10 ms·

Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

111 points by elzed 9y ago

dang 9y ago
This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.) All: if you comment on this please make sure your comment is substantive and edit out any flamebait. Let's see how far we can get with a civil discussion.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I like the motivation. But it looks like everybody's afraid to start. (Me too. I've had a lot to say on pretty much every topic that's covered or even touched here. But I don't want to risk attracting a dogpile on a day when I lack the wherewithal to juggle a lot of arguments and give each the respect it deserves.)
- clydethefrog 9y ago
  I tried to post this article a couple hours ago and I've got a message it was submitted before, without a link to the submitted article. Search resulted in nothing. Are there special measures to blocking articles and making them not even searchable? In the past I could still find flagged articles via search.
  - dang 9y ago
    Probably those articles were [dead] in addition to being [flagged] and you don't have 'showdead' (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) set to 'yes' in your profile.
buckbova 9y ago
> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such a pedestal and our government for upholding it for 200+ years. This can't end well shutting people up like this. > German police raided 36 homes over social media hate speech https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-raided-36-homes-social-media-hate-speech/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-raided-36-...
- tnzn 9y ago
  From the very begining of free speech theorization, limits such as hate speech were mentionned, just saying.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I'd like to see a specific citation here, please.
  - Natsu 9y ago
    Mentioned how? In which countries? In the USA, 'hate speech' is simply not a category of unprotected speech under the 1st amendment as it's understood today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-... An example of a category that is not protected in the USA would be death threats or false & defamatory statements.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
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danso 9y ago
> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.) From this aspect, this internal quiz question seems reasonable if its intent is to test the candidate's knowledge of the technical details (e.g. what a protected category is) in the face of a seemingly absurd situation (e.g. Why should white men be more protected than children of any color?). Similar tactics are used in HR training I've had to go through. I remember for a sexual discrimination training quiz, there was a question about a woman who used anti-gay-male slurs in the workplace who then herself alleged she was being harassed for being a female. The question was worded in a way to trap you if you thought women couldn't be the offenders. I regret to say I've forgotten the specifics but the question actually referred to a real-life case in which a court sided against the woman because of her documented use of anti-gay slurs. Edit: as absurd as that FB training slide seems, I don't think people give enough credit to how nuanced FB has to be when trying to be both a reasonable censor while allowing important free speech -- think the Philando Castile shooting video -- in real-time and across international borders and moral codes. It's a tough balancing act to train people to judge this, and the training materials are unavoidably going to sound horrific. Imagine the wording of a question that tested a candidate's handling of a photo posted of a naked young girl running in pain from a napalm attack. That said, the argument about how being the squeaky wheel, or a celebrity with a following, gets you better, faster treatment than the disenfranchised, is true. But that unfortunate situation has happened everywhere else in real life, including media. In journalism, one cynical aphorism is: "News is whatever happens to your editor"
glangdale 9y ago
I get the theory behind that quiz 'trick question', but does it make any actual legal sense? If the discrimination against a subset happens because of the component of the subset that's protected, then surely it's an attack on a protected category. So if you say "black children are all stupid" the likely implication is that you're saying "unlike white children" (otherwise why would you include black). Is this even true legally? Could a school discriminate against black children because, hey, they are children? Or a movie theater: "Let's not offer youth discounts to Latinos". I am not a lawyer, so I don't know the legalistic view, but it seems to be an absurdity.
- throwanem 9y ago
  It's not generally speaking a matter of law, since the context is that of a US-based private company moderating the behavior of its voluntary users, and we generally treat this in a very laissez-faire fashion by default. The extent to which Facebook heeds the laws of those countries other than the US, in which it does business and would like to continue doing so, is determined almost entirely by the value it places on that business. Of course, this situation changes in any such case as new legislation is made to address perceived or actual need, but that hasn't really happened yet here. The same is not true of, say, refusing trade to members of a specific ethnic group because of that ethnicity - a case in which laws of the sort I describe have indeed been made. (And, to be clear, I have serious qualms with pretty much every facet of the way in which Facebook does business, from its content moderation choices, to the fashion in which it monetizes its userbase, to the extent to which the scale of userbase it's deliberately developed - in support of that questionable style of monetization - might make "voluntary" an inaccurate way to describe the choice people have of whether or not to participate there. My description above is not normative, but positive, and should be regarded as such.)
- danso 9y ago
  From my interpretation, it's not so much a legal worry as it is a statement of company beliefs -- for starters, according to the reproduced slides, religion is not a protected category for Facebook, even though it enjoys federal protections, while gender identity is, even though there's no federal law. Additionally those legal protections are for certain categories. Age has federal protections when it comes to employment, but not for housing. None of those statuses enjoy special protection when it comes to free speech, so FB is making its own decisions here. In the slide titled "Subsets", you see a rough algorithm that censors are supposed to use: PC + PC = PC (protected class, I assume) PC + NPC = NPC (non-protected class) Irish women = PC Irish teens = NPC ------------- These guidelines presumably help censors have a quick test to tell between hate speech and controversial speech, so that posting a Chris Rock stand-up segment won't get you banned. It's obviously imperfect and in flux. The slides note that migrants became a "quasi protected category" after the Syrian refugee crisis "triggered a global conversation around the role Facebook plays in protecting migrants"
calafrax 9y ago
Creating ways to allow users to control their own groups and block content they don't want is cheaper, less controversial, and probably more effective in terms of user satisfaction.
- randyrand 9y ago
  A simple check mark in the settings would suffice. Or a "see less content like this" button. But of course, that's not what they want. Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty political guy himself, and FB is a great tool for him to influence the world.
  - calafrax 9y ago
    Yeah this seems like an attempt to demonstrate that Facebook can act as a supranational regulatory institution which seems like a bit of an overreach.
Aloha 9y ago
When you consider what Facebook is trying to accomplish, which is to establish a universal code for acceptable content across multiple cultures and languages - this looks a lot more acceptable to me, than it would be otherwise.
- beedogs 9y ago
  Except it isn't universal. According to the article, each region has its own set of guidelines for acceptability.
- _jal 9y ago
  Only if you accept the premise in the first place. There is no set of rules that won't yield absurd results. FB is always going to carve out exceptions for the powerful. The baseline still starts from Zuckerburg's upper-class, U.S. dominant-culture sensibilities. And so on.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Universal? It doesn't get more US-centric than that...
sixothree 9y ago
Context is important here. I'm guessing it got lost on you?
- dang 9y ago
  Personal swipes aren't ok on HN. Please remain civil. (Edit: It read like a swipe to me, but if you didn't intend it that way, I apologize.) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 and marked it off-topic.
  - sixothree 9y ago
    Thank you for removing. It did not add to the conversation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
gnicholas 9y ago
> * Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.* This is inaccurate as to the allowable purposes for affirmative action. In Bakke, (1978), the Supreme Court held that diversity was an allowable rationale, but redressing past discrimination was not. As described in the NYT: Diversity isn’t just one rationale for creating or maintaining a racially integrated student body. It is the only rationale. Ever since the Bakke case nearly four decades ago, no other reason for affirmative action has passed constitutional muster in the view of the Supreme Court’s majority: not equalizing opportunity, not redressing past wrongs (the flagship Austin campus was formally all-white until 1956 and functionally segregated long after that) or opening previously closed doors. Only “diversity.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-courts-diversity-dilemma.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-court... (an opinion piece related to the Fisher case, which pertained to affirmative action in university admissions)
4bpp 9y ago
Well, this calculus of protected classes they seem to be using does give off an impression that it was either designed by someone aggressively unthinking or sufficiently opposed to the premise that they tried to sabotage it as much as they could get away with. Under some pretty reasonable assumptions (complements of protected classes are protected; two permissible posts bolted together are a permissible posts), a system where protected ∩ unprotected is unprotected is trivially circumventable: for instance, rather than posting "women suck", you can always post "women drivers suck; also, women non-drivers suck".
Zak 9y ago
Where they draw the line on some of these things seems... odd. A degrading generalization about a nationality like one of their examples > the Irish suck seems relatively harmless, while the permissible > Keep the horny migrant teenagers away from our daughters seems much more dangerous. The latter is much more likely to spur some sort of antisocial behavior from a reader.
- iratewizard 9y ago
  Is the latter dangerous because it is dissent? It sounds like we are now defining a framework for what dissent is acceptable and it seems to align to a dominant political ideology. Sort of defeats the point of dissent.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Censorship is always a framework for defining acceptable dissent (or deviance, if you prefer).
  - Zak 9y ago
    It's dangerous because it evokes a specific fear that's likely to inspire action. You could swap migrants and Irish in an area with a sufficient Irish population and it would still be true. > the migrants suck Is pretty harmless, while > Keep the horny Irish teenagers away from our daughters might well lead to someone assaulting people they perceived to be Irish teenagers who were getting too friendly with their daughters.
- partycoder 9y ago
  "The Birth of a Nation" (Ku Klux Klan propaganda film) for instance, uses that tactic to dehumanize black men... that film is to blame for a temporary expansion of the KKK. So I think accusing a demographic of being perverted should be considered hate speech in my opinion.
beedogs 9y ago
I left facebook last month. I don't miss it, I'm happier for it, and articles like this kinda vindicate that decision. It's nice to see that the things I was observing there are, in fact, exactly what the company is okay with: racism, sexism, homophobia are fine on Facebook as long as you craft your posts and comments with surgical precision. It explains how, nearly every time I reported one of the assholes making those types of posts, nothing would happen. Edit: and, as usual, downvotes instead of replies. Never change, HN.
- danso 9y ago
  I suspect you're being downvoted because your assessment of the issue to "Facebook is okay with racism, sexism, homophobia" etc. is seen as an oversimplification, no different than someone from Germany/Israel saying the U.S. (and the 1st Amendment) is OK with neo-Nazis, or China thinking America as a den of smut and anarchy.
  - beedogs 9y ago
    Except Facebook being okay with discrimination and hate speech is literally spelled out in the slide deck. As long as you don't tickle the right combination of "protected class" by using an appropriate modifier (e.g. "black children" instead of "all black people") you can say whatever the hell you want about people. It's not my fault so many users here are being willfully obtuse about this.
    - JBReefer 9y ago
      Why shouldn't I be able to say whatever I want about people, even if it deviates from the norm. Norms change, "Gays are people" and "Women should be able to vote" were 100% norm-violating speech until recently. In fact, there's a few countries where those are still unwelcome speech - should we bow to their social norms? Shouldn't I be able to say things like that? Aren't you happy people did? Do you believe that our current worldview is perfect and cannot be challenged by concepts outside of the Overton window?
- dang 9y ago
dTal 9y ago
>Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general. That seems disingenuous. Higgins' rant starts by pitching "Christendom" with-a-capital-C against "these heathen animals", before he ever mentions radicalization. And when he does mention it, he says "radicalized Islamic suspect", which is fairly meaningless as a category as no burden of proof is required. Coupled with repeated incitements to "kill them all", I think that's pretty clearly directed at all Muslims. The trouble with this policy is, I can apparently be as racist and hateful as I like as long as I take care to slip a "non-protected category" in there - even if by doing so I am implying that all members of the protected category are such. For example, "lynch every last one of those baby-raping niggers" is fine, because it only applies to those niggers that rape babies. In fact it is exactly this sort of speech that is the most harmful - "All niggers rape babies and we should lynch them" is far less potent.
eehee 9y ago
What if it's true?
- partycoder 9y ago
  If you think so, you need to start asking yourself why. When hostile racial stereotypes get reinforced day after day you end up with a brainwashed society like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20d11fGz-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20d11fGz-0
  - eehee 9y ago
    Oh, I don't really think so, no, but it is conceivable. And I'd actually rather have people communicate what they believe to be true rather than what they think they can get away with.
    - deleted 9y ago
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- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  How would you even trust such results? I mean, lets look at where they come from. Reported crimes in systems that are biased against some folks, with laws that are easier to break and get caught with when you are poor. Some of the folks are poor because of the situations that have happened to them - war, civil unrest, domestic violence, racism and discrimination of the past still affecting them. And lets not forget, a lot of folks don't report crimes like rape - this is higher in some countries than others. In some cases, reporting a rape might ruin your life. How can you trust numbers coming from such systems when they say that skin color x or cultural background y does more crimes? We've had reports that do say such things, and the inherent biases in them generally make them untrue.
  - jbmorgado 9y ago
    You are setting up a framework of thought where no matter how much data you gather that shows some group is indeed more violent, you are allowed to just dismiss it on the basis of some situational perceived discrimination.
TheChosen 9y ago
Comparing a politician who is currently in office to a civilian is unfair. If a newspaper decided not to publish a speech by the leader of Iran because "wiping Israel off the map" is racist; it would be doing its readers a disservice.
DINKDINK 9y ago
Facebook says that only governments may use violence to achieve political aims: "The rule against posts that support violent resistance against a foreign occupier was developed because “we didn’t want to be in a position of deciding who is a freedom fighter,” Willner said. Facebook has since dropped the provision and revised its definition of terrorism to include nongovernmental organizations that carry out premeditated violence “to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim,” according to a person familiar with the rules." aka they would have banned American Revolutionaries in 1700's

111 points by elzed 9y ago

dang 9y ago

This was submitted and flagged several times but as far as I can tell it's a substantive article with lots of information. We've changed the inflammatory title to the more neutral subtitle and are going to try turning off flags. (For an object lesson in how determined discussion can be by title alone, the alternate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656463 is interesting.) All: if you comment on this please make sure your comment is substantive and edit out any flamebait. Let's see how far we can get with a civil discussion.

throwanem 9y ago
I like the motivation. But it looks like everybody's afraid to start. (Me too. I've had a lot to say on pretty much every topic that's covered or even touched here. But I don't want to risk attracting a dogpile on a day when I lack the wherewithal to juggle a lot of arguments and give each the respect it deserves.)
clydethefrog 9y ago
I tried to post this article a couple hours ago and I've got a message it was submitted before, without a link to the submitted article. Search resulted in nothing. Are there special measures to blocking articles and making them not even searchable? In the past I could still find flagged articles via search.
- dang 9y ago
  Probably those articles were [dead] in addition to being [flagged] and you don't have 'showdead' (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) set to 'yes' in your profile.

buckbova 9y ago

> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such a pedestal and our government for upholding it for 200+ years. This can't end well shutting people up like this. > German police raided 36 homes over social media hate speech https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-raided-36-homes-social-media-hate-speech/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/22/german-police-raided-36-...

tnzn 9y ago
From the very begining of free speech theorization, limits such as hate speech were mentionned, just saying.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I'd like to see a specific citation here, please.
- Natsu 9y ago
  Mentioned how? In which countries? In the USA, 'hate speech' is simply not a category of unprotected speech under the 1st amendment as it's understood today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-... An example of a category that is not protected in the USA would be death threats or false & defamatory statements.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
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danso 9y ago

> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.) From this aspect, this internal quiz question seems reasonable if its intent is to test the candidate's knowledge of the technical details (e.g. what a protected category is) in the face of a seemingly absurd situation (e.g. Why should white men be more protected than children of any color?). Similar tactics are used in HR training I've had to go through. I remember for a sexual discrimination training quiz, there was a question about a woman who used anti-gay-male slurs in the workplace who then herself alleged she was being harassed for being a female. The question was worded in a way to trap you if you thought women couldn't be the offenders. I regret to say I've forgotten the specifics but the question actually referred to a real-life case in which a court sided against the woman because of her documented use of anti-gay slurs. Edit: as absurd as that FB training slide seems, I don't think people give enough credit to how nuanced FB has to be when trying to be both a reasonable censor while allowing important free speech -- think the Philando Castile shooting video -- in real-time and across international borders and moral codes. It's a tough balancing act to train people to judge this, and the training materials are unavoidably going to sound horrific. Imagine the wording of a question that tested a candidate's handling of a photo posted of a naked young girl running in pain from a napalm attack. That said, the argument about how being the squeaky wheel, or a celebrity with a following, gets you better, faster treatment than the disenfranchised, is true. But that unfortunate situation has happened everywhere else in real life, including media. In journalism, one cynical aphorism is: "News is whatever happens to your editor"

glangdale 9y ago

I get the theory behind that quiz 'trick question', but does it make any actual legal sense? If the discrimination against a subset happens because of the component of the subset that's protected, then surely it's an attack on a protected category. So if you say "black children are all stupid" the likely implication is that you're saying "unlike white children" (otherwise why would you include black). Is this even true legally? Could a school discriminate against black children because, hey, they are children? Or a movie theater: "Let's not offer youth discounts to Latinos". I am not a lawyer, so I don't know the legalistic view, but it seems to be an absurdity.

throwanem 9y ago
It's not generally speaking a matter of law, since the context is that of a US-based private company moderating the behavior of its voluntary users, and we generally treat this in a very laissez-faire fashion by default. The extent to which Facebook heeds the laws of those countries other than the US, in which it does business and would like to continue doing so, is determined almost entirely by the value it places on that business. Of course, this situation changes in any such case as new legislation is made to address perceived or actual need, but that hasn't really happened yet here. The same is not true of, say, refusing trade to members of a specific ethnic group because of that ethnicity - a case in which laws of the sort I describe have indeed been made. (And, to be clear, I have serious qualms with pretty much every facet of the way in which Facebook does business, from its content moderation choices, to the fashion in which it monetizes its userbase, to the extent to which the scale of userbase it's deliberately developed - in support of that questionable style of monetization - might make "voluntary" an inaccurate way to describe the choice people have of whether or not to participate there. My description above is not normative, but positive, and should be regarded as such.)
danso 9y ago
From my interpretation, it's not so much a legal worry as it is a statement of company beliefs -- for starters, according to the reproduced slides, religion is not a protected category for Facebook, even though it enjoys federal protections, while gender identity is, even though there's no federal law. Additionally those legal protections are for certain categories. Age has federal protections when it comes to employment, but not for housing. None of those statuses enjoy special protection when it comes to free speech, so FB is making its own decisions here. In the slide titled "Subsets", you see a rough algorithm that censors are supposed to use: PC + PC = PC (protected class, I assume) PC + NPC = NPC (non-protected class) Irish women = PC Irish teens = NPC ------------- These guidelines presumably help censors have a quick test to tell between hate speech and controversial speech, so that posting a Chris Rock stand-up segment won't get you banned. It's obviously imperfect and in flux. The slides note that migrants became a "quasi protected category" after the Syrian refugee crisis "triggered a global conversation around the role Facebook plays in protecting migrants"

calafrax 9y ago

Creating ways to allow users to control their own groups and block content they don't want is cheaper, less controversial, and probably more effective in terms of user satisfaction.

randyrand 9y ago
A simple check mark in the settings would suffice. Or a "see less content like this" button. But of course, that's not what they want. Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty political guy himself, and FB is a great tool for him to influence the world.
- calafrax 9y ago
  Yeah this seems like an attempt to demonstrate that Facebook can act as a supranational regulatory institution which seems like a bit of an overreach.

Aloha 9y ago

When you consider what Facebook is trying to accomplish, which is to establish a universal code for acceptable content across multiple cultures and languages - this looks a lot more acceptable to me, than it would be otherwise.

beedogs 9y ago
Except it isn't universal. According to the article, each region has its own set of guidelines for acceptability.
_jal 9y ago
Only if you accept the premise in the first place. There is no set of rules that won't yield absurd results. FB is always going to carve out exceptions for the powerful. The baseline still starts from Zuckerburg's upper-class, U.S. dominant-culture sensibilities. And so on.
coldtea 9y ago
Universal? It doesn't get more US-centric than that...

sixothree 9y ago

Context is important here. I'm guessing it got lost on you?

dang 9y ago
Personal swipes aren't ok on HN. Please remain civil. (Edit: It read like a swipe to me, but if you didn't intend it that way, I apologize.) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 and marked it off-topic.
- sixothree 9y ago
  Thank you for removing. It did not add to the conversation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

gnicholas 9y ago

> * Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.* This is inaccurate as to the allowable purposes for affirmative action. In Bakke, (1978), the Supreme Court held that diversity was an allowable rationale, but redressing past discrimination was not. As described in the NYT: Diversity isn’t just one rationale for creating or maintaining a racially integrated student body. It is the only rationale. Ever since the Bakke case nearly four decades ago, no other reason for affirmative action has passed constitutional muster in the view of the Supreme Court’s majority: not equalizing opportunity, not redressing past wrongs (the flagship Austin campus was formally all-white until 1956 and functionally segregated long after that) or opening previously closed doors. Only “diversity.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-courts-diversity-dilemma.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/the-supreme-court... (an opinion piece related to the Fisher case, which pertained to affirmative action in university admissions)

4bpp 9y ago

Well, this calculus of protected classes they seem to be using does give off an impression that it was either designed by someone aggressively unthinking or sufficiently opposed to the premise that they tried to sabotage it as much as they could get away with. Under some pretty reasonable assumptions (complements of protected classes are protected; two permissible posts bolted together are a permissible posts), a system where protected ∩ unprotected is unprotected is trivially circumventable: for instance, rather than posting "women suck", you can always post "women drivers suck; also, women non-drivers suck".

Zak 9y ago

Where they draw the line on some of these things seems... odd. A degrading generalization about a nationality like one of their examples > the Irish suck seems relatively harmless, while the permissible > Keep the horny migrant teenagers away from our daughters seems much more dangerous. The latter is much more likely to spur some sort of antisocial behavior from a reader.

iratewizard 9y ago
Is the latter dangerous because it is dissent? It sounds like we are now defining a framework for what dissent is acceptable and it seems to align to a dominant political ideology. Sort of defeats the point of dissent.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Censorship is always a framework for defining acceptable dissent (or deviance, if you prefer).
- Zak 9y ago
  It's dangerous because it evokes a specific fear that's likely to inspire action. You could swap migrants and Irish in an area with a sufficient Irish population and it would still be true. > the migrants suck Is pretty harmless, while > Keep the horny Irish teenagers away from our daughters might well lead to someone assaulting people they perceived to be Irish teenagers who were getting too friendly with their daughters.
partycoder 9y ago
"The Birth of a Nation" (Ku Klux Klan propaganda film) for instance, uses that tactic to dehumanize black men... that film is to blame for a temporary expansion of the KKK. So I think accusing a demographic of being perverted should be considered hate speech in my opinion.

beedogs 9y ago

I left facebook last month. I don't miss it, I'm happier for it, and articles like this kinda vindicate that decision. It's nice to see that the things I was observing there are, in fact, exactly what the company is okay with: racism, sexism, homophobia are fine on Facebook as long as you craft your posts and comments with surgical precision. It explains how, nearly every time I reported one of the assholes making those types of posts, nothing would happen. Edit: and, as usual, downvotes instead of replies. Never change, HN.

danso 9y ago
I suspect you're being downvoted because your assessment of the issue to "Facebook is okay with racism, sexism, homophobia" etc. is seen as an oversimplification, no different than someone from Germany/Israel saying the U.S. (and the 1st Amendment) is OK with neo-Nazis, or China thinking America as a den of smut and anarchy.
- beedogs 9y ago
  Except Facebook being okay with discrimination and hate speech is literally spelled out in the slide deck. As long as you don't tickle the right combination of "protected class" by using an appropriate modifier (e.g. "black children" instead of "all black people") you can say whatever the hell you want about people. It's not my fault so many users here are being willfully obtuse about this.
  - JBReefer 9y ago
    Why shouldn't I be able to say whatever I want about people, even if it deviates from the norm. Norms change, "Gays are people" and "Women should be able to vote" were 100% norm-violating speech until recently. In fact, there's a few countries where those are still unwelcome speech - should we bow to their social norms? Shouldn't I be able to say things like that? Aren't you happy people did? Do you believe that our current worldview is perfect and cannot be challenged by concepts outside of the Overton window?
dang 9y ago

dTal 9y ago

>Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general. That seems disingenuous. Higgins' rant starts by pitching "Christendom" with-a-capital-C against "these heathen animals", before he ever mentions radicalization. And when he does mention it, he says "radicalized Islamic suspect", which is fairly meaningless as a category as no burden of proof is required. Coupled with repeated incitements to "kill them all", I think that's pretty clearly directed at all Muslims. The trouble with this policy is, I can apparently be as racist and hateful as I like as long as I take care to slip a "non-protected category" in there - even if by doing so I am implying that all members of the protected category are such. For example, "lynch every last one of those baby-raping niggers" is fine, because it only applies to those niggers that rape babies. In fact it is exactly this sort of speech that is the most harmful - "All niggers rape babies and we should lynch them" is far less potent.

eehee 9y ago

What if it's true?

partycoder 9y ago
If you think so, you need to start asking yourself why. When hostile racial stereotypes get reinforced day after day you end up with a brainwashed society like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20d11fGz-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20d11fGz-0
- eehee 9y ago
  Oh, I don't really think so, no, but it is conceivable. And I'd actually rather have people communicate what they believe to be true rather than what they think they can get away with.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
How would you even trust such results? I mean, lets look at where they come from. Reported crimes in systems that are biased against some folks, with laws that are easier to break and get caught with when you are poor. Some of the folks are poor because of the situations that have happened to them - war, civil unrest, domestic violence, racism and discrimination of the past still affecting them. And lets not forget, a lot of folks don't report crimes like rape - this is higher in some countries than others. In some cases, reporting a rape might ruin your life. How can you trust numbers coming from such systems when they say that skin color x or cultural background y does more crimes? We've had reports that do say such things, and the inherent biases in them generally make them untrue.
- jbmorgado 9y ago
  You are setting up a framework of thought where no matter how much data you gather that shows some group is indeed more violent, you are allowed to just dismiss it on the basis of some situational perceived discrimination.

TheChosen 9y ago

Comparing a politician who is currently in office to a civilian is unfair. If a newspaper decided not to publish a speech by the leader of Iran because "wiping Israel off the map" is racist; it would be doing its readers a disservice.

DINKDINK 9y ago

Facebook says that only governments may use violence to achieve political aims: "The rule against posts that support violent resistance against a foreign occupier was developed because “we didn’t want to be in a position of deciding who is a freedom fighter,” Willner said. Facebook has since dropped the provision and revised its definition of terrorism to include nongovernmental organizations that carry out premeditated violence “to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim,” according to a person familiar with the rules." aka they would have banned American Revolutionaries in 1700's