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Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence
- chroem- 9y agoIt's interesting that they have specific provisions for Zionism.
- literallycancer 9y agoMight have been because of the hashtag, but yeah, it's a bit weird.
- jjawssd 9y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/revealed-facebook-internal-rulebook-sex-terrorism-violence#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/revealed-facebo... What does it even mean? What are the red and green marks? What's even weirder to me is that they don't touch upon more examples. It's just so incredibly arbitrary that it can be used to easily cover up anything with zero consequences.
- jwilk 9y agoFrom the article: A tick means something can stay on the site; a cross means it should be deleted.
- shiblukhan333 9y agohttp://itvstream.info/ http://itvstream.info/
- Udik 9y agoIf you refer to "#stab and be the fear" etc., I guess it's not because it's about Zionism, but rather because it's an incitement to commit terrorist acts (totally credible, seen the situatuon). So I guess it makes sense. (And I say this as a total sympathizer with the plight of Palestinians and their struggle against the Israeli occupation.)
- DanBC 9y agoThat's because there's a specific campaign that actually happened with "how to stab a Jew" and similar. https://news.vice.com/video/palestinian-social-media-uprising-digital-intifada-part-1 https://news.vice.com/video/palestinian-social-media-uprisin... > Leaderless Palestinian youth, inspired by instructional videos and photos on social media encouraging people to "Stab a Jew," are thought to be behind a new wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank. Uncoordinated and spontaneous attacks by individual young Palestinians, mostly under the age of 25, started to occur almost daily from October 2015, with assailants often using a household weapon — a knife, axe, meat cleaver, screwdriver — before being fired upon by nearby Israeli security forces. So far, the bloodshed has claimed the lives of at least 28 Israelis and 189 Palestinians, 128 of whom Israel says were assailants.
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoYes, it is, Id expect general provisions just for religion. I guess some religions are more equal than others.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 9y ago> Anyone with more than 100,000 followers on a social media platform is designated as a public figure – which denies them the full protections given to private individuals. 100k followers is a curiously high threshold to be labeled as a public figure. I'd wager many people who are notable enough to have Wikipedia pages would not be able to hit that threshold even on Twitter.
- tptacek 9y agoPedantry: you can keep a Wikipedia page with virtually no followers or following of any kind. The criteria for Wikipedia pages is simply: (a) That there be some recognizable claim of notability --- this is an extremely low bar. (b) That the notability claim, and any other material in the article, be backed entirely by reliable secondary sources. (c) That after the article is stripped down to facts that can be verified in reliable secondary sources, there's still an encyclopedia article's worth of content left. This, too, is a very low bar. Where pages tend to run afoul of WP's notability requirement is item (b). But it's easy to see --- and to provide examples of --- people that with no public influence at all still having a Wikipedia page.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat is the downside of having a high threshold for removing protections?
- stale2002 9y agoWell, that is because by adding protections to a person, you are removing free speech rights from someone else.
- maxerickson 9y agoSo how is this relevant to things that happen on the Facebook?
- delinka 9y agoThe right to free speech does not imply a right to be heard (read, viewed, etc), by groups or individuals. If you spout things onto Social Netowrk, Inc's platform from which Social Network, Inc has decided to protect me, a private individual, they have not infringed your right to freely spout those things. Notwithstanding the fact that it's Social Network, Inc's platform (and thus property) and you have no free speech rights on someone else's platform. Your right to free speech means the government cannot unduly curtail your speech.
- darz0re 9y agoI'm more surprised that they haven't moved to Machine Learning yet.
- lwansbrough 9y agoMachine learning is incredibly bad at this kind of stuff. There are far too many false positives and special cases to leave to ML. And the stakes are fairly high for Facebook: if they block content that shouldn't be blocked, it's newsworthy.
- s_kilk 9y agoThe cult around ML here is pretty amusing. As another poster said, AI is currently staggeringly bad at this task, and I'm not sure it's going to be good enough in the near future either.
- kyledrake 9y agoI think ML could be used to flag certain content as potentially problematic (I'm hoping to experiment with this in the future), but yeah, it's definitely not going to be doing the final verdicts anytime soon.
- skocznymroczny 9y agoThey might try rewriting it in Rust though...
- jmacpore 9y agoAre the original files out there for people to go through themselves? Or do we only have what the Guardian will show us?
- CaliforniaKarl 9y agoI doubt documents like that would ever be published willingly. If those documents were public, that (in my opinion) would just enable bullies etc., as they would know exactly what they could get away with. That would then trigger tightening the rules, which would then trigger much complaining about Facebook suppressing free speech etc.. There are also the motivations of whomever wants this out there. Some people may only want the debate, but some want it out there so as to enable the bullies. And others just want the fame and fortune of being the one who published it. Honestly, this all sucks.
- kyledrake 9y agoI hope the take-away that comes out of the leaked documents is this: community moderation is very, very hard. It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "free speech vs censorship" issue. There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content moderation team well, or it tends to be an afterthought. In reality, this can be the hardest and most important job at a company. PTSD is a real problem with these teams, and pay is often sub-par. And when they make mistakes (or when they don't but people still get mad), they tend to get the bulk of the criticism from it. And then at the end, they usually aren't allowed to talk publicly about any of the work they do. Please take your content moderation department seriously. If you have one, read through the crap Facebook's team has to deal with on a daily basis, and then go over and hug them.
- coldtea 9y ago>There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there. Is it? I always admired the much-scoffed YouTube as the free-est place to talk on the internet. Where a vegan gay liberal from NY can discuss on the same video with a neo-con Mongolian and a 15-year old hipster from Sweden, an Israeli Jew, an Arab, and a black South African truck driver, and even agree and share experiences, and at worse you just get a few insults thrown and that's it.
- kyledrake 9y agoI agree with you, but this isn't just about morons lobbing dumb insults at each other in all caps with bad spelling. I'm not even comfortable describing in a comment some of the horrible things that content moderators have had to deal with. Dig through the documents (particularly the child abuse doc) and you'll get an idea. Almost all of these policies were likely created from real-life examples, because people do things that are disturbing beyond imagination. They certainly didn't pre-plan it when they were hacking together Facebook in a dorm. I can only imagine how much worse it is for the team over at Youtube. The first thing I would do as CEO over there is hug them, give them a raise, double their vacation time, and make sure they have very good access to mental health services in case they need it. I'm not saying they're treated poorly right now, but again, it would be one of the first things I looked at.
- johnthealy3 9y agoThis is the type of thing that can really benefit from public disclosure and discourse. What's "acceptable" varies so much by person and over time that having the censoring done in a black box will never be the answer. The guidelines in the article seem overall reasonable given the range of possibilities versus the number of people working on it. I hope this stays out of the reach of government as long as possible.
- marmaduke 9y agoParts of this read like a mundane description of minority report.
- ouid 9y agoWhy is there so much emphasis on the credibility of the threat? Why not just blanket remove all explicit threats? Establishing credibility is impossibly hard.
- adiabatty 9y agoMost (≈99.99%?) death threats aren't at all serious.
- ouid 9y agoEvery death threat is serious. Not many result in death, but that's not how we define serious is it? More importantly, I can't come up with a reasonable argument that it's ever constructive to the conversation to be allowed to threaten someone.
- qb45 9y agoWhere I live "I'll kill you" is a common way to express dissatisfaction with someone's actions and while explicit, it's neither serious nor credible. I'm sure facebook is full of such posts.
- mythrowaway1234 9y agoMy first thought on reading this makes me deeply empathize with the people that have to deal with these questions. It must be extremely draining and emotionally difficult work, probably traumatic. Just having to write a policy about what constitutes acceptable nudity in the context of the Holocaust by itself is pretty terrible. And yet it's important for people to see those images. Just like the controversy over the image of the naked Vietnamese girl running down a road with napalm burns. That too is an important image. But to allow that image, someone has to look at these kinds of images and decide what's ok and what's not. I can't even imagine all the disturbing shit one has to look at to come up with those rules (which will be imperfect). I can't imagine that there are many other single entities that have to deal with the ugliness of humanity at the scale of FB. The sheer volume of content is unlike anything else humans have ever seen before. By comparison news outlets like the Guardian have the luxury to struggle with these kinds of questions on a 1-off basis. Given all that I have to wonder how government regulations would make this better?
- henrikschroder 9y ago> Given all that I have to wonder how government regulations would make this better? No no, that would impact free speech. You want all large user content-handling companies to be able to tell users wanting to talk about X to go somewhere else, and it then has to be legal for those users to make that somewhere else themselves. There's enough idiots screaming about free speech on private platforms already, we don't want more of them.
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoDo you have any legal citations about the right to be heard?
- delinka 9y agoDo you have any legal citations about any party being compelled to listen to another such that the other's right to free speech is preserved?
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoI havent heard of the right to be heard, but most people know of free speech. So where are you getting the idea of the right to be heard ? Is it a legal idea, your personal idea, a philosophical idea ?
- henrikschroder 9y agoAre you trying to derail, or are you seriously not understanding that there is no right to be heard, it's a thing GP made up on the spot to illustrate what free speech is not?
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoLook Im not lawyer. But I do know free speech is something extraordinary legalistic in america so Im asking for clarification. http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-resources/about-educational-outreach/activity-resources/what-does http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-res... https://www.thefire.org/free-speech-includes-the-right-not-just-to-speak-but-to-listen-and-judge/ https://www.thefire.org/free-speech-includes-the-right-not-j... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/opinion/who-is-entitled-to-be-heard.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/opinion/who-is-entitle... A google search showed tons of different opinions and views on what I originally thought was a simple view. So no its not as simple as people are claiming or saying
- afuchs 9y ago
- johnnydoe9 9y agoThere was a recent documentary I saw shared by a couple blogs about the moderators from Facebook,YouTube, etc and how they have to deal with depression now because of the job. Full documentary is free to watch by the creators themselves https://vimeo.com/213152344 https://vimeo.com/213152344
- anigbrowl 9y agoAs I have said many times, violence is considered more tolerable than sex. Guess what you're gonna get more of. And yet there is no mechanism to decide who has input into FB's community standards.