Spotlight on Facebook Groups Affects Microsoft

NewsCloud writes "After Slashdot reported Facebook Exposes Advertisers To Hate Speech, the company removed its F**k Islam group for a day (it's back up now). According to the New York Times, 'Facebook declined to comment on Friday on the subject of hate speech or on what steps had been taken.' It turns out that Microsoft is the digital advertising provider for Facebook serving up ads for companies such as NetFlix, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and Coca Cola. But for now, the Microsoft-served ads for all Facebook group home pages (even those complying with Facebook's Terms of Use) appear to have been taken off the site. For its part, NetFlix told me to address any concerns about its own ad placement along obscene speech with Facebook. T-Mobile said they would look into it."

Comments

Re:Well that's too bad.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Read TFA. See who posted the summary. The guy essentially fabricated a story out of nowhere. Tailor-made slashvertising... Nice.

So what exactly constitutes "obscene speech"?

[RickRussellTX]

Simple question, really. You can choose to agree with speech, and you can choose not to agree with speech. I'll even stretch the concept and say that speech which wanders into explicit sexuality might be considered "obscene" under a traditional judicial concept of pornographic obscenity.

But what makes the Facebook site obscene? The use of the F-word alone?

It's Not Hate Speech

[logicnazi]

"Fuck Islam" is no more hate speech than "Fuck Creationists" or "Fuck Republicans". They both are ways to express strong rejection of a certain belief system. Merely because people label their beliefs religious doesn't magically make them immune from criticism.

More precisely the concept of hate speech is incoherent. It is impossible to at once give a definition of hate speech that makes it clear why it is significantly worse than things like "Fuck Republicans" but yet also makes it obvious that the things termed hate speech, e.g., "Fuck Islam", qualify.

I agree that speech that involves the phrase "Fuck Islam" is more likely to be motivated by thoughtless prejudice than other sorts of speech but mere correlation doesn't get you very far. There is going to be a correlation between "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior" and ignorant prejudice as well but this doesn't make the statement of evangelical beliefs hate speech.

A religious belief is a belief like any other and it's explicit rejection of evidence or proof doesn't means if anything it deserves less protection from criticism than our other beliefs not more. Of course we need to combat hate directed against the people who are muslim, christian or whatever. The fact that they believe something stupid doesn't warrant hating them, most of us believe some stupid shit. However, the way to do this isn't to treat phrases criticizing the belief differently than phrases criticizing conservatism. That just encourages people.