
Facebook finds Declaration of Independence 'racist' - mikece
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44722728
======
Waterluvian
Well, that is racist, isn't it? I guess the point is that the bot doesn't
appreciate when something's being racist for educational and historical
purposes. Reminds me of Facebook taking down important but disturbing primary
source journalism.

~~~
krapp
Yes, and that's one of the problems with a zero-tolerance policy of censoring
problematic speech - doing so without understanding and allowing for
historical context means whitewashing history as well, because history itself
is problematic in modern terms. Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin have
been banned from school libraries for similar reasons, missing the point
entirely.

~~~
acct1771
> "problematic speech"

Uh....1984, much?

~~~
krapp
>Uh....1984, much?

Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is
problematic, as opposed to speech which is not.

"Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or
difficulty."

Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or
difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted
article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to
imply, involved.

~~~
mkeyhani
May I suggest that problematic speech is often simply what people don't like
to hear?

Of course, I think it's their right to choose what they want to hear. But that
does not mean I defend censorship.

How to filter the content they consume should be every individual's choice.

Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be
able to easily opt out of them.

~~~
krapp
> May I suggest that ``problematic'' speech is often simply what people don't
> like to hear?

To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone
doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic.

> Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be
> able to easily opt out of them.

Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it
does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user.

The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can
be automated.

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ada1981
More interesting to me is that this reply from the editor:

>> Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps
had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of
cultural development' that would have been better. >>

Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real
“challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were
willing to do anything it took to get them.

~~~
chippy
Could you re-write it so that the bot (or HN readers in the current year)
wouldn't detect it as racism?

~~~
ada1981
Perhaps the point is that racism isn’t just words, but also intent.

Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard.

The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness
of your own projections.

“The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For
the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power
and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all
peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own
humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its
reflection in those we project it upon.”

------
lclarkmichalek
> At issue was a part of it that referred to "merciless Indian savages".

I mean.. not sure I disagree

~~~
hajile
When a settler's cabin was attacked, the warriors would attack everyone --
armed men plus unarmed women and children. At the end of the attack, captured
women and girls would often be raped then killed. The surviving men would be
scalped and tortured to death over a couple of days. The injured would be
hacked to death by the Indian women and children. You can debate how often
this happened, but first-hand stories are relatively common in surviving
military personnel diaries from the time.

What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and
did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't
even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of
war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what
would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators?

Mens Rea

If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's
the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a
profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't
believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real
thief?

Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy
collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the
eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of
keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or
payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the
case of payment, without even the excuse of honor).

The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any
favors.

~~~
kthejoker2
I like how we begin your story in media res with the settler's cabin already
established as if ordained by the laws of nature, disrupted from its idyllic
divine creation by these warriors perpetrating violence.

Who's rewriting what now?

~~~
hajile
I thought it axiomatic that squatting on someone else's property was not the
same as butchering someones entire family.

That aside, you cannot claim land cannot be owned then claim ownership over
it. However, if ownership can be claimed, then who is the owner, the thief or
the thief who steals from the first thief?

Consider the Sioux. People think of the Sioux as the plains Indians, but they
lived in the great lakes area. The Iroquois stole their land from them. In
turn they fought to drive off the semi agrarian Pawnee Indians (who had good
relations with the settlers -- probably because they were settling down
themselves) winning a decisive victory by massacre.

If you go farther back than that, there is tribe after tribe fighting and
butchering the previous one.

Going to Europe, you see the same pattern. Tribes butcher each other until
they are conquered or a tribe survives long enough to settle and establish
dominance. I don't hear about the land argument when discussing those
indigenous peoples (and unlike the Indians, most of them believed land could
be stolen).

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s3m4j
Machine performs its jobs flawlessly, detects racism.

------
ada1981
Perhaps they could just tag content as racist, but still let it show - just
give it a rating or visible highlight.

Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag.

People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist
stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with
the poster.

I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.

------
newman8r
How advanced is facebook's "hate speech detector" anyway? It seems like
they're just checking a blacklist of bad words and maybe doing some
rudimentary NLP.

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RickJWagner
Things should be taken in historical context. What's completely politically
correct and progressive today will be horrific tomorrow.

A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect
(in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and
now they are being vilified.

Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists
that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.

~~~
richardwhiuk
We should recognize that it's both politically incorrect, and historically of
it's time.

Just because something is from the pages of history, doesn't mean it should be
presented as perfectly fine today - that's also wrong.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I find the case of Monty Python extremely important because some of their
sketches are even more poignant (and funny!) today. Many would have no chance
of being created and aired. However, the painful issues behind them, such as
following some dogmas with blind faith and the consequences of such actions,
are still there and watching Monty Python today gives young viewers a
refreshing perspective.

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drngdds
In their defense, it is.

~~~
acct1771
Was.

------
koosnel
What is a facebook?

~~~
XalvinX
Best bet is to forget you ever heard of it, and don't sign up or download
anything remotely related to it. Not being sarcastic here, either.

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poster123
White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land,
and in reaction, there _were_ many cases where the American Indians responded
by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men
but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans
did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused
the American Indians to behave as they did.

~~~
tomohawk
That's an incredibly simplified view of what actually happened, and therefore
a false narrative - about what you'd expect from watching a Hollywood movie.
In many cases, American Indian tribes had been fighting each other for
millenia, and thought they could use the newcomers to their advantage against
enemy tribes. The Sioux, for example, were newcomers to the plains, having
recently driven out / exterminated other tribes that had been there for quite
some time.

If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books.
Here's one:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-
ev...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-everything-
that-is)

~~~
teilo
Thank you for this. Balance it hard to find. The fact is that we are speaking
not of a monolithic nation, but of individual tribes with unique histories.
Lumping Native Americans into a single bucket, while politically useful, is
ahistorical. Nations war over access to land and resources. This is just at
true of the first nations as it is of the new worlders.

The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should
not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe
against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former
greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly
due to the imbalance of power.

~~~
poster123
The atrocities of the first nations against white settlers should also not be
whitewashed.

~~~
teilo
I don't. But I also don't stigmatize it. They treated the white settlers just
like they treated rival tribes - as competitors for land and resources. As in
nearly all of human history, these conflicts are settled by war and bloodshed.

