
Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech - lunchbreak
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html
======
bduerst
While 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 have outliers, but the
question is, how effective is the process really?

~~~
gojomo
If you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker &
willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.

~~~
bduerst
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.

~~~
monochromatic
So-called hate speech doesn’t cause harm other than to feelings. It’s
constitutionally protected in the US, and Facebook is going down the wrong
path trying to eliminate it.

~~~
Godel_unicode
It's constitutionally protected from the government infringing upon it. As
Facebook is not the government, they are perfectly free to limit speech in any
way they choose.

~~~
YorkshireSeason
The article can be read as stating that "[Facebook is an] Unseen Branch of
Government"

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snowmaker
The 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...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf)).

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 expertise to do this accurately for
every country in the world.

~~~
quanticle
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).

------
aisofteng
>They consist of dozens of unorganized PowerPoint presentations and Excel
spreadsheets with bureaucratic titles like “Western Balkans Hate Orgs and
Figures” and “Credible Violence: Implementation standards.”

>In Pakistan, moderators were told to watch some parties and their supporters
for prohibited speech.

>In another email, moderators were told to hunt down and remove rumors wrongly
accusing an Israeli soldier of killing a Palestinian medic.

These are very similar to the information collected by and activities engaged
in by a state intelligence organization.

~~~
baybal2
Hah, I googled those titles just an hour ago, and there were few random pdfs,
and powerpoints.

Now, not a single one.

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mc32
They can’t have this responsibility. It gives them too much centralized power
and fails to devolve power locally where people are better fit to
understanding the audience and the content.

I really think the answer is in localized, community-based moderation (with
appeals to localized corp) like forums used to be. Obviously that goes against
their will to control every aspect of their platform.

~~~
nradov
Well there are localized social networks in countries where Facebook is
blocked or just unpopular. WeChat in China, VKontakte in Russia. I'm not sure
that's any better?

What does localized even mean anymore, and who should decide whether someone
is sufficiently "local" to qualify as a moderator?

~~~
mc32
Devolving moderation on national level (as opposed to centralized global)
would be a start, but also self selecting groups. If you choose to be in a
Singaporean page, group, forum, etc., you abide by their localization.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
But what does that mean for a global group? Seriously?

For example: I help run a large art group on facebook. (Large = 76,975
members). While the breakdown of our group shows the largest percentage of
folks in the group are from the US (20k), lots of folks are from India (15k)..
and the rest are from elsewhere in the world. We list ourselves as global. The
unpaid admins and moderators are from different countries and times zones. We
use Translate functions at times.

What localisation do we have? Do we have a choice? If one admin is in Norway,
can we use a Norwegian model of nudity censorship instead of the more
restrictive American or Indian or Facebook models of "acceptable" nudity? Can
you list locally with one admin even if your demographics do not fit? Do large
countries always have the advantage? If demographics change, does the
censorship style?

These are all issues with "local" or national level censorship, and I dont'
think there is an easy answer.

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scarejunba
How does everyone have so much trouble with Facebook and Twitter? I have both
and have used both for years and I know that both require you to pick what you
want to look at. I exhaust my Twitter feed in seconds and then have nothing to
look at.

Both my FB feed and my Twitter feed are more heartwarming, adorable, funny, or
touching than angry or whatever. Maybe all of this is just a reflection of who
you guys are.

And I'm no stranger to controversy. Ban the bomb, no war, I've been there.
Where I haven't been is Twitter/FB flamewars. And you know how? I unfollow as
soon as I don't like. It's not the end of the world.

~~~
pjc50
You're not popular enough.

> unfollow

In the nastier situations, it's not people who you follow that's the problem.
It's the people who @ you from a constant stream of new accounts.

~~~
sjroot
Facebook should add a privacy setting that allows you to disable @mentions
completely, or limit them to people you have added as a friend. I would not be
surprised if this is already a feature.

~~~
josteink
It does.

------
EGreg
The problem as usual is centralization on the Web. That’s what caused the VCs
to fund Facebook and why it became this behemoth. (Peter Thiel thinks a
monopoly is awesome.)

Take for example a law passed earlier this year which required networks to
remove posts dealing with child trafficking. The EFF and many free speech
advocates went ballistic:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-
censored-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-
internet)

But what if we had open source software that any small community could use to
run their own Facebook-like social network?

Look, Wordpress has been around for 15 year and people have figured out how to
clean up their own blog spam. Communities like HN or a local village can
easily police their own posts. Local communities are also able to know a local
language and local customs and laws.

The problem is centralization.

------
40acres
I 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.

~~~
quanticle
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.

~~~
abraae
Reddit may be coming to it's golden age.

~~~
pixl97
Nope... for this reason

"I hate group X, I create an account and become part of X. I attack group Y
until group X gets banned."

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fromthestart
We can barely agree on what constitutes hate speech in the U.S.; fb is
expecting to define and police hate speech globally?

~~~
rntz
From Facebook's perspective, what is the alternative? _Not_ trying to define
censorship guidelines - and consequently (as we saw in Myanmar) enabling
genocide?

~~~
flyingswift
Damned if they try, damned if they don't

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lwf
Note this is mostly (entirely?) old news, first reported by Motherboard. c.f.
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-
facebo...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-
content-moderation-works)

(via
[https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1078443875784683521](https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1078443875784683521)
)

------
mactyler
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.

------
throw2016
There is a lot of apologism for censorship on this thread in sharp contrast to
the threads on china and others where they are demonized for the exact same
thing.

This is troubling as it seems when we do it commentators are ready with a
litany of justifications in contrast to the blanket judgements on other
discussions. This kind of double standards is abusive of discourse and the
values sought to be defended and cannot then be a forum for informed
discussion.

~~~
John_KZ
HN is right-biased and quite nationalist.I'm always amused to realize that
some people _actually believe_ that Facebook's "moderation efforts" are a good
think, while WeChat's or VK's are not.

I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public,
but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool
for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even
if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really
protecting your own interests.

------
bookofjoe
The Times seems to have one or more Facebook employees feeding it confidential
material in spite of Zuckerberg's threat to prosecute anyone caught doing so.
Constant leak of documents/emails/etc.

------
makosdv
The 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.

~~~
mactyler
“...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?

~~~
int_19h
The hubris is in doing it extralegally.

They should work with legislatures and law enforcement in their respective
countries of operation to figure out what those countries (and their people)
actually want them to do. Some countries have strong hate speech laws; some
have strong freedom of speech protections. Ideally, this should be reflected
in their communication platforms. One size doesn't fit all.

~~~
mactyler
While I completely agree that one size doesn’t fit all, you can’t deny
facebook might run into some problems if the governments of each country they
are working with aren’t exactly pushing for what facebook thinks are some of
the most forward thinking morals like individual freedom of speech or lgbtq
rights or gender equality. It puts you in a rough precedent and a likely
banning from a country to start working with some governments on rules and not
some with others. I think I agree with some of the aspects of your statement
but there should be a larger body responsible for defining the base set of
ethics for the digital world but on a global scale and something more like the
geneva convention. I think its often unfair to all the people that work on
these problems that truly care about finding solutions to imply that there is
an easy alternative they are somehow incredulously ignoring.

~~~
int_19h
> you can’t deny facebook might run into some problems if the governments of
> each country they are working with aren’t exactly pushing for what facebook
> thinks are some of the most forward thinking morals like individual freedom
> of speech or lgbtq rights or gender equality.

At that point, they have to decide if operating in a country that demands this
sort of thing is morally acceptable or not.

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kqbx
I haven't been able to find the original files (probably not possible) but it
looks like The Guardian has access to at least some of them too:

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/facebook-
files](https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/facebook-files)

Note that these were published on May 2017.

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walrus01
I dearly wish the NY times would share this trove of Excel sheets and
PowerPoints as a torrent. Let people view all of them.

~~~
snowmaker
There are probably legal issues preventing them do from doing so. I'm not
super familiar with this area of law, but the snippets they shared probably
fall into some analogue of fair use, while the full documents would be a clear
breach of trade secret laws.

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selimthegrim
Samiul Haq was murdered shortly after the election in Pakistan. Let’s give
Facebook some credit for exercising due caution there.

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jmspring
Having a bunch of likely millenial aged individuals with limited life
experience based in Menlo Park to have a say in discourse that crosses so many
boundaries? What could possibly go wrong?

~~~
beatpanda
This is exactly why Silicon Valley engineers, and engineers generally, need to
stop being so dismissive of people with "useless" liberal arts educations, and
instead bring in sociologists and anthropologists to think through these
processes in a comprehensive way.

I'm being downvoted into oblivion elsewhere on this site for suggesting this,
but I feel like it's a very obvious move for tech companies that have this
problem.

~~~
jmspring
I have no problem with anthropologists and those in the liberal arts employed
when there are skills they have that help a company. Bubble-1, many humanities
students were hired around working with content. That wasn't a bad thing.

As I said in another post, companies also actually used to hire people outside
the tech bubble to deal with things like categorization of websites, etc. That
went away once they could achieve a certain percentage with cheap labor.

~~~
sunsetMurk
..and now with ML/etc.!

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zakum1
Noble aspirations (including those of the founding fathers of the US) that
rational dialogue is the answer and not censorship need to be reinterpreted in
a Facebook-world where dialogue is largely impossible. It demands a new
citizenship, which I believe requires us to eschew platforms like Facebook,
not because we want to turn back the clock, but because by their nature they
are incapable of supporting true social dialogue. It isn’t a question of
censorship, it is a personal question of ethical standards.

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jgalt212
I would just shut down in these hard to govern, hard to monetize
regions/countries. I know it's a bit step from "connecting the world" mantra,
but it solves the problem.

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djohnston
i'll save you the click, tldr: facebook is trying to solve an unsolvable
problem, they've made some mistakes as 2 billion people have a lot of
different ideas about what constitutes a good or bad decision, but no one has
anything better to offer, including the author of the article.

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Steko
Whoever wrote their rulebook used Apple's emoji instead of Facebook's own.

