May 10, 2019

Hany Farid: Facebook’s Response to Fixing Issues Like Extremist Material is “Frustratingly Slow”

From The New York Times

Why Does Facebook Fail to Fix Itself? It's Partly Humans

By The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — The question comes up over and over, with extremist material, hate speech, election meddling and privacy invasions. Why can't Facebook just fix it?

It's complicated, with reasons that include Facebook's size, its business model and technical limitations, not to mention years of unchecked growth. Oh, and the element of human nature...

"They have been frustratingly slow in dealing with everything from child sexual abuse to terrorism, white supremacy, bullying, nonconsensual porn" and things like allowing advertisers to target categories such as "Jew hater," simply because some users had listed the term as an "interest," said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Professor Hany Farid has a joint appointment at UC Berkeley in the School of Information and EECS.

Last updated:

May 21, 2019