4 ms·

The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results (https:

The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...). I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertise to do this accurately for every country in the world.

nkozyra 8y ago
Wow that is a fascinating link, how have I have seen this before.
quanticle 8y ago
The article indicates that all the rules are made centrally, in Menlo Park. I would find it very surprising if they had enough consultants to come up with comprehensive, culturally aware guidelines that allow moderators to make nuanced decisions about what to ban and what to leave up. Instead, their goal seems to be keeping Facebook out of trouble. As long as they can point to a guideline that says that hate group X is banned, they're covered. To Facebook, the goal isn't to prevent the transmission of hate speech. The goal is to stop Facebook from being perceived as a vehicle to transmit hate speech. Facebook executives know that in advertising, perception overrides reality. They're willing to do whatever it takes to keep up the perception that Facebook is doing everything in its power to stop hate speech, even if those measures have little or no practical impact (or even if they backfire and suppress speech that should be allowed).
stevenicr 8y ago
I was thinking about that google rule book when responding to this recent hn thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 about google (Google Is Smashing Multi-Discipline Websites to Combat Fake News), The truly terrible thing is that most people do not know that F and G are censoring to the degrees they are. Most (99.9%?) - don't know that there is a group of human moderators and site rankers that are trying to follow some esoteric multi-page set of guidelines to determine what is shown and what is not shown. We know nothing of these people who are choosing what gets seen or not seen on our state / country / city, etc. What are their political leanings? religious views? How much time are these people given to decide if something you say or think you are going to hear is blocked? How much do these people make for making these important decisions? What is their education level? What about those things for the people who make these sets of rules. Also, how are these things affecting the algorithms? These things matter. The lack of transparency is bad for users and those who think they speaking to their audience.

nkozyra 8y ago

Wow that is a fascinating link, how have I have seen this before.

quanticle 8y ago

The article indicates that all the rules are made centrally, in Menlo Park. I would find it very surprising if they had enough consultants to come up with comprehensive, culturally aware guidelines that allow moderators to make nuanced decisions about what to ban and what to leave up. Instead, their goal seems to be keeping Facebook out of trouble. As long as they can point to a guideline that says that hate group X is banned, they're covered. To Facebook, the goal isn't to prevent the transmission of hate speech. The goal is to stop Facebook from being perceived as a vehicle to transmit hate speech. Facebook executives know that in advertising, perception overrides reality. They're willing to do whatever it takes to keep up the perception that Facebook is doing everything in its power to stop hate speech, even if those measures have little or no practical impact (or even if they backfire and suppress speech that should be allowed).

stevenicr 8y ago

I was thinking about that google rule book when responding to this recent hn thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 about google (Google Is Smashing Multi-Discipline Websites to Combat Fake News), The truly terrible thing is that most people do not know that F and G are censoring to the degrees they are. Most (99.9%?) - don't know that there is a group of human moderators and site rankers that are trying to follow some esoteric multi-page set of guidelines to determine what is shown and what is not shown. We know nothing of these people who are choosing what gets seen or not seen on our state / country / city, etc. What are their political leanings? religious views? How much time are these people given to decide if something you say or think you are going to hear is blocked? How much do these people make for making these important decisions? What is their education level? What about those things for the people who make these sets of rules. Also, how are these things affecting the algorithms? These things matter. The lack of transparency is bad for users and those who think they speaking to their audience.