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.

Comments

Who'd a Thunk?

[sycodon]

Try to police speech and expression and you fuck it up every time.

Re:Who'd a Thunk?

[Tuidjy]

Yes, the policies are poorly written. Did you expect something else from Facebook?

And I bet some specific populations are inflamed by "White men" being protected while "Black Children" are not.

But you know what? "Black females" are more protected than "Christian children". "Lesbian Iraqi" are protected, while "White Europeans" are not.

"Young Europeans are subhuman scum" is OK by the stated policies. "Muslim schizophrenics are dangerous" is to be censored.

I bet if the article was written by a Fox news reporter, he would have focused on one of the latter examples. Once you know the flawed rules, you can manipulate them to produce inflammatory results.

As for the slide? Who knows why they came up with such an example. Probably because they wanted the right answer to be reached through knowing the policy, as opposed to following one's gut feelings.

Re: Who'd a Thunk?

[saloomy]

So who has more power and prestige in society: black men or white women? How about black women vs gay black men? Trying to rank demographics is what makes you a racist mother fucker and part of the problem. Yes, having white guys as the brunt of the jokes does a stereotype make, and it's sad. But it's not nearly as sad as trying to defend the stereotype because you feel achievement should be ridiculed. When we see past the stereotypes of who is being ridiculed, attacked, and disparaged is when racism will truely cease.

Re: Who'd a Thunk?

[TheRaven64]

The problem with this argument is that it's to do with medians and not individuals. If you pick a random white guy in the USA and compare him to a random woman of any colour, or to a black guy, then the odds are that he will have had more luck in the opportunities presented to him (which, for some reason, we now call 'privilege'). But there are a lot of individual pairs of white guy and black guy for which the converse is true. Do you think Obama had fewer opportunities than a white guy growing up in a trailer park?

I'm a white guy, and I was fortunate to be born to comfortably off parents who valued education enough to send me to a good school and who encouraged my interests in a field that turned out to be in high demand. Every day on the way to work, I cycle past a few white guts who live on the street and have problems with substance abuse. Saying that we both have more power and prestige because we're white is nonsense. Some of us have more power and prestige because we have been really lucky. That correlates strongly with skin colour for various entrenched reasons to do with wealth distribution and social attitudes, but is in no way caused by skin colour.

While the point could be valid

[tietokone-olmi]

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~.

Re:While the point could be valid

[Rockoon]

You need a society where there is systematic abuse of white men

You mean like a society that has decided the only unprotected people are those that are both white and men?

Re:While the point could be valid

[tietokone-olmi]

>It's impossible because it's not possible for them to be victimized in that way.

Yeah, that's what the racist would say. Can't possibly murder a negro; at most it's damage to property, right?

>Having your feelings hurt != hate speech.

Concrete discrimination against whites today starts from exactly the ideology where whitey cannot possibly be hurt, or damaged, or discriminated against in any way. So we have things like gender-based admission quotas that stop applying the second that the proportion of women to men increases past 1:1, 3:2, or whatever it was; and assistance for the underclasses that're deliberately inapplicable to white people regardless of background.

Re:While the point could be valid

[epyT-R]

If it's immoral to use race as a discriminator, then it's immoral regardless of the targeted race. If the racetype is used to determine the morality of the discrimination under the guise of fighting such discrimination, then the philosophy is illogical and self defeating.

You need a society where there is systematic abuse of white men before they could possibly be the victim of hate speech.

No. The individual situation matters, not some generalized assumption. You just need one person or institution in a position of power to discriminate for/against someone based on race for it to be an example of racism. The best thing for society is to provide a way for grievances to be heard in as unbiased a way as possible, equally, for ALL citizens. Your position (which is the popular GoodThink atm) demonizes specific groups (white/straight/male) by uniting everyone else against them (I'll let you draw the obvious historical parallels). By assuming it's just not possible for them to be discriminated against, you place them on second tier status, dehumanizing them.

Re:Somewhat misleading headline

[Rockoon]

The whole concept of "protected class" is bereft of morality...

So slashdot has to propagate the ignorant outrage?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.