Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it's leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it's trying to generate shock at "how the sausage gets made". Any process involving humans will have outliers, but the question is, how effective is the process really?
Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
That is not censorship or silencing, it’s simply advising you that my place is not the place for that kind of behaviour.
What if it's just people discussing things you don't like amongst themselves, with willing speakers and willing listeners?
On the internet, if one wants to express hate speech, there are still websites to do so that may not be Facebook.
As for other places to express speech you label "hate speech" - not really. Domain registrars, hosting providers, and payment processors will shut you down. See what happened to SubscribeStar recently. There actually is nowhere to go if the consortium of megacorporations decides they don't like you.
Cyberpunk was supposed to be a dystopia but you seem to desperately want to bring it about.
To clarify: My perspective is that we have reached a point where it is clear that in the space of online, there are a few dominant companies that effectively control population traffic and attention through hosting spaces. The internet can be viewed as a public private space, with all the consequences of such. Changing it would require government-level regulation, bringing in the established checks on speech restriction that the government has.
I do not want any consequence. I am undecided on the pros/cons of possible soltutions.
Read Justice Brandeis' concurring decision in Whitney vs. California.[1] He wrote the classic decision on this subject, and I can't improve on that.
"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed."
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. Every denunciation of existing law tends in some measure to increase the probability that there will be violation of it. Condonation of a breach enhances the probability. Expressions of approval add to the probability. Propagation of the criminal state of mind by teaching syndicalism increases it. Advocacy of law-breaking heightens it still further. But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on. The wide difference between advocacy and incitement, between preparation and attempt, between assembling and conspiracy, must be borne in mind. In order to support a finding of clear and present danger, it must be shown either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated, or that the past conduct furnished reason to believe that such advocacy was then contemplated."
"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. [n4] Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it."
"Moreover, even imminent danger cannot justify resort to prohibition of these functions essential to effective democracy unless the evil apprehended is relatively serious. Prohibition of free speech and assembly is a measure so stringent that it would be inappropriate as the means for averting a relatively trivial harm to society. A police measure may be unconstitutional merely because the remedy, although effective as means of protection, is unduly harsh or oppressive. Thus, a State might, in the exercise of its police power, make any trespass upon the land of another a crime, regardless of the results or of the intent or purpose of the trespasser. It might, also, punish an attempt, a conspiracy, or an incitement to commit the trespass. But it is hardly conceivable that this Court would hold constitutional a statute which punished as a felony the mere voluntary assembly with a society formed to teach that pedestrians had the moral right to cross unenclosed, unposted, wastelands and to advocate their doing so, even if there was imminent danger that advocacy would lead to a trespass. The fact that speech is likely to result in some violence or in destruction of property is not enough to justify its suppression. There must be the probability of serious injury to the State. Among free men, the deterrents ordinarily to be applied to prevent crime are education and punishment for violations of the law, not abridgment of the rights of free speech and assembly."
Note the standard Brandeis laid down:
"In order to support a finding of clear and present danger, it must be shown either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated, or that the past conduct furnished reason to believe that such advocacy was then contemplated." "Immediate serious violence". That's the US standard for prior restraint. That's what Facebook, as a US company, should be using.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357#writin...
No, it's the US standard for applying the coercive power of government to prior restraint.
The US standard for private actors applying prior restraint to their own platforms is “do what you will, so long as you apply any prior restraint the government has dictated based on immediate serious violence.”
> That's what Facebook, as a US company, should be using.
Facebook is not the US federal or a US state government, and thus the logic underlying why the government is limited to prior restraint in those narrow conditions does not apply.
This reaction is also false.
Facebook is part of the state!
Why? Organisations like FB organise large-scale information flow, in particular regarding controversial political issues. The majority of citizens receive the information regarding political decisions (e.g. who should be president) filtered and structured via FB. Hence organisations like Facebook are currently part of the the state! They are public infrastructure, and should be subject to democratic control.
Do you think I'm wrong, or do you agree with the veracity of my observation, but not with the style of its presentation?
If the former, I invite you to study past discussions of the subject (e.g. googling: site:ycombinator.com freedom of speech xkcd). If the latter, how do you recommend presenting such as subject?)
There is a sense in which all corporations are part of the chartering State, and there is a sense in which all citizens (and hence, all combinations involving citizens, with or without others) are part of the State of which they are citizens, particularly if it is a (direct or representative) democracy, but neither of those (nor any other sense in which Facebook might be considered associated with the State) is relevant here, because Facebook is not applying the coercive power associated with the state to prevent others from using their own resources to share information, which is the critical aspect of state prior restraint that is why it is restricted.
> The majority of citizens receive the information regarding political decisions (e.g. who should be president) filtered and structured via FB.
No, they don't. Online is still below TV as a news source, both in preference and actual use [0][1]. FB, or online as a whole, isn't the most used news source, much less the majority source. A very large minority receives some of their news, including political news, via social media, sure.
> Hence organisations like Facebook are currently part of the the state!
Even if the premise wasn't false, the conclusion offered wouldn't follow from it.
[0] http://www.journalism.org/2018/12/03/americans-still-prefer-...
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/07/americans-on...
Arguably, if the state permits a company to become a de-facto monopoly, it should be regulated as a public utility. That was a mainstream position from 1920 to 1980.
By your standard, traditional media are also part of the state. That is also false.
Just because a term exists doesn't mean we should pay attention to it.
And, rather than trying to square-the-circle of global speech standards enforced by crude algorithms and rushed, underinformed low-wage moderators, they could make the remedy for unwanted speech simply unsubscribing/unfriending the source. And, for users who feel disturbed by broadcasts, FB could offer opt-in moderation circles – leaving all willing-listeners, with no grievances, unmolested by 3rd-party censorship.
Then, willing-speakers sending legal speech to willing-listeners wouldn't be collateral damage of their clumsy improvised censorship regimes.
FB and others could also do as you said - make quarantine zones for specific prejudicial groups and their ideologies.
Except time and again these groups have proven they're not wanting to stay in their own special self-moderated zones but are actively looking to broadcast. There are businesses built upon these prejudicial world views and deplatforming them just shows how they heavily they rely on broadcasting:
https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/facebook-link-blocking/
https://444.hu/2016/11/14/facebook-is-reading-your-private-m...
(The intended receiver can be frustrated or confused that they couldn't receive the message their friend wanted to send.)
And as you typically have to opt-in to messaging with someone new, they could wait for complaints rather than have content-based prior restraint. And, react to specific abuse with post-action blocking of the harasser, or quarantining-the-harasser as someone who'd need extra explicit acceptance before their messages are delivered.
And I wonder if his reasoning applies to the kinds of speech policing Facebook is doing, or only to the same sorts of things modern US free-speech law makes illegal: direct threats & incitements to imminent violent acts. (Notably not illegal: 'hate speech', blasphemy, insults, abstract advocacy of most crimes, etc.)
Surely once everyone can access the equivalent of several university educations online, the masses will come to realise that sodomy should be legal for libertarian reasons; transparency and access to information will mean voters will demand and get honest officials; that employers will realise it's not rational to discriminate against a sysadmin for not wearing a dress shirt; and it'll be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
In the subsequent decades, people have re-evaluated some of those predictions for understandable reasons.
Personally, I'm in favor of free speech. I'm not in favor of being inundated by manipulative propaganda from a foreign power. I don't know how to reconcile those two views.
I mean, I guess I'm in favor of curtailing dishonest advertising, and that's kind of what propaganda is, but... I'm not sure where the lines are.
The classical line has been at incitement. It understands that humans are prone to irrationality in the heat of anger. But outside of that it is understood that some harm may be necessary for justice or other ideals to be served. Speech is the mechanism we use to weigh the costs of our actions.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience."
This would probably satisfy just about everyone.
I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertise to do this accurately for every country in the world.
To Facebook, the goal isn't to prevent the transmission of hate speech. The goal is to stop Facebook from being perceived as a vehicle to transmit hate speech. Facebook executives know that in advertising, perception overrides reality. They're willing to do whatever it takes to keep up the perception that Facebook is doing everything in its power to stop hate speech, even if those measures have little or no practical impact (or even if they backfire and suppress speech that should be allowed).
The truly terrible thing is that most people do not know that F and G are censoring to the degrees they are.
Most (99.9%?) - don't know that there is a group of human moderators and site rankers that are trying to follow some esoteric multi-page set of guidelines to determine what is shown and what is not shown.
We know nothing of these people who are choosing what gets seen or not seen on our state / country / city, etc. What are their political leanings? religious views?
How much time are these people given to decide if something you say or think you are going to hear is blocked? How much do these people make for making these important decisions? What is their education level?
What about those things for the people who make these sets of rules. Also, how are these things affecting the algorithms?
These things matter. The lack of transparency is bad for users and those who think they speaking to their audience.
>In Pakistan, moderators were told to watch some parties and their supporters for prohibited speech.
>In another email, moderators were told to hunt down and remove rumors wrongly accusing an Israeli soldier of killing a Palestinian medic.
These are very similar to the information collected by and activities engaged in by a state intelligence organization.
Now, not a single one.
I really think the answer is in localized, community-based moderation (with appeals to localized corp) like forums used to be. Obviously that goes against their will to control every aspect of their platform.
What does localized even mean anymore, and who should decide whether someone is sufficiently "local" to qualify as a moderator?
How about territories within nations? Should the same moderation standards apply to Mississippi and California?
There are no clear right or wrong standards here. Any changes are as likely to make things worse as better due to unintended consequences. The Facebook employees in Menlo Park have made some bad decisions on occasion but they at least try to do the right thing most of the time within the constraints imposed by their business model. National authorities often have more sinister motives.
For example: I help run a large art group on facebook. (Large = 76,975 members). While the breakdown of our group shows the largest percentage of folks in the group are from the US (20k), lots of folks are from India (15k).. and the rest are from elsewhere in the world. We list ourselves as global. The unpaid admins and moderators are from different countries and times zones. We use Translate functions at times.
What localisation do we have? Do we have a choice? If one admin is in Norway, can we use a Norwegian model of nudity censorship instead of the more restrictive American or Indian or Facebook models of "acceptable" nudity? Can you list locally with one admin even if your demographics do not fit? Do large countries always have the advantage? If demographics change, does the censorship style?
These are all issues with "local" or national level censorship, and I dont' think there is an easy answer.
Traditionally, persons who work for the Ministry of Truth, or some equivalent thereof qualify as sufficiently 'local'.
It's either Facebook self-censoring, or said ministry will do that job for them. Pick your poison.
Yes, even in the United States. Especially in the United States, post 9/11.
Both my FB feed and my Twitter feed are more heartwarming, adorable, funny, or touching than angry or whatever. Maybe all of this is just a reflection of who you guys are.
And I'm no stranger to controversy. Ban the bomb, no war, I've been there. Where I haven't been is Twitter/FB flamewars. And you know how? I unfollow as soon as I don't like. It's not the end of the world.
Someone is WRONG on the internet.
Ask any lawyer, picking a jury usually involves pulling the dumbest, most incompetent people, while polling for their gut alignment, relative to case at hand. These are the most emotional, and likely most easily driven to judgement. They also usually lack power in their daily lives, and are eager for some trigger time, so to speak.
So, now, put that on the internet. Pack these people together in clusters relative to their home towns and high schools, and never let them escape each other. Preserve every last memory, especially the most embarrassing ones that their family members can command, to bring an obnoxious personality to heel, if possible.
Take everyone with a shit job, with company and store policies design to screw the customer. Ever call center goon, every cellular and wireless store clerk gunning for contract sign ups. Ask them what's wrong with the world.
Now, randomly distribute agit prop into a flashing marquee on their home page, to gin them up, as they start cruising for love interests, and the unattainable crushes that taunt them on a daily basis. Give them parking tickets, too many bills to pay. Make them late with the rent. Get them pregnant.
Welcome to Facebook.
> unfollow
In the nastier situations, it's not people who you follow that's the problem. It's the people who @ you from a constant stream of new accounts.
I don't use facebook or twitter, so I guess that colors my perception as to how trivial they are in the broader picture of life, but it also means I don't totally understand the issues that people who use the sites face.
Then there's the problem that you don't have to be on either website for people to use it to campaign against you. From trivial tactics like getting you fired or SWATted to more egregious things like the Rohingya genocide.
Take for example a law passed earlier this year which required networks to remove posts dealing with child trafficking. The EFF and many free speech advocates went ballistic:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-...
But what if we had open source software that any small community could use to run their own Facebook-like social network?
Look, Wordpress has been around for 15 year and people have figured out how to clean up their own blog spam. Communities like HN or a local village can easily police their own posts. Local communities are also able to know a local language and local customs and laws.
The problem is centralization.
I'm not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different countries and regions, each region has it's own unique history and flash-points, it's best to understand these from folks who are on the ground rather than overworked moderators and engineers in Menlo Park.
Facebook got to where it is by being a centralized social platform, but successful community standards enforcement at this level will take a more decentralized, hyper-local approach.
Also, similarly to how large tech companies publish yearly reports on diversity metrics and data requests from governments, if Facebook is really going to make this effort a priority they should publish a report detailing its efforts.
"I hate group X, I create an account and become part of X. I attack group Y until group X gets banned."
Facebook cannot and should not be the one attempting to reconcile cultural norms across the entire world into a single speech code that satisfies everyone.
In my opinion the problem with social networks is just the effect of an underlying cause, which is that many people are so poor, uneducated, sick or old that they only care about the immediate future. Religious and inflexible people will believe anything that reaffirms their beliefs. They will bite at all fake news and spread it around and vote in a disastrous way for the future of the country.
Unfortunately there will always be a part of the population that lacks long term concern. You can't improve social networks when people are lacking long term concern, which is usually the domain of young educated professionals, who have the most to lose from this folly.
The people who don't want Facebook to impose its community standards outside the US usually just want to be able to impose their own community standards on others. They're no better than Facebook. Why should anyone care what they want?
Facebook does exactly this. The second report was published a little over a month ago: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/enforcing-our-community...
Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, on Integrity, so this is near and dear to my heart.
How about not having a news feed algorithm and business model that promotes and profits from outrage and negative emotional contagions?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
(via https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1078443875784683521 )
This is troubling as it seems when we do it commentators are ready with a litany of justifications in contrast to the blanket judgements on other discussions. This kind of double standards is abusive of discourse and the values sought to be defended and cannot then be a forum for informed discussion.
I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public, but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really protecting your own interests.
What about this is hubris? Wouldnt you argue they have a responsibility to try? Wouldnt it be hubris to build such a powerful platform and not think to care about minimizing the amount of damage malicious actors could do with it?
And Facebook does this without a hint of recognition that such imposition will be (and already is) being used as a political weapon against dissident voices.
That's hubris.
Major corporate policy such as what we are discussing is dictated by them, in that order.
They should work with legislatures and law enforcement in their respective countries of operation to figure out what those countries (and their people) actually want them to do. Some countries have strong hate speech laws; some have strong freedom of speech protections. Ideally, this should be reflected in their communication platforms. One size doesn't fit all.
At that point, they have to decide if operating in a country that demands this sort of thing is morally acceptable or not.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/facebook-files
Note that these were published on May 2017.
To give an example, at a meetup hosted by a large game corp, some college children presented a project aimed at logging the speaking time of business-meeting participants based on superficial details (primarily sex, race), with the goal of equalizing the amount of speaking time based on such. The fact that my objection to such will be perceived as sexism/racism is my other objection.
I'm being downvoted into oblivion elsewhere on this site for suggesting this, but I feel like it's a very obvious move for tech companies that have this problem.
As I said in another post, companies also actually used to hire people outside the tech bubble to deal with things like categorization of websites, etc. That went away once they could achieve a certain percentage with cheap labor.
For example, documenting some sort of 'ideal' or 'pro/con' type lists of potential fallout. When architecting a system.. or in design/feature proposals.
Surely folks less in the weeds of technical requirements and actual implementation could help decide earlier on if something is 'good'.
Ironically it’s these graduates with the strongest opinions on what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to say. It’s not mechanical engineering grads freaking out on Twitter over cultural appropriation, tone policing, etc. They are the last people you would want to entrust with this power.
A millennial is going to be around 30. They're not children. In fact they likely have children of their own.
> demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.
It mentions various ranges, roughly 1980 at the earliest, 1996 at the latest. So a millenial according to that today would range from age 22 to age 38. That leaves us with "people under 40 with limited life experience".
They probably meant young people, sure, but the sentence makes sense either way, since under 40 is still kinda young to formulate rules for how to moderate political discussions anywhere on the globe. A person would have to study and travel and learn a lot, just about that, to have anything valuable to say about it at age 30. If you spend that time working at Facebook instead, to speak of "limited life experience" in this context is very kind either way.
The real kicker is that it's not even just about Facebook and their own limited life experiences though. From the article:
> Then the company outsources much of the actual post-by-post moderation to companies that enlist largely unskilled workers, many hired out of call centers.
The cool thing here is, since it's in the tree of their comment, the orginal commenter sees that, too.