Social Media is Evil

[KevinM1]

He made a lot of humorous jests about Facebook's failures, but the bulk of his video focuses on the example of Facebook in Myanmar (Burma).  In Myanmar, Facebook was originally excluded from data charges for Myanmar users, making it essentially free, resulting in Facebook becoming the prime source of information for many in Myanmar.  In Myanmar, for many years, Facebook was used to spread hate speech against the Rohingya, in part due to the fact that Facebook had insufficient Burmese speakers such that they couldn't properly police the content (still a problem).  Thus hate in Myanmar was spread wildly, was believed as fact, and not adequately policed, thanks to Facebook.

Thanks to Facebook, or thanks to an ineffectual (or, completely effectual if this is the desired outcome) government?

This brings up an interesting gray area - Facebook itself is not a news organization. It's merely a social media platform. To what extent should it police people's opinions? I mean, obvious hate speech, harassment, trolling, etc. seems a pretty obvious 'no' on any platform, but what about people who use dog whistle terms? Or just regular language, but in a provocative way?

Should Facebook have the responsibility to vet every purported news source that people share on it?