Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#2This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.)
All: if you comment on this please make sure your comment is substantive and edit out any flamebait. Let's see how far we can get with a civil discussion.
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#3This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.) All: if you comment on thi…
I like the motivation. But it looks like everybody's afraid to start. (Me too. I've had a lot to say on pretty much every topic that's covered or even touched here. But I don't want to risk attracting a dogpile on a day when I lack the wherewithal to juggle a lot of arguments and give each the respect it deserves.)
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#4This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.) All: if you comment on thi…
I tried to post this article a couple hours ago and I've got a message it was submitted before, without a link to the submitted article. Search resulted in nothing. Are there special measures to blocking articles and making them not even searchable? In the past I could still find flagged articles via search.
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#5This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.) All: if you comment on thi…
I tried to post this article a couple hours ago and I've got a message it was submitted before, without a link to the submitted article. Search resulted in nothing. Are there special measures to blocking articles and making them not even searchable? In the past I could still find flagged articles via search.
Probably those articles were [dead] in addition to being [flagged] and you don't have 'showdead' (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) set to 'yes' in your profile.
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#6> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough.
As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such a pedestal and our government for upholding it for 200+ years.
This can't end well shutting people up like this.
> German police raided 36 homes over social media hate speech
https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-raided-36-...
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#7> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)
From this aspect, this internal quiz question seems reasonable if its intent is to test the candidate's knowledge of the technical details (e.g. what a protected category is) in the face of a seemingly absurd situation (e.g. Why should white men be more protected than children of any color?). Similar tactics are used in HR training I've had to go through. I remember for a sexual discrimination training quiz, there was a question about a woman who used anti-gay-male slurs in the workplace who then herself alleged she was being harassed for being a female. The question was worded in a way to trap you if you thought women couldn't be the offenders. I regret to say I've forgotten the specifics but the question actually referred to a real-life case in which a court sided against the woman because of her documented use of anti-gay slurs.
Edit: as absurd as that FB training slide seems, I don't think people give enough credit to how nuanced FB has to be when trying to be both a reasonable censor while allowing important free speech -- think the Philando Castile shooting video -- in real-time and across international borders and moral codes. It's a tough balancing act to train people to judge this, and the training materials are unavoidably going to sound horrific. Imagine the wording of a question that tested a candidate's handling of a photo posted of a naked young girl running in pain from a napalm attack.
That said, the argument about how being the squeaky wheel, or a celebrity with a following, gets you better, faster treatment than the disenfranchised, is true. But that unfortunate situation has happened everywhere else in real life, including media. In journalism, one cynical aphorism is: "News is whatever happens to your editor"
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#8> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…
From the very begining of free speech theorization, limits such as hate speech were mentionned, just saying.
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#9> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…
From the very begining of free speech theorization, limits such as hate speech were mentionned, just saying.
I'd like to see a specific citation here, please.
Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use
#10I get the theory behind that quiz 'trick question', but does it make any actual legal sense? If the discrimination against a subset happens because of the component of the subset that's protected, then surely it's an attack on a protected category. So if you say "black children are all stupid" the likely implication is that you're saying "unlike white children" (otherwise why would you include black).
Is this even true legally? Could a school discriminate against black children because, hey, they are children? Or a movie theater: "Let's not offer youth discounts to Latinos".
I am not a lawyer, so I don't know the legalistic view, but it seems to be an absurdity.