Facebook to police anti-Black hate speech more aggressively than anti-White | Hacker News Reader

Facebook to police anti-Black hate speech more aggressively than anti-White

washingtonpost.com

69 pointsburnthrow81 comments

How about hate speech against Romani? Most would see them as White (at least inasmuch as they're not Black) therefore discrimination against them isn't as bad, as per Facebook, and yet anti-Romani discrimination is much more prevalent (and vicious!) in Europe. Is this Facebook saying it's an American-only company?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiziganism

https://www.hhrjournal.org/2020/04/anti-roma-racism-is-spira...

> From Slovakia to Romania and Bulgaria, states have enacted disproportionate or militarized measures targeting Romani neighborhoods or towns. Some of these measures are driven by a racist narrative that casts Roma as a collective health and safety threat. The Bulgarian government has imposed particular measures, including road blocks and police checkpoints, on several Romani neighborhoods despite no evidence of COVID-19 positive test results there.[2] A Bulgarian Member of the European Parliament, Angel Dzhambazki, speculated that Romani “ghettos [could] turn out to be the real nests of contagion.”

https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-and-travellers/anti-gypsyism...

Good point! The "whites and blacks" division and even the word racism are very Western and assume a context of colonisation. I bet there are many omissions like that in all the countries Facebook operates in, and doesn't know much about.

It is tricky to apply American norms of political correctness in other environments, which have different history and different conflicts. I think, admitting that the norms are in fact American, might already be too controversial.

Even more tricky is when you realize that SJWs in other countries often come from privileged backgrounds (practically all of them have university education), and get their ideology from internet, mostly reading American sources. So, even if you hire a local team of Slovakian, Romanian, or Bulgarian ideologically pure people as moderators, they may be very sensitive about any kind of anti-Black discrimination or stereotyping (because that's what they discuss daily on Twitter), but quite ignorant about the Roma.

Also, in Europe you have lots of white groups hating other white groups, e.g. because of them speaking different language. So if the rule is that hate speech is okay as long as it is against whites...

This is a rational economic response to outrage culture.

Anti-white speech elicits minimal economic damage (ie no backlash).

Anti-black speech elicits enormous consequences.

So Facebook is simply calibrating their model to accurately reflect the real world cost for the company of different types of speech.

Based on the same logic, not letting black people in your neighbourhood is the same rational economic response to crime. That is why we don't allow for discrimination based on race or gender.

I think the variable of interest with crime is poverty, not race. Rich black people don't commit more crime than rich white people.

And we DO discriminate economically in our neighborhoods - people move to wealthier areas where the opportunity cost of crime is higher and better schools + better police make crime unattractive.

>In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “Whites,” “men” and “Americans.” Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as “low-sensitivity” — or less likely to be harmful — so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms.

If you want to destroy a multi-racial democracy, alienating and scapegoating its largest, poorest (in absolute population terms [0][1][2]), and most well-armed ethnicity during a period of economic instability seems like a great approach.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+black+...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+hispan...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+whites...

It's interesting to watch language evolve.

Racist: bias against PoC

Race-blind: no bias on the basis of race

Antiracist: bias against non-PoC (perceived to be "anti"racist because it goes against historical racism against PoC)

Please note this language change is only for the US

Considering how aggressively the US is exporting its culture: forget it.

I guess that's true, but I must say that in my direct vicinity there is a lot of anti-US sentiment, especially on their politics and culture "indoctrination" of other west countries. I'm a student in the NL

I'm from (east) Germany and over here it's kinda mixed. Most people have a sort of passive acceptance for american cultural imports, but many also dislike large parts of it.

As an American, I hope more people see us as a warning, rather than something to aspire to.

I can't even watch Shark Tank anymore (was a guilty pleasure), because I'm tired of hearing about 'the american dream'.

Adding nationalistic flamewar to the race flamewar you've already been fomenting is seriously not ok. Please stop posting flamebait to HN.

Good timing as I was just reached out to by a Facebook recruiter. No thank you!

Make sure to tell them exactly why you're declining.

We'll fix prejudice and bias, with prejudice and bias! The strategy has been so successful everywhere else its been tried.

Policing one group more than another is how we got to this point in the first place. Past sins, past acts, do not justify discrimination, or selective policing in the future, it will only make the problem of disproportionate punishment worse. It's like Yelp putting a scarlet letter on black owned businesses thinking that will make things better, instead of identifying businesses for people to NOT visit. Separate but equal is over, why are we still debating this?

>why are we still debating this?

It's cheaper to incite a race/sex/gender war than fight a class war against 300 million people.

"oh look the peasants are ripping each other to shreds, how delightful! Jenkins! Fetch me my binoculars!"

EDIT: Translation: Yes, it is quite obviously the rich that profit from the current "culture war" while the working class, regardless of their political views, are pulling the short straw.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and you've been flaming up a storm. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Lets replace one type of racism with another. Maybe instead of aiming for a swinging pendulum we should try to balance it to make sure everyone is treated fairly.

Bean counters have deemed that too expensive. /s? I'm not even sure tbh.

It's really disappointing to see such reactionary comments on HN. Obviously Facebook ought to pay more attention to anti-Black racism: this has historically been where the problem is, and so it's where the bulk of the effort should go.

Tangential (and not to attack you specifically), but I don’t understand the basis by which tech, HN included, judges itself to be more liberal and less reactionary than other industries. There’s just as many racists in tech as the rest of American society, with a special bend towards libertarian/scientific realism/racism that is much more pronounced than in other segments of America than I’ve seen. It’s traditionally been one of the most unwelcoming places for minorities (Hi Coinbase!), and has pioneered new workplace and have championed euphemisms like “culture fit” to exclude people who don’t look like them (not limited to black people).

> It's really disappointing to see such reactionary comments on HN.

Disappointing, yes. Surprising? No.

What efforts? There is no reason to weigh things differently. Hate speech is removed via an algorithm, it costs them nothing to weigh hate speech equally... Actually it's probably easier to design an algorithm where everything has the same weight.

This is not the case. The vast majority of interracial violence is African on European. People will also say "what about slavery" being completely ignorant of history, which includes millions of White Europeans being kidnapped and raped and worked to death in Africa by the Barbary slave trade. There are no White descendants of the White slaves that were brought to Africa -- largely because it was the policy of many of these places to kill even the children that were borne of rape to these slaves.

We need a principled stand against racially incendiary rhetoric or none at all. Either the basis needs to be the First Amendment, in which none of it should be policed, or it needs to be evenly applied regardless of race, and people who post hate about Whites need to be banned from social media instead of verified and glorified.

This is just going to help right wing populists get elected. When I read this I feel angry, it strikes me as deeply racist and antithetical to my values. It's the type of feeling that I imagine pushed a certain number of people towards Trump.

I can guarantee that there are millions of other people who will be feeling the same way and will express that feeling the only place they can (since they have no voice in mainstream journalism or entertainment) - at the voting booth.

EDIT: Whoever flagged the post: thanks for proving my point.

I could start a long outrage rant, but I don't even care anymore. I'm tired of arguing with people at this point.

> Comments like “White people are stupid” were treated the same as anti-Semitic or racist slurs. [and won't be anymore]

My opinion, and this won't change: This policy is racist. Whoever came up with it is racist. Whoever defends it is racist.

EDIT/OFFTOPIC: Just figured out, on your profile you can enable display of flagged/removed posts. You can then vouch for their un-removal. May I consider myself a hackernews-necromancer now?

I think the blanket insistence that anybody who has an argument for this must be racist is breathtakingly hypocritical.

> anybody who has an argument for this must be racist

Anybody who believes people of one skin colour should be treated different than people of another is, in my books, a racist. There's no conversation to be had here.

Well I do, I think groups of people who were treated badly in the past should now be treated a little better for a while.

It's not enough to say, okay, let's all be fair from now on. I think this misses the acknowledgement of all the past violations of this principle, and any attempts to make this right.

Also it's important to realize how recent "the past" is. My grandmother (who's relatively young; she had my mother when she was 19) grew up in a government sponsered residential school which told her she was too stupid to learn anything

Hypothetical scenario: Before I was born, my father murdered your father, and got away with it.

Now, after my father has passed away, the truth is revealed.

What should my punishment be?

For the record, I lean toward the theory that creating balance will eventually return the scale is equilibrium, and that is probably better in the long term than giving the scale a push to get to equilibrium faster.

However, your analogy doesn't make sense. No individual should be explicitly punished for the sins of an individual ancestor. But if some huge group of ancestors commits an atrocity against a target group that has effects lasting generations, to the point where that target group still suffers the ancestral hatreds to this day (just look at the dead posts in this thread - on Hacker News), then it's not exactly an outrageous occurrence if the society gives some boon to the targeted group. Of course, society is a zero-sum game, and a boon to any is a burden on others, but that's how the entire system works - there's no getting away from the physics of that. But to say the other groups are "punished" with no further context implies something worse than that. There's no way to compare this scenario with an individual person committing a crime against another.

That sounds reasonable on the surface, but actually it's even worse.

Groups are just sets of individuals. And "boons" are punishment if they are forced.

So to adjust the example: a group of people who look like my father killed a group of people who look like your father. What is my punishment?

It sounds absurd because group identity is absurd.

Are there individuals who need help? Let's help them. We do already, but we can do more.

Are there individuals committing crimes of real violence? Let's stop them.

That's not absurd at all.

If they used that murder to reap profit & you inherited that profit, you could pay some of it back

The saying goes "Two wrongs don't make a right", and I think it applies here.

Beyond that, Facebook doesn't just operate in the USA, so, honestly, american history is completely irrelevant to how a big part of their users is going to perceive this "good" discrimination.

Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. Receiving benefits because of your assigned groups rather than your individual merits must become a positive thing. We are all incentivized to add importance to further categorizations of people, so we might gain some favour. The more of your remedy we get, the worse off we will be.

How do you imagine this unequal treatment for good will come to an end "after a while"? When all organizations are geared up to divvy up resources among these groups? When even more people in power got there as champions for specific categories? It will be very hard to get out of that situation.

I'd much rather make up for past violations of "equal treatment for all" by implementing more "equal treatment". The more of this we can manage to get, the better of we will be. And there will be nothing to wind down "after a while".

I just wanted to highlight that this is a reasonable comment, and it's hard to find these among the noise that permeates the same half of the opinion gradient that it falls on.

@rags2riches I'm with you against these authoritarian structures built around redistribution. But one can (and you, too, can) treat some groups of people a little better without literally giving them stuff, creating weird power structures, or encouraging a culture of victimhood.

Say I was organising a poetry meetup. There are many aspects to making its attendees enjoy themselves, but evenly distributing my effort would not create the most equitable event. If I want the event to go well, most of my effort should probably go to people for whom the barriers are biggest. This could involve making sure the venue is accessible to wheelchair users, extra encouragement for the person who seems to never have heard that their poems can be worth something, or creating a speaking convention that benefits everyone equally, but puts the most burden on those who are bravest and loudest.

> Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups.

> It will be very hard to get out of that situation.

Interestingly, not in the case of what the posted article is about! Facebook can decide on its own to give extra priority to checking comments for (what its moderators consider) anti-black racism, and it's also the kind of thing that will eventually make itself unnecessary.

No, the key difference is: Facebook isn't putting more effort into fighting anti-black discrimination; it's changing its algos to ignore anti-white racism that it is already capable of detecting.

I guess both are a slightly different phrasing of the same thing - they're aligning their moderation effort in some way, but I'm not sure why you choose it.

If it's okay to ask: has anti-white racism been a significant problem for you in your life? For example, are you a white person who experiences anti-white bias from people you interact with?

> There's no conversation to be had here.

then why engage in one? If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences?

If yes, then, well, maybe there is no discussion to be had, it would be an inane claim.

If no, some racism has more consequences, then this insistence that "its all racism" is pointless at best - the term is mostly useful to describe harmful relationships and ways to combat that harm.

This sounds like justification that some forms of racism aren't as racist as others. Sounds a lot like "separate but equal" reasoning. Disgusting.

I would argue that while both are just as bad the anti-white racism can have worse consequences as it will increase the distain that whites have for blacks and at the end lead to even more discrimination against black people.

One has to be blind to not see that this is already happening.

I remember reading an essay a while ago where someone argued that this played a big part in the 2016 US elections but this is not something that I can verify.

> If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences?

Even if they have different consequences, you can still click Delete on both of them.

I think you should spend less resources actively searching for the one you consider less serious, because the resources are limited, but if someone else reported them, and you are already spending your attention looking at them anyway, you might as well delete both.

"A society which has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

The world is not US. There are many white people who have done nothing to the black people. Even more, they have been under similar obsession for even more time. Get over of your US centric view of the world.

I think the usual counterargument to your point is that Europeans have greatly benefited, directly or indirectly, from the conquest & colonization of Black & Brown people. I don't know how much water that argument holds, but there it is.

Sure, there were European groups that were themselves being actively colonized/conquered (eg, Ireland), but it's also true that the conditions in their home countries led many of these same peoples to seek their fortune elsewhere and to end up at the vanguard of colonization. For example, when the British were in India, there was an outsize presence of Scottish & Irish fortune seekers in the subcontinent who made out like gangbusters.

This perspective is not any better.

Try to put it into your head - most white people did not benefit from the oppression of the black people.

I did not, my ancestors did not, my countrymen did not.

I do not share any collective guilt with some American slave owners, or French colonists.

Like it was told, this policy is racist. Whoever came up with it is racist. Whoever defends it is racist.

Again, this is not my argument - just one that I've seen brought up in this context. It's also not completely wrong.

While it's possible you, your ancestors, or your countrymen did not directly or indirectly benefit a single cent from a transfer of wealth via colonialism or oppression of non-Europeans, I do honestly doubt that would be true for most people of European descent.

Nobody from east of Italy and German proto-state did not benefit from it, also Scandinavia.

If you want to include all the beneficiaries, you should include coastal Africans and all the traders including Arab and Jewish ones. Things will get messy. If you also talk about slavery then you also should not forget all the white slaves of the same time period.

I think that the most unfortunate fact about the end of American slavery was that the oppressed did not overpower the oppressors. At least not directly. As such there was no real liberation.

I have been thinking if it would have been best if all the black people would have been deported back to Africa. It would have given greater dignity that I feel is something that is really missing in the larger picture. Imagine if nobody in US was there because their ancestors were a former slave.

The world is complex.

Your argument still seems to apply only to countries with access to ocean.

(It was one of the reasons behind WW1, that Germany objected against some European countries colonizing the rest of the world, and not allowing countries such as Germany to also take a piece. And Germany lost that war. And there were other countries that were too small to participate in this kind of conflict.)

This is not my argument - just one I see come up with some regularity. I do not know how valid it is - partially, I guess.

"If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out." --Hammurabi

Privilege is invisible to those who have it

That has a bit of an "emperors new clothes" feel to it if you ask me

> Privilege is invisible to those who have it

This is tricky, because in theory it can apply both ways, but in practice people who accuse others of having invisible privileges will deny having their own.

It's like having your cake and eating it too. "You are so privileged!" "No, I am not." "Yes you are, but you can't see it, precisely because you are privileged." "Well, you are privileged too, in a different way." "No, I am not." "How could you know, if the privilege is invisible to those who have it?" "Well, I just know for fact that you are privileged and I am not. And my friends agree with me. Unlike your friends, who agree with you, because they are as wrong as you are."

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