under law in those private spaces they control. After all, they function more like a public utility and common carrier. Otherwise, they will abuse those powers in various ways, for example if their employees have a particular set of biases. It is unacceptable for our most basic and ubiquitous forms of communication to be controlled by tech giants that ignore fundamental societal values like free speech. I also want to point out that not everything that is labeled "hate speech" is clearly bad. For example, Ibram X Kendi defines "racist" as anything that perpetuates inequities across racial groups, meaning differences in outcomes (rather than differences in opportunity). I think most people would not consider a difference in outcomes to be racist, but under Kendi's definition (which is part of the "anti-racist"/CRT movement), even something like an objective standardized test can be viewed as racist. So should speech defending standardized testing be censored on social media? What about speech defending Kyle Rittenhouse, which Twitter/Facebook/etc. have been censoring under their policy around violence/dangerous individuals, despite the recent ruling? Similarly, gender identity and trans issues are highly controversial and there is significant debate on how to deal with it. Does it really make sense to censor open discussion of this issue while it is so current? In all these instances we already have a tried and true solution - let the speech happen, let debate run its course, and avoid simply letting those in power control speech and other outcomes. I'm not sure why that ever became controversial.