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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~.
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.
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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.
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.