Facebook’s hate speech algorithms are deliberately anti-white and anti-male. By Elizabeth Dwoskin.
The users were asked to rate 75 examples of hate speech on the platform to determine what they considered the most harmful. …
The 10 worst examples, according to the surveyed users, were almost all directed at minority groups, documents show. Five of the posts were directed at Black people, including statements about mental inferiority and disgust. Two were directed at the LGBTQ community. The remaining three were violent comments directed at women, Mexicans and White people. …
Yet racist posts against minorities weren’t what Facebook’s own hate speech detection algorithms were most commonly finding. The software, which the company introduced in 2015, was supposed to detect and automatically delete hate speech before users saw it. …
The software found that 90% of the hate speech was directed at whites and men:
The algorithm was aggressively detecting comments denigrating White people more than attacks on every other group, according to several of the documents. One April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of “hate speech” subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men, though the time frame is unclear. …
One of the reasons for these errors, the researchers discovered, was that Facebook’s “race-blind” rules of conduct on the platform didn’t distinguish among the targets of hate speech. … The algorithms were also over-indexing on detecting less harmful content that occurred more frequently, such as “men are pigs,” rather than finding less common but more harmful content.
But that hate speech is considered good at Facebook, so the problem was fixed in late 2019:
From now on, the algorithm would be narrowly tailored to automatically remove hate speech against only five groups of people — those who are Black, Jewish, LGBTQ, Muslim or of multiple races — that users rated as most severe and harmful. (The researchers hoped to eventually expand the algorithm’s detection capabilities to protect other vulnerable groups, after the algorithm had been retrained and was on track.) Direct threats of violence against all groups would still be deleted. …
Kaplan and the other executives did give the green light to a version of the project that would remove the least harmful speech, according to Facebook’s own study: programming the algorithms to stop automatically taking down content directed at White people, Americans and men.
In other words, Facebook eventually succumbed to Democratic pressure and okayed hate as long as it was directed at white American men. But that wasn’t enough for the Washington Post.
Facebook implemented a double standard especially for those white kulaks! Talk about systemic racism.
Personally, I never use Facebook. Why would I want anything to do with a site that discriminates against me and lies to me?
