Facebook Execs Nixed Employees' Plan to Quell Hate Speech: Report
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It is always an "Employees' Plan" because the people tasked with doing it are obviously employees, or sometimes consultants. The people making the decision are always "Execs" because they are executing a decision. This headline is designed to transmit a disturbing message, with nothing actually notable behind it.
>Kaplan, the company’s most influential Republican, was widely known as a strong believer in the idea that Facebook should appear “politically neutral,” and his hard-line free speech ideology was in lockstep with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Facebook recently changed its corporate name to Meta.) He bent over backward to protect conservatives, according to previous reporting in The Post, numerous former insiders and the Facebook Papers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...
You can literally use that sentence to quell any free speech just by saying I’m triggered.
If your feelings are hurt, stop reading a particular platform. There are enough groups online you can isolate yourself from any opinion you don’t like.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen these sort of images shared across Facebook many times and it was a large part of a decision to step back my usage of the product around 2016, including having my account deactivated for several years
This topic is commonly viewed in a political lens (free speech, etc) but I view it in a free market lens: Facebook.com is full of garbage and Meta can ignore user experience issues, such as flamebait and hate speech, to their own detriment. It’s actively difficult, from my experience, to use their product in just about any way without running into heaps of inflammatory garbage.
Was it a moderation issue? Was it FB optimizing for engagement? Could algorithmic moderation of inflammatory content have even helped? I don’t know, but what was one of the few things I stayed on FB for, instead became a heap of garbage with the occasional scattered gem.
But implementing a whole site filtering mechanism for derogatory art sounds like an extreme measure.
I’m not suggesting a specific fix, but rather pointing out that I personally have difficulty with inflammatory content on FB: friends I added back in high school share inflammatory bullshit constantly, groups that I join that ostensibly appeal to my interests seem to frequently devolve into various forms of inflammatory bullshit, etc.
Assuming that I’m not just unusually afflicted by bullshit, I expect in the long term and in aggregate this is a major market issue for Meta
Of course we should. They make a delightful bolognese sauce.
But, seriously, I don't think this phenomenon you're seeing is because of anything Facebook is doing to metaphorically stir the pot. It's because there's not a lot of left unity as a whole. Ask any 5 socialists what their ideal socialist utopia would look like, and you'll get 7 different answers. I see this all the time on similarly-oriented Reddit subs. Reddit doesn't do anything to bring people together besides provide a forum, and they certainly don't do anything to algorithmically engineer conversations to go a certain way.
Maybe not stir the pot specifically, but it’s their user experience and they own it. Which post shows up first on my feed greatly alters the user experience, and FB has to make a decision on that. It’s not chronological, and it seems to frequently involve me seeing 3 day old shitstorms.
But, tell me: would it make any difference to you if you saw these "3 day old shitstorms" when they were only 1 day old? If anything, what they really want you to do is discover these posts in their pre-shitstorm posts, so you can be involved in getting the shit flying. It seems like this actually represents a failure of algorithmic moderation, to me.
It's a failure of a lot of things, but ultimately a failure to create a product desirable to anybody not interested in flinging shit.
Nope, I didn't forget—I don't entirely mind being their product, but it seems like Facebook forgot the fact that, if I'm their product, then they need to make it worth my time to go to it.
> Perhaps these practices create an ideal (or, at least better than what "display everything chronologically would) environment for displaying ads to receptive people.
Maybe it does, but it doesn't seem like they're firing on all cylinders. Instead, it seems like they're trying to get more and more out of fewer and fewer "products".
I belong to scuba diving groups and they all have different rules on off-topicness.
Join or start a group that strictly prohibits political or off-topic discussions.
It's definitely different group to group though-- some people won't experience it and others are puzzled why the "so I herd u leik mudkips" meme group they joined 10 years ago is spreading antivax images.
I don't follow ANY companies. I have about 50 friends from high school and college. Actually, one friend owns a coffee shop so I follow their page. How do I let facebook know to stop showing me shit about truckers and right wing terrorism? Like, I block it, and it is back a few days later.
Unfriend or unfollow people who don’t post what you want to see. Join groups you like.
This is like blaming Netflix for a random show they showed you when you actively give them indications you would like it. All you have to do is add shows you want to your queue.
Is it because Bob occasionally interacts with inflammatory right-wing hate?
Is it because Bob has second-order friends who like inflammatory right-wing hate?
Is it because Bob himself likes inflammatory right-wing hate?
Why should one have to change their friend list, simply to stop a social media algorithm from shoveling content that that person repeatedly expresses they don't like? Wouldn't it be better to just have a check-box: "I don't want to see right-wing hate" and have Facebook honor that, regardless of what the person's friends' activity is?
Hmm I just read another article on this which said the proposed tweak was actually to STOP automatically blocking hate speech against white people.
I guess in light of that you can see how the quote is factually correct but worded in such a way to completely misrepresent the nature of the proposal
>They were proposing a major overhaul of the hate speech algorithm. From now on, the algorithm would be narrowly tailored to automatically remove hate speech against only five groups of people — those who are Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim or of multiple races — that users rated as most severe and harmful. (The researchers hoped to eventually expand the algorithm’s detection capabilities to protect other vulnerable groups, after the algorithm had been retrained and was on track.) Direct threats of violence against all groups would still be deleted.
>…
>But Kaplan and the other executives did give the green light to a version of the project that would remove the least harmful speech, according to Facebook’s own study: programming the algorithms to stop automatically taking down content directed at White people, Americans and men. The Post previously reported on this change when it was announced internally later in 2020.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/21/faceboo...
If you think a post is hate speech, mark it as such to exclude it and its creator from your bubble. Allow other users to subscribe to your bubble, and visa versa, such that you share your include/exclude lists with them, out to a given degree of separation, with any exceptions you might list.
So I could add ACLU, NPR and SPLC and various friends, celebrities, and polticians to my bubble and share their exclusions, and you could add NRA, FOX, FedSoc, etc., to yours. We effectively each get our own bespoke hate speech filters while hosted on a common carrier. This is decentralized, scalable, hyperdemocratic moderation. People of all ideologies can peacefully share the same platform, singing Kumbaya in harmony.
- If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them.
- If you need to buy a car, and you know somebody who is selling a car, you don't need to go to Facebook Marketplace and use them as an intermediary to buy a car from a stranger
- If politicians and businesses are interacting directly with constituents/customers in their community, they don't need to pay Facebook to boost their political ads.
It's not at all surprising, then, that social media companies (particularly Facebook) have done everything they could possibly do to undermine any community that risks drawing people away from the newsfeed.
“ - If somebody shows you photos of their new baby in person, you don't have to go to Facebook and look at their ads to see them.”
If someone shows me their baby pictures I become better friends with that person. I’m more inclined to show them more of my pictures later on, online and offline. And then usually that’s reciprocated too
That's obviously not the case in most countries on this earth. Holocaust denial for example is illegal across the EU.
I will also note that in most cases, these laws don't prohibit such speech unless it is done in a manner likely to lead to harm. How widely or narrowly that is commonly understood is a different question.
I guess the benefit would be the ability to get updates from your crazy family members while not having to see everything they post?
Whether or not this is a net positive for the world is a different question.
What button do I click to opt out of hate-speech-fostered discrimination, harassment, abuse, and genocide?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2021/09/23/faceboo...
I'd really like that.
And what happens when the system takes down quotes from the Quran--which Muslims believe to be not only the inspired, but perfect word of God--as "hate speech."
I'm not disagreeing with the approach--I'm just pointing out that societies can't help but encode their religious and quasi-religious views onto putatively secular rules. What Twitter or Facebook deem "hate speech" is invariably dictated by what white Americans,[1] think that means.
[1] Or others socialized into that culture. The practice of Islam here in America has a distinct influence of mainline Protestantism quite absent from the practice in Bangladesh. I was at an Islamic wedding for a family member several years ago, and the imam was narrating over passages from scripture to conform it to how Americans view things.
Besides, the overreliance on the writings of scriptures is a distinctly protestant characteristic
In a way, from an islamic perspective, it's much much better to just acknowledge that you are not living by the teachings of the koran even if that means living a sinful life than it is to try to remake or drastically reinterpret the koran in way that whatever you are doing isn't a sin anymore.
Now obviously that does not apply to the hadiths which are, a part from the extremely consequential early caliphate intestine wars, probably one of the biggest source of inter and inner sect conflict and disagreement. Much more so than the koran itself imo. How to interpret them, how much theological value they hold and even which are valid are all questions that will probably be debated forever.
In fact we (in my direct entourage, not all Muslims obviously ;) ) always find it a bit odd how... cavalier christians can be with their scripture when it comes to picking what they like and discarding what they don't. To me I couldn't see the point, but I know enough to understand that christian theology is much much more complicated and extremely intricate, but that's still what it can look like from my perspective. So it's funny to me to see someone say that not everyone is as literal as... protestants!
The dominant group faces a different problem, because someone has to make the rules. “When does life begin?” Clearly society must answer this one way or the other—we won’t let people exercise their personal “choice” at say 2 months after birth. If religion doesn’t decide that question, some other non-falsifiable moral framework will.
Or the imam had been influenced by American culture and was conforming it to their own views.
I totally agree that people discount how much impact protestantism had/still has, but these views have been secularized and can thrive without any religious framework.
It's all culture, basically; I don't think I'm disagreeing with you.
What about hate speech against white people, or Christians? Have these groups been dehumanized to the point where that is just considered completely acceptable and uncontroversial now?
As a “brown” person I think hateful speech directed at “white people” is offensive because so often it’s classist. But I don’t make the rules!
This is a pretty disingenuous slippery slope argument which can be used to argue against any censorship of virulent hate speech on any private platform.
The classification problem is not one that can ever be agreed to though as you point out, so I'd rather that larger platforms like Facebook simply provide tools to choose and mark the kind of content you'd prefer to see rather than blocking comments that a vocal group dislikes. The real solution to this problem was found many decades ago, and is of course ignored. Go back to teaching children stuff like the following rather than making victimhood into a currency.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones,
> But words can never hurt me.
It's true that social media is full of pearl-clutching, and that's what you propose to remedy with your "sticks and stones" curriculum, but it doesn't address the real problem of hate speech. And again, I can't stress this enough: I'm not saying that Facebook deleting posts is any kind of answer; what I'm saying is it seems you think the question of hate speech has to do with people being offended rather than people being actively harmed. Given the hyperbole in the media (social or otherwise) it's understandable why you would think that was the case, but social media isn't the best place to get your information.
As far as real world harm when it comes to permitting or not permitting speech goes, I'd put the danger of effective societal censorship creating authoritarianism that harms masses of people as so far beyond the level of harm created by some random insane person who sees some negative comments about some group on social media that it's not even on the same planet of harm.
In and of themselves, words cannot cause anybody harm.
As far as your concern about people being actively harmed, that's a big topic that's certainly debatable, both in terms of whether anybody is being harmed to a discussion of who is being harmed. I'm not sure if this is the best venue for this kind of debate because there's a lot that cannot be spoken about in a forum like this.
But I think your preferred social media network of choice isn't the proper avenue for this task. Society has developed a police and criminal justice system over thousands of years to prevent and punish actual criminal acts (violations of life, liberty, and property) while at the same time taking great care to protect the rights of the accused. It's imperfect in many ways, yes of course, but at the moment it's the system that's actually credible. The idea that society is expecting people like Mark Zuckerberg to effectively become the society-shaping, crime-prevention czar seems insane to me.
This is really hard because there are so many claims done in bad faith.
For example, comparing Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee is incredibly racist, but people will claim it's not, and will claim it's no different than comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to a neanderthal. But this is entirely a bad faith claim, since the comparison of black people to primates has been a racist trope that spans decades or even centuries.
For the modern world, I think it is important to expect that giant private conglomerates uphold the civil liberties given to us under law in those private spaces they control. After all, they function more like a public utility and common carrier. Otherwise, they will abuse those powers in various ways, for example if their employees have a particular set of biases. It is unacceptable for our most basic and ubiquitous forms of communication to be controlled by tech giants that ignore fundamental societal values like free speech.
I also want to point out that not everything that is labeled "hate speech" is clearly bad. For example, Ibram X Kendi defines "racist" as anything that perpetuates inequities across racial groups, meaning differences in outcomes (rather than differences in opportunity). I think most people would not consider a difference in outcomes to be racist, but under Kendi's definition (which is part of the "anti-racist"/CRT movement), even something like an objective standardized test can be viewed as racist. So should speech defending standardized testing be censored on social media? What about speech defending Kyle Rittenhouse, which Twitter/Facebook/etc. have been censoring under their policy around violence/dangerous individuals, despite the recent ruling? Similarly, gender identity and trans issues are highly controversial and there is significant debate on how to deal with it. Does it really make sense to censor open discussion of this issue while it is so current? In all these instances we already have a tried and true solution - let the speech happen, let debate run its course, and avoid simply letting those in power control speech and other outcomes. I'm not sure why that ever became controversial.