Anti-Semitic social posts 'not taken down' in 80% of cases
bbc.com
bbc.com
In my opinion, internet and social media changed the game. Freedom of speech now is not the same as freedom of speech 200 years ago. The spread of information now is massive and instanteneous, and people are up against ML models which are being trained to grab their attention. For example, Cambridge Analytica - were their actions an exercise of freedom of speech or exploitation of social media?
Hate speech is also a slippery slope, as the Rwandan genocide and many other genocides/massacres attest to.
For those arguing for unfettered speech on social media, if you're going to convince me of your argument, you at least need to acknowledge that this history exists. If you're focused only on the risks associated with clamping down on free speech (which I agree are very real risks) and ignore the flip side of that coin, then it's hard to take the argument seriously.
The best I've heard from people making your argument is hand-wavy sloganeering of tired, unoriginal memes like "the best disinfectant is sunlight" or "the solution to bad speech is more speech", with at most one small anecdote provided in support of this idea.
If you're talking one of the more recent ones, (last decade or so) that Facebook shoulders some of the blame for, you'd literally have to surveill Every. Last. Communique. Which everyone with any sense should recognize as an Orwellian Dystopian nightmare, and a fruitless moving target, because as soon as groups of interest realize they are being monitored, arms races and coded communique come into play.
So it isn't moving goalposts. It's a simple statement that the individual's desire for a hate-speech free Internet is not so great it warrants laying the technical foundation and infrastructure which in the wrong hands will absolutely be abused. Certainty factor of 1.
Technology empowers everyone equally, especially those already in a position of power that we really don't want to make exercising control practical for. That's the people problem that no application of technology can fundamentally solve for.
That is not what I think. Hate speech is the causal factor that I'm talking about, not the medium. People used the most effective tools that were available to them at the time. Before it was radio, print or film. Now it's social media.
> Orwellian Dystopian nightmare
I agree that speech restrictions can progress into an Orwellian nightmare.
But, again, you've ignored the flip side. Hate speech can also progress into an Orwellian nightmare. It's happened throughout history.
So we have two opposing things that can each potentially lead to an Orwellian nightmare. Yet in your argument you've ignored the latter, only focusing on the risks of the former. That's why I am unconvinced by this line of argumentation. It is ahistorical in the way that it downplays the causal factors that lead to genocides and massacres.
To convince me, you'll have to explain why the former is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than the latter, while keeping true to history.
Wars happen for different reason. I wouldn't know of any war started by strong language.
One point of the conflict was that speech was restricted too much as far as I know, that can easily escalate a conflict.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
What conservatives ignore (and I consider myself pretty conservative-leaning) is that there's a grey area of speech that doesn't rise to direct incitement to violence but that nevertheless contributes to a climate that leads to genocide.
Other examples: The Der Sturmer publication in the 1920s Germany, and the hate speech being broadcast on public radio in Rwanda, among other examples. This speech galvanizes the general public against a group, which can lead to a not-so-great outcome for them.
This is the part I won@t budge policywise on. I won't accept a Big-Brother-Knows-Best arrangement where some nebulous group gets to wield absolute control over what things people say get to be heard.
For every untouchable, despised viewpoint in the town square are instances beyond number of parents warning children to take that individual as an example not to be. Or instances of a future being moved to counter the movement. Life, and by extension free-speech, is risky. We know this. We've known this. We will hopefully teach our children the same so they too will know.
Ours is not the right to forge their chains. Liberty is important, hard won, and easily lost, and difficult to reclaim. Does that mean unpopular movements gain momentum? That lives may be lost? Yes. Does that mean we should abandon all semblance of commitment to Liberty, and erect the illusion of a safe world only to have it be shattered again and again in a self-reinforcing spiral whereby more and more liberty is ceded to authorities so they can deliver more safety?
I know what my answer is. What's yours?
The whole purpose of the first and second amendments are so that - when, not if - our own government becomes tyrannical we can organize, and violently overthrow it.
Inciting violence (particularly against the government) is literally the whole point of the first two.
The US government is not supposed to rule, it's supposed to serve. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that. It's not only our right, specifically protected by the Bill of Rights, it's our duty and we can't even begin to do that if "inciting violence" is prohibited speech.
>It’s a slippery slope to give a subset of people control over what is allowed to be said.
The issue isn't even control, it's that there exists no person or organization that can be trusted with this power.
I want to know who hates me and why. Protecting me from that endangers me more.
If they are true to enforcing their guidelines equally, then I should not be seeing 84% of anti-semitic posts still spreading around on these social media websites.
Either it is open season on 'hateful content' so that we can see who posted what and why, or everything gets banned entirely and every post is policed with 'guideline checks' everywhere.
It also is the safer bet against censorship.
However, it is against the law in plenty of other countries, and likely against the TOS of most sites.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
They are typically happy to forgo criticism of anti semitism from, say, pro zionist southern baptist groups or hungary's orban.
They are usually much more concerned with completely nonracist criticism of Israel from the likes of UK's jeremy corbyn.
State comes first.
How would I go about building an accessible social feed that cannot be censored? Is there any country and/or technology in the world that is viable now and in the long term?
I've witnessed this behavior in other places and on social media. I don't know what the goal is of this false labeling.
Did anyone even read the article?
And there's a link to the actual report in the story.
https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ug...
There's also a very special kind of monomania. Some big account will post on Twitter or Facebook lamenting violence. "This synagogue in London got vandalized!" for instance, or perhaps "this US citizen living in the state of New York was beaten and there's security camera footage." Then about 500 people will immediately jump in to post, "Israel is bad!!"
Here, for instance, is Chelsea Football Club tweeting this past May, about a week after a Norwich synagogue was graffiti'd with a Swastika:
https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/1396189477173923853 "Chelsea FC stands with the UK's Jewish community, and Jewish communities across the world, in the face of rising antisemitism. This hatred and intimidation towards the Jewish community is unacceptable and must stop."
Here's a blue check reply (accompanied by dozens of random Tweeters with the same sentiment):
"Condemning Israel attacks is not antisemitism, Supporting Palestine and against settlers is not antisemitism, Anti-Zionism is not Antisemitism". https://twitter.com/ManarSarhan/status/1396207673473970190
Consider replacing this with any other race. "Discrimination against African-Americans is bad!" posts the NFL, as someone has burned a cross in front of a Black church. But the Twitter replies stridently call out: "Look at the violence in Africa! Look at the dictatorships! Look at all those schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Zimbabwe!" Would you really tolerate that kind of reply for a second longer than it took you to overcome your disbelief?
Recently, folks at Rutgers have been criticizing Campus Hillel as a Zionist organization. The place where your average secular Jewish college students gets Challah bread once a semester. Yet saying "that is anti-semitic" invites a whole bunch of people to whitesplain to you why it isn't.
When black churches are being shot up, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Uganda's action as a country.
When South Americans are being detained in cages at the border, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Venezuela's action as a country.
When Muslims are experiencing intense Islamophobia, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Syria's action as a country.
I love this absolutely brilliant smokescreen. I'm going to use it. Thank you.
Of course plenty of criticism of Israel is valid and not anti-Semitic.
It is also true that plenty of anti-Semites love to criticize Israel.
It's also true that a vast number of them are false accusations used by Israeli racists to quash criticism of the apartheid system within Israel.
Politicians who criticize Israel legitimately are always subjected to this.
A more appropriate term would be 'richsplaining'; when a rich person tries to explain to a poor person how the world is. It's not about race, it's about wealth. It's still not 100% correlation, but it's closer.
Race is not the root.
In general though I don't think social media platforms should be taking down content that does not violate the law or that the law should be expanded to cover "hate speech." In the USA at least free speech has worked pretty well so far.
It has always existed.
Adding "offensive" widens the scope enormously and unfairly and suddenly we're into the realms of restricting the freedom of speech for normal everyday situations.
There are some generally accepted "yes" and "no's", and then, yes, there's a few things at the edge that might give me cause to think twice.
If defining that line is "extremely fuzzy" to you, then you're already way too far down the rabbit hole (in my opinion) and I won't be following you down there.
Back then someone could have created an offensive blog and it wouldn’t have been taken down. But people would have to link to it, seek it out. Now we have social media sites algorithmically pushing content in our faces, IMO it’s only fair that they’re asked to consider what they’re pushing when they do it.
The issue I've seen is that tends to make it hard to sneak ads into the feed without it being really obvious to everyone what is being done.
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>It said that those it tagged as Holocaust denial remained online 80% of the time, while for neo-Nazi content it was 71%.
I'm glad to see they were somewhat specific on the content. On the internet things get muddy and I've been on a forum that was tied to a specific location that was connected to an American politician. For a short while we were inundated with some new accounts there arriving to tell us how outraged they were about this antisemitic politician who as far as I could tell had just criticized Israeli government actions / policies.
It's unfortunate that my first thought was "What what are we talking about exactly here?"
A report came out in the UK claiming widespread anti-semitism on University campuses and made the headlines. They had failed to distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism in the report, which was very disappointing. There certainly was some clear cases of anti-semitism, but they bundled criticism of Israel and accusations of Israel running an apartheid regime as "anti-semitism".
As you point out, this is not the case here.
Being Jewish != supporting Israel. I have never been to Israel, I do not identify as Israeli, nor do I support Israel. I fully support a free and independent Palestinian state and believe Israel is commiting genocide. Only 30% of Jews live in Israel and the rest are scattered across the world. Much of the Antisemitism discussed in this article is occuring in America and across Europe. I challenge everyone to seperate these two issues, as public apathy is what fuels further attacks by extremists online and in real life.
It's completely wrong to assume that there is a box and everyone in that box shares the exact same attributes. Society even tries to convince and manipulate people into adopting behaviors and values which are not their own; just so that they could 'fit in' (in the box). This is the root of 'peer pressure' which I take is a big problem in the US school system (go figure).
Maybe this agenda serves social media and advertising companies (and corporations overall)? It's convenient for advertisers if people in any given category share exactly the same attributes. It seems to be an extension to the goals of the factory model of education; to produce people who are optimized for participating in society whilst questioning things as little as possible.
Is that the situation here tho?
Were the platforms just going to let anything go and someone made them do it?
I don't buy into that idea here.
I doubt any of the platforms are happy to host it either.
e: Turns out that the researchers' full report actually does contain concrete examples, which seem to be legitimately bad and take-down-able.
I think it is dog whistling, but if you aren't familiar with anti-Semitic arguments and angles of attack, I don't think it is clear at all, which is probably the point.
On the surface it just seems like a list of facts and some are even seemingly laudatory, such as helping to end apartheid. The bad stuff is subtle or lower down the page.
If I were a moderator and just doing a quick check, I probably wouldn't spot anything wrong with the page.
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> Our researchers reported hundreds of racist anti-Jewish posts to social media firms using their user reporting tools. 84% were not acted upon.
The same social media cartel still housing 'hate' on their platforms with 84% of anti-semitism posts still on their sites! That's not good enough. Even Khomeini is still there violating the 'sloppy Twitter guidelines'.
Do better.