6 ms·

Facebook finds Declaration of Independence 'racist'

61 points by mikece 8y ago

foolzcrow 8y ago
Facebook uses drug addiction/gambling studies to keep minorities addicted to dopamine for page views.
- ada1981 8y ago
  Citation? Not surprising, however.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  s/minorities/majority/
Waterluvian 8y ago
Well, that is racist, isn't it? I guess the point is that the bot doesn't appreciate when something's being racist for educational and historical purposes. Reminds me of Facebook taking down important but disturbing primary source journalism.
- chippy 8y ago
  all about the context
- krapp 8y ago
  Yes, and that's one of the problems with a zero-tolerance policy of censoring problematic speech - doing so without understanding and allowing for historical context means whitewashing history as well, because history itself is problematic in modern terms. Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin have been banned from school libraries for similar reasons, missing the point entirely.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    > "problematic speech" Uh....1984, much?
    - krapp 8y ago
      >Uh....1984, much? Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is problematic, as opposed to speech which is not. "Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty." Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to imply, involved.
      - mkeyhani 8y ago
        May I suggest that problematic speech is often simply what people don't like to hear? Of course, I think it's their right to choose what they want to hear. But that does not mean I defend censorship. How to filter the content they consume should be every individual's choice. Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
        krapp 8y ago
        > May I suggest that ``problematic'' speech is often simply what people don't like to hear? To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic. > Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them. Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user. The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can be automated.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Or the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (aka "Napalm girl").
lclarkmichalek 8y ago
> At issue was a part of it that referred to "merciless Indian savages". I mean.. not sure I disagree
- zerr 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure :)
- hajile 8y ago
  When a settler's cabin was attacked, the warriors would attack everyone -- armed men plus unarmed women and children. At the end of the attack, captured women and girls would often be raped then killed. The surviving men would be scalped and tortured to death over a couple of days. The injured would be hacked to death by the Indian women and children. You can debate how often this happened, but first-hand stories are relatively common in surviving military personnel diaries from the time. What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators? Mens Rea If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real thief? Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the case of payment, without even the excuse of honor). The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any favors.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    I like how we begin your story in media res with the settler's cabin already established as if ordained by the laws of nature, disrupted from its idyllic divine creation by these warriors perpetrating violence. Who's rewriting what now?
s3m4j 8y ago
Machine performs its jobs flawlessly, detects racism.
ada1981 8y ago
Perhaps they could just tag content as racist, but still let it show - just give it a rating or visible highlight. Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag. People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with the poster. I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Things should be taken in historical context. What's completely politically correct and progressive today will be horrific tomorrow. A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect (in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and now they are being vilified. Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  We should recognize that it's both politically incorrect, and historically of it's time. Just because something is from the pages of history, doesn't mean it should be presented as perfectly fine today - that's also wrong.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    I find the case of Monty Python extremely important because some of their sketches are even more poignant (and funny!) today. Many would have no chance of being created and aired. However, the painful issues behind them, such as following some dogmas with blind faith and the consequences of such actions, are still there and watching Monty Python today gives young viewers a refreshing perspective.
- jordigh 8y ago
  "Merciless Indian savages" isn't something we should just accept because we must reject political correctness. The Europeans who came to Anglo-America were usually impoverished societal rejects, with difficult economic or religious situations yet airs of superiority over the American natives. The oppression they experienced at the hands of richer Europeans back in the old world was redirected at the other group they could punch down towards: the natives who had been recently genocided by foreign diseases and gunpowder. This is a very common human trait. When you have a group of people experiencing hardship, they will look for someone at a greater disadvantage than them to redirect their retribution to. The economic hardships that Germany felt after WW1 were blamed on the marginalised Jews. Most people in the antebellum South were poor, not wealthy plantation owners, but of course the entire white population could punch down towards what they viewed as childish or animalistic slaves. Today economic downturn and lack of jobs can be blamed on illegal immigrants, instead of the galloping wealth disparity. This has got nothing to do with being very careful with speech so as to not offend anyone. It's got nothing to do with political correctness or incorrectness. These words, "merciless Indian savages" are about one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of freedom.
ada1981 8y ago
More interesting to me is that this reply from the editor: >> Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better. >> Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real “challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were willing to do anything it took to get them.
- chippy 8y ago
  Could you re-write it so that the bot (or HN readers in the current year) wouldn't detect it as racism?
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Perhaps the point is that racism isn’t just words, but also intent. Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard. The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness of your own projections. “The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its reflection in those we project it upon.”
  - tscs37 8y ago
    Once you figure out what triggers a bot, it's fairly easy to circumvent those bots. I'm fairly certain that you could even automate the transformation of text such that it remains essentially the same without triggering any bots.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tomp 8y ago
  Why is it invalid to assign value to two different cultures? E.g. IMO a culture that encourages genital mutilation or slavery is inferior to a culture that doesn't. (Although in practice all such value assignments are highly multi-dimensional, so there might not be an overall ordering.) Edit: This isn't a comment on whether or not Jefferson's evaluation of his and the natives' cultures was valid or correct.. but what I gather from your comment, is that you're implying any such value judgement is "racist" ("culturist"?).
poster123 8y ago
White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land, and in reaction, there were many cases where the American Indians responded by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused the American Indians to behave as they did.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  That's an incredibly simplified view of what actually happened, and therefore a false narrative - about what you'd expect from watching a Hollywood movie. In many cases, American Indian tribes had been fighting each other for millenia, and thought they could use the newcomers to their advantage against enemy tribes. The Sioux, for example, were newcomers to the plains, having recently driven out / exterminated other tribes that had been there for quite some time. If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-everything-that-is https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-ev...
  - teilo 8y ago
    Thank you for this. Balance it hard to find. The fact is that we are speaking not of a monolithic nation, but of individual tribes with unique histories. Lumping Native Americans into a single bucket, while politically useful, is ahistorical. Nations war over access to land and resources. This is just at true of the first nations as it is of the new worlders. The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.
    - poster123 8y ago
      The atrocities of the first nations against white settlers should also not be whitewashed.
koosnel 8y ago
What is a facebook?
- XalvinX 8y ago
  Best bet is to forget you ever heard of it, and don't sign up or download anything remotely related to it. Not being sarcastic here, either.
drngdds 8y ago
In their defense, it is.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Was.
newman8r 8y ago
How advanced is facebook's "hate speech detector" anyway? It seems like they're just checking a blacklist of bad words and maybe doing some rudimentary NLP.

61 points by mikece 8y ago

foolzcrow 8y ago

Facebook uses drug addiction/gambling studies to keep minorities addicted to dopamine for page views.

ada1981 8y ago
Citation? Not surprising, however.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
s/minorities/majority/

Waterluvian 8y ago

Well, that is racist, isn't it? I guess the point is that the bot doesn't appreciate when something's being racist for educational and historical purposes. Reminds me of Facebook taking down important but disturbing primary source journalism.

chippy 8y ago
all about the context
krapp 8y ago
Yes, and that's one of the problems with a zero-tolerance policy of censoring problematic speech - doing so without understanding and allowing for historical context means whitewashing history as well, because history itself is problematic in modern terms. Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin have been banned from school libraries for similar reasons, missing the point entirely.
- acct1771 8y ago
  > "problematic speech" Uh....1984, much?
  - krapp 8y ago
    >Uh....1984, much? Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is problematic, as opposed to speech which is not. "Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty." Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to imply, involved.
    - mkeyhani 8y ago
      May I suggest that problematic speech is often simply what people don't like to hear? Of course, I think it's their right to choose what they want to hear. But that does not mean I defend censorship. How to filter the content they consume should be every individual's choice. Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
      - krapp 8y ago
        > May I suggest that ``problematic'' speech is often simply what people don't like to hear? To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic. > Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them. Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user. The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can be automated.
icebraining 8y ago
Or the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (aka "Napalm girl").

lclarkmichalek 8y ago

> At issue was a part of it that referred to "merciless Indian savages". I mean.. not sure I disagree

zerr 8y ago
I'm pretty sure :)
hajile 8y ago
When a settler's cabin was attacked, the warriors would attack everyone -- armed men plus unarmed women and children. At the end of the attack, captured women and girls would often be raped then killed. The surviving men would be scalped and tortured to death over a couple of days. The injured would be hacked to death by the Indian women and children. You can debate how often this happened, but first-hand stories are relatively common in surviving military personnel diaries from the time. What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators? Mens Rea If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real thief? Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the case of payment, without even the excuse of honor). The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any favors.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  I like how we begin your story in media res with the settler's cabin already established as if ordained by the laws of nature, disrupted from its idyllic divine creation by these warriors perpetrating violence. Who's rewriting what now?

s3m4j 8y ago

Machine performs its jobs flawlessly, detects racism.

ada1981 8y ago

Perhaps they could just tag content as racist, but still let it show - just give it a rating or visible highlight. Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag. People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with the poster. I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Things should be taken in historical context. What's completely politically correct and progressive today will be horrific tomorrow. A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect (in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and now they are being vilified. Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.

richardwhiuk 8y ago
We should recognize that it's both politically incorrect, and historically of it's time. Just because something is from the pages of history, doesn't mean it should be presented as perfectly fine today - that's also wrong.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I find the case of Monty Python extremely important because some of their sketches are even more poignant (and funny!) today. Many would have no chance of being created and aired. However, the painful issues behind them, such as following some dogmas with blind faith and the consequences of such actions, are still there and watching Monty Python today gives young viewers a refreshing perspective.
jordigh 8y ago
"Merciless Indian savages" isn't something we should just accept because we must reject political correctness. The Europeans who came to Anglo-America were usually impoverished societal rejects, with difficult economic or religious situations yet airs of superiority over the American natives. The oppression they experienced at the hands of richer Europeans back in the old world was redirected at the other group they could punch down towards: the natives who had been recently genocided by foreign diseases and gunpowder. This is a very common human trait. When you have a group of people experiencing hardship, they will look for someone at a greater disadvantage than them to redirect their retribution to. The economic hardships that Germany felt after WW1 were blamed on the marginalised Jews. Most people in the antebellum South were poor, not wealthy plantation owners, but of course the entire white population could punch down towards what they viewed as childish or animalistic slaves. Today economic downturn and lack of jobs can be blamed on illegal immigrants, instead of the galloping wealth disparity. This has got nothing to do with being very careful with speech so as to not offend anyone. It's got nothing to do with political correctness or incorrectness. These words, "merciless Indian savages" are about one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of freedom.

ada1981 8y ago

More interesting to me is that this reply from the editor: >> Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better. >> Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real “challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were willing to do anything it took to get them.

chippy 8y ago
Could you re-write it so that the bot (or HN readers in the current year) wouldn't detect it as racism?
- ada1981 8y ago
  Perhaps the point is that racism isn’t just words, but also intent. Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard. The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness of your own projections. “The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its reflection in those we project it upon.”
- tscs37 8y ago
  Once you figure out what triggers a bot, it's fairly easy to circumvent those bots. I'm fairly certain that you could even automate the transformation of text such that it remains essentially the same without triggering any bots.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tomp 8y ago
Why is it invalid to assign value to two different cultures? E.g. IMO a culture that encourages genital mutilation or slavery is inferior to a culture that doesn't. (Although in practice all such value assignments are highly multi-dimensional, so there might not be an overall ordering.) Edit: This isn't a comment on whether or not Jefferson's evaluation of his and the natives' cultures was valid or correct.. but what I gather from your comment, is that you're implying any such value judgement is "racist" ("culturist"?).

poster123 8y ago

White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land, and in reaction, there were many cases where the American Indians responded by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused the American Indians to behave as they did.

tomohawk 8y ago
That's an incredibly simplified view of what actually happened, and therefore a false narrative - about what you'd expect from watching a Hollywood movie. In many cases, American Indian tribes had been fighting each other for millenia, and thought they could use the newcomers to their advantage against enemy tribes. The Sioux, for example, were newcomers to the plains, having recently driven out / exterminated other tribes that had been there for quite some time. If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-everything-that-is https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-ev...
- teilo 8y ago
  Thank you for this. Balance it hard to find. The fact is that we are speaking not of a monolithic nation, but of individual tribes with unique histories. Lumping Native Americans into a single bucket, while politically useful, is ahistorical. Nations war over access to land and resources. This is just at true of the first nations as it is of the new worlders. The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.
  - poster123 8y ago
    The atrocities of the first nations against white settlers should also not be whitewashed.

koosnel 8y ago

What is a facebook?

XalvinX 8y ago
Best bet is to forget you ever heard of it, and don't sign up or download anything remotely related to it. Not being sarcastic here, either.

drngdds 8y ago

In their defense, it is.

acct1771 8y ago
Was.

newman8r 8y ago

How advanced is facebook's "hate speech detector" anyway? It seems like they're just checking a blacklist of bad words and maybe doing some rudimentary NLP.