Post No Evil Redux

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, History, Documentary, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we revisit our story on Facebook and its rulebook, looking at what’s changed in the past two years and exploring how these rules will impact the 2020 Presidential Election. Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and gore. Today, they’re anything but. How do you define hate speech? Where’s the line between a joke and an attack? How much butt is too much butt? Facebook has answered these questions. And from these answers they’ve written a rulebook that all 2.2 billion of us are expected to follow. Today, we explore that rulebook. We dive into its details and untangle its logic. All the while wondering what does this mean for the future of free speech? This episode was reported by Simon Adler with help from Tracie Hunte and was produced by Simon Adler with help from Bethel Habte. Special thanks to Sarah Roberts, Jeffrey Rosen, Carolyn Glanville, Ruchika Budhraja, Brian Dogan, Ellen Silver, James Mitchell, Guy Rosen, Mike Masnick, and our voice actor Michael Chernus. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, so in the layer cake of mayhem that we find ourselves in, that metaphor makes no sense.
0:06.5	I want to update a story that we played a few years ago that is fascinating, but definitely
0:13.6	shifting and changing as we speak and worth tracking and yet hard to track with all the things
0:19.0	that are happening right now.
0:20.2	This is a story that aired, I believe, two years ago, but still very timely, as you'll hear.
0:26.1	A bit later in the episode, we'll come back around and update it, bring it up to the present.
0:31.4	Wait, you're listening.
0:32.5	Okay.
0:33.7	All right.
0:35.0	Okay.
0:36.3	All right.
0:37.7	You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:40.7	Radio Lab.
0:41.2	From W. N. Y.
0:43.3	C.
0:44.1	See?
0:44.4	Yeah.
0:48.8	Hey, I'm Chad I boomrod.
0:50.5	I'm Robert Krollwitch.
0:51.7	Radio Lab.
0:52.4	And today we have a story about what we can say. And what we can't. And by the way, there's going to be a smattering of curse words here that we're not going to bleep, which I think makes sense given the content of the story. And also there's some graphic scenes that if you've got kids with it, you may want to set this one out.
1:13.8	Anyway, the story comes to us from producer Simon Adler.
	...

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