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

Somewhat misleading headline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Somewhat misleading headline

[Rockoon]

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

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~.

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.

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.