Facebook's Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules Allows Vile Posts To Stay Up (propublica.org)

ProPublica has found inconsistent rulings on hate speech after analyzing more than 900 Facebook posts submitted to them as part of a crowd-sourced investigation into how the world's largest social network implements its hate-speech rules. "Based on this small fraction of Facebook posts, its content reviewers often make different calls on items with similar content, and don't always abide by the company's complex guidelines," reports ProPublica. "Even when they do follow the rules, racist or sexist language may survive scrutiny because it is not sufficiently derogatory or violent to meet Facebook's definition of hate speech." From the report: We asked Facebook to explain its decisions on a sample of 49 items, sent in by people who maintained that content reviewers had erred, mostly by leaving hate speech up, or in a few instances by deleting legitimate expression. In 22 cases, Facebook said its reviewers had made a mistake. In 19, it defended the rulings. In six cases, Facebook said the content did violate its rules but its reviewers had not actually judged it one way or the other because users had not flagged it correctly, or the author had deleted it. In the other two cases, it said it didn't have enough information to respond.

"We're sorry for the mistakes we have made -- they do not reflect the community we want to help build," Facebook Vice President Justin Osofsky said in a statement. "We must do better." He said Facebook will double the size of its safety and security team, which includes content reviewers and other employees, to 20,000 people in 2018, in an effort to enforce its rules better. He added that Facebook deletes about 66,000 posts reported as hate speech each week, but that not everything offensive qualifies as hate speech. "Our policies allow content that may be controversial and at times even distasteful, but it does not cross the line into hate speech," he said. "This may include criticism of public figures, religions, professions, and political ideologies."

Comments

A crowd sourced investigation

[Patent Lover]

How scientific.

Some of the most vile postings I've seen on FB

[SlaveToTheGrind]

have been directed toward conservatives or others who don't mindlessly toe the party line. Strangely, those all seem to stay up. If you want to talk about uneven enforcement, how about starting there?

Re:Some of the most vile postings I've seen on FB

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Ah, I get it. So you don't even participate in FB, have no basis to believe that what I'm saying is untrue, pretend it didn't just play out right in front of you here, and yet accuse me of making it all up. That's some chutzpah.

Re:I miss Usenet

[Pfhorrest]

You could be "silenced" on UseNet, with a killfile. But the thing was, killfiles were user-specific. Each user could decide who they wanted to "ban" from the discussion, and to that user, whoever they wanted gone, was gone. Any nobody else had any idea.

I don't see why modern discussion systems can't implement something like that. Allow people to share "kill-lists" too, so you can get a list of all the known [the-other-side] trolls you don't want to deal with from other people who've had to deal with them. Everyone gets their own personal shadowban button, but it only shadowbans people from that user's perspective. Eliminate anyone you want from your view of the discussion and build your own personal filter bubble if you want. Nobody else will be any the wiser. Nobody gets censored, and anyone who wants to see the shitstorm of unfiltered content can, at their own expense and nobody else's.