Good from Zeynep on Facebook moderation, plus a question
[ by Charles Cameron — wondering, roughly: is the world digital or analog? if that even means anything ]
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This post — Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children — together with the tweet about it below —
Facebook moderation against hate speech allows the first four examples, but not the fifth. (source: https://t.co/zWwjusW3dM) pic.twitter.com/9ew4C2pxXG
— Alex Goldman (@AGoldmund) June 28, 2017
— triggered Zeynep Tufekci‘s latest. Here she goes:
What happens when your product is about human society but you run it from so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules with too small a workforce. https://t.co/83yeJ309f4
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017
I understand the complexities here—but that's the point. A 2 billion user base cannot be reduced to powerpoints for rushed, tiny workforce.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017
Code scales easily, but dealing with complexities and messiness of human societies does not. Facebook's business is almost all the latter.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017
Treating human societies like simple, abstract toy models—a great tool for computer science—is how you end up here. https://t.co/fVxVd6UwWe
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017
And here’s the tweet she’s quoting in that last one:
This is a real slide from a Facebook training document for its censors. The correct answer is #3: White men. https://t.co/vpvSVMIEsC pic.twitter.com/rWkuu0BwO0
— ? kade ? (@onekade) June 28, 2017
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A significant ouroboros from that ProPublica article, BTW:
Facebook also added an exception to its ban against advocating for anyone to be sent to a concentration camp. “Nazis should be sent to a concentration camp,” is allowed, the documents state, because Nazis themselves are a hate group.
That should give us pause for thought, I think.
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There’s something very important going on here in this discussion as a whole and Tufecki’s tweets in particular: quite aside from the powerful issue of Facebook and its rules for moderators, there’s a more general question about quality and quantity — or should I say qualitative and quantitative approaches?
I’m wondering how well this distinction between (depending which tweet you quote) “human societies” and “simple, abstract toy models” — or “human society” and “so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules” or “code” and the “complexities and messiness of human societies” or a “2 billion user base” and “powerpoints” — maps to the distinction between digital and analog..
Any thoughts?
