Facebook was tasked by various EU member States to crack down on “hate speech”. Facebook “vowed” backed in 2016 to remove “hate speech” in less than 24 hours, and Germany held them to that task with a mandate back in 2017 to censor “hate speech” or face hefty fines per violation. Well, as part of Facebook’s new transparency initiative, they’re now bearing the fruits of their censorious labor, and it’s not good for many users and communities.
CNBC picked up the news from over on the official Facebook blog, where the mega-corporation revealed that they’ve deleted 3.2 billion fake accounts, as well as removed 11.4 pieces of “hate speech”.
According to some users they’ve been locked out of their accounts without notice, while others have noted that they’ve suffered from viewership suppression. Facebook didn’t exactly show any examples of the kind of “hate speech” they removed, but in the blog they defined “hate speech” with inexplicably broad terms, and then explained how they were censoring it…
“We don’t allow hate speech on Facebook. We define hate speech as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, calls for exclusion or segregation based on protected characteristics, or slurs. These characteristics include race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disability or disease. When the intent is clear, we may allow people to share someone else’s hate speech content to raise awareness or discuss whether the speech is appropriate to use, to use slurs self-referentially in an effort to reclaim the term, or for other similar reasons. […]
“In recent years, using machine learning, we have developed detection technology that can find and flag hate speech using several different methods. To date, we have used our proactive detection technology to identify potentially violating content and send it to our content review team. More recently, we have improved our technology such that we can now start to remove hate speech, as well. One method involves detecting and automatically removing content that matches existing hate speech violations in our database. Another method involves proactively detecting potentially violating content and then giving it a score according to its similarity to content we’ve previously removed for violating our hate speech policy. Starting in Q2 2019, our systems began removing posts automatically when they received very high scores or matched existing hate speech in our database. In all other cases when our systems detect potential hate speech, they send the post to our review team to determine if it should be removed.”
As mentioned, they don’t list examples of this “hate speech”, but they expect their users to trust that it’s generally bad stuff.
The problem is that Facebook is basically operating in the dark and only relaying to the public the stats from their actions, rather than an actual look at their actions.
For instance, some users have reported being wrongly banned and their groups wrongly shut down. If the groups weren’t hurting anyone or weren’t involved in any targeted harassment, who cares if they use language that the censors at Facebook deem uncouth?
Unfortunately we don’t get an inside look at their censorship procedures, so Facebook is free to censor as they please, which even includes temporarily suspending Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for engaging in “hate speech”.
(Thanks for the news tip Treavor Calkum)
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