Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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~.
It must be very complicated trying to live as a SJW. I prefer just being nice to 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.
Biased toward facts and truth.
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.
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.
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.
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.