Among the most challenging issues for Facebook is its role as the policeman for the free expression of its two billion users.
Now the social network is opening up about its decision-making over which posts it decides to take down - and why. On Tuesday the company for the first time published the 27-page guidelines, called Community Standards, that it gives to its workforce of thousands of human censors. It encompasses dozens of topics including hate speech, violent imagery, misrepresentation, terrorist propaganda, and disinformation. Facebook said it would offer users the opportunity to appeal Facebook's decisions.
The move adds a new degree of transparency to a process that users, the public, and advocates have criticized as arbitrary and opaque. The newly-released guidelines offer suggestions on various topics, including how to determine the difference between humor, sarcasm and hate speech. They explain that images of female nipples are generally prohibited, but exceptions are made for images that promote breastfeeding or address breast cancer.
"We want people to know our standards and we want to give people clarity," Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy management, said in an interview. She added that she hoped publishing the guidelines would spark dialogue. "We are trying to strike the line between safety and giving people the ability to really express themselves."
The company's censors, called content moderators, have been chastised by civil rights groups for mistakenly removing posts by minorities who had shared stories of being the victims of racial slurs. Moderators have struggled to tell the difference between someone posting a slur as an attack and someone who was using the slur to tell the story of their own victimization.
In another instance, moderators removed an iconic Vietnam War photo of a child fleeing a napalm attack, claiming the girl's nudity violated its policies. (The photo was restored after protests from news organizations.) Moderators have deleted posts from activists and journalists in Myanmar and in disputed territories such as Palestine and Kashmir, and have banned the pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk as "unsafe to the community."
The release of the guidelines is part of a wave of transparency that Facebook hopes will quell its many critics. It has also published political ads and streamlined its privacy controls after coming under fire for its lax approach to protecting consumer data.
The company is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over the misuse of data by a Trump-connected consultancy known as Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently testified before Congress about the issue. Bickert said discussions about sharing the guidelines started last fall and were not related to the Cambridge controversy.
The company's content policies, which began in earnest in 2005, addressed nudity and Holocaust denial in the early years. They have ballooned from a single page in 2008 to 27 pages today.
As Facebook has come to reach nearly a third of the world's population, Bickert's team has expanded significantly, and is expected to grow even more in the coming year. A far-flung team of 7,500 reviewers, in places like Austin, Dublin, and the Philippines, assesses posts 24-hours a day, seven days a week, in more than 40 languages. Moderators are sometimes temporary contract workers without much cultural familiarity with the content they are judging, and they make complex decisions in applying Facebook's rules.
Bickert also employs high-level experts including a human rights lawyer, a rape counselor, a counterrorism expert from West Point, and a PhD researcher with expertise in European extremist organizations, as part of her content review team.
Activists and users have been particularly frustrated by the absence of an appeals process when their posts are taken down. (Facebook users are allowed to appeal the shutdown of an entire account, but not individual posts.) The Washington Post previously documented how people have liked this this predicament to being put into "Facebook jail" - without being given a reason why they were locked up.
No comments:
Post a Comment