Facebook’s Secret Hate-Speech Censors Seem to Protect White Men but Not Black Children

Look, I know that headline seems crazy. When I first saw people talking about this on Twitter, I thought that there was no way it could be true. And then I read ProPublica's excellent report on Facebook's censorship rules and...you guys, the world is kind of a terrible place.

So Facebook has a group of censors who work for them. Their job is to keep hate speech off the platform. If you've spent any time on Facebook, you know they're not always great at it. For instance, ProPublica points out the twin anecdotes of Congressman Clay Higgins and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado. Higgins wrote on Facebook about the need to find radicalized Muslims and "kill them all." This post, which explicitly called for violence, was allowed to stay. Delgado, on the other hand, posted a status that said, "All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed" and found that post deleted and her account suspended.

How can that be? Why is one deemed okay while the other is an issue? The answer is crazy and has to do with how Facebook defines hate speech:

One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.

The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.

That's right. Under Facebook's policy, it seems that specificity is the key to letting your hate speech stand. Want to make awful comments about women? You better find a subset of women to do it! This is obviously madness. The goal of anti–hate speech should be to protect those who are oppressed, not those who do the oppressing. The moment Facebook found itself in a position where the answer to that slide was "white men" was the moment they should have realized that they had to change their policy. Also a good sign that you're screwing stuff up? When you make a point of exempting a presidential candidate's hate speech that violates your policies, at the order of your CEO, as happened around Donald Trump's calls for a Muslim ban. What's the point of policing hate speech if you make exceptions for the loudest and arguably most dangerous versions of that speech? If Facebook wants to be at the center of everything we do online, then it needs to respect the responsibility that comes with that role, because this doesn't cut it.