Facebook Brings the Hammer Down on Use of the Offensive Slur 'Hoes.' In a Gardening Group.

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If, like me, you've been worried about the harmful effects of rampant sexist slurs coming from those notorious misogynists who love planting begonias and tomatoes and talking about it online, sleep easy, my friends. Those thugs will take their pruning shears to the social fabric no more. Facebook censors are on the job, keeping the rest of us safe. 

NY Post - Facebook’s censors are digging deep — flagging the word “hoe” in a western New York gardening group because they apparently confused the tool for a disparaging term for women.

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?,” [moderator] Elizabeth Licata said. … 

Licata said she never a response from the company, but a Facebook representative told The Associated Press that some of the enforcements had been corrected. …

The extra set of eyes did not prevent a subsequent post in the group from being automatically disabled because of “possible violence, incitement, or hate in multiple comments,” Licata said.

“Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” were some comments Facebook deemed offensive, according to the moderator.

The gardening group snafu was not Facebook’s first hoe faux pas.

This winter, the social network apologized to residents of Plymouth Hoe, an area of the coastal city of Plymouth in England, for repeatedly flagging posts that referenced the seaside attraction.

In George Orwell landmark and uncannily prescient work "1984," the character Syme - who works at the Ministry of Truth with Winston Smith and is the closest thing to a friend he has - explains the way the Party uses language to control thoughts and perpetuate its power by explaining, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” 

And now, we're living it. Except instead of the Party replacing words with approved speech, it's the social media companies. Worse, it's their algorithms. There's not even a human being making these decisions, it's a collection of 1s and 0s. Any person at Facebook who would see "Hoes" come up in group of bores flexing on each other about their daffodils or an actual point on an actual map wouldn't bat an eye. But our robot overlords have been programmed to seek out and destroy any language deemed offensive, context be damned. And because some sort of rudimentary AI is in charge, it is unaccountable to any mere human. With no appeal process. No right to the redress of grievances guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. 

I mean, watch any content creator on YouTube long enough and you'll see them using code words while discussing topics we all have conversations about every day, out of fear of getting sent out to the cyber cornfield by Big Algorithm. And I'm not talking about swear words, but even how they discuss Covid. Google and Twitter are doing slightly different but similarly draconian forms of requiring us to talk in their Newspeak. 

And while you might argue that they're private companies and totally voluntary and you don't have to join them if you don't like them, you might want to check yourself. Tech is the primary way we communicate with each other. And whichever bot controls what you get to say, controls you. Besides, 80 years ago, bad people were making that same argument to defend movie studios for blacklisting writers. But at least when Cecil B. DeMille was trying to destroy people's careers, a guy like John Ford could tell him to go piss up a rope to his face. These plant lovers don't have that luxury when Skynet is telling them they can't use a common gardening tool name because Skynet doesn't know the difference between sexist insults and boring conversations. 

All I'm saying is, be afraid. When the fans of actual hoes aren't safe, none of us are.