Facebook Asks on Every Post: 'Is This Hate Speech?'
Facebook Asks on Every Post: 'Is This Hate Speech?'
By TYLER O'NEIL MAY 1, 2018
UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom for Facebook's response.
On Tuesday, Facebook launched an initiative enabling
users to identify "hate speech."
On virtually every single public post, an option has emerged.
"Does this post contain hate speech?" the site asks, giving two
options: "Yes" or "No." Each post also gives the option to
dismiss the question with a tiny "x" box to the right of the answers.
The "hate speech" question even appears on a
user's own posts.
Facebook appears to have applied this policy to
everyone's posts, an equal opportunity "hate speech" identifying
project. It shows up on PJ Media:
Even posts not sharing articles had the "hate
speech" identification option.
Then, just as suddenly as the "hate speech"
identification options appeared, they disappeared on Tuesday morning.
Some did not take kindly to this option. "What the
heck Facebook? Why are you asking if I'm committing hate speech?" Joshua
Herring, a humanities instructor at Thales Academy and contributor for The
Imaginative Conservative and The Federalist, asked.
Joshua Herring on Facebook complaining about being asked
if he is engaged in sharing "hate speech."
After the "hate speech" identification options
disappeared, a Facebook spokesperson explained the situation to PJ Media.
"This was an internal test we were working on to
understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be
hate," the spokesperson said. "A bug caused it to launch publicly.
It's been disabled.”
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