8 ms·

Facebook’s internal rules of deletion

144 points by unicornporn 10y ago

deathhand 10y ago
Is criteria for shadow banning content? Or just content in general? Does FB notify at all?
tptacek 10y ago
There are ways in which these policies are more coherent than the moderation rules we have here; in particular, the rationale for disallowing speech designed to target or intimidate minorities (for Facebook: because it's bad for business, by making people hesitant to share; here: because it destroys civility and the possibility of intellectual curiosity). Every time I ask peers about what the best rule for HN would be with respect to racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination, I'm met with the response "duh, just ban racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination". HN wants something more elegant than that kind of ban, but the construction Facebook uses here seems plenty elegant. But yes, you eventually get to the PC/NPC stuff, and "fucking Muslim" vs. "fucking migrant", and it's off the rails. The good parts of this, though, are worth considering!
- legodt 10y ago
  There has not been a real problem of harassment and hate speech on HN so I don't really see how it applies. Now, HN has a HUGE misogyny problem and to a lesser extent holds a startling quantity of alt-right/neo-nazi posters, but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site. Therefore, moderating these views becomes murky and less cut and dry, especially because trying to homogenize views upsets a lot of users with more libertarian leanings. This demographic breakdown is also observed in tech culture/SV culture at large so it is no big surprise to see it here too.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    (I didn't downvote you) > There has not been a real problem of [...] hate speech on HN What do you have showdead in your profile set to? If you have it set to "no" you're going to miss a lot of it. But even so, there's plenty of it on HN. Algolia search doesn't return killed comments, but there's plenty of rabid anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, etc on HN. > HN has a HUGE misogyny problem and to a lesser extent holds a startling quantity of alt-right/neo-nazi posters, but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site I'm not sure this is compatible with the 1st sentence I quoted. Some people's freedom of speech silences other people.
    - legodt 10y ago
      Thanks for joining the conversation. I wanted to steer my comment a little bit more to the last point you made about how racism and misoginy, no matter how subtle, does create a toxic culture which silences or intimidates others, but saying that REALLY riles up the "freeze peach" crowd here and I was concerned that making such a statement in an already upsetting comment would get me hit with the flaghammer. More to the topic at hand (and the parent comment), this is about the role of a site making active and aggressive steps to remove content or clamp down on the posting of content that is focused on organizing and attacking outgroups openly, something that does not occur here on HN. You are going to get comments colored with implicit racism or gendered bias, but nobody is grabbing pitchforks to intentionally attack anyone here. HN, despite carrying all of the more socially regressive actors of the meatspace tech community is remarkably civil and kind
    - empressplay 10y ago
      > Some people's freedom of speech silences other people. While this statement might be somewhat true, the idea that someone would be censored for having an opinion that others find offensive is extremely frightening. Obviously if someone attacks a group based on a stereotype, or advocates discriminatory or harmful behaviour towards a group, that's one thing -- but suggesting censoring people because they may hold views that others don't like isn't a road you want to go down (who makes that judgement?)
    - zeveb 10y ago
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    Care to expand on the misogyny problem?
  - wyager 10y ago
    Edit: I partially misunderstood the parent comment. See below. Your viewpoint is antithetical to open intellectual discourse. You specifically call for censorship on political grounds, not even because of something that could be construed as an attack. To quote: > but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site Fringe political ideas should not be suppressed, especially if they aren't even attacking anyone. HN's decent level of open discourse is not a "problem", it's one of the things that makes this site better than e.g. Reddit.
    - legodt 10y ago
      I never called for censoring groups, I was just outlining the problems faced here. If you read back up to parent, what I'm trying to get at is saying that despite HM harboring these regressive actors, at no point are they mobilizing or openly attacking others, so Facebook style content removal or moderation does not cross-apply here. I think we may be more on the same page than you realize
      - wyager 10y ago
        Ah, you're right, I misunderstood. Editing my comment.
      - empressplay 10y ago
        Calling them "regressive actors" only contributes to the "problem", it doesn't help it.
        legodt 10y ago
        Although their views may be seen as rephrensible from my perspective I still see their value as contributors to this site considering most topics that they are contributing to discussion on won't bring up these issues
    - DanBC 10y ago
      > I'm downvoting you > censorship > Fringe political ideas should not be suppressed, especially if they aren't even attacking anyone. Hypocrite.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    > Now, HN has a HUGE misogyny problem [citation needed]
- striking 10y ago
  Is there any reason you chose to compare these rules to HN's rules? HN's moderation is one of the best I've ever encountered, I'm not sure there's much of a need to improve it.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    HN's moderation works only because Scott and Dan patrol threads flagging and banning people who are (for instance) openly anti-Semitic on threads. It would be better to have simple, coherent rules against these things, rather than unstated rules that require enormous amounts of effort to enforce. Again I want to be clear that most of these rules seem silly or even puerile. Just the beginning of it made sense.
    - nl 10y ago
      It would be better to have simple, coherent rules against these things, rather than unstated rules that require enormous amounts of effort to enforce. Would it? It would certainly require less effort, but we know from other places that blanket rules are pretty easy to game (eg, see the games people play on Wikipedia with the 3RR rule). Once people know them, the rules themselves become weaponized.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - striking 10y ago
      Ah, I might have misunderstood then. That makes sense. Do you have any suggestions for rules, just off the top of your head?
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Unfortunately, "more coherent" doesn't mean "better", it just means "more fleshed-out". The problem with formalizing rules of human behaviour is that the latter is generally too fuzzy, so you either end up with a very complex system of rules, or with a simple system that has tons of edge cases (like the one in the post). I think you were attracted to the improvement of writing rules down, but that has a host of other problems, including the fact that you are then forced to enforce the rules, even where they don't make sense (e.g. you have to remove some comment because of the letter of the law, even though it wasn't actually inflammatory, it just ran into an edge case). I moderate(d) a large reddit community (millions of subscribers?) and you pretty much can't win. If you don't have rules, you're "murky" and "wanton". If you have rules, you get "these rules suck" or "you're only enforcing the rules whenever you feel like it" when you try to go by the spirit of the law rather than the letter.
- empressplay 10y ago
  The phrase "migrant" refers to an action or behaviour taken by a person -- that can't really be considered a PC because that would be going down a road nobody really wants to (there are all sorts of actions people do that others are critical of and you'd have to write a phone-book full of rules if you wanted to start moderating that) However, a rule that says you can't make blanket statements about a PC is much easier to enforce.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    They go on to say this, however... statements such as “migrants are dirty” are allowed, while “migrants are dirt” isn’t So I'm not sure the rules are quite as simple as outlined. There's other oddities, like one area says " the term teenager does not enjoy special protection", then another area where they specifically say it does get protection. Argh.
- wyager 10y ago
  > "duh, just ban racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination". This sounds reasonable at face value, but not one of these things is well-defined. Many people interpret uncomfortable but entirely reasonable discussion of sociology and demography (e.g. discussions of wage differences or crime distribution) as racist or sexist or ageist. Many people confuse anti-Zionism or anti-theism for anti-Semitism. IMO it's better to be very conservative with banning such things, because the false positive risk is very high, and there are a lot of important things to discuss around these topics.
  - illuminati1911 10y ago
    Exactly. Especially today it's really difficult to have rational discussions about difficult topics because the radical people at both ends can't wait for an opportunity to to flag neutral or relatively neutral people to the opposite end unless they agree with everything they think. I will rather have Internet where people can say pretty much whatever they want without censorship, even racists, hateful, homophobic things etc. than Internet where some highly biased establishment thinks they are above everybody else and can decide the topics people talk about. There is very VERY thin line between preventing facists, racists etc. and becoming one yourself.
tyingq 10y ago
Honestly surprised at how complex the rules are. There's rationale, for example for why “Irish women are dumb" is not OK, but “Irish teenagers are dumb” is OK.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  I'm actually not sure how that follows, because it says this right below it: > There are also sub-categories that enjoy extra > protection. These are listed in the same chapter: > Age – youth, senior citizens, teenagers
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Yes, that's confusing, but I didn't make up the example...it's in there: http://68.media.tumblr.com/c7058d6bf2e9bee1facb23098dda4b78/tumblr_inline_oi9t0rXF2i1rzk8n5_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/c7058d6bf2e9bee1facb23098dda4b78/...
    - shard972 10y ago
      Hm, maybe someone mixed up their slide? I would imagine with all the online bullying issues facebook has that protecting teens would be a high priority.
      - tyingq 10y ago
        There's a whole different section of rules for bullying. For example, picture of someone urinating in their pants == OK, unless there is a caption calling it out in a derogatory fashion. Unless the person is a public figure (more rules to define this), then the derogatory caption == OK.
hug 10y ago
Facebook's rules are necessary because of the nature of the beast: When a company is large enough to have to begin to hire outsiders to moderate content, the "moderation culture" (for want of a better term) is lost. In order to communicate this, you need to codify it in a set of rules that outlay exactly what actions take place when. The problem I see with this method is that you lose the ability to have a "why". Why content is left in place despite not meeting the rules, or why content is removed despite meeting them. Community insiders promoted to moderate have usually demonstrated that their opinions are in line with the culture that the moderators are attempting to promote, which means the sort of rules that lay out exactly what is acceptable versus what is unacceptable are not required. There's definitely upsides to the moderator-community-gestalt method of determining what content is unacceptable, the biggest of which is that it denies trolls the ability to 'rules lawyer' their way into posting content which is against the spirit of the rules, but not against the letter. Which system is more elegant? I don't think Facebook's is, necessarily, but even if it were I don't think it should (or needs to) apply to a community like HN.
- caf 10y ago
  The "rules lawyering" is probably why they don't make the details of these rules public.
sfRattan 10y ago
"We do not allow ranking private individuals on physical appearance or personality." [1] Exploiting that particular human proclivity is part of why Facebook exists.... [2] [1]: http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b024b598c740a53f23f35f801251cc7/tumblr_inline_oi9t4oUdZ31rzk8n5_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b024b598c740a53f23f35f801251cc7/... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash
- fwn 10y ago
  ...which doesn't mean it has to be part of their contemporary deletion rules.
lisper 10y ago
"There are also sub-categories that enjoy extra protection...: Age – youth, senior citizens, teenagers" and then, just a few paragraphs later: "[C]ombining a protected category with an unprotected category results in an unprotected category. Irish teenagers are the example. While they are protected under the national origin category, the term teenager does not enjoy special protection" Wat?
- ohwello 10y ago
  The rule sounds absurd on its own, but makes perfect sense when you read the example.
baybal2 10y ago
baybal2 10y ago
dandare 10y ago
I understand why private companies will not publicly subscribe to any specific set of rules: they often need to, have to or want to break these rules. They are a business and I am not judging them here. But I believe such rules should be an open standard - for other companies to build on, non-profits or even state sector. Navigating these rules should be even thought at elementary school one day.
cannyvalley 10y ago
Can anyone confirm the authenticity of this document?
- heisenbit 10y ago
  I can't but Süddeutsche Zeitung is on the level of the NYT in Germany so I generally trust them to have done their homework.
asdfawef 10y ago
This is a joke.

144 points by unicornporn 10y ago

Is criteria for shadow banning content? Or just content in general? Does FB notify at all?

There are ways in which these policies are more coherent than the moderation rules we have here; in particular, the rationale for disallowing speech designed to target or intimidate minorities (for Facebook: because it's bad for business, by making people hesitant to share; here: because it destroys civility and the possibility of intellectual curiosity). Every time I ask peers about what the best rule for HN would be with respect to racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination, I'm met with the response "duh, just ban racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination". HN wants something more elegant than that kind of ban, but the construction Facebook uses here seems plenty elegant. But yes, you eventually get to the PC/NPC stuff, and "fucking Muslim" vs. "fucking migrant", and it's off the rails. The good parts of this, though, are worth considering!

legodt 10y ago
There has not been a real problem of harassment and hate speech on HN so I don't really see how it applies. Now, HN has a HUGE misogyny problem and to a lesser extent holds a startling quantity of alt-right/neo-nazi posters, but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site. Therefore, moderating these views becomes murky and less cut and dry, especially because trying to homogenize views upsets a lot of users with more libertarian leanings. This demographic breakdown is also observed in tech culture/SV culture at large so it is no big surprise to see it here too.
- DanBC 10y ago
  (I didn't downvote you) > There has not been a real problem of [...] hate speech on HN What do you have showdead in your profile set to? If you have it set to "no" you're going to miss a lot of it. But even so, there's plenty of it on HN. Algolia search doesn't return killed comments, but there's plenty of rabid anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, etc on HN. > HN has a HUGE misogyny problem and to a lesser extent holds a startling quantity of alt-right/neo-nazi posters, but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site I'm not sure this is compatible with the 1st sentence I quoted. Some people's freedom of speech silences other people.
  - legodt 10y ago
    Thanks for joining the conversation. I wanted to steer my comment a little bit more to the last point you made about how racism and misoginy, no matter how subtle, does create a toxic culture which silences or intimidates others, but saying that REALLY riles up the "freeze peach" crowd here and I was concerned that making such a statement in an already upsetting comment would get me hit with the flaghammer. More to the topic at hand (and the parent comment), this is about the role of a site making active and aggressive steps to remove content or clamp down on the posting of content that is focused on organizing and attacking outgroups openly, something that does not occur here on HN. You are going to get comments colored with implicit racism or gendered bias, but nobody is grabbing pitchforks to intentionally attack anyone here. HN, despite carrying all of the more socially regressive actors of the meatspace tech community is remarkably civil and kind
  - empressplay 10y ago
    > Some people's freedom of speech silences other people. While this statement might be somewhat true, the idea that someone would be censored for having an opinion that others find offensive is extremely frightening. Obviously if someone attacks a group based on a stereotype, or advocates discriminatory or harmful behaviour towards a group, that's one thing -- but suggesting censoring people because they may hold views that others don't like isn't a road you want to go down (who makes that judgement?)
  - zeveb 10y ago
- literallycancer 10y ago
  Care to expand on the misogyny problem?
- wyager 10y ago
  Edit: I partially misunderstood the parent comment. See below. Your viewpoint is antithetical to open intellectual discourse. You specifically call for censorship on political grounds, not even because of something that could be construed as an attack. To quote: > but their views only come across in the content they post here, not as a form of attacking other groups on the site or off the site Fringe political ideas should not be suppressed, especially if they aren't even attacking anyone. HN's decent level of open discourse is not a "problem", it's one of the things that makes this site better than e.g. Reddit.
  - legodt 10y ago
    I never called for censoring groups, I was just outlining the problems faced here. If you read back up to parent, what I'm trying to get at is saying that despite HM harboring these regressive actors, at no point are they mobilizing or openly attacking others, so Facebook style content removal or moderation does not cross-apply here. I think we may be more on the same page than you realize
    - wyager 10y ago
      Ah, you're right, I misunderstood. Editing my comment.
    - empressplay 10y ago
      Calling them "regressive actors" only contributes to the "problem", it doesn't help it.
      - legodt 10y ago
        Although their views may be seen as rephrensible from my perspective I still see their value as contributors to this site considering most topics that they are contributing to discussion on won't bring up these issues
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > I'm downvoting you > censorship > Fringe political ideas should not be suppressed, especially if they aren't even attacking anyone. Hypocrite.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  > Now, HN has a HUGE misogyny problem [citation needed]
striking 10y ago
Is there any reason you chose to compare these rules to HN's rules? HN's moderation is one of the best I've ever encountered, I'm not sure there's much of a need to improve it.
- tptacek 10y ago
  HN's moderation works only because Scott and Dan patrol threads flagging and banning people who are (for instance) openly anti-Semitic on threads. It would be better to have simple, coherent rules against these things, rather than unstated rules that require enormous amounts of effort to enforce. Again I want to be clear that most of these rules seem silly or even puerile. Just the beginning of it made sense.
  - nl 10y ago
    It would be better to have simple, coherent rules against these things, rather than unstated rules that require enormous amounts of effort to enforce. Would it? It would certainly require less effort, but we know from other places that blanket rules are pretty easy to game (eg, see the games people play on Wikipedia with the 3RR rule). Once people know them, the rules themselves become weaponized.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - striking 10y ago
    Ah, I might have misunderstood then. That makes sense. Do you have any suggestions for rules, just off the top of your head?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Unfortunately, "more coherent" doesn't mean "better", it just means "more fleshed-out". The problem with formalizing rules of human behaviour is that the latter is generally too fuzzy, so you either end up with a very complex system of rules, or with a simple system that has tons of edge cases (like the one in the post). I think you were attracted to the improvement of writing rules down, but that has a host of other problems, including the fact that you are then forced to enforce the rules, even where they don't make sense (e.g. you have to remove some comment because of the letter of the law, even though it wasn't actually inflammatory, it just ran into an edge case). I moderate(d) a large reddit community (millions of subscribers?) and you pretty much can't win. If you don't have rules, you're "murky" and "wanton". If you have rules, you get "these rules suck" or "you're only enforcing the rules whenever you feel like it" when you try to go by the spirit of the law rather than the letter.
empressplay 10y ago
The phrase "migrant" refers to an action or behaviour taken by a person -- that can't really be considered a PC because that would be going down a road nobody really wants to (there are all sorts of actions people do that others are critical of and you'd have to write a phone-book full of rules if you wanted to start moderating that) However, a rule that says you can't make blanket statements about a PC is much easier to enforce.
- tyingq 10y ago
  They go on to say this, however... statements such as “migrants are dirty” are allowed, while “migrants are dirt” isn’t So I'm not sure the rules are quite as simple as outlined. There's other oddities, like one area says " the term teenager does not enjoy special protection", then another area where they specifically say it does get protection. Argh.
wyager 10y ago
> "duh, just ban racism, anti-Semitism, ageism, homophobia and gender discrimination". This sounds reasonable at face value, but not one of these things is well-defined. Many people interpret uncomfortable but entirely reasonable discussion of sociology and demography (e.g. discussions of wage differences or crime distribution) as racist or sexist or ageist. Many people confuse anti-Zionism or anti-theism for anti-Semitism. IMO it's better to be very conservative with banning such things, because the false positive risk is very high, and there are a lot of important things to discuss around these topics.
- illuminati1911 10y ago
  Exactly. Especially today it's really difficult to have rational discussions about difficult topics because the radical people at both ends can't wait for an opportunity to to flag neutral or relatively neutral people to the opposite end unless they agree with everything they think. I will rather have Internet where people can say pretty much whatever they want without censorship, even racists, hateful, homophobic things etc. than Internet where some highly biased establishment thinks they are above everybody else and can decide the topics people talk about. There is very VERY thin line between preventing facists, racists etc. and becoming one yourself.

tyingq 10y ago

Honestly surprised at how complex the rules are. There's rationale, for example for why “Irish women are dumb" is not OK, but “Irish teenagers are dumb” is OK.

mattkrause 10y ago
I'm actually not sure how that follows, because it says this right below it: > There are also sub-categories that enjoy extra > protection. These are listed in the same chapter: > Age – youth, senior citizens, teenagers
- tyingq 10y ago
  Yes, that's confusing, but I didn't make up the example...it's in there: http://68.media.tumblr.com/c7058d6bf2e9bee1facb23098dda4b78/tumblr_inline_oi9t0rXF2i1rzk8n5_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/c7058d6bf2e9bee1facb23098dda4b78/...
  - shard972 10y ago
    Hm, maybe someone mixed up their slide? I would imagine with all the online bullying issues facebook has that protecting teens would be a high priority.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      There's a whole different section of rules for bullying. For example, picture of someone urinating in their pants == OK, unless there is a caption calling it out in a derogatory fashion. Unless the person is a public figure (more rules to define this), then the derogatory caption == OK.

hug 10y ago

Facebook's rules are necessary because of the nature of the beast: When a company is large enough to have to begin to hire outsiders to moderate content, the "moderation culture" (for want of a better term) is lost. In order to communicate this, you need to codify it in a set of rules that outlay exactly what actions take place when. The problem I see with this method is that you lose the ability to have a "why". Why content is left in place despite not meeting the rules, or why content is removed despite meeting them. Community insiders promoted to moderate have usually demonstrated that their opinions are in line with the culture that the moderators are attempting to promote, which means the sort of rules that lay out exactly what is acceptable versus what is unacceptable are not required. There's definitely upsides to the moderator-community-gestalt method of determining what content is unacceptable, the biggest of which is that it denies trolls the ability to 'rules lawyer' their way into posting content which is against the spirit of the rules, but not against the letter. Which system is more elegant? I don't think Facebook's is, necessarily, but even if it were I don't think it should (or needs to) apply to a community like HN.

caf 10y ago
The "rules lawyering" is probably why they don't make the details of these rules public.

sfRattan 10y ago

"We do not allow ranking private individuals on physical appearance or personality." [1] Exploiting that particular human proclivity is part of why Facebook exists.... [2] [1]: http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b024b598c740a53f23f35f801251cc7/tumblr_inline_oi9t4oUdZ31rzk8n5_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b024b598c740a53f23f35f801251cc7/... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facemash

fwn 10y ago
...which doesn't mean it has to be part of their contemporary deletion rules.

lisper 10y ago

"There are also sub-categories that enjoy extra protection...: Age – youth, senior citizens, teenagers" and then, just a few paragraphs later: "[C]ombining a protected category with an unprotected category results in an unprotected category. Irish teenagers are the example. While they are protected under the national origin category, the term teenager does not enjoy special protection" Wat?

ohwello 10y ago
The rule sounds absurd on its own, but makes perfect sense when you read the example.

baybal2 10y ago

dandare 10y ago

I understand why private companies will not publicly subscribe to any specific set of rules: they often need to, have to or want to break these rules. They are a business and I am not judging them here. But I believe such rules should be an open standard - for other companies to build on, non-profits or even state sector. Navigating these rules should be even thought at elementary school one day.

cannyvalley 10y ago

Can anyone confirm the authenticity of this document?

heisenbit 10y ago
I can't but Süddeutsche Zeitung is on the level of the NYT in Germany so I generally trust them to have done their homework.

asdfawef 10y ago

This is a joke.