Mark Steyn had exactly the same reaction I did. I watched some bits of Zuck’s testimony on Fox News because I wanted to see the bland boy-face of evil and I wasn’t disappointed. He performed magnificently enough that my wife became pissed off at me for yelling at the TV. The snippet Steyn notes provoked my second loudest yell and an admonition to stop ranting.
On Fox, this bit came before the weaseling he did under examination from Ted Cruz, when I erupted with my loudest commentary. My wife changed the channel at that point.
Zuckerberg’s intentions are what he thinks makes him a misunderstood white hat. In his ignorant isolation he truly thinks his intentions are good: That is what makes him evil.
When he speaks about “protecting the “community”” he sneeringly arrogates moral superiority, and is too ignorant to even recognize it. When he speaks about “protecting the electoral process” he is saying “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” He had no concern about “protecting” the 2012 election, when his company actively aided Obama. So be it, as long we as define that as campaign “contribution in kind,” but stop with the maternalistic condescension.
And give up the moral preening that your mission is defining “hate speech.”
One senator who did understand the dangers ahead was Nebraska’s Ben Sasse. Earlier in the hearing, Zuckerberg had suggested that Facebook will eventually develop algorithms that will sniff out hate speech and be able to address it immediately. “Hate speech — I am optimistic that, over a five to ten-year period, we will have A.I. tools that can get into some of the nuances — the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems.”
When Sasse’s turn to question Zuckerberg arrived, he asked a simple question: “Can you define hate speech?”
Zuckerberg said it would be hard to pin down a specific definition, and mentioned speech “calling for violence” as something Facebook does not tolerate.
Does anyone at Facebook understand the ramifications of a vague definition of hate speech? Does Zuckerberg think that the sometimes-violent opposition to any viewpoint that is even remotely conservative on college campuses happened in a vacuum?
He’ll be using Fahrenheit 451 as the instruction manual. And on that, Facebook stock rises. We are dumb f**ks.