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Two things…

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Do you ever get a matched pair of news items cross your threshold; two things that interlock in a horrible way?

This lady was murdered and her murderer (relationship unclear) posted pictures of her body (and his; he cut himself up too) on her FaceBook account.

The snuff pictures stayed up for days, despite the efforts of several family members to have them removed, because some drone on FB couldn’t see how they violated policies. Her sister said, “They told me I could block Jennifer if I didn’t like what she posted and gave me other similar options.” Didn’t like what Jennifer posted. Jennifer is the murdered woman. She’s not posting much at the moment.

Followed shortly by this Breitbart item:

The European Commission has today announced a partnership with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft in order to crack down on what it classes as “illegal hate speech” while “criminaliz[ing]” perpetrators and “promoting independent counter-narratives” that the European Union favours.

The article is worth a read. Bearing in mind that we don’t have good speech protections here and bearing in mind most of Europe was until very recently some flavor of monarchy or dictatorship so they’re pretty comfy with that and bearing in mind the EU is a bunch of corrupt lefty kleptocrats, this is all pretty scary.

What ties the two together is that gatekeepers are stupid. That’s one flaw of cracking down — who decides where the line is? Either the first responders are scripts and bots (hence people in poor old Scunthorpe couldn’t get their mail from AOL servers back in the day), or they’re overworked, poorly-compensated human flunkies with a good amount of autonomy and delusions of adequacy. Either way, mistakes happen. Nothing but mistakes happen. Whole galloping herds of stampeding mistakes will happen.

My personal FaceBook is as pure as the driven snow — nothing but innocuous people I know (not counting that one brother), history and chicken groups — but something as mild as this post in a different context could land me in shit, if the EU gets its way.

May 31, 2016 — 9:30 pm
Comments: 13