Tag: facebook

Facebook Employees Pushed Company To Exclude Criticism Of White People, Men From Hate Speech Rules

Facebook employees urged executives to exclude criticism directed towards white people and men from the company’s hate speech policies, according to internal documents reported on by The Washington Post.

Facebook researchers tried to change the company’s content moderation algorithms that automatically delete hate speech, because they viewed the algorithms as inadequately protecting minority users, The Washington Post reported, citing internal memos and research. The effort came following a document from April 2020 which showed that around 90% of hate speech algorithms were detecting and removing content directed towards white people and men.

Researchers argued that these figures indicated bias in Facebook’s automatic deletion algorithms because the content reported to be the most “harmful” or “the worst of the worst” was more often directed at minority groups, the Post reported.

The employees then urged Facebook executives, including the vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, to ditch Facebook’s “race-blind” hate speech algorithms which did not discriminate based on the race to which the hate speech was directed, according to the Post. Instead, the researchers pushed for algorithms that automatically removed hate speech directed only towards black people, Jews, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims and people of multiple races.

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Facebook and Twitter Silent on Whether Kyle Rittenhouse Support Is Still Banned

Facebook and Twitter banned support for Kyle Rittenhouse across their platforms shortly after the Kenosha riots. After a jury in Wisconsin found Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges brought against him, those same platforms refuse to say if support for the teenager is still banned.

Rittenhouse was found not guilty on five charges including first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment. The presiding judge, Bruce Schroeder, also dismissed two additional weapons charges.

As Breitbart News recently reported, Big Tech companies continued to censor statements of support for Rittenhouse, even as the prosecution’s case fell apart:

Over a year old, the ban is still in place on both Facebook and Instagram and is even catching GOP Senate candidates like Josh Mandel in its net.

Facebook says supporting Rittenhouse violates its guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations.”

Users on Twitter also report that the platform is still suspending them for supporting Rittenhouse.

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According to Facebook (Meta), the metaverse will be censored

The Facebook executive spearheading the company’s virtual reality efforts hopes to create virtual worlds with “almost Disney levels of safety” but has also acknowledged that moderation “at any meaningful scale is almost impossible.”

Facebook’s parent company Meta is working on creating virtual reality worlds where people will socialize, work, game, and even do shopping using 3D avatars of themselves.

In an internal memo, obtained by the Financial Times, Andrew Bosworth, who will be spearheading Meta’s $10 billion “metaverse” project, alleged that virtual reality can potentially be a “toxic environment,” especially for minorities and women.

The memo notes that content and behavior censorship and moderation could be a big challenge, especially given the company’s poor record in fighting “harmful” content.

“The psychological impact on humans is much greater,” said Kavya Pearlman, chief executive of the XR Safety Initiative, a non-profit focused on developing safety standards for VR, augmented and mixed reality. She further explained that users would retain what happened in the metaverse like it happened in reality.

Bosworth outlined a plan that the company could use to tackle the issue, but experts have noted that policing behavior in a virtual reality setting requires a lot of resources and might not even be possible.

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Facebook partners with New Zealand media for funding, will help outlets censor “false comments”

Facebook’s parent company Meta has launched a program to “support” journalism in New Zealand and has made a new commitment to managing “defamation.”

The aim of the program is presented as a way to help media organizations in New Zealand create sustainable business models.

The program includes a Grant Fund, Audience Development Accelerator, the creation of a News Innovation Advisory Group, and the provision of digital training focused on engagement for news organizations.

According to Facebook’s head of public policy for Australia and New Zealand Mia Garlick, the program will involve 12 media organizations with regionally, culturally, and digitally diverse publications. The idea is that these organizations will “come together and try to innovate and learn from experts and really collaborate on new strategies to drive business growth both on and off Facebook.”

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Facebook Aggressively Censoring Any Searches for Kyle Rittenhouse Amid Trial

Big Tech platform Facebook is aggressively censoring any searches for information about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois youth falsely accused of homicide by Wisconsin prosecutors following a self-defense incident at an ANTIFA riot.

Reports of Facebook turning off any and all search results amid the trial began last week, with Facebook users sharing evidence of totally disabled searches for Rittenhouse.

The block of information comes as Rittenhouse defense attorneys increasingly reveal a corrupt charade of a prosecution, with Kenosha County prosecutors implicated in coercing false testimony from witnesses and hardened ANTIFA militants openly admitting to chasing Rittenhouse armed with weapons during the shootings in August 2020.

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Media outlets campaign to get Facebook to censor climate “misinformation”

A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.

These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.

One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”

The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.

The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.

“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.

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Facebook employee said censorship colleagues were “drunk on power”

A Facebook data scientist accused fellow employees of being “drunk on power” for censoring posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who killed two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at the height of last summer’s riots.

The data scientist said some of the censored posts did not violate the platform’s policies as they were discussing whether Rittenhouse was being treated fairly and if he was acting in self-defense. Rittenhouse’s official stance at trial will be self-defense.

Facebook removed many posts supporting Rittenhouse because its policies prohibit the praising of “mass shootings” and “mass shooters.”

In Facebook internal discussions, obtained by the New York Post, most employees agreed with the censorship of pro-Rittenhouse posts. However, one employee, a data scientist, disagreed.

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Facebook leaks reveal employees pushed for censorship of conservative news outlets

More reports based on leaked internal Facebook documents are getting published, this time to show that suppression of conservative and alternative media outlets is not happening on the giant platform by accident, but also that this type of bias is creating divisions within the company itself.

The Wall Street Journal reported, based on internal message board discussions that it has seen, that many lower-ranked employees put pressure on their managers to effectively deplatform news organizations like Breitbart, which is considered right-wing.

The message board logs appear to have from the same cache of documents provided earlier by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, that the WSJ is now reporting about in a series of articles called “Facebook Files.”

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Facebook Adds To Its Orwellian Content Moderation By Protecting Activists And Journalists From “Bullying”

Just when you thought the censorship at social media companies couldn’t possibly get any worse, Facebook has come along and moved the bar. 

The company is now going to be protecting activists and journalists, who is is called “involuntary” public figures, with additional safeguards against “harassment and bullying”, Reuters reported. 

The company says people it determines to be “human rights defenders” will be protected under the new safeguards, which we’re sure will be completely discretionary and applied only to those “activists” who are advocating for liberal causes. 

Nevermind the fact that when someone becomes an “activist” they are no longer an “involuntary” public figure, but we digress.

Facebook’s handling of public figures has been an area of debate over the last month, as the company deals with allegations form a “whistleblower” who went public with details of the company’s content moderation strategies. 

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