(RepublicanInformer.com)- Twitter and Facebook are at it again. This time, they are trying to further automate the process of identifying posts on their platforms that they deem as “hate speech.”
According to the Washington Post, which reviewed internal documents from Facebook, the company is on the verge of conducting a “major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate speech.
One part of this new initiative is reversing its “race-blind” enforcement of hate speech. They will now police speech against Muslims, blacks, LGBT, Jews and multi-racial people more than they will anti-white hate speech.
The company is calling it the WoW project. Its algorithms will be reworked to improve detection and then deletion of “the worst of the worst” violators of hate speech rules.
The Post report says Facebook intends to assign number scores to particular posts, and then weigh them by the perceived harm they may cause. Posts with scores that are weighted heavier will be given higher priority.
One example is that a post reading “gay people are disgusting” will take on higher priority for Facebook’s new algorithms than a post that reads “men are pigs.”
Other terms that have been de-prioritized by Facebook’s new algorithms are “men,” “whites” and “Americans,” according to the Post report. The company will now treat posts that have these terms as “low-sensitivity.” In other words, they won’t perceive them as abusive or harmful, and won’t delete the posts as a result.
Sally Aldous, a spokeswoman for Facebook, told the Post:
“We know that hate speech targeted towards underrepresented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious. Over the past year, we’ve also updated our policies to catch more implicit hate speech, such as content depicting Blackface, stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world, and banned Holocaust denial.”
Meanwhile, over at Twitter, the company announced it expanded its policy on hateful conduct. It will not ban language that “dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity or national original.” Twitter will also “continue to surface potentially violative content through proactive detection and automation.”
If reported to Twitter, tweets that violate the company’s rules will be removed. If the users who wrote them repeatedly violate the rules, they might have their account permanently suspended or temporarily locked.
Twitter provided examples of content that would be banned, such as “All [national origin] are cockroaches who live off of welfare benefits and need to be taken away.” Another example they provided is “[Religious Group] should be punished. We are not doing enough to rid us of those filthy animals.?
The social media company further said:
“Many people raised concerns about our ability to enforce our rules fairly and consistently, so we developed a longer, more in-depth training process with our teams to make sure they were better prepared when reviewing reports.”
Both Facebook and Twitter have received a huge amount of criticism over their censorship policies in the past, and it’s unlikely these changes will do much to quell that.
