Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the devil-in-the-detail dept.

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.

Related:
Facebook Reports BBC for Reporting Child Porn Images Found on Facebook
Facebook Blocks Users from Sharing World Socialist Web Site Promotional Video
Facebook-Owned Instagram Removes Opioid-Related Posts


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:40PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:40PM (#671285)

    Racism is basically a short-circuit in the brain that convinces people that somebody's skin color, language, nationality, etc allows you to infer anything at all about their character.

    Oh, I thought that was called "statistics" or maybe "science"

    A lot of that has to do with creationist theory. Creationist theory in the sense of all minds and characters are identical across all races, just like height or skin color or ... oh wait.

    Now there's a totally separate issue used to propagandize the issue, such that noticing any difference is claimed to be the same as firing up the crematoriums, which is obviously hilarious. I'm not the same person as my neighbor does not necessarily result in I must put him in a camp, but for propaganda reasons any noticing of race is portrayed negatively as nazi this and that, which sold pretty well for awhile but less so in recent decades and years.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:07PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:07PM (#671299)

    Racism is basically a short-circuit in the brain that convinces people that somebody's skin color, language, nationality, etc allows you to infer anything at all about their character.

    Oh, I thought that was called "statistics"

    Then you fundamentally misunderstand statistics.

    For the sake of argument, let's say someone did a study and discovered that 45% of houses in X County have white siding, whereas in most of the state only 30% of houses have white siding. Now, what would be a valid conclusion is "houses in X County are substantially more likely to have white siding." What you are advocating, though, is "This is a house in X County, and everyone knows houses in X County are much more likely to have white siding, so this house probably has white siding," which is incorrect because more than half of houses in X County don't have white siding.

    Statistics can help you understand aggregate trends, but without theory about what those statistics mean, they don't help you accurately understand the data points that led to that statistic. As another simple example, if the median income of 500 people is $75,000, that tells you is that 250 people earned less than $75,000 and 250 earned more than $75,000 but it doesn't tell you whether any particular person earned $10,000 or $100,000,000.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:28PM (#671348)

      "Everyone knows houses in X County are much more likely to have white siding, and looking at white siding can trigger my epileptic seizures, so it is safer if I stay out of X County."

      No, there isn't a 100% safe place, and living in X County wouldn't make it 100% likely to have a seizure and then fall down and crack a skull, but the conclusion should be obvious: it is safer to stay away.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 25 2018, @12:17PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 25 2018, @12:17PM (#671594)

      What you are advocating, though, is "This is a house in X County, and everyone knows houses in X County are much more likely to have white siding, so this house probably has white siding,"

      Not really, no.

      Its a strange jump from "anything" to this very specific example.