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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: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:15PM (4 children)
Because rather than devising methods to screen people for "brilliant", "hard-working", "educated", etc, you're advocating screening people based on "Norwegian" and "Mexican" and making all kinds of assumptions about them based solely on their national origin. You are, in essence, intentionally making decisions based on ignorance rather than data.
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, @08:33PM
Thexalon your responses are inspiring, actually giving good objective feedback. I have a hard time getting past this level of ignorance and taking an empathetic educational approach.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:26AM
Well I don't know about that! But then, neither does khallow, which is kind of the point, I guess. Ignorance, the essence of khallow! Interesting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:38PM
Who is devising and implementing these methods? It's certainly not the people making the judgments based on incomplete data. It's certainly not the dynamics by which people enter the US illegally. Sure, we could consider the hypothetical situation where the US gets the crap Norwegians and the best Mexicans, but why should the deplorable in question buy that is happening in reality?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 25 2018, @10:45PM
Those aren't ethnic or racist categories. They are first and foremost political/societal categories. Let us recall that a key concern of the anti-immigration is whether a large group of immigrants will bring the problems of their homelands with them. The problems of Norway are far more palatable than the problems of Mexico.
One also sees this at the US state level. There are similar complaints (with some merit) about people migrating from states with problems, like California or New York, and then recreating, intentionally or not, those problems in their new home states (such favoring regulation and lawsuits from California, or aggressive driving behavior from New York).
So before stereotyping stereotyping as "racism", perhaps you ought to be thinking about the reason this mental short-circuit exists in the first place. Inheritable traits don't appear out of nowhere. There has to be some survival value to them - that is, evolution-wise, stereotyping is accurate enough to have survival value else we wouldn't be seeing the behavior in the first place.