

Salem woman denied use of Facebook because of Native American name - dbg31415

At what point do we just call Facebook racist?  They really don&#x27;t seem to be taking any action to fix discriminatory policies.<p>* Salem woman denied use of Facebook because of Native American name - KPTV - FOX 12 || http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kptv.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;28853494&#x2F;salem-woman-denied-use-of-facebook-because-of-native-american-name<p>* Facebook&#x27;s Name Policy Strikes Again, This Time at Native Americans | Electronic Frontier Foundation || https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;facebooks-name-policy-strikes-again-time-native-americans<p>* Petition · To Allow Native Americans to use their Native names on their profiles. · Change.org || https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;facebook-to-allow-native-americans-to-use-their-native-names-on-their-profiles
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trcollinson
You may call Facebook racist right now, if you would like. But let's look at
this from another side shall we? Facebook has approximately 9000 employees.
They have approximately 1.4 Billion users. Or in other words, they have about
1 employee for every 156,000 users. This means, they don't actually keep track
of every user that shows up to their site. They couldn't. They would have to
have every employee in the company look at a user every 10 seconds, every
moment of every day to look over the users in a one year time frame.

So, what they actually do is automate the system and attempt to catch people
who are not following their rules using algorithms. A human never reviews such
a case at all. If someone is blocked it's because some piece of code decided
they are trying to game the system. It doesn't just catch Native American's.
It probably catches thousands or more accounts per day of people who actually
are trying to game their system. What you are reading about is a handful of
false positives on an otherwise successful system.

We also need to remember that users like these are NOT Facebooks customers.
Facebook attempts to be nice and fix the problem and actually it seems like
they make things right more often then not. But these users are Facebooks
product, not their customer. Their customers are advertisers who want to put
their advertisements in front of people. They treat people really well for not
really needing them at all.

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jklein11
Using algorithms to limit the amount of work facebook employee's have to do to
make sure users are following the rules makes perfect sense. It doesn't
explain why you would cut humans out of the process entirely.

To your point about users are not Facebook customers is technically correct,
but these users are actually the product that facebook is trying to sell. If
you were a company looking to buy ad space would you use a platform that
mistreated your potential customers?

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trcollinson
Oh, and with all of that, I have to say no, they are not racist, sexist, or
any other -ist. They honestly don't care who you are. If you fit the profile
of someone that their advertisers are willing to pay them to put ads in front
of, you will be allowed into the system. It is purely a matter of economics in
a capitalistic society.

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eriksalgstrom
Yeah because the economics of a capitalistic society are never racist...

And, more to the point, if Facebook designs an algorithm for validating names
that assumes that names not conforming to particular cultural norms are not
valid, that is in fact racist.

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logn
It's more like calling an English spellchecking algorithm (or its authors)
racist because it doesn't recognize some words. It could be racist, but it
could also just be that writing the software is difficult. And
validating/recognizing names is a well-known AI problem.

I'd rather just call all of this anti-human, because it's actually about
empowering robots and monetizing humans.

