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Facebook reveals 25 pages of takedown rules for hate speech and more

April 24, 2018 by  
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Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public’s constant calls for clarity and protests about its decisions. Today Facebook published 25 pages of detailed criteria and examples for what is and isn’t allowed.

Facebook is effectively shifting where it will be criticized to the underlying policy instead of individual incidents of enforcement mistakes like when it took down posts of the newsworthy “Napalm Girl” historical photo because it contains child nudity before eventually restoring them. Some groups will surely find points to take issue with, but Facebook has made some significant improvements. Most notably, it no longer disqualifies minorities from shielding from hate speech because an unprotected characteristic like “children” is appended to a protected characteristic like “black”.

Nothing is technically changing about Facebook’s policies. But previously, only leaks like a copy of an internal rulebook attained by the Guardian had given the outside world a look at when Facebook actually enforces those policies. These rules will be translated into over 40 languages for the public. Facebook currently has 7500 content reviewers, up 40% from a year ago.

Facebook also plans to expand its content removal appeals process, It already let users request a review of a decision to remove their profile, Page, or Group. Now Facebook will notify users when their nudity, sexual activity, hate speech or graphic violence content is removed and let them hit a button to “Request Review”, which will usually happen within 24 hours. Finally, Facebook will hold Facebook Forums: Community Standards events in Germany, France, the UK, India, Singapore, and the US to give its biggest communities a closer look at how the social network’s policy works.

Fixing the “white people are protected, black children aren’t” policy

Facebook’s VP of Global Product Management Monika Bickert who has been coordinating the release of the guidelines since September told reporters at Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ last week that “There’s been a lot of research about how when institutions put their policies out there, people change their behavior, and that’s a good thing.” She admits there’s still the concern that terrorists or hate groups will get better at developing “workarounds” to evade Facebook’s moderators, “but the benefits of being more open about what’s happening behind the scenes outweighs that.”

Content moderator jobs at various social media companies including Facebook have been described as hellish in many exposes regarding what it’s like to fight the spread of child porn, beheading videos, racism for hours a day. Bickert says Facebook’s moderators get trained to deal with this and have access to counseling and 24/7 resources, including some on-site. They can request to not look at certain kinds of content they’re sensitive to. But Bickert didn’t say Facebook imposes an hourly limit on how much offensive moderators see per day like how YouTube recently implemented a four-hour limit.

A controversial slide depicting Facebook’s now-defunct policy that disqualified subsets of protected groups from hate speech shielding. Image via ProPublica

The most useful clarification in the newly revealed guidelines explains how Facebook has ditched its poorly received policy that deemed “white people” as protected from hate speech, but not “black children”. That rule that left subsets of protected groups exposed to hate speech was blasted in a ProPublica piece in June 2017, though Facebook said it no longer applied that policy.

Now Bickert says “Black children — that would be protected. White men — that would also be protected. We consider it an attack if it’s against a person, but you can criticize an organization, a religion . . . If someone says ‘this country is evil’, that’s something that we allow. Saying ‘members of this religion are evil’ is not.” She explains that Facebook is becoming more aware of the context around who is being victimized. However, Bickert notes that if someone says “‘I’m going to kill you if you don’t come to my party’, if it’s not a credible threat we don’t want to be removing it.” 

Do community standards = editorial voice?

Being upfront about its policies might give Facebook more to point to when it’s criticized for failing to prevent abuse on its platform. Activist groups say Facebook has allowed fake news and hate speech to run rampant and lead to violence in many developing countries where Facebook hasn’t had enough native speaking moderators. The Sri Lankan government temporarily blocked Facebook in hopes of ceasing calls for violence, and those on the ground say Zuckerberg overstated Facebook improvements to the problem in Myanmar that led to hate crimes against the Rohingya people.

Revealing the guidelines could at least cut down on confusion about whether hateful content is allowed on Facebook. It isn’t. Though the guidelines also raise the question of whether the Facebook value system it codifies means the social network has an editorial voice that would define it as a media company. That could mean the loss of legal immunity for what its users post. Bickert stuck to a rehearsed line that “We are not creating content and we’re not curating content”. Still, some could certainly say all of Facebook’s content filters amount to a curatorial layer.

But whether Facebook is a media company or a tech company, it’s a highly profitable company. It needs to spend some more of the billions it earns each quarter applying the policies evenly and forcefully around the world.

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Why Mike Pompeo’s Senate confirmation is historic — and not in a good way for Trump

April 24, 2018 by  
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Update: Minutes before the Senate’s foreign relations committee was set to vote, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced he has changed his mind and will support CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be President Trump’s secretary of state. That means, instead of making history for the opposition to his nomination, Pompeo is expected to get approval from the committee and be confirmed by the full Senate later this week.

It has been more than 70 years since a cabinet nominee had such a hard time making it out of the Senate while still being confirmed.

In at least one way, no secretary of state nominee has had as much trouble as CIA Director Mike Pompeo is having getting confirmed: By the end of the day Monday, he’s expected to become the first secretary of state nominee to fail to get voted out of a Senate committee. But by the end of the week, he could be the first Cabinet member since 1945 to get a vote in the full Senate anyway.

There are a couple of factors that play off each other, making life hard for Pompeo and President Trump, but they mainly boil down to one: partisanship.

On Monday afternoon, Pompeo’s committee approval vote is expected to fall short by one vote, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will join all 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote against Pompeo.

That’s the first time that has ever happened to a secretary of state, said Matt Green, a political-science professor at Catholic University. While Cabinet nominations like the attorney general tend to have partisan confirmation processes, secretaries of state have generally received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, Green said.

That doesn’t mean Trump has to go back to the drawing board. Senate GOP leaders are expected to bend procedural rules and bring Pompeo’s nomination up for a full vote in the Senate, anyway, later this week.

There, with more votes in play, Pompeo is expected to narrowly gain confirmation, thanks to two Democrats who will make up for Paul’s defection: Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.).

Heitkamp and Manchin are running for reelection in states that Trump won by double digits in 2016, so they have an incentive to be seen as working with the president. (Even though, notably, neither voted for Trump’s premiere legislative accomplishment, the GOP tax overhaul, last year.)

Anyway. Back to our history lesson. If/when Pompeo does finally get confirmed by the Senate, he’ll have done it in such a roundabout way as to make history again.

Green and Senate records say Pompeo is on the cusp of becoming the first Cabinet nominee to fail a committee vote since 1945. That time, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, couldn’t get enough support from conservative Southerners in his own party to get through a committee vote to be commerce secretary, but he did get through the full Senate.

There are a couple of similarities between now and then that are instructive to understanding Pompeo’s historic struggles:

Wallace was a Democrat who didn’t make it out of a Democratic-controlled committee, thanks to factions within the party, Green pointed out. Pompeo is a Republican who probably won’t make it out of a Republican-controlled committee for some of the same reasons. Paul represents a relatively small but vocal noninterventionist wing of the party.

It’s like deja vu for Trump, who was extremely frustrated in the summer when an effort to repeal Obamacare failed by one vote in a Republican-controlled Congress because the party was so divided.

Pompeo also doesn’t have the traditional résumé of a secretary of state. A congressman before he became CIA director, Pompeo doesn’t have the relationship with senators or diplomatic experience on which most secretaries of state have been able to rely, Green pointed out.

That has led to skepticism among Democrats in particular that Pompeo may be swayed by Trump’s controversial views on Russia and more nationalistic tendencies. At his confirmation hearing, he refused to explicitly say whether Trump asked him to get the FBI to back off an aspect of the Russia investigation.

[How Mike Pompeo went from one of Trump’s biggest critics to one of his biggest fans]

It’s also one reason many of Trump’s nominees have struggled to get confirmed: They’re often novices in the job. The secretary of state Trump fired for Pompeo, Rex Tillerson, had no government experience. He got approved by a 13-vote margin, which would be big for Pompeo but is remarkably tight, compared with previous secretaries of state. Green calculated that going back to the Carter era, secretaries of state were approved by an average margin of 91 votes.

There’s a dynamic factoring into Pompeo’s nomination that is uniquely 2018: hyperpartisanship when it comes to the president. Democrats voting against Pompeo have their policy reasons, but it’s undeniable that the politics of sticking it to Trump are a winner among their base.

Opposing Trump is popular among Democrats because Trump is so extremely unpopular. His approval ratings have risen slightly, but he’s still one of the most unpopular presidents in history at this moment in his presidency.

All of that combined makes Trump’s life extremely difficult. His party has such a narrow majority in the Senate that losing one or two senators is all it takes to sink a key vote. He’s nominating people for the Cabinet who would be controversial even in calmer times. And the Senate is so partisan right now that even the historically bipartisan secretary of state position is getting caught up in it.

“Need more Republicans!” Trump tweeted in frustration on Monday morning about the makeup of the Senate. On that, he’s partially right. Pompeo’s Senate snub will make history, but let’s not forget it’s happening, in part thanks to a Republican senator.

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