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Facebook reveals 25 pages of takedown rules for hate speech and more
Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public's constant calls for clarity and protests about its decisions. Today Facebook published 25 pages of detailed criteria and examples for what is and isn't allowed.
Facebook is effectively shifting where it will be criticized to the underlying policy instead of individual incidents of enforcement mistakes like when it took down posts of the newsworthy "Napalm Girl" historical photo because it contains child nudity before eventually restoring them. Some groups will surely find points to take issue with, but Facebook has made some significant improvements. Most notably, it no longer disqualifies minorities from shielding from hate speech because an unprotected characteristic like "children" is appended to a protected characteristic like "black".
Nothing is technically changing about Facebook's policies. But previously, only leaks like a copy of an internal rulebook attained by the Guardian had given the outside world a look at when Facebook actually enforces those policies. These rules will be translated into over 40 languages for the public. Facebook currently has 7500 content reviewers, up 40% from a year ago.
Also at MarketWatch.
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(Score: 2) by rigrig on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:10PM (1 child)
No, Facebook worries about advertisers paying them less money.
This can happen because of
a) people leaving Facebook, resulting in less people to advertise to.
So far repeated apologies and promises to not do whatever they were found out doing again (and again and again) seem to work pretty well to keep users around.
b) advertisers leaving Facebook because of public pressure calling specific companies to boycott Facebook because their black-box moderation resulted in some outrage-worthy mishap. (even though the company would quite like to continue advertising to such a well-tracked group of advertees)
From now on, Facebook and these companies can point to the rulebook, and claim they couldn't foresee the latest mishap (because if they could have seen it coming, anybody could, so why didn't they speak up before?). Also, the rules will be updated to prevent this from ever happening again, so no need to boycott them.
(Alternatively: this specific incident was because of someone mot properly following the rulebook, so they will receive better training, and it obviously isn't a systematic outrage-worthy problem)
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:02PM
Good point. This is probably the actual motivation.
I think there is a real internal motivation to unevenly apply the rules to mould public perception according to a particular ideology though. Above and beyond the primary concern of advertising money.