
Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use - elzed
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms
======
danso
> _The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and
> several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected
> categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation,
> national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability
> /disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of
> protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits
> are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized
> Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
> (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)_

From this aspect, this internal quiz question seems reasonable if its intent
is to test the candidate's knowledge of the technical details (e.g. what a
protected category is) in the face of a seemingly absurd situation (e.g. Why
should white men be more protected than children of any color?). Similar
tactics are used in HR training I've had to go through. I remember for a
sexual discrimination training quiz, there was a question about a woman who
used anti-gay-male slurs in the workplace who then herself alleged she was
being harassed for being a female. The question was worded in a way to trap
you if you thought women couldn't be the offenders. I regret to say I've
forgotten the specifics but the question actually referred to a real-life case
in which a court sided against the woman because of her documented use of
anti-gay slurs.

Edit: as absurd as that FB training slide seems, I don't think people give
enough credit to how nuanced FB has to be when trying to be both a reasonable
censor while allowing important free speech -- think the Philando Castile
shooting video -- in _real-time_ and across international borders and moral
codes. It's a tough balancing act to train people to judge this, and the
training materials are unavoidably going to sound horrific. Imagine the
wording of a question that tested a candidate's handling of a photo posted of
a naked young girl running in pain from a napalm attack.

That said, the argument about how being the squeaky wheel, or a celebrity with
a following, gets you better, faster treatment than the disenfranchised, is
true. But that unfortunate situation has happened everywhere else in real
life, including media. In journalism, one cynical aphorism is: "News is
whatever happens to your editor"

------
dTal
>Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific
sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was
deleted for attacking whites in general.

That seems disingenuous. Higgins' rant starts by pitching "Christendom" with-
a-capital-C against "these heathen animals", before he ever mentions
radicalization. And when he does mention it, he says "radicalized Islamic
_suspect_ ", which is fairly meaningless as a category as no burden of proof
is required. Coupled with repeated incitements to "kill them all", I think
that's pretty clearly directed at all Muslims.

The trouble with this policy is, I can apparently be as racist and hateful as
I like as long as I take care to slip a "non-protected category" in there -
even if by doing so I am implying that all members of the protected category
are such. For example, "lynch every last one of those baby-raping niggers" is
fine, because it only applies to those niggers that rape babies. In fact it is
exactly this sort of speech that is the most harmful - "All niggers rape
babies and we should lynch them" is far less potent.

------
gnicholas
> * Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action
> for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing
> discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and
> genders equally.*

This is inaccurate as to the allowable purposes for affirmative action. In
_Bakke_ , (1978), the Supreme Court held that diversity was an allowable
rationale, but redressing past discrimination was not. As described in the
NYT:

 _Diversity isn’t just one rationale for creating or maintaining a racially
integrated student body. It is the only rationale. Ever since the Bakke case
nearly four decades ago, no other reason for affirmative action has passed
constitutional muster in the view of the Supreme Court’s majority: not
equalizing opportunity, not redressing past wrongs (the flagship Austin campus
was formally all-white until 1956 and functionally segregated long after that)
or opening previously closed doors. Only “diversity.”_

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-
court...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-courts-
diversity-dilemma.html) (an opinion piece related to the _Fisher_ case, which
pertained to affirmative action in university admissions)

------
Zak
Where they draw the line on some of these things seems... _odd_. A degrading
generalization about a nationality like one of their examples

> _the Irish suck_

seems relatively harmless, while the permissible

> _Keep the horny migrant teenagers away from our daughters_

seems much more dangerous. The latter is much more likely to spur some sort of
antisocial behavior from a reader.

~~~
iratewizard
Is the latter dangerous because it is dissent? It sounds like we are now
defining a framework for what dissent is acceptable and it seems to align to a
dominant political ideology. Sort of defeats the point of dissent.

~~~
Zak
It's dangerous because it evokes a specific fear that's likely to inspire
action. You could swap migrants and Irish in an area with a sufficient Irish
population and it would still be true.

> _the migrants suck_

Is pretty harmless, while

> _Keep the horny Irish teenagers away from our daughters_

might well lead to someone assaulting people they perceived to be Irish
teenagers who were getting too friendly with their daughters.

------
Aloha
When you consider what Facebook is trying to accomplish, which is to establish
a universal code for acceptable content across multiple cultures and languages
- this looks a lot more acceptable to me, than it would be otherwise.

~~~
_jal
Only if you accept the premise in the first place.

There is no set of rules that won't yield absurd results. FB is always going
to carve out exceptions for the powerful. The baseline still starts from
Zuckerburg's upper-class, U.S. dominant-culture sensibilities. And so on.

------
glangdale
I get the theory behind that quiz 'trick question', but does it make any
actual legal sense? If the discrimination against a subset happens because of
the component of the subset that's protected, then surely it's an attack on a
protected category. So if you say "black children are all stupid" the likely
implication is that you're saying "unlike white children" (otherwise why would
you include black).

Is this even true legally? Could a school discriminate against black children
because, hey, they are children? Or a movie theater: "Let's not offer youth
discounts to Latinos".

I am not a lawyer, so I don't know the legalistic view, but it seems to be an
absurdity.

~~~
throwanem
It's not generally speaking a matter of law, since the context is that of a
US-based private company moderating the behavior of its voluntary users, and
we generally treat this in a very _laissez-faire_ fashion by default. The
extent to which Facebook heeds the laws of those countries other than the US,
in which it does business and would like to continue doing so, is determined
almost entirely by the value it places on that business.

Of course, this situation changes in any such case as new legislation is made
to address perceived or actual need, but that hasn't really happened yet here.
The same is not true of, say, refusing trade to members of a specific ethnic
group because of that ethnicity - a case in which laws of the sort I describe
have indeed been made.

(And, to be clear, I have serious qualms with pretty much every facet of the
way in which Facebook does business, from its content moderation choices, to
the fashion in which it monetizes its userbase, to the extent to which the
scale of userbase it's deliberately developed - in support of that
questionable style of monetization - might make "voluntary" an inaccurate way
to describe the choice people have of whether or not to participate there. My
description above is not normative, but positive, and should be regarded as
such.)

------
calafrax
Creating ways to allow users to control their own groups and block content
they don't want is cheaper, less controversial, and probably more effective in
terms of user satisfaction.

~~~
randyrand
A simple check mark in the settings would suffice. Or a "see less content like
this" button.

But of course, that's not what they want. Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty
political guy himself, and FB is a great tool for him to influence the world.

~~~
calafrax
Yeah this seems like an attempt to demonstrate that Facebook can act as a
supranational regulatory institution which seems like a bit of an overreach.

------
DINKDINK
Facebook says that only governments may use violence to achieve political
aims:

"The rule against posts that support violent resistance against a foreign
occupier was developed because “we didn’t want to be in a position of deciding
who is a freedom fighter,” Willner said. Facebook has since dropped the
provision and revised its definition of terrorism to include nongovernmental
organizations that carry out premeditated violence “to achieve a political,
religious or ideological aim,” according to a person familiar with the rules."

aka they would have banned American Revolutionaries in 1700's

------
buckbova
> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social
> networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t
> remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough.

As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a
race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just
unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such a
pedestal and our government for upholding it for 200+ years.

This can't end well shutting people up like this.

> German police raided 36 homes over social media hate speech

[https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-
raided-36-...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-
raided-36-homes-social-media-hate-speech/)

~~~
sgift
Germany learned the hard way that letting people "speak their mind" does not
always lead to great outcomes. The Weimar Republic actually had the things you
wanted, it even allowed parties to be part of the parliament while wanting to
eliminate the Republic. The result was Nazi Germany. We decided against
repeating this. Different histories lead to different results.

~~~
dmichulke
The problem here is that Nazi Germany also disallowed people to "speak their
mind".

So if you say free speech caused Nazi Germany, I might as well say: Lack of
free speech let Nazi Germany (and even more so the Holocaust) go on for such a
long time.

So is limiting free speech really the solution? I think we're setting a
dangerous precedent.

~~~
pluma
The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore
that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany.

This is the case in modern Germany as much as it is the case in the US or the
UK.

The German answer to that is to look at what allowed us to become Nazi Germany
last time and to avoid that.

Some of the resulting limitations are questionable (e.g. the parliamentary 5%
hurdle), some are not (e.g. treating incitement of violence and racial hatred
as a crime).

If you rally a crowd, step on a podium and tell them to "gas the Jews" or
"kill all white men" or "hunt down and murder Edward Snowden", you're facing
jail time. Because you're intentionally motivating people to commit serious
crimes. Whether you're Joe Blow or a major politician.

FWIW I do disagree that censorship is the wrong solution although many
politicians in Germany demand it because it's an easy win. Deleting incitement
may stop the hatred from spreading but it doesn't address the cause. Even
worse: it hides a crime and interferes with criminal investigations.

Social media companies' response to meeting the legal demands in Germany is to
either block content preemptively or to basically give you a button that lets
you opt into not seeing it. That doesn't follow the spirit of the law, let
alone the letter of it.

~~~
dmichulke
I mostly agree with your points and just want to note a few things:

> The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore
> that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany.

This is not a binary thing, in a democracy there will always be a number of
people who think the state is _insert arbitrary negative adjective here_

So there will always be people who feel threatened (if only in some aspects)
by the state, no matter if it's Nazi. And these people want to protect their
rights such as free speech, and IMO rightly so. So avoiding becoming Nazi
Germany is not enough, you need to avoid even aspects of it such as wars on
foreign soil or surveillance of civilian communication, both of which are
present today and were in the 1940s.

Limiting free speech is just another aspect that adds to the list of becoming
Nazi, hence my 'no'.

> If you rally a crowd, step on a podium and tell them to "gas the Jews" or
> "kill all white men" or "hunt down and murder Edward Snowden", you're facing
> jail time.

IANAL but I think this is covered by penal code already [1]. Now hate speech
is bad but it'll only convince the ones who are already "close to being
convinced". That probably doesn't include you and me, and I personally prefer
to know who are the idiots around than to have them shut up and only later
realize who they are when they commit an actual crime.

As a side note, it matters even today whether you're a politician (if only in
the US) [2]

[1]
[https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/241.html](https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/241.html)
[2]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7829062249374105...](https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/782906224937410562)

------
TheChosen
Comparing a politician who is currently in office to a civilian is unfair. If
a newspaper decided not to publish a speech by the leader of Iran because
"wiping Israel off the map" is racist; it would be doing its readers a
disservice.

------
4bpp
Well, this calculus of protected classes they seem to be using does give off
an impression that it was either designed by someone aggressively unthinking
or sufficiently opposed to the premise that they tried to sabotage it as much
as they could get away with. Under some pretty reasonable assumptions
(complements of protected classes are protected; two permissible posts bolted
together are a permissible posts), a system where protected ∩ unprotected is
unprotected is trivially circumventable: for instance, rather than posting
"women suck", you can always post "women drivers suck; also, women non-drivers
suck".

------
dang
This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a
substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory
title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags.
(For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the
alternate submission at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463)
is interesting.)

All: if you comment on this please make sure your comment is substantive and
edit out any flamebait. Let's see how far we can get with a civil discussion.

~~~
clydethefrog
I tried to post this article a couple hours ago and I've got a message it was
submitted​ before, without a link to the submitted article. Search resulted in
nothing. Are there special measures to blocking articles and making them not
even searchable? In the past I could still find flagged articles via search.

~~~
dang
Probably those articles were [dead] in addition to being [flagged] and you
don't have 'showdead' (described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))
set to 'yes' in your profile.

------
sixothree
Context is important here. I'm guessing it got lost on you?

~~~
dang
Personal swipes aren't ok on HN. Please remain civil. (Edit: It read like a
swipe to me, but if you didn't intend it that way, I apologize.)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
sixothree
Thank you for removing. It did not add to the conversation.

------
eehee
What if it's true?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
How would you even trust such results? I mean, lets look at where they come
from.

Reported crimes in systems that are biased against some folks, with laws that
are easier to break and get caught with when you are poor. Some of the folks
are poor because of the situations that have happened to them - war, civil
unrest, domestic violence, racism and discrimination of the past still
affecting them. And lets not forget, a lot of folks don't report crimes like
rape - this is higher in some countries than others. In some cases, reporting
a rape might ruin your life.

How can you trust numbers coming from such systems when they say that skin
color x or cultural background y does more crimes? We've had reports that _do_
say such things, and the inherent biases in them generally make them untrue.

~~~
jbmorgado
You are setting up a framework of thought where no matter how much data you
gather that shows some group is indeed more violent, you are allowed to just
dismiss it on the basis of some situational perceived discrimination.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Not really, I'm just aware that a lot of these sorts of grouping stereotypes
are wrong - and much of the past studies have been flawed by discriminatory
views.

For example, take the "poor people commit more crimes". Now, I don't know that
this is true, though I know folks believe it and some studies have seemed to
back it up. But I also know that a lot of poor folks lack ways to hide their
crime (no private place to smoke pot in, for example) and live in areas more
likely to be policed heavily. The only thing I can really come up with is that
poor people get _caught_ for crimes more often, and so are easily over-
represented in the prison system. The conclusion that "poor people commit more
crime" is one of bias.

This sort of thing is enough to cast doubt on a lot of these sorts of
statements and check for such biases. It is a bit different from the data
actually being true with the cause of the trend being discrimination. For
example, "Felons often return to crime after release in the US" is likely
true. Part of the reason for that is because of discrimination and biases
against the ex-felon (especially in certain subsets of felons). I'd not ignore
the data, but address the discrimination when trying to fix it.

------
beedogs
I left facebook last month. I don't miss it, I'm happier for it, and articles
like this kinda vindicate that decision.

It's nice to see that the things I was observing there are, in fact, exactly
what the company is okay with: racism, sexism, homophobia are fine on Facebook
as long as you craft your posts and comments with surgical precision. It
explains how, nearly every time I reported one of the assholes making those
types of posts, nothing would happen.

Edit: and, as usual, downvotes instead of replies. Never change, HN.

~~~
danso
I suspect you're being downvoted because your assessment of the issue to
"Facebook is okay with racism, sexism, homophobia" etc. is seen as an
oversimplification, no different than someone from Germany/Israel saying the
U.S. (and the 1st Amendment) is OK with neo-Nazis, or China thinking America
as a den of smut and anarchy.

~~~
beedogs
Except Facebook being okay with discrimination and hate speech is literally
spelled out in the slide deck. As long as you don't tickle the right
combination of "protected class" by using an appropriate modifier (e.g. "black
_children_ " instead of "all black people") you can say whatever the hell you
want about people.

It's not my fault so many users here are being willfully obtuse about this.

~~~
JBReefer
Why shouldn't I be able to say whatever I want about people, even if it
deviates from the norm. Norms change, "Gays are people" and "Women should be
able to vote" were 100% norm-violating speech until recently. In fact, there's
a few countries where those are _still_ unwelcome speech - should we bow to
their social norms?

Shouldn't I be able to say things like that? Aren't you happy people did? Do
you believe that our current worldview is perfect and cannot be challenged by
concepts outside of the Overton window?

