Facebook's algorithm bans a passage from the Declaration of Independence

Remember earlier this month when Facebook's algorithm banned a passage from the Declaration of Independence? Jim Goad looks into it at Taki's Magazine.

On July 2, Facebook’s indefatigable legions of Hate Robots censored a post as “hate speech” because it dared to contain a passage from the Declaration of Independence:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The three words everyone zeroed in on were “merciless Indian savages.” The only thing inaccurate in the term “merciless Indian savages” is the word “Indian,” but facts don’t matter in an era where moral outrage is forever on the warpath.



According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker:

Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Read more here.