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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

I had my first experience with it today. I used a yiddishism in a comment on a post about one of yiddish institutions and was greeted with a hate speech pop-up. IG is definitely going to purge quite a lot of colloquialisms with it.

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People from Spanish speaking countries have had their FB accounts limited for asking about black ink cartridges for HP printers or black HP printers in computer supply pages.

https://larepublica.pe/tecnologia/2020/06/14/facebook-volvio...

https://www.fayerwayer.com/2020/09/facebook-imagen-maldita-b...

That's appallingly ango-centric.

It's probably the same sort of dumb bag-of-words classifier that made Google's toxic speech identifier classify sentences like "I am gay" as "extremely toxic".

You give each word a score and sum them together, completely ignoring context and meaning.

So weird, why would a yiddishism have a negative speech score?

Edit: realizing this comes across as sarcastically anti-Semitic. This is a genuine question, I don't understand why a yiddishism would carry such connotations in the automated hate speech system.

In the context of the last trend of nlp a word is defined by its context, if a word is mostly used as a derogatory term in the corpus that the model has been trained it will most likely be used as a flag to classify the content as hatespeech

Do people use yiddishisms derogatorily?

Not sure if I’m understanding “yiddishism” correctly here, but internet anti-Semites do mock kvetching all the time.

Yes, since internet anti-Semites mock kvetching anyone using yiddish words in a comment on a post about yiddish institution is an anti-Semite engaging in hate speech.

https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories...

I'm not sure your point?

Absent the original commenter (you) providing context, that makes for reasonable supposition. Automated systems learn from a corpus that includes internet anti-Semites using Yiddishisms in a mocking manner to insult and inflame leads to false-positives on real-world, genuine uses.

Similarly, how does one fish out the context and gauge just how appropriate (according to HN, never) a use of "n----r" and all its variants? Consider whether one should tell Joe Schmoe Black American he cannot use the word all to prevent Joe Schmoe White American from having a chance at using it to incite.

It's a hard problem with many a false-positive to be had in ways that will befuddle, outrage, and amuse.

That's an excellent question, the ml modelers should ask those questioners themselves. There is a comment in this thread that in Spanish languages asking for a black ink cartridge (cartucho de tinta negro in Spanish) for a printer is automatically blocked because the word negro in hate comment is the word that has most signal for the classifier

Such nonsense as AI moderation will force everyone to be good but good only in terms of some very narrow cultural norms with no respect to other cultures.

And since practices like these only growing it will become norm in near future.

Not only AI.

Spanish speakers have gotten into trouble for using the Spanish word for black in other contexts, like:

British audience misunderstanding Spanish phrase by an Uruguayan player.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-9104039/M...

https://elpais.com/deportes/2020-12-23/gracias-negrito-la-ac...

German players misunderstanding Spanish word:

https://apnews.com/article/sports-2020-tokyo-olympics-africa...?

https://twitter.com/Romein0omatic1/status/141646122833191322...

Yes, it's just sad that some people start judging beforehand, implying malicious behavior rather than misunderstanding.

And other people want to be offended, even when there is no insult, just different cultural norms.

That last link is the distilled essence of Twitter to me. A white woman from America telling a black person that he doesn't understand what a black person's perspective would be on the topic of racial slurs and how they [mis]translate across languages.

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