
Ask HN: Why are Twitter and Facebook so poor at moderating hate speech? - helpfulanon
In response to this: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;morning-mix&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;get-some-of-them-to-kill-themselves-popular-neo-nazi-site-urges-readers-to-troll-liberals-into-suicide&#x2F;?tid=hybrid_collaborative_3_na<p>I want to understand why social media companies don&#x27;t seem to look as though they are taking responsibility for moderating extremists and coordinated hate groups trolling on their platforms. This problem has been escalating exponentially for years, especially over the US election cycle, and is a critical issue. Why does Silicon Valley feel as though it must not take a position on this?<p>Twitter, Facebook in my belief are no longer politically neutral organizations when they allow vindictive trolling and misinformation to proliferate and serve the agenda of alt-right hate groups. Do the people working at these companies ever ask themselves these questions or are they purposely oblivious to what&#x27;s going on?
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erichocean
> _Why does Silicon Valley feel as though it must not take a position on
> this?_

Twitter and Facebook already do take positions: they actively kick people and
groups off their services. Literally happens every day.

Prior to kicking people off, they actively "shadow ban" unsavory elements of
their user base to prevent their ideas/hate speech from spreading.

Twitter even does this kind of shadow banning on a per-tweet basis. For
instance, I follow a journalist named Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson). She
would always retweet Trump and Clinton in pairs, but I almost never got the
Trump retweets (which gave me the distinct impression she was pro-Clinton). I
only found out about the per-tweet suppression Twitter employed when she
started tweeting about it.

Twitter even goes so far as to put up big ass warnings now when you click on
web links to _content_ that violates _Twitter 's_ (progressive-friendly, anti-
hate) terms of service! The one I saw most recently was for links to
[https://voxday.blogspot.com/](https://voxday.blogspot.com/), which is
(apparently) some kind of white nationalist site. Presumably, some people who
try and follow such a link in their feed will not actually read it, thinking
it's some kind of malware site.

What more do you expect them to do? From my perspective, they're already doing
a lot.

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PaulHoule
Part of it is that there is not a clear line of where legitimate discourse
ends and "hate speech" starts.

~~~
helpfulanon
Sure there is. Posting an article that was contrived by hate groups, is hate
speech. Convincing someone to commit suicide because of their sexual
orientation, political views, is hate speech. It's not that hard

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Who defines what groups are a "hate group?"

Is Black Lives Matter a "hate group?" What about Blue Lives Matter? What about
an anti-BML group? Who decides? And once they're a hate group, according to
you everything they publish is automatically considered "hate speech" and
therefore banned. Seems overly broad.

Honestly yelling "it is just obvious" is very naive and unworkable. People
have tried for years to come up with black and white definitions of these
things and they've all failed. It often boils down to "when I see it, I know
it" but that varies per individual.

~~~
dictum
> Who defines what groups are a "hate group?"

From what I've observed, every publication has the Southern Poverty Law Center
as the arbiter — and then you end up with things like this
[http://www.theexmuslim.com/2016/10/27/southern_poverty_law_c...](http://www.theexmuslim.com/2016/10/27/southern_poverty_law_center_loses_the_plot/)

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cnnsucks
Anyone know if Twitter is acting on users calling for the assassination of
president elect Trump? Twitter seems to be pretty aggressive at inferring
violations of their policies when someone squabbles with an SJW favored party.
Trump is prolific Twitter user with a lot of followers ... are they just
supposed to look the other way and ignore all the public death threats?

~~~
x1798DE
"Someone should kill you." Or "I hope someone kills you." are not, by the way,
death threats. A death threat would be, "I'm going to kill you."

That said, I'm only inferring the nature of the "threats" from your
description, I don't make a habit of looking at politicians' twitter feeds.

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lj3
Wow, damned if you do, damned if you don't. From the right's perspective,
Facebook and Twitter actively censors unfavorable political opinions. This
goes way beyond just policing hate speech and is one of the biggest reasons
the Left didn't see Trump's victory coming. Silencing dissenting opinions
doesn't mean those dissenting opinions just go away. But it is funny watching
an entire industry fall over themselves trying to figure out the obvious.

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throwaway420
Maybe spreading the idea of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words
will never hurt me" rather than creating generations of people who need safe
spaces and crumble at the smallest unpleasant thought would work better than
trying to curb an element of human behavior that has gone on forever and will
continue to go on (unfortunately) for a long time.

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zer00eyz
Trolling and misinformation exists on BOTH sides of the fence.

Lets look at one side: Your black so your automatically less

Lets look at the other side: Your a white male so you privileged

One of these is hate speech, the other is a protest/complaint about the
current state of things. Functionally both are the same.

For years the courts have been cautious about dealing with language and the
first amendment. If you sit down to think about WHY it is because it is a
slippery slope.

