Thread by @ashwinl

1/ I’m in Vilnius this week. Here’s an attempt to connect a couple dots from observations and conversations. Bear with me. Want to paint the human side of this story. #Facebook

2/ Just met a 40-year old father of 2 from Venezuela. We’ll call him John. John studied chemical engineering

3/ John’s grand parents were from Lithuania and fled the country in 1944 when the Soviet occupation began. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_oc…

4/ John’s grandparents ended up in Venezuela.

Recall, Venezuela has the world's largest known oil reserves (discovered after WWI). Apparently it had Latin America’s highest GDP in the mid 20th century according to Wikipedia.

5/ John mother was Venezuelan mother. His family was educated and well-to-do. John later married a woman from Italy. They have 2 kids and inherited property in Venezuela. “Citizens of the world”

6/ Chávez came into power in 1998. His successor, Maduro, continued governing in a similar populist manner from 2013 to present.

7/ Because of the country’s hyperinflation, currency devaluations, food shortages, unemployment, general safety and currency export controls ...

8/ ... John and his family left soon after Maduro (leaving behind much of their belongings, unsold property) and went to be near his wife’s family in Europe.

9/ As a side, now large multi national corporations are leaving Venezuela too “cit­ing the ‘de­te­ri­o­ration’ of a coun­try in the midst of an eco­nomic melt­down”. We talk about the news today...
wsj.com/articles/kello…

10/ Back to John... he is having difficulty getting Italian citizenship to allow him to work in Europe bc the Venezuelan embassy isn’t cooperating. As a result he is classified as an “economic migrant”. I can sense he is eager to work.

11/ John speaks English, Spanish and Lithuanian and some Italian.

12/ Meanwhile ..... Facebook is investing 100s of millions of $ to combat hate speech. “For 2017, Face­book in­creased the com­mu­nity op­er­ations team’s bud­get by al­most 50% to $220 mil­lion.”
wsj.com/articles/faceb…

13/ In the past few years, “every­one has come to re­al­ize that we re­ally need to over-in­vest in this,” Mr. Rosen told re­porters last week. “This is the top pri­or­ity for the com­pany.”

14/ “#Facebook re­mains out­gunned in many ways. Its ser­vices are of­fered in more than 100 lan­guages, but its con­tent re­view teams speak a lit­tle more than 50. That means prob­lematic posts con­tinue to thrive, es­pe­cially in de­vel­op­ing mar­kets

15/ Have you browsed #Facebook job postings, especially for “Community Operations”. Scroll down and see the variety of languages they need help in. Supports the @wsj point.
m.facebook.com/careers/teams/…

16/ But, it’s interesting that all these jobs are in #menlopark, #Dublin or #Hyderabad. Why? People like John are looking for work, educated, yet politically handcuffed. How many other “economic migrants” are in the same boat?

17/ In fact a job for John exists (“Market Specialist, Community Operations, Lithuanian”), but it’s in Dublin where he doesn’t have authority to work
m.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a…

18/ Kanye had something to say about a potential solution recently

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by @kanyewest view original on Twitter

19/ Imagine a world where people like John could address @facebook @fbnewsroom “top priority” from their home on their own time. And get a piece of that $220M budget.

20/ Eliminating hate speech would be reduced a lot faster in a less centralized manner even with the 💯s of languages

21/ There’s even a global currency you can instantly pay these workers with ... #Bitcoin of course!

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