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."
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?
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?