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The statement, ‘men are trash’ is something that has been thrown around for quite a while now, mostly as a response to the terrible things men do to women, against women or just do in general.
As popular as the statement is on social media the issue of whether it constitutes as hate speech is something that would light up a wildfire and we are not going to get into that.
What we’ll get into, however, is the fact that Facebook labels the term ‘men are trash’ as hate speech.
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What this means is that, if you make a post that includes the statement ‘men are trash’, your post will be deleted regardless of the context.
Well, this policy seems to have rubbed off a number of people the wrong way, including Facebook’s own staff members.
In the leaked audio of Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, answering some questions from his team, one of the questions arose around the issue of tagging ‘men are trash’ as hate speech.
“According to your policies ‘men are trash’ is considered tier-one hate speech. So what that means is that our classifiers are able to automatically delete most of the posts or comments that have this phrase in it. Why?” the question was posed.
In his response, Mark says that the reasoning behind this policy is that gender in itself is a protected category. He goes further to state that if the statement was substituted to ‘Muslims are trash’ then it would create an uproar.
“We don’t think that we should be in the business of assessing which group has been disadvantaged or oppressed”
Mark says that tagging any form of gender discrimination as hate speech, including ‘men are trash’ is a way of maintaining consistency in their policy.
He says that as much as the policy might not sit well with everyone and some people might say those hate speech policies should be put in place to protect groups that have previously been disadvantaged or oppressed, Facebook is not in the business of determining which groups are oppressed or disadvantaged.
“We’ve made the policy decision that we don’t think that we should be in the business of assessing which group has been disadvantaged or oppressed, if for no other reason than that it can vary very differently from country to country…
So what we’ve basically made the decision on is, we’re going to look at these protected categories, whether it’s things around gender or race or religion, and we’re going to say that that we’re going to enforce against them equally,” he adds.
So there you have it. That’s the reason you cannot post ‘men are trash’ on Facebook.
Whether you are satisfied by the reason is a whole other matter which you should feel free to share in the comments section down below.
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