Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Apologizes After Flagging Declaration of Independence As Hate Speech (nymag.com)
To celebrate this week's holiday, The Vindicator, a small newspaper in Texas, posted sections of the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Yadda, yadda. You get the idea. But a section of the text containing the phrase "Indian Savages" set off Facebook's hate-speech flags. The post was then temporarily taken down by Facebook, Business Insider reports. From a report: He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. After The Vindicator ran a story on the censorship, Facebook corrected the mistake. "The post was removed by mistake and restored as soon as we looked into it. We process millions of reports each week, and sometimes we get things wrong," a Facebook spokesperson said. And honestly, as far as Facebook getting things wrong, this is an ideal "mistake."
Even Wikipedia has filters now, I gave up editing after my edits kept getting "your edits have been automatically been identified by a filter as unconstructive". Wikipedia has probably lost more edits to that than the recently rejected EU copyright filters.
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natureâ(TM)s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. â" Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, i
See that "Preview" button?
In context of the 21st century, I think if it were written today plenty of people WOULD have a problem with the sentence "Indian Savages". Obviously the declaration of Independence wasn't intended as a "hate piece" but by today's morality I can't blame Facebook for automatically filtering it out per algorithm.
I'm not a fan of Facebook or censorship (although I think a private entity like Facebook has a right to keep content non-objectionable ON THEIR SITE- but not off it) but I think there is nothing wrong with Facebook's algorithm in this case- it did what it was written to do- it caught unwanted language on it's system.
I'm pretty sure a lot of Mark Twain's work would rightly get blocked too.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The people who wrote that document were a terrorist cell who later committed genocide against said savages you know.
The author isn't ridiculously biased and missing the point of the declaration / Constitution at all. Apparently also never got the point of 1984.
Because of the clear leftward lean of Tech/social media companies, there will be a natural inclined to suspect every thing they decide to remove from their systems or block. This is a self created position that is the result of past actions that seemed pretty clearly anti-one-political-party.
I think people understand that this sort of thing is possible and can accept that mistakes happen, but that cant be accepted when the organizations like Facebook have burned up whatever good faith they had.
I read somewhere that two-thirds of colonial citizens didn't care who won the Revolutionary War. Fast forward 242 years, two-third of American citizens don't care who wins the presidential election. Some things never change.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
It is absolutely the case that the white colonists really f**ked over the natives, and that this f**kage is embedded in the founding documents of the United States and even the fascia of the U.S. Capitol building.
We don't have to stand behind it today. We shouldn't.
Bruce Perens.
There goes my plan to serialize G.K. Chesterton on Facebook ...
I thought they were all programmers.
Do you have ESP?
It was written with full awareness that it would start a war.
If hate speech is forbidden then can there be such a thing as a just war?
The Declaration of Independence does contain hate speech against Native Americans. These are the same Native Americans that the SCOTUS has sided with regarding US violation of multiple treaties. Here's one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The language in that document regarding Native Americans was hateful, racist and unjust then, and it still is now.
Facebook's algorithm was right.
This doesn't mean Facebook hates the US, or freedom, or white people. This does mean that our past, present, and future are full of moral choices that define us.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
How many of you remember when NPR tweeted out the Declaration of Independence line by line and a bunch of Trump supporters got mad because they thought it was about Trump? It happened last year, and it happened again this year.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/julia...
You are welcome on my lawn.
waiting for the US Govt to apologize to the England, because the US Government has become bigger taxers, more corrupt, more kleptocratic & fascistic than England was,
were sorry about 1776 & 1812, we just wanted to own our own piece of the pie, but we screwed it up and freedom is just a mirage in the desert
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It certainly looks as if Facebook's attempted pivot from being a seller of personal data to a responsible netizen is not going well at all. It almost seems as if the whole Facebook company were not set up to do anything but exploit the personal information of people.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU SAVAGE COWS!!
They continued over the next 150 years to commit genocide
I reached this one section and immediately thought of Beevis and Butthead:
”He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people”
Hehe. Hehe. “Manly Firmness” hehe. Hehe.
#DeleteChrome
The computer did it is bullshit and just another attempt from these tech companies to avoid any responsibility for their products, the truth is FB employs sweatshop people from Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, India etc (aka 3rd world shitholeâ countries) as "content moderators" and the constitutions language indeed would be seen as hate speech from their point of view.
Amusing that the 3rd world is now deeming what is acceptable speech in the civilised world.
it's been decades since I read the Declaration of Independence in full and never gave a second thought to the phrase "Indian Savages" but yeah, that there's hate speech. It's a phrase specifically targeted to a race intended to imply all members of that race were in some way immoral and/or evil. If that's not hate speech I don't know what is.
Just because the Dec of Independence (and by extension America) has a lot of good parts doesn't mean we should pretend the bad didn't exist.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If Facebook keeps on hiring and promoting left wing nuts to police the internet, they will eventually face some serious legal problems because of these empowered haters:
- Various forms of internal and external discrimination
- The leak of damaging company information whenever haters disagree with company policy
- The release users' private information and messages whenever haters disagree with their religion, political leanings, or personal choices including sexual
Billionaires some times forget what happens to Kings in America.
Unadulterated proof right before your eyes. Unless that doesn't fit your narrative, then you'll make excuses.
"You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free."
-an American president, 1995
As so clearly demonstrated FB’s automated “flagging”, the United States no longer enjoy any forms of freedom of speech. No longer are we allowed to freely discuss ideas. Deeming and idea “hate speech” is really just the knee jerk response of the weak minded, lack of critical thinking skilled zombies the majority of the United States has become.
One of the reasons why the US broke off from the UK was that the UK was actually treating their treaties with the locals non-white people seriously.
Meanwhile many of the people who lived in the USA wanted to just kill them and take their land.
The USA broke off from the UK, and proceeded to kill the locals -- engaged in systemic genocide -- and take their land.
The document contains *more* than just hate speech, and the independence of the USA from the monarchy was more than just an excuse to engage in genocide, but both are actually there.
Don't be surprised. Don't be outraged. It's very simple. If you want ZERO tolerance for specific words and you want immediate action, then you're going to get false positives. Zero tolerance is implemented to prevent tragedies.
"No, you may not bring your loaded pistol on this plane."
"You have murdered 300 people, you're going to prison for life. The State may just kill you."
But there are things that seem extreme to people with no rational worldly context. Words, of all things, do not need zero tolerance measures. If someone were to post/say/yell "Indian Savages" in any venue, no tragic circumstances would occur. Same with the N*word. No tragic circumstances would occur. At worst, some people get angry and/or offended. In those cases, simply responding to peoples' reports of a bad post is sufficient.
Hiding behind AC alias just like the AntiFa hide behind their masks.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Here are the "questionable practices" Oswald McWeany refers to.
If that doesn't meet your definition of "savage," I shudder to think what does.
"rightly"
There is no reason to block Mark Twain.
Listen here, I"m no right-winger, but facts are FACTS:
1) People were racist in the past
2) a lot of people
3) and they tortured and they maimed and they killed and they raped
4) and they wrote fiction, nonfiction, history, and philosophy about it
This is our inheritance as human beings. Any notion of "rightly blocking" racism, violence, sexism, etc. is nothing more or less than book burning.
If a politician today says something racist, by all means don't vote for them.
But if Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson says something racist, and you decide that this means that we have to erase Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson from history, all I have to say is: human history belongs to all of us, and it's both unpleasant and educational. So a big fuck you to the book burners.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
There are very few places where terms such as "Indian Savages" are used in an intelligent and useful way.
There are very few places where that phrase is used, period. If you filter all instances of that phrase, probably 80% of the time you're filtering the Declaration of Independence.
For this to be the only really contentious point of this document (which was not written in the same spirit as e.g. the constitution/bill of rights; it is a seriously "angry letter"), i'd say we've done pretty well.
When the settlers came, they killed off a huge amount of indians via disease. You can read Squanto's account of America after his return; a land that was full of people was basically a ghost town.
It's crazy, but disease probably wiped out an order of magnitude more people than the US did.
how would I design and account for this in code? Without being 100% sure of the source. Does everything have source metadata for context? As is the real world how could anyone trust any provided context metadata anyway?
;)
I am no fan of Facebook and I do not have an account. But maybe Facebook is trying to fight a losing battle here! I think most humans would make this mistake since it would appear to be a no brainier in the PC correct, overly sensitive, I'm a victim society we have in America.
When one first looks events like these always look bad. The real fix maybe to toughen up or take it in stride.
Just my 2 cents
I am a bit confused, given the document is a declaration of war, it seems like hatred would be a part of that...
Or, you know, we can admit that "savages" describes tribal people with little technological advancement who raped and murdered each other for 10,000 years before white people showed up, then happily raped and murdered them too.
Speaking as a white guy, I call bullshit on your false equivalency.
There are currently 562 native American nations recognized by the US government. These do not include all of the nations and cultures that existed here, just the ones the government currently recognizes, many centuries post-genocide for some. Nor does it include the nations of Canada which may also have been involved in the French-Indian war and other conflicts.
To paint 562 different cultures with one brush and label them savages who rape and murder each other is ridiculous. Some tribes were warlike, others were not. Some behaved savagely, others did not. One thing there is little evidence of are Indian tribes committing wholesale genocide against one another. Even their bloodiest conflicts tended to be relatively brief, and not involve the complete eradication of their neighbors. Contrast this to our own ancestors, who did exterminate numerous cultures as they swept across the continent.
I used to defend my culture as "yes, our forefathers did some terrible things (killing native Americans, enslaving women and black people, etc.) but most of us have learned from history and we've risen above that," but, given the recent election of a flagrant racist and admitted sexual assaulter as president, and the rabid rallies that have followed him around since, it's pretty clear we're basically as rotten as we've ever been, and haven't really learned much at all.
So yeah, the facts of history are "anti-white" in the sense that we own a whole lot of crimes with a capital C that native Americans and other groups do not. Is that a function of us as people, or a function of our power (and technology)? Hard to say, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Those were our actions, and by the looks of things, could well be again in the near future. Which as a human being (who happens to have white skin), makes me sick, but maybe if we hadn't tried to white-wash our own history and instead owned the vile crap our forefathers did and spoke of it honestly, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
YOU'RE A GODDAMNED IMPOSTER! There is no way you're Pinky's Brain with some stupid assed indefensible logic like that. When has that line of reasoning ever worked? You can't say with any certainty what that outcome would have been. Shit happens. Plans get fucked up and changed. Sometimes it's all lies and the liar finally dies or something. I have enough money right this minute to go out and buy a Ferarri. The majority of my family including me wants a Ferarri. We aren't buying Ferarri. We're buying a house.
What you appear to be doing is justifying and brushing off what happened. You'd be more helpful shutting the fuck up if you don't actually care. What you typed sounds racist as fuck whether you meant it to be or not.
"Hate speech" is just a symptom of Newspeak. If you Control speech, you control thought, for good or ill. The Constitution guarantees the Freedom of Speech, not Freedom from Being Offended. While deplorable, we can't control how others think. It's the act against someone, not the speech, that should be criminalized.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
The "Indian Savages" is part of a sentence which provides the context and justifies the use of the term:
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. "
They are labelled "savages" because they are known for their slaughter of women and children and the elderly and the sick ... ANYBODY without regard to age sex or condition. In 1776 the colonial Americans and the British held to traditional rules of not intentionally killing women and children and the elderly in war. There are always exceptions in war since war is chaos, and people in war sometimes overstep the rules, but the "rules" generally adhered to ruled out such actions by persons considered "civilized". Persons who intentionally and deliberately operated outside the traditional "rules of war" were considered "savages". It may seem quaint now, but it should be remembered here that in WWI (over 130 years later) there were leaders in the British government for example who considered submarine warfare savage and illegitimate and did not want Britain to match the Germans in this uncivilized, cowardly and sneaky form of war.
Context and history matters.
Now, having said that, we should all drop the "noble savage" crap and admit the following truths about the people referred to:
[1] There is no such thing as a "Native American"; the people referred to in the Declaration were descended from immigrants to this land just like the founders (most of whom were born here, and many of whom had been here for generations). These "Native Americans" simple came here from Asia, rather than Europe, and arrived earlier because they could walk across a land bridge rather than needing to leash to build and operate ships. They did not evolve here as a separate species, they are descended from the same human tree that began in Africa or the Middle East. They did not "live at one with nature" because they were so noble and enlightened, they lived as they did because they had not developed any advanced technology and were essentially illiterate.
[2] If one want to get all bent out of shape over the word "savages", then one should face the reality that they were actually stone aged barbarians who had no written language, had not mastered the wheel, had not even achieved bronze age status, did not know the shape of the world and where they were upon it, had no significant maps or documented political boundaries, etc. While SOME tribes were peaceful and friendly, others were documented as cannibals (yes, in NORTH America, well-documented in books from the time), and still others between those extremes had nevertheless severe and bloody cultures. If some Donald Trump supporters today engaged in a pale shadow of some of these acts, everybody at Facebook would denounce ALL people with MAGA hats as worse than "Savages" [sarc]and might even go more extreme and call them something really bad like "NAZIs"....nah, that would never happen [/sarc]
I agree that we should all allow for incompetence to be the root cause for such things, except for a couple of points:
(a) These "errors" are being done by the giant tech firms and the big established media companies who are always insisting they are the smartest, most-capable, and self-checking people in the arena.
(b) Any random events should have an overall random distribution. It's possible that all the random errors in a week, for example, would go against a particular group or viewpoint while actually being random events, but over a longer span like a month or a year would even out and be clearly random. If they are NOT reasonably evenly distributed over time across the possible spectrum of targets, then they are NOT random.
These repeated "random errors" at places like Facebook have almost universally and over a long time been hostile to Traditional America, political conservatives, Trump supporters, TEA partiers, etc. Mysteriously always against the center or right of the American political spectrum and nearly never against progressivism/leftism/historical revisionism.
Fake news is not an imaginary thing.
When only 7% of journalists are Republicans in a country as evenly divided as ours, there is NO WAY the news is unbiased or biased in favor of the right.
When those almost totally left wing reporters then provide coverage of a Republican president that is more than 90% negative even as the economy is booming and consumer confidence is at an 18 year high it's a sign that something is off-balance in the newsrooms.
When those same left wing journalists (who insist they are "main stream" and unbiased) make error after error after error against that Republican president but somehow amazingly not in his favor, after spending 8 years performing virtual analingus on Obama, it's a sign of a problem.
You can whine and complain all you want that people to your political right believe that much of the "mainstream" news is actually just fake propaganda, but they have more ammunition for their beliefs than you have for yours.
Get back to me when the "journalists" currently panicking that ONE former Fox news reporter is a State Dept spokesperson and ONE former Fox News producer is about to take the White House communications director job decide to retroactively panic at the HUNDREDS of Google people who went back-and-forth between White House jobs under Obama and their Google jobs, or the numerous ties between Obama admin people and ALL the non-Fox news networks. Try looking up all those Obama-era media connections... if you have an honest bone in your body you'll be shocked.
...the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Sounds like hate speech to me.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
From Encyclopedia Britannica: "Noble savage, in literature, an idealized concept of uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization.
The glorification of the noble savage is a dominant theme in the Romantic writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Émile, ou, De l’education, 4 vol. (1762), is a long treatise on the corrupting influence of traditional education; the autobiographical Confessions (written 1765–70) reaffirms the basic tenet of man’s innate goodness; and Dreams of a Solitary Walker (1776–78) contains descriptions of nature and man’s natural response to it."
It wasn't necessarily an offensive term back then; the early European Americans did compete with them for resources and land.
More links here.
What let a low-IQ savage like you anywhere near a keyboard? We'll have to have a little word with your mother..
Well the Declaration of Independence was "fighting words" that started a war. The 1/3 of the population that wished to remain loyal British subjects likely did consider it "hate speech", plus a few folks on the other side of the Atlantic, and oh yeah them Canadians too.
But yeah. a phrase or two in there likely triggered a filter and/or facebook employee.
The USA being a country built on two genocides and imperialism but viewing itself as the "greatest country on earth home of the brave yadda yadda" no wonder that sometimes things get a bit nonsensical!
If freedom of speech surrounding US history makes the ban list.
That must be a massive list of the rest of the internet thats on a never link, never find, never mention, never deep link, never show, repot and ban.
A SJW created white list that only uses words and terms they approve of, the rest of the internet and US history is banned?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Democrats are farther to the right of Republicans as often as they aren't (see Russiagate for a current example) and hate the real left more than Republicans do.
Obama was a right-wing freakshow, who went well to the right of his Republican predecessors on most issues. Ignore the PR and look at what Democrats actually do for once in your teabagging life.
When I first read this story the "apology" from Facebook read a little differently.
"It looks like we made a mistake and removed something you posted on Facebook that didn't go against our Community Standards. We want to apologize and let you know that we've restored your content and removed any blocks on your account related to this incorrect action."
The reason I mention it, is when I read it, the words stood out to me .. namely "didn't go against our Community Standards".
It most certainly DOES go against their "Community Standards". Now, it should get an exception because it's History, and Newsworthy and probably a few other reasons. But no, not because it doesn't go against their Community Standards, because as those Standards are written, it clearly does.
The gist of your rant is: right wing = bad, Dems = bad, ergo Dems = right wing.
Faulty math, and faulty politics.
"...among these are life...."
Am I the only one who wonders what FB's "curated" news will be like?
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
...i cannot wait for the day we get to evict every one of you Caucasians, Negroes, Orientals and Arabs from our land.
Too lazy to come up with something better than a half-assed straw man?
As an indigenous person, I now only have one question.
WHEN THE FUCK WILL ALL YOU PEOPLE LEAVE?
It's our land. Go back to your motherland. NOW.
According to memory, around 1970 (I turned 10 that year), some ...group ...entity, asked a number (a lot? ) of Americans what they thought of The Declaration of Independence without identifying it. Hmm, I'm guess they read some sections?
A fair percent of the people thought it was subversive and / or illegal.
Not much has changed.
I tried googling it. Google sucks.
So _some_ things that are historic and have content at odds with today's morality should be allowed to stay.
Other things that are historic and have content at odds with today's morality should be removed.
Fact: by today's standards of morality, most of the founding fathers would be found to be sexist and racist.
Do you not see the inherent problem with this?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"... which is built on recognizing individual rights ..." ... but _whose_ individual rights? At the time of writing, the 'who' was a very restricted subset of the population. It did not at the time include First Nations or slaves nor some would say, women. The document was in many respects inherently discriminatory especially if viewed through the lense of the moral belief system of the time. But if we view it through the lense of today's morality we can interpret it to our collective benefit. Maybe that is it's true value, it's flexibility to interpretation ... the ultimate political document.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It's your fault (Republicans, that is) that journalists are not Republicans. Being a journalist requires critical reasoning. That's been pushed out of Republicanism entirely.
The trend is towards 100% fakery in the Republicans. Your Faker in Chief is prime evidence. Until he got elected, hardly a single Republican leader could stand to be near him. Now they suck up to him day and night. Frauds the lot of them.
Why do you spell "declaration" as "deceleration"? It's really got me curious...
Not for hundreds or even thousands of years, they haven't. Sure, the Austro-Hungarian Empire has come and gone but it did so without the wholesale slaughter or displacement of the people who lived there. Any more remedial history questions?
It looks like your remedial learning of history stopped thousands of years ago.
And how long go do you think the US-Indian wars were? Maybe not quite hundreds but definitely over a century.
I know a few places where if you stood and yelled The Word We Must Not Say, you'd be introduced to a tragic circumstance.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain