Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

> 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"

>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.

> * 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... (an opinion piece related to the Fisher case, which pertained to affirmative action in university admissions)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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-...

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.

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".

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 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.

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

What if it's true?

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.