Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech

While the individual examples listed here are not good, what is the false-positive and false-negative rates for FB&#x27;s method of censorship?<p>Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it&#x27;s leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it&#x27;s trying to generate shock at &quot;how the sausage gets made&quot;. Any process involving humans will have outliers, but the question is, how effective is the process really?

The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google&#x27;s guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;insidesearch&#x2F;howsearchworks&#x2F;assets&#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;en...</a>).<p>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.

&gt;They consist of dozens of unorganized PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets with bureaucratic titles like “Western Balkans Hate Orgs and Figures” and “Credible Violence: Implementation standards.”<p>&gt;In Pakistan, moderators were told to watch some parties and their supporters for prohibited speech.<p>&gt;In another email, moderators were told to hunt down and remove rumors wrongly accusing an Israeli soldier of killing a Palestinian medic.<p>These are very similar to the information collected by and activities engaged in by a state intelligence organization.

They can’t have this responsibility. It gives them too much centralized power and fails to devolve power locally where people are better fit to understanding the audience and the content.<p>I really think the answer is in localized, community-based moderation (with appeals to localized corp) like forums used to be. Obviously that goes against their will to control every aspect of their platform.

How does everyone have so much trouble with Facebook and Twitter? I have both and have used both for years and I know that both require you to pick what you want to look at. I exhaust my Twitter feed in seconds and then have nothing to look at.<p>Both my FB feed and my Twitter feed are more heartwarming, adorable, funny, or touching than angry or whatever. Maybe all of this is just a reflection of who you guys are.<p>And I&#x27;m no stranger to controversy. Ban the bomb, no war, I&#x27;ve been there. Where I haven&#x27;t been is Twitter&#x2F;FB flamewars. And you know how? I unfollow as soon as I don&#x27;t like. It&#x27;s not the end of the world.

The problem as usual is centralization on the Web. That’s what caused the VCs to fund Facebook and why it became this behemoth. (Peter Thiel thinks a monopoly is awesome.)<p>Take for example a law passed earlier this year which required networks to remove posts dealing with child trafficking. The EFF and many free speech advocates went ballistic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-congress-censored-internet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-congress-censored-...</a><p>But what if we had open source software that any small community could use to run their own Facebook-like social network?<p>Look, Wordpress has been around for 15 year and people have figured out how to clean up their own blog spam. Communities like HN or a local village can easily police their own posts. Local communities are also able to know a local language and local customs and laws.<p>The problem is centralization.

I commend Facebook for allocating more resources to enforce its community standards, what&#x27;s the point in outlining standards if there is no enforcement?<p>I&#x27;m not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different countries and regions, each region has it&#x27;s own unique history and flash-points, it&#x27;s best to understand these from folks who are on the ground rather than overworked moderators and engineers in Menlo Park.<p>Facebook got to where it is by being a centralized social platform, but successful community standards enforcement at this level will take a more decentralized, hyper-local approach.<p>Also, similarly to how large tech companies publish yearly reports on diversity metrics and data requests from governments, if Facebook is really going to make this effort a priority they should publish a report detailing its efforts.

We can barely agree on what constitutes hate speech in the U.S.; fb is expecting to define and police hate speech globally?

Note this is mostly (entirely?) old news, first reported by Motherboard. c.f. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;xwk9zd&#x2F;how-facebook-content-moderation-works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;xwk9zd&#x2F;how-facebo...</a><p>(via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;josephfcox&#x2F;status&#x2F;1078443875784683521" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;josephfcox&#x2F;status&#x2F;1078443875784683521</a> )

Seems like a pretty challenging task for anyone, also 1500 pages sounds like a good start, it would be nice if anyone who feels really strongly about the problems of this situation and wants to help out in a productive manner to read all of the pages and offer suggestions on how to improve it, maybe even upload some openly contributable global attempt at a “unified” (at least in distribution) agreed upon ethical core. Somewhat like the geneva convention did for conventional warfare, but for discourse through digital platforms different networks could adopt and reference.

There is a lot of apologism for censorship on this thread in sharp contrast to the threads on china and others where they are demonized for the exact same thing.<p>This is troubling as it seems when we do it commentators are ready with a litany of justifications in contrast to the blanket judgements on other discussions. This kind of double standards is abusive of discourse and the values sought to be defended and cannot then be a forum for informed discussion.

The Times seems to have one or more Facebook employees feeding it confidential material in spite of Zuckerberg&#x27;s threat to prosecute anyone caught doing so. Constant leak of documents&#x2F;emails&#x2F;etc.

The thing that troubles me the most is the hubris of Facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes. It is their site, so they can do what they want, but I can also do what I want and not use it. Given Facebook&#x27;s massive drop in stock price this year, it seems like their investors think Facebook is following the wrong path as well.

I haven&#x27;t been able to find the original files (probably not possible) but it looks like The Guardian has access to at least some of them too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;series&#x2F;facebook-files" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;series&#x2F;facebook-files</a><p>Note that these were published on May 2017.

I dearly wish the NY times would share this trove of Excel sheets and PowerPoints as a torrent. Let people view all of them.

Samiul Haq was murdered shortly after the election in Pakistan. Let’s give Facebook some credit for exercising due caution there.

Having a bunch of likely millenial aged individuals with limited life experience based in Menlo Park to have a say in discourse that crosses so many boundaries? What could possibly go wrong?

Noble aspirations (including those of the founding fathers of the US) that rational dialogue is the answer and not censorship need to be reinterpreted in a Facebook-world where dialogue is largely impossible. It demands a new citizenship, which I believe requires us to eschew platforms like Facebook, not because we want to turn back the clock, but because by their nature they are incapable of supporting true social dialogue. It isn’t a question of censorship, it is a personal question of ethical standards.

I would just shut down in these hard to govern, hard to monetize regions&#x2F;countries. I know it&#x27;s a bit step from &quot;connecting the world&quot; mantra, but it solves the problem.

i&#x27;ll save you the click, tldr: facebook is trying to solve an unsolvable problem, they&#x27;ve made some mistakes as 2 billion people have a lot of different ideas about what constitutes a good or bad decision, but no one has anything better to offer, including the author of the article.

Whoever wrote their rulebook used Apple&#x27;s emoji instead of Facebook&#x27;s own.