Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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."
I mean that with all the hate I can muster.
This is how you deal with the problem.
What would Donald Trump do?
Then don't do that.
I suggest putting it on a card.
censor all the things
The US university system graduates so many SJW every year. They would enjoy the feeling of power to censor the internet for a social media company.
Just list all the terms, music, art, culture, music/movie reviews, cartoons, blasphemy to be de ranked, banned and removed.
SJW can also report users, accounts, art work, history to EU and US law enforcement too.
Just hire a lot more SJW and let them censor social media.
Social media's got what governments crave. They crave censorship. It's got social justice.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Anything else means that you're getting in the way of somebody's Freedom of Speech.
In fact, it might be nice to know that Fred Bloggs can't go three posts without using the N-word.
It will inform me when I'm making decisions about who to invite to a party, recommend for a job opening, etc.
I'm not saying that Facebook is making a good faith effort to solve the problem. I've never looked at it, so I have no idea. I'm saying that the problem as stated is a hard problem. It's easy to, say, ban certain particular words, but that doesn't accomplish very much.
I'm not sure that the problem as stated could be addressed by anything much short of a human equivalent AI, and even that would only allow some particular set of standards to be applied uniformly. It sure couldn't guarantee that the standards were fair.
As an example consider the text "You with a donkey's member!" This is apparently a violently abusive comment, but that depends on context that isn't present. I'm sure I could come up with a context where that would be encouragement. And every single word in that sentence is perfectly harmless. Or what about "Pepe the frog"? That was intended to be a humorous children's cartoon character....but it didn't stay that way, much to the annoyance of the creator.
That said, the evidence seems to support the assertion that Facebook encourages hateful posts, and is more reluctant to censor nazi-ish posts than those with an opposing message. Again, I have no direct evidence for this as I never visit that site, and am relying on material published by others.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Arbitrary, subjective rules can never be enforced fairly. Create more objective criteria, or stop moderating altogether and let people do their own blocking like adults.
Facebook and trump are both going down in flames in 2018.
You heard it here first.
It means that they can filter whatever they want and blame it on the "automated" filter....
Publish the "49 items" so we may judge for ourselves what it is that you deem "hate speech." Otherwise fuck off.
There was nothing comparable to that -- no bureaucracy that needed to employ a small army to act as a thought police, enforcing vaguely-defined thoughtcrime. There were just a few, content-neutral rules one had to follow, to post on Usenet. You were free to write anything you wanted, no matter how vulgar or obscene. Complete and unrestricted freedom of speech. You could not be silenced. When some snowflake or a SJW got triggered, too bad, so sad. They could do nothing about it. In its heyday, I had a blast of a time trolling the snowflakes and giving them daily aneurisms. I miss those days.
Of course, Usenet's still around, if one knows where to find it. And, come to think of it, I think I will. The riff-raff, the millenial snowflakes can have Faceboot, Twatter, and the rest of that junk. They should stay off Usenet. They wouldn't be able to handle it.
At first pass, there seems to be an easy way to recognize if one's "Hateful Comment" is truly "offensive" and not a result of one's unconsciously political bias.
In a nutshell, if one doesn't find the comment hateful when used against their own sacred cows, then it isn't hateful.
To cite an example in the article which FACEBOOK deleted a post during a "candid discussion of gender issues"
"...Charro Sebring, which said, “Men really are trash.”
If the comment had been "Women really are trash" and the complainer found it acceptable within the bounds of the discussion, then it was NOT HATEFUL.
Realistically, we don't live in a utopia where every perceived transgression is instantly recognized and the transgressor objectively punished. I'd hate to have NOMADS running around saying "Sterilize Imperfection ... STERILIZE!!!"
One left-wing troll story after another. Are you retards trying to hit your quote before the year is up or are is the supervision on their Christmas vacation this week?
How scientific.
As Tim finishes a late-night USENET session in his den, he congratulates
himself for once again helping to preserve the freedom of 'Netters and
nutters everywhere, he hears a sharp rapping at his front door. "Now,
who could that be?" he asks himself as he peers through the fisheye lens
set in the door. He sees nobody outside and prepares to return to the
den. As he turns to make his way back, another salvo of raps erupts
from the other side of the door. Bemused, Tim steps back to the door
and gazes through the viewport. As before, he sees nothing. He
mutters, "Must be that little bastard kid from down the str..." before
more raps interrupt his thought.
Tim has had enough of this bullshit. He opens the door, leaving all
three chains in their runways. He peers carefully around the edge of
the door, expecting to see the little brat hiding against the door...
oh, what a kick in the pants HE'S gonna get! However, there is still
nothing to see. Throughly confused now -- especially since he didn't
hear any footsteps in the gravel outside his porch, Tim prepares to
close the door. He's going to call the cops if this SOB bothers him
again.
As his hand presses against the door, he sees a metallic flash as .
something shoots through the gap between door and jamb. Tim screams as
the object curls around and buries itself in the back of his hand.
Blood drizzles out to stain the door, rivulets running down towards the
plush shag carpet, as bolts of pain course up Tim's arm to galvanize his
reeling brain. Tim tries desperately to yank his hand away from the
pain, but manages only to tear the hand wound open further and shatter
two bones in his palm. As the bone-shards work their way into the
surrounding flesh, a white-hot shout of agony causes Tim's knees to
buckle, then to give way, causing even more injury to his mangled palm
as all his weight becomes suspended from the large and very sharp hook
that has been thrust through his hand. The last things Tim sees before
he loses consciousness are his right hand, now split nearly in half as
the hook tears away the last strap of flesh between his middle and index
fingers, followed by the
removal of the hook and the arrival of a large set of bolt-cutters,
which begins to munch on his door-chains as he heads into the black. .
.
Some time later, Tim awakens to find himself lying on his living-room
floor. His right hand throbs sickly. He groans and tries to sit up. He
gags as something slick and cool clenches tightly around his neck, then
relaxes as he quickly lets his head return to the floor. He sees that
his wrists and ankles are also bound by more thick straps of black
rubber attached to the floor with large nails. His ankles have been
secured so that his knees are bent at a 90-degree angle and his legs are
spread apart. Tim struggles halfheartedly, then subsides as he hears a
grunt, followed by the sound of a chair scraping on his kitchen floor.
Tim and the floor both shake as heavy footfalls approach. A moment
later, Tim's assailant emerges into the living room.
"Hello there, Mr. Brown! You can call me Bit. I'll call you Tim. Hope
you don't have any problems with that," chuckles the gigantic man
looming over Tim. Bit smiles crookedly at his new buddy as he makes his
way to the couch, dragging a well-used EASTON aluminum baseball bat
behind him. The couch protests loudly as Bit sits on it, but holds up.
Bit lays the bat against the arm of the couch, then gazes fixedly at
Tim.
"Tim, we have a little problem here. My problem is that I don't care to .sig). That ain't all, bud. If
download over 200 lines of useless SHIT when I read someone's message.
I'd wager others feel the same way, especially all those poor sods in
the OTHER newsgroups that have been receiving your 'The Last Word' posts
(each one complete with the 'scorefile'
your original post had been
They are all dying.
I have been poking around into a few communities I used to visit or knew people in, and visiting a few communities I didn't visit back when they were fresh and new. Almost all of them have waning activity. The largest active IRC now seems to be freenode, and mostly in the developer channels, combined with #hardware. 2600's irc is dead. IRC2P on I2P has about 20-30 regulars, spread across the i2p developer channels, #salt, and the russian/chinese channels and is otherwise dead. MU* communities that used to have playerbases in the hundreds connected range are now down to 100 at their peak, other than 1-2 cybersex themed MU*s. The older or mismanaged ones having 3-5 players, usually not even staff connected to them anymore.
XMPP is similiar. Despite every major messaging app, except maybe Slack having been founded/based on XMPP, no end users know or care about that anymore, instead claiiming they are 'private' because some social media hype claimed it so.
Result of all this, the techies who were middle aged during the 80s-90s are all retiring out of online activity, except for a few die-hards. The younger crowd is migrating to social media or hype based faux privacy networks because that is what their friends are doing. The millenials and younger are using whatever service all their friends are lemmings-ing to, and those of us who are left are having a hard time finding which legacy services still have the participation to reward our time.
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?
I had to look that up. Seems to exist, so don't hate me for it...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Repeat after me:
"Hate speech" does not exist.
It is a line of bullshit used by some people to attempt to justify silencing other people they don't agree with while also trying to cementing themselves in the "right side of history" camp. There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment nor to the concept of freedom of speech in general. What constitutes "hate speech" depends on who defines it, so in a decade it could easily hang the people currently trying to hang others with it.
Note that threats are not "hate speech," they have their own category and if the threats are credible they are also illegal in practically every jurisdiction.
By taking down posts, in the absence of government law, and clear unambigous written government law, passed by politicians in a legislature, Facebook is denying my rights.
My rights have written laws. And there are lots of "free speech" precedents too.
Facebook is not empowered to enforce the law, without a trial, or a clear formal appeal process -- and inconsistently.
If I was a right wing agitator, I would use the word "biased" instead of "inconsistent"
Facebook will
1) Shutdown
2) Be sued into oblivion
3) Post everything. IF the governments want to censor, let the government be the repressive jackboot of the face forever free speech killers.
This is the end game. Bets?
It is not complicated. It is not different this time. There is no new ground here.
Or has the comment section here been more cesspool-y in the last few weeks?
This kind of thing is inevitable when you try to police free speech.
Don't like it? Tough.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
According to these idiots insults are hate speech:
http://www.dictionary.com/brow...
noun
speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.
Websters seems to have it simplified down to a literal state which could be fine:
https://www.merriam-webster.co...
Definition of Hate speech
: speech expressing hatred of a particular group of people
Wikipedia is all over the map but at least seems to only report on various countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These people are subjectively confused thinking "any form of expression regarded as offensive":
https://definitions.uslegal.co...
Hate Speech Law and Legal Definition
Hate speech is a communication that carries no meaning other than the expression of hatred for some group, especially in circumstances in which the communication is likely to provoke violence. It is an incitement to hatred primarily against a group of persons defined in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the like. Hate speech can be any form of expression regarded as offensive to racial, ethnic and religious groups and other discrete minorities or to women.
These people get it:
https://www.urbandictionary.co...
Hate speech
A highfalutin' way of saying "I disagree with your meticulously-researched, irrefutable facts, so I am going to organize a social media campaign to demonize you and ruin your life. But don't forget to donate to my Patreon."
Sane, rational human being: "I sure do loves me some grapes!"
Filthy SJW bacterium: "OMFG GRAPE HAS 'RAPE' IN IT THAT'S HATE SPEECH! RAAAAAAAPE CULTUUUUUURE!"
Disparaging a social group is hate speech to these people:
https://www.thefreedictionary....
hate speech
n.
Bigoted speech attacking or disparaging a social group or a member of such a group.
Twitter's fallacy here -- and the one which powerful forces are trying to foist upon other big names -- is that you can have a global communication platform with one set of rules. There is no one set of rules that refers to all speech. There is no way to measure "hate" fairly. Twitter has painted themselves into a corner: they will forever be too strict, or too lenient, often being loudly accused of both at the same time.
One of the problems with filters is something I see on other sites, especially on political issues. Things escalate. When a post is finally flagged, often it's in response to a post that's similar or worse. Sites have trolls using moderation to eliminate opinions they don't like. If you just mildly insult someone who holds an opinion you don't like, then if they respond in kind, report them.
Deep Learning should be used to identify those who make the most complaints, or have a disproportionate number of reported posts in response to their posts. That'll make a "troll score" and lower the reliability of those who generate hate speech, as well as those who post hate speech.
Facebook is the worst, as the top comments are ranked by responses, so the most outrageous comments are on top, as they get the most "your wrong" comments. If Facebook treated such comments as a "downvote" on the original comment, then it would better filter out the noise.
But since Facebook is 100% noise, how would anyone notice?
Learn to love Alaska
Censorship and policing freedom of speech is a slippery fucking slope. If there is content offends you, stop fucking reading, listening to, watching it.
Facebook has become such a large portion of our communication, both between individuals and between organizations that they act almost as a governing body for communications of those types. How much bigger do they need be before they way they censor speech becomes more important that government censorship of speech?
After a certain point it almost becomes irrelevant whether we call ourself a "free speech" society if the private corporations that control our communications are allowed to decide what kind of speech will or will not be allowed.
This discussions in itself illustrates the problem. We have trusted them to know where to draw the line and there is no way for them to do that and have everyone agree that they've done it correctly. Should we allow them to censor something that most people consider to be hate speech? Is 51% enough agreement to have something censored? How about 75%? I guess I should be asking that to Facebook since they get to decide. What about as societal norms shift. Right now hate speech against women is "clearly" wrong, but hate speech against men is not only acceptable, it is encouraged. There might come a time when that particular brand of hate is no longer tolerated too, but whether that type of language will be allowed on Facebook will be up to them.
It seems like we are granting the few people who are in the positions to make those decisions too much power over our right to free speech. So we ask, "Why do they make the decisions that they do?" I think a better question would be, "Why do we let them make these decisions on our behalf?"
They should have kept their US branding globally.
Freedom of speech, freedom after speech sells around the world.
People who need to interact with their own governments can use boring national sites.
Keep social media fun, free and full of different news.
Thats what attracts people and profits. Users can all get 100% censorship in their own nations for every day.
US social media does not need to report users to they own nations police for enjoying US freedom of speech.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thanks for the troll mod, Trump fans. You're just egging me on.
Mod this comment down as well. I have karma to spare.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I once reported a posting of a preacher claiming that people hit by a hurricane deserved to die and the "lord" was punishing them for their sins for embracing the gay community. I thought that surely qualified as hate speech and should be removed. Facebook did not delete the post. Regardless of your beliefs, saying that someone deserves to die and they are rightfully being punished by a deity of some sort with death based on their acceptance of gay people is, in my opinion, the definition of hate speech. You can easily condemn someone's opinions or beliefs without calling for or sanctioning their death.
Because the left loves racism if it is against an approved group for the Two Minutes of Hate.
I'm old enough (i.e., not middle-aged yet) to remember when "hate speech" was on the anti-free-speech fringes. Then it started moving in on us. And the closer and closer it got, the greater and greater amount of largely anodyne words and thoughts became verboten. Now some claim that certain words or thoughts are equivalent to physical violence. It was better when people were just seen as obnoxious dicks, and not some form of Neo-Grammar(ish) Nazi guilty of breaking windows of the mind.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Well, better get ready to flag me for hate speech. The things I say may be true or maybe false, or here's a though: it just may be an opinion and go fuck yourself if you don't like it, but either way, all that matters in this Internet life is that there's enough interaction around my comment to keep the unemployed, liberal chant monkeys howling and the ads clicks flowing. Blame conservatives all you want, but they generally don't "do Internet" all that well, so who's fault is it really for over reacting to bullshit you have no business pretending to know anything about or think you can control with protesting, aka bumbling around, staring at my phone and taking snap chat stories to get laid by nose ring wearing bbw's you millennial bovine scattologist. All indication on the Internet pointed towards Hillary winning, but she didn't did she? If conservatives browsed the web like liberals do (stats say %40 of country listeners still have dialup), we would have seen it coming. It's not a trick; it's not a hack; you guys are outnumbered and votes are done on paper, but you wouldn't know if you spend all of your time on social networking sites and no intelligent U.S. male wants a female president when the feminazis and transtopo won't give it a rest. It took blacks 200 years; you guys/girls/shems can wait. You do know the bathroom thing was WOMEN having a problem with it right? Had nothing to do with men's opinions. We're too perverted and women just didn't want a "CD male" in their bathrooms because most women don't see the difference, unfortunately. Im sure most people around the world weren't even thinking that at all, they just needed another tiring "blame the white guy patriarchy for my low sense of self worth" excuse. I dare you all to find a grandmother and talk about feminism and see what she says. She'll tell you guys you are all full of shit and destroying the country when you've 100x more than they did.
One of the most curious things about censorship-, prohibition-, arbitrariness-, etc. prone attitudes is that they usually try to prove that they are objectively better. They don't seem to accept their real imposition-based authority (you can use Facebook only if you accept its rules or Facebook's rules have to agree with the corresponding legislation or Facebook should listen what many of its users say) and hypocritically claim their moral superiority.
DISCLAIMER: I am not defending any position here. In general, I prefer permissive and properly-understanding approaches which only rely on prohibitions when strictly required.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
And what are you, an illegal sand n1gger migrant who was bred by chimps in hindustan and adopted by n1gger slave trader, then let to pass border security with a counterfeit birth certificate?
Seriously, chimp, get back to your roots - go visit your relatives in a zoo.
It is very, very inconvenient and frustrating when one cannot arbitrarily assign people dehumanizing labels!
This, at least among other things.
Killing Nazi's use to be the law for a reason.
Right-leaning, pro-Israel Shurat HaDin fights a multi-year campaign against Facebook on OP's exact grounds and no one bats an eye.
Left-leaning pro-publica leads with Facebook permitting anti-Muslim hatespeech and everyone goes batshit.
Truth (Capital "T" Truth) and groupthink don't mix. Humans WILL lie to themselves about anything and everything. And we get very upset when reality refuses to follow our whims. And why, oh why, are you socializing with people you don't like on a platform that doesn't like you?
You can't just go around talking poetically. You just can't talk like that. It shows that you have a constant melodrama going on in your schizophrenic head and that your psychotic self-righteousness always paints you the hero against evil, evil being anything you don't like for a split second or longer for any reason.
Our society is completely and totally doomed. We need to start preparing for the collapse. Leftist-trained subhumans are being used by the plutocracy to destroy everything to make way for an automated economy. We need revolution in 30 years or everything we know and love is going to die forever.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
Exactly. A Nazi is somebody the hard left crazies disagree with. And FB's enforcement isn't uneven: if it's conservative, explicitly pro-Trump or anti-Hillary it's hate speech, even if it's merely a recitation of facts without opinion.
Like buzz feeds article on '37 things white people need to do to not ruin 2018'. Racism at its finest.
Why are they trying to censor Facebook?
Facebook is a PG-13 version of 4chan.
Let Facebook be Facebook. People will get tired of it and the fad can finally die, as it should have years ago.
...Setting the standards for double-standards!
Oh? You mean like BLM shouting "Hands up, don't shoot" is racism?
Heard that one before Reichsmarshall