Zuckerberg Testimony: Facebook AI Will Curb Hate Speech In 5 To 10 Years (inverse.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: After a question from Senator John Thune (R-SD) about why the public should believe that Facebook was earnestly working towards improving privacy, Zuckerberg essentially responded by saying that things are different now. Zuckerberg said that the platform is going through a "broad philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company." "We need to now take a more proactive view at policing the ecosystem," he said. In part, Zuckerberg was talking about hate speech and the various ways his platform has been used to seed misinformation. This prompted Thune to ask what steps Facebook was taking to improve its ability to define what is and what is not hate speech.

"Hate speech is one of the hardest," Zuckerberg said. "Determining if something is hate speech is very linguistically nuanced. You need to understand what is a slur and whether something is hateful, and not just in English..." Zuckerberg said that the company is increasingly developing AI tools to flag hate speech proactively, rather than relying on reactions from users and employees to flag offensive content. But according to the CEO, because flagging hate speech is so complex, he estimates it could take five to 10 years to create adequate A.I. "Today we're just not there on that," he said. For now, Zuckerberg said, it's still on users to flag offensive content. "We have people look at it, we have policies to try and make it as not subjective as possible, but until we get it more automated there is a higher error rate than I'm happy with," he said.

Comments

Do they really need an AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're already doing a pretty good job of censoring conservative beliefs. Most of my conservative friends on Facebook have had their account disabled for time-out periods or even outright banned. They're doing a good job already.

They do have some automation. I saw a friend post a Pepe picture, and he was banned immediately for that hateful act.

Re:Don't worry

[AmiMoJo]

"Western values" have always included limits on speech, even in the US. For example:

- State secrets
- Certain personal details like medical information
- Credible threats
- Speech that directly causes injury/death ("fire!")
- Contempt of court
- Lying under oath
- Grooming children for sexual exploitation
- Encouraging suicide
- Planning crimes

Beyond that there is a lot of speech that while not illegal can still have severe consequences for saying, and free speech protections don't extend to private venues.

There are many grey areas. What constitutes illegal harassment, or a credible threat, for example. But it's impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion of free speech and hate speech unless you first acknowledge that you never had, and never will have the absolute right to say anything you like at any time.

In fact, if you want to defend free speech, like I do, you need to understand this because an extreme "everything must be 4chan" position is not an effective argument.