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."
By my definition you are a nazi, so time to bludgeon you to death with a baby seal.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Note to self...
Don't destroy ISIS
Don't give middle class workers a tax cut
Don't increase GDP over 3%, higher than Obama did any time over 8 years
Don't prosecute illegals that kill Americans
Don't protect VA whistle-blowers that are trying to help veterans
Don't bring back Americans jailed overseas, such as shoplifting basketball players
I don't think your advice is very good.
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.
No. Because FB is a private entity. They're not the government.
As such, they're under NO legal compulsion to provide you with an unrestricted venue for airing your thoughts.
And FB isn't "enforcing the law". They're enforcing their "terms of service". Which they are free to set in any manner they see fit.
This being said, "Hate Speech" doesn't actually exist. And if it does, it exists under the purview of free speech.
It's NOT illegal to hate someone and say so.
Also, most of these platforms provide AMPLE controls for blocking content if people don't wish to see it.
But various people are too lazy.
And then there's the authoritarians. Who DO want to control your speech and how you think.
All these people are going to yammer at FB for "DO SOMETHING!" that they're ALREADY perfectly capable of doing FOR THEMSELVES.
Ultimately, they're going to figure out what the Founding Fathers understood intrinsically.
You simply CANNOT control speech. All attempts eventually become too cumbersome and fail.
Either by beating down the censors to the point where such things are abandoned.
Or by simply diverting so much effort from running the company that it eventually causes the company to fold.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That depends if the comments are for federal gov, state or local government officials.
Once the private sector inserts itself between gov and the citizens it has to allow freedom of speech given its role in been a portal for local, city, federal gov.
Social media activist SJW cant just ban users for trying to petition their Government for a redress of grievances. The government selected a social media site to be their digital portal.
That reduces the ability to say they are 100% private sector and can ban account, users, comments, remove news.
Then its like been banned by a government for freedom of speech by a private sector site that allows comments about government policy.
Terms of service stop when accepting government interaction starts.
A lot of comments also have to be kept for FOIA and as part of the official record. Gov officials cannot just ask a social media SJW to remove all negative comments to m make their gov, city, state look better. Each and every comment could be considered part of the a citizen interacting with their government.
If social media wanted to keep its own private sector restrictive "Terms of service" SJW rules then do not become a local and national portal for government.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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
When I was visiting a college town last year, their definition of Nazi and racist was anyone who was not a Democrat. It went from "punch a Nazi" to "shoot a Nazi" to "punch a racist", to "punch a Republican".
I have grown up in a flyover state. The amount of true Nazis is very small. In fact, in times past where they marched, and nobody gave a rat's ass basically killed their movement. Now with protests and people coming from other areas of the country just to spark riots, this extreme ideology just gets embraced by more, along the lines of the Streisand Effect.
Real Nazis know how to return violence. However, if they are ignored and silently given a "-1 Overrated" (to put it in Slashdot terms), they will lose membership and all but disappear. However, if people come fight them, it means they get a lot more recruits along the lines of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
It is very, very inconvenient and frustrating when one cannot arbitrarily assign people dehumanizing labels!