NYT: Lynchings Around the World are Linked To Facebook Posts (bostonglobe.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: Riots and lynchings around the world have been linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest -- a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions and histories of social instability. Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

A reconstruction of Sri Lanka's descent into violence, based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger, found that Facebook's newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing. Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact... Sri Lankans say they see little evidence of change. And in other countries, as Facebook expands, analysts and activists worry they, too, may see violence.
A Facebook spokeswoman countered that "we remove such content as soon as we're made aware of it," and said they're now trying to expand those teams and investing in "technology and local language expertise to help us swiftly remove hate content." But one anti-hate group told the Times that Facebook's reporting tools are too slow and ineffective.

"Though they and government officials had repeatedly asked Facebook to establish direct lines, the company had insisted this tool would be sufficient, they said. But nearly every report got the same response: the content did not violate Facebook's standards."

Comments

Good for Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for Facebook. Why doesn't Slashdot remove similar hate speech? Why do the editors allow the comments to be filled with anti-Semitic spam? It's truly embarrassing that Facebook, with orders of magnitude more posts, can police hate speech, but Slashdot refuses to do so. Perhaps it's time to let Slashdot's advertisers know about all the hate speech appearing with their ads. Slashdot's management should be ashamed of all the hate speech that they allow and seem to condone by not deleting it. And make no mistake, Slashdot occasionally deletes posts, yet there's so much hate speech. Truly embarrassing for Slashdot...

Who's coordinating this?

[DNS-and-BIND]

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat? After all, he's an outsider with no political experience. Trump was a total outsider, Sanders was a Democrat outsider, and look at all the dirty tricks that were played against them. Personally, I think insiders are the problem as they run our system for the benefit of themselves, not us. Plus, it would be very interesting to have Zuckerberg as America's first Jewish president.

Re:Who's coordinating this?

[quantaman]

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat?

There's no conspiracy, it's just how the media works.

2 years ago everybody knew that organizations were mining FB data to push agendas and the News Feeds were rife with misinformation, but it just looked like some weird geek issue and nothing had happened to demonstrate why that might be a problem.

But now we've seen a major electoral upset, and both data mining and misinformation played a role, so people now understand how these abstract FB problems can have real world effects.

So now the news orgs want to send reporters to look into FB and ordinary people want to read about it, and that's why all these stories are coming out.

Re: Who's coordinating this?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Why did Diamond and Silk get censored, anyway? Nobody ever explained that, least of all Facebook. They just said they were "unsafe to the community". The outspoken sisters were were provided with no reason why their videos were labeled as unsafe.

Re:Who's coordinating this?

[quantaman]

That's simply not true. The Trump campaign didn't use Cambridge Analytica data, they used RNC data, which was more accurate.

Cambridge Analytica did digital advertising on behalf of Trump and a pro-Trump PAC, and they would have used Cambridge Analytica data to do that.

So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.

Huh? Cambridge Analytica is a really scuzzy company and a possible link between Russia and the Trump campaign. They're hardly "the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election".

Re:Who's coordinating this?

[PopeRatzo]

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories.

There were anti-Facebook "drumbeats" as early as 2007, when they first announced the Beacon project (Facebook scripts on non-FB websites). There were plenty of warnings, for those with ears to year and eyes to see.

The reason you only started noticing them six months ago is because you see attacks on Facebook as attacks on Donald Trump's legitimacy. Which they are.

Trump was a total outsider,

Nobody with money is an outsider when it comes to US politics. Donald Trump is the ultimate insider. He's been shmoozing politicians and the powerful for decades. They way he's opened the executive branch to every two-bit huckster and leech (DeVos, Pruitt, Mnuchin, Pompeo, etc etc) is the Swamp personified. Remember the chief scientist for the Department of Agriculture that had no background in science? Remember Kris Kobach? He made Mike Goddamn Flynn the national security advisor and it turned out he was an agent of at least one foreign government.

For chrissake, where did you get the idea that he's some kind of outsider, or that someone with absolutely no experience governing and little experience running successful businesses could possibly do well as president?

Re:Who's coordinating this?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

"School shootings" are another current fad, even though they are nothing new, and are actually less common today than they were 25 years ago. So far the media attention has had zero effect on policy.

Less common? How do you measure that? Number of shootings or number of victims?

Because going by number of shootings, according to wikipedia, there have been roughly the SAME number of school shootings in the 3 and a bit years since 2015 (62) as there were in the ENTIRE decade of the 1990s (63).

So. Why do you think they're 'actually less common today' than the early to mid 90s?

Re: Who's coordinating this?

[TapeCutter]

Nazi Germany was socialist in the same way the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is democratic.

Re:Don't forget Slashdot! We promote RACISM!

[Z80a]

And then you go to this nazi party, and it's a bunch of fatty mixed race nerds that will shit their pants and run when they see a Jew, afraid he will shoot terrible mind control waves or something.

Re:Speech be free

[rossz]

It turns out there are large portions of the world that are incapable of handling free speech. Sadly, that includes many of our own universities.

Re:See also: Burma and the Rohingya

[DNS-and-BIND]

I love how that's as far as you go back, and don't bother to question why a Buddhist monk - a Buddhist! - would go so far as to call for violence. Just came out of nowhere, right?

As a backgrounder, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army staged a series of concerted attacks on the Burmese army. Unwilling to tolerate another Moslem jihad, the Rohinyas have been expelled to Bangla, where live some of those funding and leading ARSA. Saudi Arabia is too far away to dump them.

The number of corpses hasn't been that overwhelming. The Karens, Kachins, and Shans have been similarly suppressed by the ethnic Burmans occasionally. I realize that being dead is overwhelming to the person departing this Vale of Tears. I also realize that jihad has a habit of sprouting where local Moslem majorities (or near so) coexist next to non-Moslems. We can probably take the Philippines as a case study. You can also chart the decline of the Christian population in Paleostine, and then ask the Yazdis and the Zoroastrians of Iraq for details.

Yes

[JimSadler]

Yes ! If we allow freedom of speech the people will all lynch each other! Therefore we have another wonderful reason to stifle free speech. It is rather like the gun controversy. Obviously if we allow people access to guns some people with shoot each other. And yes, when we allow razor blades some women kill themselves in the bath tub by cutting their wrists. Thus the nanny state is our new imperative. Obviously for every freedom there is some really negative result that attaches. Surely we must erase freedom completely.

History repeats itself

[knorthern knight]

World War I - Germany engages in a multi-front war against British Empire, France, Russian Empire (pre-USSR), and USA. Predicatbly, they lose. Rather than accepting the fact that Germany lost because they were outnumbered, Hitlere convinced Germans that they were "stabbed in the back by the Jews", when victory was within reach. The repercussions of that delusion were ugly.

Election USA 2016 - Democrats put up unpopular candidate, who won primaries only because of an initial surge of support from "super-delgates" that gave her momentum going into the primaries. She's married to a former president who pushed through NAFTA (Bush negotiated it, but couldn't push it through), and was fully supporting TPP, until Sanders and Trump came out against it. She was the one who called blacks "super predators", stood up in a coal-mining state and said that she was going to shut down more coal mines, never bothered to show up and campaign in some of her crucial "Blue Wall States", illegally ran a private email server, deleted several thousand emails with "bit-bleach" when subpeona'd, lied about "coming under fire" at Benghazi, etc, etc, etc. Rather than admitting that they shot themselves in the foot by running the most awful candidate they could, the only one who could conceivably lose to Donald Trump... they claim that they were "stabbed in the back by Facebook".

What will the ugly repercussions of this delusion be?

Facebook Made Me Do It

[maxbuzz]

Facebook is the new "the devil made me do it" excuse for bad behavior.

Lynchings is scum killing without solid reasons

[gweihir]

Facebook, as much as I despise them, does not cause this. The people that do these things are broken and do not qualify as modern human beings, Facebook is just a communications channel here. These people would lynch others even with no electronic communications at all, as they are basically glorified cavemen.