Seems like a pretty challenging task for anyone, also 1500 pages sounds like a good start, it would be nice if anyone who feels really strongly about the problems of this situation and wants to help out in a productive manner to read all of the pages and offer suggestions on how to improve it, maybe even upload some openly contributable global attempt at a “unified” (at least in distribution) agreed upon ethical core. Somewhat like the geneva convention did for conventional warfare, but for discourse through digital platforms different networks could adopt and reference.
Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
21–30 of 207 posts
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#22I commend Facebook for allocating more resources to enforce its community standards, what's the point in outlining standards if there is no enforcement?
I'm not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different countries and regions, each region has it's own unique history and flash-points, it's best to understand these from folks who are on the ground rather than overworked moderators and engineers in Menlo Park.
Facebook got to where it is by being a centralized social platform, but successful community standards enforcement at this level will take a more decentralized, hyper-local approach.
Also, similarly to how large tech companies publish yearly reports on diversity metrics and data requests from governments, if Facebook is really going to make this effort a priority they should publish a report detailing its efforts.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#23The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results ( https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en... ). I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertis…
Wow that is a fascinating link, how have I have seen this before.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#24While the individual examples listed here are not good, what is the false-positive and false-negative rates for FB's method of censorship? Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it's leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it's trying to generate shock at "how the sausage gets made". Any process involving humans will…
If you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker & willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.
If only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were completely full of willing listeners for hate speech, then that might be applicable. Hate groups aren't sending private forum messages to each other, they're broadcasting
Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#25I commend Facebook for allocating more resources to enforce its community standards, what's the point in outlining standards if there is no enforcement? I'm not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different c…
The problem is that nothing that Facebook does will actually solve the problem. The solution that will actually solve the problem, having different social networks, with different community standards for each, is antithetical to Facebook's existence. Facebook will continue to make more PowerPoint presentations and hire more outsourced content moderators in a desperate attempt to make the unworkable work... or at least be seen putting in the effort until the the political controversies have blown over.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#26While the individual examples listed here are not good, what is the false-positive and false-negative rates for FB's method of censorship? Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it's leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it's trying to generate shock at "how the sausage gets made". Any process involving humans will…
If you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker & willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.
But FB doesn’t believe that. They’ve had policies for awhile against content they deem abusive.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#27While the individual examples listed here are not good, what is the false-positive and false-negative rates for FB's method of censorship? Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it's leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it's trying to generate shock at "how the sausage gets made". Any process involving humans will…
If you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker & willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.
It’s impossible to separate censorship from moderation / curation, though. In many cases they are different names for the same thing.
Is there a forum that doesn’t ban people, or remove and reshuffle content, or use algorithms to figure out what to show people? For better or worse, most people are attracted to places that do these things.
False positives are regrettable, but only if you feel that we are each inherently special and deserve to each be treated with the same standards. When there are 100 million people to serve, how can a few thousand moderators hope to do an excellent job in all cases?
Many of these questions are still open. We’re at the dawn of the internet, and it’ll be around for the rest of humanity in some form.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#28I commend Facebook for allocating more resources to enforce its community standards, what's the point in outlining standards if there is no enforcement? I'm not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different c…
The problem is that nothing that Facebook does will actually solve the problem. The solution that will actually solve the problem, having different social networks, with different community standards for each, is antithetical to Facebook's existence. Facebook will continue to make more PowerPoint presentations and hire more outsourced content moderators in a desperate attempt to make the unworkable work... or at leas…
Reddit may be coming to it's golden age.
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#29The thing that troubles me the most is the hubris of Facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes. It is their site, so they can do what they want, but I can also do what I want and not use it. Given Facebook's massive drop in stock price this year, it seems like their investors think Facebook is following the wrong path as well.
“...the hubris of facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes?”
What about this is hubris? Wouldnt you argue they have a responsibility to try? Wouldnt it be hubris to build such a powerful platform and not think to care about minimizing the amount of damage malicious actors could do with it?
Re: Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
#30The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results ( https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en... ). I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertis…
The article indicates that all the rules are made centrally, in Menlo Park. I would find it very surprising if they had enough consultants to come up with comprehensive, culturally aware guidelines that allow moderators to make nuanced decisions about what to ban and what to leave up. Instead, their goal seems to be keeping Facebook out of trouble. As long as they can point to a guideline that says that hate group X is banned, they're covered.
To Facebook, the goal isn't to prevent the transmission of hate speech. The goal is to stop Facebook from being perceived as a vehicle to transmit hate speech. Facebook executives know that in advertising, perception overrides reality. They're willing to do whatever it takes to keep up the perception that Facebook is doing everything in its power to stop hate speech, even if those measures have little or no practical impact (or even if they backfire and suppress speech that should be allowed).