Mark Zuckerberg has had a lot of practice apologizing, even before the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “You know a man has fucked up when he’s forced to apologize as much as a woman,” noted Full Frontal host Samantha Bee on Wednesday night, after playing a supercut of Zuckerberg apologies in the news over the years. But while Facebook’s data-privacy violations are the latest major PR nightmare for the social media platform, it also has tons of other problems that Bee won’t let us (or them) forget about.
For one thing, she says, Facebook has become a haven for hate speech, thanks to inconsistently enforced community standards. While Facebook didn’t take down an “All Lives Splatter” page that encouraged motorists to run over protestors right away, it has suspended women for making generalizations about men. “I’m pretty sure Facebook’s community standards are just a guy wearing a shirt that says, You Do You, Bro,” said Bee. (Last year, leaked internal documents indicated that part of the problem is that Facebook’s algorithm protected categories like race and gender but not age or social class, so that negative discussion of “white men” would raise red flags, but a post insulting “black teens” would not.)
Facebook’s failure to quash hateful rhetoric, whether by enabling advertisers to reach “Jew haters” or neglecting to crack down on inflammatory posts that contributed to violence in Sri Lanka, led Bee to compare it to a robot that eats human skin. “Maybe that robot does amazing things like cure cancer or make Thin Mints, and that is great,” said Bee, talking directly to Zuckerberg. “But it’s fueling those amazing things with human skin, and you can’t be surprised when a human skin–eating robot starts eating people. That’s what you built it to do […] It made you rich, and it is your job to kill it.”
