
Facebook ignored racial bias research, employees say - jbegley
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-management-ignored-internal-research-showing-racial-bias-current-former-n1234746
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rbecker
_In an effort to be neutral, the company’s hate speech policies treat attacks
on white people or men in exactly the same way as it treats comments about
Black people or women [..]

Employees said that this policy means the company’s automated content
moderation tools proactively detect far more hate speech targeting white
people than it does hate speech targeting Black people, even if the hate
speech targeted at Black people is widely considered more offensive -- a
hypothesis supported by academics and the company’s own internal research.._

To avoid such an outcome, reddit used to explicitly allow hate speech against
"majority" groups (in the US, despite reddit being used
globally):[https://web.archive.org/web/20200629172643/https://www.reddi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200629172643/https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-
reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or)

They've since changed the wording to be less explicit, only forbidding hate
speech against "marginalized or vulnerable" groups, without mentioning that
this means hate speech against other groups is still allowed. The examples
they give show their intention is the same: "Some examples of hateful
activities that would violate the rule: [..] Post describing a racial minority
as sub-human and inferior to the racial majority":
[https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-
reporting/acc...](https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-
reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or)

It would be interesting to see how they would apply this rule to a South
African subreddit.

