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Many platforms have been doing this. It's likely because the majority of tech folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience. It's basic

Many platforms have been doing this. It's likely because the majority of tech folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience. It's basic marketing. I'm not sad that some of these really hateful people are blocked, that's a given. But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be considered hate speech.

bdhe 7y ago
> But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be considered hate speech. I mean, the headline talks about far-right hate groups, and not about conservatives in general. Why is it that a lot of conservatives seem to take it personally when hate groups are banned? I think this victimhood complex is unhealthy. Facebook is not choosing sides by banning hate groups.
- firemancoder 7y ago
  It's not that conservatives don't want hate groups banned, every reasonable person does. It's because of the ever expanding definition of what hate speech is. I'm no conservative, but I definitely see their point when "I love America" is hate speech, yet "Straight White Men should die" is not. Look at Twitter as an example.
  - didibus 7y ago
    I don't disagree that detecting hate isn't a hard problem. But I also feel it isn't as ambiguous as you make it out to be. "X loves Y" - not hate speech. "X should die" - hate speech. Now, context to these could change it. But the question is, can two random person proficient in the same language tell apart similarly the two kinds of speech? If a human can perform the task with pretty good accuracy, then it's doable. Now if we're saying that even people can't tell apart hate and violence, we're in more trouble. But as of now, I think it's a pretty strong claim to make that people can't actually decipher hateful tones in text.
    - turkeysandwich 7y ago
      I think the enforcement is way more imbalanced than you realize. Here's an example, how about instead of "X should die", it's "lol, can all X just die?". They give it a little jocular spin with the "Lol", but it's effectively the same comment. Here's the deal: if X in that comment is "black people", you get banned on Twitter. If it's "white people" you don't get banned. Now personally, I don't mind the comment in either form. I don't believe it's an actual threat to anyone. It's kind of edgelordy, but whichever. And beyond that, I'd be very unhappy if someone got banned for something like that, because it just stomps over whatever other, more legitimate commentary they might've had. I'm interested in having conversations, even imperfect ones. All conversations are imperfect. But OK, let's move past "X should die". But it's not just that. Any discussion where one side can be spun as a vulnerable minority (merit be damned), that minority status can be used to silence the other side. So for example, consider transwomen in women's sports. There's a not-insignificant push among trans activists to claim that transwomen are "biologically female". I think the logic with that is: 1. sex is fuzzier than most people realize (debatable) and 2. hormone treatments are sufficient to tip someone over the line into the other biological sex (also debatable). Referring to a trans woman as male for the sake of argument runs you a serious risk of getting permabanned from Twitter if the person you're arguing with is particularly ornery.
      - didibus 7y ago
        Hum, you make claims of this will get you banned and this won't. What are those assumptions built on? I'm not saying it's not the case, I don't use Twitter and don't know their processes. That said, in my work, we deal with similar scenarios. Normally, you look for trends and you have different levels of enforcement for different risks. So say you have automated systems doing monitoring which flags and alerts of possible bad behavior. Normally these are scored and categorized. For some score and category, you might take an automatic actions. Say, block the comment from posting at all and tell the user to reword in a non hateful manner their idea. Or you delete the comment. Now these infractions go towards the account. When there's many if them, indicating a trend, it promotes the account for manual review. At that point, a person does a holistic overview of the account and its infractions. If they can reverse some if them, feeding back into the automated monitoring and alerting to improve its false positive rates, and they can confirm them, to add weight to those labels. Finally, they can choose to contact the account holder to justify themselves, give them a warning, take partial enforcement like deleting certain posts, or outright ban them. Even the ban has degrees. You could have the account ban, but be allowed to create a new account. Or you can be banned with cross account detection, so your IP, email, address, credit cards etc. are all banned to make it hard for you to even sign up again. And the processes in place and their rules are constantly adjusted and reevaluated. And there's even backfill mechanisms, so if rules are relaxed in the future, prior enforcement can be reversed if they no longer hold against the new rules for example. Would you find that if say Facebook or Twitter were to operate in a somewhat similar fashion that it would seem reasonable?
- Agustus 7y ago
  The issue is that there is a far-right and not a far-left. When you say: this is what is acceptable to us, there has to be a way to look at a side and say there is the limit. The other issue is that the approach these days to minimize or eliminate opposition by making them a “hate group.”
- belorn 7y ago
  I have a standard test for this based on a very simple hypothesis: Hate is hate regardless who is targeted. If someone write a hate speech about the Jewish people and rewrite every mentioning of Judaism to Islam, then it is still hate speech. The target of hate doesn't change the fact that it is hate. So I apply the same to feminism and rewrite every mentioning of men to immigrants and women to nationalists. Simple word for word rewrite. Hate being hate, if the rewrite look like hate speech then the original text must also be hate speech. If Facebook is not choosing sides then such test should work to determine if something is hate or not.
overthemoon 7y ago
Not every conservative is getting banned, either. "Fascist parties and neo nazis are getting banned, therefore ordinary conservatives are also being targeted" really makes no sense.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  It is when the two are conflated with extreme regularity.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Then perhaps conservatives shouldn't make it so easy to be conflated with far right extremists? I mean it's not hard to say white supremacists shouldn't be in government, but mainstream conservatives literally voted a white supremacist into government. They almost voted a pedophile into government. Sure there are jerks on the Democratic side but we tend to remove them from authority until they've shown appropriate contrition for an extended period of time. Republicans double down that everyone else is to blame and the bringing up the fact that they did something crappy is somehow censoring them. Facebook is a public company they can remove any speech that they think detracts from their platform.
    - Fellshard 7y ago
      I believe the term for what you just did is 'victim-blaming'. The alt-right label, for example, has fuzzy boundaries, and this is leveraged to apply that label to anyone without feeling the need to verify the accused's position or statements in more detail. It could be argued that the right has similar issues around applying the label of 'communist', 'socialist', etc. The intent in these cases is to cordon the accused off, lighting a signal flare that their ideas are too extreme to be worth considering. This causes real harm to real ability to discuss things in the moderate spectrum if everyone is being labeled as being at the edges.
    - LyndsySimon 7y ago
      Can you provide a couple of examples of this? In particular, I don't recognize who you're referring to in this section: > [M]ainstream conservatives literally voted a white supremacist into government. They almost voted a pedophile into government. -- > Sure there are jerks on the Democratic side but we tend to remove them from authority until they've shown appropriate contrition for an extended period of time. Is it possible that you're seeing this through you own political biases? I freely admit that I generally see the issues with left-wing figures more easily than those on the right, so please don't think I'm being "whataboutist", because that's not my intention at all. When I read the above, the first reactive thought I had was "What about Ralph Northam? He is in his college yearbook either in blackface or a Klan robe. What about Justin Fairfax? He's been accused of multiple sexual assaults. Both of them are still in their elected positions" Of course, this isn't to say the GOP doesn't have its own members with serious problems - instead, my point is that it isn't any easier to conflate conservatives with far right extremists than it is to conflate progressives with far left extremists. From where I stand, it seems to be completely a matter of what biases the viewer holds.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
> It's likely because the majority of tech folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience I agree. I don't think it's being done out of malice, just that tech is so politically homogeneous that not enough people realize this is out of line to keep these sorts of projects from going forward. The ball gets rolling and there's not enough people voicing a strong enough objection to stop it. I think in the future we'll see this as a failure to acknowledge that tech is not as diverse as the population in general. Car companies aren't stupid. They know they don't know everything so they do customer research, get focus groups, etc, etc, to help them determine how to tune things to be attractive to the target audience. Tech's target audience is the global population but tech mostly fails to account for all the customers that don't live on the West coast or Northeast of the US. We saw the same thing when music was somewhat democratized by the internet in the 2000s. Country and hip-hop surged in popularity because a bunch of well of white music producers in a few cities on the coasts didn't have the perfect picture of what everyone wanted.
- 0815test 7y ago
  How is tech "politically homogenous"? If anything, tech folks are a bit more likely to skew away from the political center, but it's not like they consistently lean "left" as a group.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    I don't know if the people that make up tech lean left over all if you summed them up but the ones that don't lean left sure seem to keep their mouth shut in the workplace which has the same effect.
    - Fellshard 7y ago
      Because we've heard the stories of what has happened to other right-leaning tech people who broke from PC orthodoxy.
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  > tech is so politically homogeneous Tech culture is somewhat homogeneous, especially in LA and SF - but I certainly wouldn't say tech itself is homogenous. I'm fairly extreme politically, as an anarcho-capitalist - though it's important to note that despite the "anarchist" root, I'm as peaceful a person as can be and my views are literally founded upon the premise that forcing others to do something is immoral. I'm also happy to discuss my philosophy and do so under my real name. If you search me, you'll find years of posts across multiple communities where I actively discuss my views and the views of others. It's enough of a part of my life that I've decided that I can never completely separate it from my profession life because it influences the way I think about the world so thoroughly. As a result, I've even been asked about it multiple times in job interviews. I give the above as background; my point in it is to say that I've been approached privately by many people who are outside the mainstream orthodoxy of tech. Some want to say they approve of some parts of what I profess, others want to pit their ideas against mine in a private and safe way. Others still seem to just want to be able to admit to someone that they feel that they have to hide who they are at work. There is absolutely something of a chilling effect on political speech in tech. One of the reasons it's so difficult to discuss is because the people who are made examples of seem to go one of two ways - they flee the scene of the controversy and try to minimize the impact of the controversy (e.g. Brenden Eich), or they embrace it and push hard in the opposite direction, which makes them end up being seen as skewing very hard to the extreme right (e.g. Andrew Torba). I don't have data to support my assertion, but my experience leads me to believe that there are more right-wing people in tech than it appears, and that there is a significantly higher number of libertarians of all flavors in tech than the general population.

bdhe 7y ago

> But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be considered hate speech. I mean, the headline talks about far-right hate groups, and not about conservatives in general. Why is it that a lot of conservatives seem to take it personally when hate groups are banned? I think this victimhood complex is unhealthy. Facebook is not choosing sides by banning hate groups.

firemancoder 7y ago
It's not that conservatives don't want hate groups banned, every reasonable person does. It's because of the ever expanding definition of what hate speech is. I'm no conservative, but I definitely see their point when "I love America" is hate speech, yet "Straight White Men should die" is not. Look at Twitter as an example.
- didibus 7y ago
  I don't disagree that detecting hate isn't a hard problem. But I also feel it isn't as ambiguous as you make it out to be. "X loves Y" - not hate speech. "X should die" - hate speech. Now, context to these could change it. But the question is, can two random person proficient in the same language tell apart similarly the two kinds of speech? If a human can perform the task with pretty good accuracy, then it's doable. Now if we're saying that even people can't tell apart hate and violence, we're in more trouble. But as of now, I think it's a pretty strong claim to make that people can't actually decipher hateful tones in text.
  - turkeysandwich 7y ago
    I think the enforcement is way more imbalanced than you realize. Here's an example, how about instead of "X should die", it's "lol, can all X just die?". They give it a little jocular spin with the "Lol", but it's effectively the same comment. Here's the deal: if X in that comment is "black people", you get banned on Twitter. If it's "white people" you don't get banned. Now personally, I don't mind the comment in either form. I don't believe it's an actual threat to anyone. It's kind of edgelordy, but whichever. And beyond that, I'd be very unhappy if someone got banned for something like that, because it just stomps over whatever other, more legitimate commentary they might've had. I'm interested in having conversations, even imperfect ones. All conversations are imperfect. But OK, let's move past "X should die". But it's not just that. Any discussion where one side can be spun as a vulnerable minority (merit be damned), that minority status can be used to silence the other side. So for example, consider transwomen in women's sports. There's a not-insignificant push among trans activists to claim that transwomen are "biologically female". I think the logic with that is: 1. sex is fuzzier than most people realize (debatable) and 2. hormone treatments are sufficient to tip someone over the line into the other biological sex (also debatable). Referring to a trans woman as male for the sake of argument runs you a serious risk of getting permabanned from Twitter if the person you're arguing with is particularly ornery.
    - didibus 7y ago
      Hum, you make claims of this will get you banned and this won't. What are those assumptions built on? I'm not saying it's not the case, I don't use Twitter and don't know their processes. That said, in my work, we deal with similar scenarios. Normally, you look for trends and you have different levels of enforcement for different risks. So say you have automated systems doing monitoring which flags and alerts of possible bad behavior. Normally these are scored and categorized. For some score and category, you might take an automatic actions. Say, block the comment from posting at all and tell the user to reword in a non hateful manner their idea. Or you delete the comment. Now these infractions go towards the account. When there's many if them, indicating a trend, it promotes the account for manual review. At that point, a person does a holistic overview of the account and its infractions. If they can reverse some if them, feeding back into the automated monitoring and alerting to improve its false positive rates, and they can confirm them, to add weight to those labels. Finally, they can choose to contact the account holder to justify themselves, give them a warning, take partial enforcement like deleting certain posts, or outright ban them. Even the ban has degrees. You could have the account ban, but be allowed to create a new account. Or you can be banned with cross account detection, so your IP, email, address, credit cards etc. are all banned to make it hard for you to even sign up again. And the processes in place and their rules are constantly adjusted and reevaluated. And there's even backfill mechanisms, so if rules are relaxed in the future, prior enforcement can be reversed if they no longer hold against the new rules for example. Would you find that if say Facebook or Twitter were to operate in a somewhat similar fashion that it would seem reasonable?
Agustus 7y ago
The issue is that there is a far-right and not a far-left. When you say: this is what is acceptable to us, there has to be a way to look at a side and say there is the limit. The other issue is that the approach these days to minimize or eliminate opposition by making them a “hate group.”
belorn 7y ago
I have a standard test for this based on a very simple hypothesis: Hate is hate regardless who is targeted. If someone write a hate speech about the Jewish people and rewrite every mentioning of Judaism to Islam, then it is still hate speech. The target of hate doesn't change the fact that it is hate. So I apply the same to feminism and rewrite every mentioning of men to immigrants and women to nationalists. Simple word for word rewrite. Hate being hate, if the rewrite look like hate speech then the original text must also be hate speech. If Facebook is not choosing sides then such test should work to determine if something is hate or not.

overthemoon 7y ago

Not every conservative is getting banned, either. "Fascist parties and neo nazis are getting banned, therefore ordinary conservatives are also being targeted" really makes no sense.

Fellshard 7y ago
It is when the two are conflated with extreme regularity.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Then perhaps conservatives shouldn't make it so easy to be conflated with far right extremists? I mean it's not hard to say white supremacists shouldn't be in government, but mainstream conservatives literally voted a white supremacist into government. They almost voted a pedophile into government. Sure there are jerks on the Democratic side but we tend to remove them from authority until they've shown appropriate contrition for an extended period of time. Republicans double down that everyone else is to blame and the bringing up the fact that they did something crappy is somehow censoring them. Facebook is a public company they can remove any speech that they think detracts from their platform.
  - Fellshard 7y ago
    I believe the term for what you just did is 'victim-blaming'. The alt-right label, for example, has fuzzy boundaries, and this is leveraged to apply that label to anyone without feeling the need to verify the accused's position or statements in more detail. It could be argued that the right has similar issues around applying the label of 'communist', 'socialist', etc. The intent in these cases is to cordon the accused off, lighting a signal flare that their ideas are too extreme to be worth considering. This causes real harm to real ability to discuss things in the moderate spectrum if everyone is being labeled as being at the edges.
  - LyndsySimon 7y ago
    Can you provide a couple of examples of this? In particular, I don't recognize who you're referring to in this section: > [M]ainstream conservatives literally voted a white supremacist into government. They almost voted a pedophile into government. -- > Sure there are jerks on the Democratic side but we tend to remove them from authority until they've shown appropriate contrition for an extended period of time. Is it possible that you're seeing this through you own political biases? I freely admit that I generally see the issues with left-wing figures more easily than those on the right, so please don't think I'm being "whataboutist", because that's not my intention at all. When I read the above, the first reactive thought I had was "What about Ralph Northam? He is in his college yearbook either in blackface or a Klan robe. What about Justin Fairfax? He's been accused of multiple sexual assaults. Both of them are still in their elected positions" Of course, this isn't to say the GOP doesn't have its own members with serious problems - instead, my point is that it isn't any easier to conflate conservatives with far right extremists than it is to conflate progressives with far left extremists. From where I stand, it seems to be completely a matter of what biases the viewer holds.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

> It's likely because the majority of tech folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience I agree. I don't think it's being done out of malice, just that tech is so politically homogeneous that not enough people realize this is out of line to keep these sorts of projects from going forward. The ball gets rolling and there's not enough people voicing a strong enough objection to stop it. I think in the future we'll see this as a failure to acknowledge that tech is not as diverse as the population in general. Car companies aren't stupid. They know they don't know everything so they do customer research, get focus groups, etc, etc, to help them determine how to tune things to be attractive to the target audience. Tech's target audience is the global population but tech mostly fails to account for all the customers that don't live on the West coast or Northeast of the US. We saw the same thing when music was somewhat democratized by the internet in the 2000s. Country and hip-hop surged in popularity because a bunch of well of white music producers in a few cities on the coasts didn't have the perfect picture of what everyone wanted.

0815test 7y ago
How is tech "politically homogenous"? If anything, tech folks are a bit more likely to skew away from the political center, but it's not like they consistently lean "left" as a group.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I don't know if the people that make up tech lean left over all if you summed them up but the ones that don't lean left sure seem to keep their mouth shut in the workplace which has the same effect.
  - Fellshard 7y ago
    Because we've heard the stories of what has happened to other right-leaning tech people who broke from PC orthodoxy.
LyndsySimon 7y ago
> tech is so politically homogeneous Tech culture is somewhat homogeneous, especially in LA and SF - but I certainly wouldn't say tech itself is homogenous. I'm fairly extreme politically, as an anarcho-capitalist - though it's important to note that despite the "anarchist" root, I'm as peaceful a person as can be and my views are literally founded upon the premise that forcing others to do something is immoral. I'm also happy to discuss my philosophy and do so under my real name. If you search me, you'll find years of posts across multiple communities where I actively discuss my views and the views of others. It's enough of a part of my life that I've decided that I can never completely separate it from my profession life because it influences the way I think about the world so thoroughly. As a result, I've even been asked about it multiple times in job interviews. I give the above as background; my point in it is to say that I've been approached privately by many people who are outside the mainstream orthodoxy of tech. Some want to say they approve of some parts of what I profess, others want to pit their ideas against mine in a private and safe way. Others still seem to just want to be able to admit to someone that they feel that they have to hide who they are at work. There is absolutely something of a chilling effect on political speech in tech. One of the reasons it's so difficult to discuss is because the people who are made examples of seem to go one of two ways - they flee the scene of the controversy and try to minimize the impact of the controversy (e.g. Brenden Eich), or they embrace it and push hard in the opposite direction, which makes them end up being seen as skewing very hard to the extreme right (e.g. Andrew Torba). I don't have data to support my assertion, but my experience leads me to believe that there are more right-wing people in tech than it appears, and that there is a significantly higher number of libertarians of all flavors in tech than the general population.