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
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A BBC investigation found 100 "sexualised images of children" on Facebook. Auntie Beeb reported the images to Facebook, who found over 80% of them to be "not in breach of their guidelines" - despite one of them including a still from a child abuse video with a label requesting viewers "share child pornography."
The twist is that when the BBC followed up on this failure, Facebook reported the BBC to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre for "distributing images of child exploitation".
How can Facebook expect users to help them police their content when reporting abuse gets the users accused of the abuses they are reporting?
Alternate articles:
On January 15th, 2018, World Socialist Web Site reported that users are unable to share a promotional video for a January 16th online meeting, "Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship."
Facebook has blocked users from sharing a social media video promoting the January 16 online meeting "Organizing resistance to Internet censorship," featuring World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. The initial post of the video, uploaded Friday, cannot be shared by any user. Those who attempt to do so receive an error message that seems to imply a technical failure.
Users reported, however, that upon clicking "If you think you're seeing this message by mistake, please let us know," they were presented with a notice that clearly indicates the content had been blocked in the name of keeping Facebook "safe."
WSWS published an open letter about internet censorship and net neutrality on November 25. The FCC repealed net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017.
In this AC's opinion, Facebook is certainly within their rights to refuse to host any content for any reasons they choose. However, for many people, Facebook is the internet.
Should we worry about entrenched services such as Facebook and Google using their positions to suppress information? Does the presence or absence of net neutrality change one's analysis of the situation?
One Woman Got Facebook to Police Opioid Sales On Instagram (archive)
Eileen Carey says she has regularly reported Instagram accounts selling opioids to the company for three years, with few results. Last week, Carey confronted two executives of Facebook, which owns Instagram, about the issue on Twitter. Since then, Instagram removed some accounts, banned one opioid-related hashtag and restricted the results for others.
Searches for the hashtag #oxycontin on Instagram now show no results. Other opioid-related hashtags, such as #opiates, #fentanyl, and #narcos, surface a limited number of results along with a message stating, "Recent posts from [the hashtag] are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram's community guidelines." Some accounts that appeared to be selling opioids on Instagram also were removed.
The moves come amid increased government concern about the role of tech platforms in opioid abuse, and follow years of media reports about the illegal sale of opioids on Instagram and Facebook, from the BBC, Venturebeat, CNBC, Sky News and others. Following the BBC probe in 2013, Instagram blocked searches of terms associated with the sale of illegal drugs.
[...] Carey is now the CEO of Glassbreakers, a startup maker of software to support workforce diversity. But she worked on illegal drug sales in her previous job at MarkMonitor, a company that protects brands like pharmaceutical companies from online counterfeiting, piracy, and fraud. In a Mar. 30 tweet to Rob Leathern, Facebook's director of product management, Carey wrote, "The historical response that users can report abuse and moderators will review hasn't changed in 4 years." She asked him to "Please hold leadership accountable."
#StopSnitching.
Also at CNN.
See also: Facebook Needs to Do More to Stop the Online Opioid Market, Says FDA Chief
Related: Senate Investigators Google Their Way to $766 Million of Fentanyl
U.S. Surgeon General Urges More Americans to Carry Naloxone
U.S. Life Expectancy Continues to Decline Due to Opioid Crisis
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:19PM (27 children)
white ain't right
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:55PM (26 children)
Then how do you explain the fact that it is mostly the left who are supportive of brown skinned people, and the right tends to take a contrary position?
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:41PM (5 children)
Because you don't have a left-wing.
Liberalism doesn't derive from leftist thinking, because they support using immigration policy to undermine the wages and bargaining position of the working classes, and don't even consistently oppose foreign military operations which are the push factor in mass migration.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
Leftist people want to support immigrants for humanitarian purposes, not to drive wages down. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a retard (like you). Why? Simple: the leftists are just as threatened by cheap labor (hello! tech industry?) as the blue collar industry is with immigration.
But thanks to partisan political games bought about people looking to fool morons such as yourself into believing whatever drivel they can muster turning every issue into convenient double edged swords. So everything is now a kindergarten level black and white issue. Here's the kind of garbage people like you are perpetuating:
Support immigrants? You're a commie hippie leftist looking to destroy america and white people/culture.
Support Strict Immigration policy? You're a deplorable right wing racist card carrying nazi kkk member looking to ethnically cleanse the planet of non whites.
You can also swap in gay marriage and gun rights above.
In summary: fuck you.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:23PM
It's funny some people think I'm Left, but my immigration position is actually quite radical for everyone.
It makes no sense at all to be letting people in. Not when we're about to break apart in civil war because the Elites have sucked out >90% of the wealth and set us against each other. There's no more money or opportunity in the US for anyone coming here, so just shut it down entirely.
Now, if we killed all the Elites and politicians... we could get this country back on track and it wouldn't matter to us that we have immigration of people needing help, much less people capable of making great contributions from the moment they touch foot here (allegedly the Norwegians).
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:03PM (1 child)
It depends a lot on what kind of leftist you're talking about.
What you're describing is best labelled "neoliberalism". It's been the dominant policy ideal of the Democratic Party ever since 1992 or so, exemplified by Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as Barack Obama, and basically amounts to "equal rights for everyone regardless of race, gender, sex, or orientation, but no substantial opposition to corporate control over the economic structure". And you're absolutely right that they really don't want the working classes to have a strong bargaining position.
That's substantially different from lots of different kinds of leftist thinking, though. The major fight within the Democratic Party as of late has been the neoliberals doing everything they can to hang onto their current power, while people more to the left of them are arguing that the "identity politics" around race, gender, sex, orientation ... issues are being used to hide the fact that the neoliberals will gladly sell out the working classes to big corporations. It's gotten nasty enough that the neoliberals are firing and otherwise removing from the party structure anybody challenging neoliberalism as the party's ideals.
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, @08:31PM
^ for all you RWNJs out there
don't worry, most "leftists" get along fine with conservatives and realize that Alex Jones does not represent the average conservative.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:44PM
Leftist immigration policy is access to white residential areas and welfare programs is a human right and any suggestion that non-whites should just build their own instead of parasitism is hate speech because ... who knows.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:06PM (19 children)
What does "supportive" mean here?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:20PM (18 children)
In this use case it is actually "not antagonistic towards" as well as "understanding that brown skinned people experience a lot of prejudice as a fact of life." Actually supportive? Maybe with support for teaching with ESL, donations to human rights organizations, outreach etc.
It is often quite obvious that most people who complain about illegal immigration have a fair bit of bigotry tied into their viewpoint, they don't want "those" people coming over to their country. Sometimes its racism, sometimes its cultural differences, sometimes it is just misplaced anger about the state of the country / world. At least liberals pay lip service at minimum to live and let live, and don't bring in the big tech censorship crap as that doesn't equate to the average person.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:13PM (17 children)
Two kinds of questions that can be used to figure out whether somebody's anti-immigration stance is really about immigration:
1. Ask about Puerto Ricans. The reason for this is pretty simple: Puerto Ricans are American citizens (a lot of racists will deny this, but it's been true for over a century), but generally speak Spanish as their primary language and are darker-skinned than European-Americans, so complaints about Puerto Ricans aren't about immigrants, they're complaints about Hispanic people.
2. Ask about immigrants from places that are predominantly white. For example, if someone is thinking that Norwegian immigrants are great, while Mexican immigrants are terrible, then what's motivating those opinions isn't economics either.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:25PM (13 children)
Ok? Why would that be? The two countries aren't comparable economically. Norwegians taken at random are better educated, experienced with a developed world society and economy, and lower fertility. Likely to be more of a contributor to the US economy.
OTOH, point 1. seems a reasonable litmus test.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:40PM (10 children)
Both (legal) Mexican immigrants and Norwegian immigrants arrive under the same terms: They are generally ineligible for public assistance of any kind, and will be deported if they're caught doing anything they're not supposed to. The Mexican immigrant might be a brilliant hardworking person, the Norwegian immigrant might be a lazy idiot, but rather than try to figure out whether the individuals trying to immigrate are going to help or harm the country you're instead assuming Norwegian=good and Mexican=bad.
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. It doesn't, and that fallacy does real harm to all involved. Not just the people whose skin color, language, nationality, etc have been associated with negative traits: As an example, a lot of rich white Jewish people trusted Bernie Madoff because he was at least at first glance a rich white Jewish guy.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:40PM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:07PM (2 children)
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
"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
Not really, no.
Its a strange jump from "anything" to this very specific example.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:51PM (5 children)
Or it might be a Mexican lazy idiot and a brilliant hardworking Norwegian. Those happen too. Most likely it would a Norwegian pulled in by a good job in the states versus an illegal immigrant who slipped through the wall. The former being better economically than the latter (as well as being less likely to be in competition most of the people who are concerned about illegal immigration).
While the economic reason isn't greatly compelling, it does exist. The US would have a considerably better time of it economically absorbing typical Norwegians than typical Mexicans. However, the sort of people of the two countries who want to migrant to the US for economic reasons by far tend to come from Mexico. The US isn't likely to attract the economically most desirable people from the world (unless they happen to be fleeing persecution). I agree that it would make more sense to educate and train weaker immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere than it would be to pine for better quality immigrants from Europe who aren't so willing to immigrate when they usually have a good thing going in their home countries.
And what does that have to do with the subject?
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:32PM (1 child)
You shithole, khallow! There! It's not politically correct, but khallow is a racist!!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:00PM
And the sky is blue, so what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:27PM (2 children)
If we're talking about 1000 of them, it is probably OK. Filter out the commies and other dummies please.
After we take in a million of them, and they have created Norwegian-speaking cities, and they are demanding Norwegian-language schools and ballots, and there are Norwegian radio/TV stations, and a major political party is pandering to them, my answer is NO WAY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @12:34AM (1 child)
Where will you be when the dementia kicks in?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:28AM
Sounds like Minnesota, possibly Nord Dukota, or Western North Dackota (eastern Montana). Full of Norwegians.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:21PM (12 children)
To have a set of rules and to uniformly and fairly apply those rules are two very different things.
Facebook worries about users gaming the rules. Facebook has rules in place to specifically allow Facebook to game the rules while claiming fairness and impartiality.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:53PM (7 children)
You seem to think that the rules should apply equally to rich and poor alike.
We do not live in a world of equality. For instance the rich are underprivileged because they cannot commit crimes. Nothing they do can be defined as a crime.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:32PM
I suppose we could spend thirty seconds googling, say for tax evasion, and disprove that vapid joke, but what would be the point? I'll instead note that in the same sarcastic vein, the poor don't commit crimes either. They're just oppressed.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:42PM (5 children)
Another classic example is its a white privilege to commit hate crimes, only whites are permitted that designation.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:07PM (1 child)
Another classic example is its a white privilege to commit hate crimes, only whites are permitted that designation.
That is simply not true.
Here is a recent example. [chicagotribune.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:35PM
There is still a bias.
She got 200 hours of community service and four years of probation for beating someone.
This guy http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/18/florida-man-gets-year-in-prison-for-mosque-threat.html [foxnews.com] got a year in jail for making a phone call that : "Court documents say the message used profanity against Islam, the prophet Muhammad and the Quran and threatened to "go down to your center" and shoot people."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:36PM (2 children)
ha ha! *nelson voice*
VLM you need to accept the FACT that you are a bigot, only then can you begin to understand your journey through life. You can hide behind all sorts of "logical and factual" rationale all you want, but eventually the walls will crumble and you'll have to face yourself. Do it now before your latent hatred becomes ingrained and you end up as one of those old racist assholes people barely tolerate.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 25 2018, @12:18PM
Meaningless word salad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @03:32PM
It seems you're day late and a dollar short! :-)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:57PM
It's a good marketing decision. They should change their branding to be the Fair and Balanced social network.
(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.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:24PM
Are the published rules also the rules that apply to the more "senior" moderators?
Or, asking a different way: are the 'published' rules the *only* moderation rules?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:56PM (1 child)
But who will no longer disqualify us from shielding from tortuous constructions like that?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:59PM
Only Strunk and White can save us now.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:29PM
Facebook moderation:
Just say no.
Don't fall for the "first one's free".
Not even once.
Zuck's wack.