Facebook's Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children (propublica.org)
Sidney Fussell from Gizmodo summarizes a report from ProPublica, which brings to light dozens of training documents used by Facebook to train moderators on hate speech: As the trove of slides and quizzes reveals, Facebook uses a warped, one-sided reasoning to balance policing hate speech against users' freedom of expression on the platform. This is perhaps best summarized by the above image from one of its training slideshows, wherein Facebook instructs moderators to protect "White Men," but not "Female Drivers" or "Black Children." Facebook only blocks inflammatory remarks if they're used against members of a "protected class." But Facebook itself decides who makes up a protected class, with lots of clear opportunities for moderation to be applied arbitrarily at best and against minoritized people critiquing those in power (particularly white men) at worst --
as Facebook has been routinely accused of. According to the leaked documents, here are the group identifiers Facebook protects: Sex, Religious affiliation, National origin, Gender identity, Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Serious disability or disease. And here are those Facebook won't protect: Social class, continental origin, appearance, age, occupation, political ideology, religions, countries. Subsets of groups -- female drivers, Jewish professors, gay liberals -- aren't protected either, as ProPublica explains: White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
Try to police speech and expression and you fuck it up every time.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's a black box. They do what they want according to what they think will get the most eyeballs for the longest amount of time. There is no logic to it behind that. They A/B test protected classes, then measure the outrage.
Human-ness?
Anyway, religion shouldn't be protected, because anyone who is STUPID ENOUGH to believe in magical floating fairies should get any abuse coming to them.
The reason for the headline is that "children" is not a protected category, while skin color and gender both are.
It's entirely about the words.
"white men" are protected exactly as much as "black men" or "white women" or "black women", because both the noun and the adjective refer to protected categories.
"black children" are protected, likewise, just as much as "white children" or "white adults" or "black adults"-- the second word in the phrase is not a protected category.
Dumb ass that wrote the article found that being pedantic could help form the basis of a click bait article.
What's the problem?
The author goes off the deep end when her ideology comes out somewhere halfway through the summary. To wit, the bit where she decries the disallowing of hate speech against white men in particular, because it's of course not possible to hate-speak against whitey for ~reasons~.
Facebook's Secret Censorship Rules Protect Black Men From Hate Speech But Not White Children
Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even harder.
Slashdot is becoming SJW Central ... Slashdot is becoming SJW Central ... Slashdot is becoming SJW Central
Everyone: delete your facebook account and stay the hell away from the internet or else you may be offended by a stranger!! If you're ok with being offended by strangers you may stay. If you complain about being offended, GTFO. There you go, problem solved, no censorship necessary.
The usual stereotype about female drivers is that most female drivers are bad. In other words, that females en masse are bad as drivers. I fail to see how it's not about a protected class, unless some other stereotype is meant here.
I choose oblivion. I never asked to be created. Even then, I will never willingly submit to some bastard who's only tenet is "love me, or suffer." Love extracted at the end of a sword is not love.
Try getting a blonde joke removed from Facebook under the cause of racism. Just try it.
It must be very complicated trying to live as a SJW. I prefer just being nice to people.
And it's awesome!
Captcha - "scoops"; I'll take two!
In addition to the current (today) ruling on Google in regards to Privacy for all Canadians worldwide, this is why FB will be the next American corporation up against the wall.
Protecting White Men is a direct violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
First Nations deserves equal protections. So do black or Jewish Canadian musicians like Drake.
So do little kids.
Discrimination is not ok.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Now that this is public knowledge, people can post any hate speech they want. "White men who aren't me suck!", for example. Or "women older than 1 are terrible people!"
First of all, the article makes it seem like whites are protected while blacks aren't. That isn't the case, everyone in a group gets equal rights to censorship.
However this is a clear example of Simpson's Paradox, if you split up your sample set enough, you get contradictory results.
This is a direct result of SJW demands for censorship with a healthy dose of discrimination, you get a patchwork of rules that is neither based on word of law or common sense and can be cut and paste to fit pretty much every model.
You can boil down and extend every SJW argument using the same logic and see that what they are asking for is not protection but discrimination.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Seriously, this is taking the example way out of context. It's a perfect example of training material giving examples that on the surface seem legitimate and the having the less obvious example be the right answer. The example is done to prove a point and make people pay attention to detail. When talking about "protected" in today's world, everyone thinks of anything but white men. That's the point here. The right answer of an entire race is hiding with subsets of a gender and race.
Had they shown a picture of black people, one of a white woman store clerk and one of white kids, people would have just chosen the picture of black people and not ever thought of why they did. To teach, you need to provoke thought, not just make it easy to select the right answer without knowing why.
Facebook isn't a govt. Why is it policing anything? Just put up a 18+ sign and make people login confirm they are an adult.
Facebook is a public US company, so they should attempt to keep their customers and shareholders happy. That isn't always possible with billions of both.
It isn't like a new source or public utility. You don't have to use facebook, BTW. Actually, it is pretty easy to block at the network layer. https://lifehacker.com/5817447...
There unfortunately has to be some moderation or everything turns into 4chan/b/.
Also your 'blocking' will break any number of websites completely, because they've gotten the clue that they need to host some of their actual content on the same domains that host their ads, so if you block their ads, their site doesn't work at all. Putting it in the HOSTS file takes away any flexibility of choice in the matter.
If you are unhappy with how facebook is conducting itself then by all means, stop using it. There has never been a need to use facebook and it's causing you distress then you shouldn't be using it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Fuck. You.
Didi Delgado, whose post stating that “white people are racist” was deleted, has been banned from Facebook so often that she has set up an account on another service called Patreon, where she posts the content that Facebook suppressed. In May, she deplored the increasingly common Facebook censorship of black activists in an article for Medium titled “Mark Zuckerberg Hates Black People.”
You don't have to be white to be a racist.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As a motorist I have been asking for protection against female drivers for years.
First of all if they're 'secret'.... how do you know what they protect?
Biased toward facts and truth.
Is cancer
Seriously, consider the source.
Have gnu, will travel.
But it's definitely biased.
only that bias is anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male, and anti-conservative..
http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
And the obligatory theme song https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The protected category of race includes black children and white men.
So black women are protected and white children and male drivers aren't protected...
Actually, that won't cause an uproar...
Does Not exist, you damned snowflakes .
...is to speak honestly. Now I don't have to debate or wonder whether the OP is insane. They cut straight to the end. See, our culture is getting more efficient every year!
Thank you.
Should be the reward for the Slashdot "editors" who decide to publish articles about Facebook.
in many, many ways.
But he insists that I exist. If given the choice, I would choose to be obliterated. From the start, preferably.
Sounds fake
Clearly the solution is to stop policing speech and let every commercial web service turn into a swirling maelstrom of racial slurs.
No, the solution is to make it easy for people to choose not to listen. In real life when some hate filled bigot is rambling on most of us are usually blissfully unaware of it since we choose not to go to whatever event s/he is speaking at.
What these social media sites need is an "ignore" button that essentially blocks that person from any contact with the user who chooses to ignore them. This would have to be coupled with some mechanism to prevent users from creating multiple accounts as a means to get around the ignore. However a scheme like this lets everyone have their freedoms: the bigots have their freedom of speech to say what they want and the rest of us have our freedom to not hear it just like we do in real life.
Interesting, if twisted, fantasy.
As TFA states these are arbitrary policies that change all the time. People started complaining about the open discrimination and hatred for white males, and Facebook could not say "nuh uh" with the prevalence of posts doing exactly that. So for a while (read: until the coast is clear) they will address those issues.
Pretty much how all authoritarian systems work, and history is chalk full of examples. Some are quite famous, but of course "it couldn't happen to me..".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
On Ars Technica, the headline is: Facebook’s secret rules mean that it’s ok to be anti-Islam, but not anti-gay
Impetuous! Homeric!
Does anybody suspect that screenshot is fake?
How come these articles always revolve about "the white man"?
This is why media narratives are dangerous. They produce legions of misled idiots like yourself. Facebook is anything but a white male haven.
Violating copyright was already illegal
Given the amount of conservatives being attacked, this doesn't look like to be the practice.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Honestly, FB is in a no-win situation and should go hardcore for the First Amendment (which exists specifically to protect unpopular and/or offensive speech) and just be hands off with user content unless there are threats of violence or encouragements of harming one'self or another or violating the laws in the US... The race card in general and hate speech specifically is subjective and the term is already abused routinely by the fascist progressives on a daily basis.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
It seems to me the choice of examples is intended to show Facebook is racist. But in my opinion it fails to do so. Their rules may be stupid, but if applied consistently they are not racist. Example: White men is protected, but Black Children is not. Ok. Question. Is Black men protected? I assume so, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly. Is White children protected? Again, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly, then the answer is no. So what do we have: white children. Not protected. black children, not protected. white men: protected. black men: protected. Then the sex discrimination that is implied: apparently female drivers is not protected, while white men is. Fine. But the question is: Is 'white females' protected? If I understand the rules correctly, yes it is. Is mMale drivers protected? If I understand the rules correctly, it isn't. So what do we have: white males protected, as is white females (and consequently, also black females). female drivers not protected, male drivers not protected. So based in the information I see, you cannot conclude that Facebook's rules are either racist or sexist. They are stupid as fuck, but not racist or sexist.
Dare one suspect that extracting a single slide out of a presentation might possibly be presenting the issue outside of its original context?
The obvious solution is to keep adding protected classes. Of course the end result of that will be that everybody falls into a protected class, effectively making hate speech towards anybody off-limits. That means we'd all have to be nice to each other, or stop using FaceBook. Either way works for me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hey....why not give us white guys this one, eh?
I mean, in EVERY other forum, it is perfectly normal and acceptable to ridicule and rant against white guys....it is never discrimination if it's against a white guy.
Maybe the non-white guys are using the wrong text editor?
Real lawyers write in C++
Dishonest and angled as fuck.
Black men would be protected.
White teens wouldn't.
Angled dishonest confusing SJW propaganda.
"Hate speech" shouldn't be a concept banned and censored.
Because of hate speech laws we lack and actual debate and public support for our own genocide and invasion by unwanted people. We never got a chance to talk about and affect it. Where will that leave things? Why would we have to support and respect what we never agreed to and which was enforced upon us by the non-democratic rulers?
When civil-war and terror are the only options to affect things because you are silenced and ignored?
Biggest treason, genocide and catastrophe of Europe ever.
How did this SJW propaganda get elevated to the front page? That article is sensationalist bullshit.
Who invented this term? Why, it was our Jewish 'masters', wasn't it, who invented this phrase to shut down FREE speech - i.e. any discussion or criticism of their endless crimes against us.
Fake news
Or it just may be, that it is not so simple to formulate rules for automated censoring. If all "muslims" are in a "protected group" without restrictions, then it becomes impossible to criticize "radical muslims". Same goes for "racist white men" or "racist whites". Also if "black women" should be included in the censoring scheme, then "white men" must be too. All this "politically correct" censoring is a questionable approach at best.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Come on, find credible sources, not just some unvalidated unpublished "trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica" that came out of nowhere.
While there's certainly valid criticism to be leveled at Facebook's censorship policies, can we all take a moment to realize that the slides from the supposed Facebook training slides published by ProPublica offer precisely zero evidence as originating from Facebook?
The article offers no evidence to suggest what appears to be one-sided protection is actually a systemic policy within the organization. While this could very well be the case, cherrypicking examples of Facebook's censorship isn't necessarily evidence of the claim. In fact, the ProPublica article claims a "trove of internal documents sheds light on the algorithms that Facebook’s censors use to differentiate between hate speech and legitimate political expression" but doesn't offer a single one of those documents up for public consumption.
ProPublica prides itself on investigative journalism. This article is not that. I expect better.
Nobody's a minority on FB, and nobody's a majority on FB. Why? Because, if you're a latin immigrant, you got your whole country on FB as well, if you're a Syrian refugee, same - got all your community on FB with you (and they do use cell phones just as anyone). So basically everyone is inside his own community on FB. Who's a minority when you're with all your people? Who's a majority when there are so many countries and societies there?
So that liberal twat Zuck is also a racist? Yeah, not buying this article one bit. However, it would be much better if everyone learned that talk is just that. Talk. Opinions hurt people even less than nothing, unless they are deliberately looking for being offended.
And those people need to fuck right the hell off.
Pax Vobiscum
Let's be honest, if you are going to have any sort of systematic moderation of content, you are going to have to have some sort of standards for what is and isn't allowable. Facebook isn't in this to create a platform for the free expression of ideas - they are there to sell advertising, and it's bad for business to have vitriolic hate speech all over people's news feeds.
So if you are going to draw up some standards to unambiguously draw lines for your paid moderation staff, how are you going to do it? Basing it primarily on classes that are legally protected isn't a bad start, at least in the sense that the law is intended to democratically codify our society's shared morality.
What's more, you have to figure out how intersections between sets is going to work - it becomes a problem of set theory and attribute inheritance between sets. The way they are doing it, where the intersection of a Protected set and Non-protected set becomes Non-protected, errs on the side of free speech, but I'd argue it's the only reasonable way to do it. So if you insult black people as a whole, you're over the line, but if you insult black children, you aren't. That seems odd, but think about the alternative - if any set intersecting with a protected class was itself protected, it would mean that you couldn't talk about the protected class in any context at all. I couldn't say anything bad about Christian terrorists or female serial killers or white supremacists or North Korean dictators... because they would each inherit the protection of religion, gender, race, or nationality, respectively.
“'The police should kill Black Lives Matter thugs!' is unacceptable,but it’s completely fine to say 'Mike Brown, shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, deserved to die.'"
Anyone with an unbiased brain can see the difference between the two and why one shouldn't be part of a blanket censoring. If anything should be blocked, it should be "____ deserved to die".
I'm actually thinking this article argues against itself.
It really says something that journalists are not blacklisted for being so fucktarded
What am I supposed to be outraged about now? A casual glance at the words seem to imply that white men are allowed to be racist while black children are allowed to be discriminated against; however, due to the weasel wording, you have to fully "get with" whatever agenda is being pushed before you can participate in any discussion about it.
TL;DR, What kind of fucked up summary is this? I only clicked on this article so I could ask that question.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
They will protect the ones that have more political power over them, Facebook is a cesspool of everything thats wrong about society, is worse, it amplifies the worst examples and does not encourage social change at all.
This system is fairly sensible and only appears racist to some because of the way it's spinned.
Sex+Race is protected, but not Race+Age. That's because Age is explicitly not protected.
Screw Facebook.
Goodbye slashdot. This is just too retarded.
I once reported a black guy for calling for the death of all white people. Repeatedly.
And that wasn't counting the racial slurs he was using.
When it was reviewed, his post did not breach Facebook community guidelines, meanwhile I got a 3 day ban for saying white people aren't the sole source of racism in the world.
Hello, yes my name is Jamal Obama Brown! Oh, no it's not a family name, but I legally changed it to reduce my white privilege on paper.
You're not hiring anymore? Oh, you wanted a diversity hire, not just "a person who meets the job requirements"
Thank you facebook, I appreciate what you have done for White men. It's a lonely world when everyone is calling you an evil white devil and constantly asking if you are racist for no good reason. I really do appreciate this. I hope to see more laws that support protection of White Male and Female against hate speech. We have been led to believe that if you are not White it's fine and dandy to spout every hateful word under the sun to a White person, but when a White person tries to retort and explain that the opposite party is actually being the one that is racist you still somehow end up being racist because you are white. And as everyone knows from our 90% Ultra-Left Liberal Marxist colleges that only White people can be racist. This is a recipe for disaster and not fair to White people. Without our own laws that protect us from hate speech then we will be persecuted to the grave. Thank you once again and I appreciate you for being extremely mindful of the current day situation, especially since it's so fashionable to hate Whitey.