https://www.cnet.com/features/is-facebook-censoring-conservatives-or-is-moderating-just-too-hard/
Is Facebook censoring conservatives or is moderating just too hard?
The company
says it makes moderation errors. Others, particularly conservatives, see
censorship.
Last
year, Prager University
took to Twitter to complain about Facebook. The conservative
organization's grievance? Facebook had
blocked videos that were flagged as hate speech.
One of the blocked videos argued that men should be more
masculine, rather than less. Another video stated it wasn't Islamophobic to
argue that the Muslim world is currently "dominated by bad ideas and
beliefs."
Facebook quickly
apologized, tweeting that the blocks were
mistakes. The social network, which defines hate speech as a "direct
attack" based on religion, gender or other protected characteristics, said
it would look into what happened.
That didn't satisfy PragerU or some of
its more than 3 million Facebook followers, who accused the company
of intentionally censoring conservative speech.
"They didn't do anything until there was a public
outcry," said Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer of PragerU, adding
that the social network has a history of censoring conservative speech.
Facebook has repeatedly denied that it suppresses conservative
voices.
The dust-up between PragerU and Facebook underscores one of the
biggest challenges for social media companies as they try to become consistent
about what content is allowed on their platforms. Content moderation errors,
whether innocent or intentional, fuel an ongoing belief that social networks
like Facebook, Twitter and
Google-owned YouTube censor
speech.
Conservatives are not the only ones to accuse Facebook of
censorship. Some LGBQT users
and some black users have
made the same claim, but conservatives are the most consistently vocal.
The allegation of anti-right bias at Facebook goes back to at
least 2016, when former contractors who worked at the company told Gizmodo they'd
been instructed to suppress news from conservative sources. Facebook denied the
allegations.
Conservatives cite Silicon Valley's largely liberal
workforce, as well as events like the barring of figures
like Milo Yiannopoulos and YouTube's demonetizing
various right-of-center channels, as evidence of bias.
Tech companies have said in congressional
hearings that suppressing content based on viewpoint goes
against their missions. A Twitter representative told Congress this
year it found "no statistically significant
difference" between the reach of tweets by Democrats versus Republicans. Mark Zuckerberg,
Facebook's boss, has had a quiet series of dinners with aggrieved
conservatives to hear their complaints about perceived bias.
What is called censorship by some, as in the case of PragerU, has
been labeled a mistake by tech companies themselves.
Facebook, which has more than 2.5 billion users worldwide, says
human reviewers make the wrong call in more than 1 in 10 cases. The estimate is
based on a sample of content taken down by mistake, and posts that were left up
but should have been pulled down.
It's unclear how many posts this equates to, but content reviewers
look at more than 2 million posts a day, Facebook said. Twitter and Google
declined to disclose their error rates.
Allegations of conservative censorship partially stem from a lack
of trust in specific companies, says Jillian York, director for international
freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Facebook has been
particularly beleaguered by scandals in recent years, ranging from content
moderation spats to the infamous Cambridge Analytica case.
"Most of this content moderation is still done by humans, and
humans are notorious for having their own values and biases," York said.
Tech companies routinely release data about the types of content
they remove from their platforms. Content moderation, though, is still an
opaque process. Advocacy groups have been pushing social media companies to
share more information about how they apply their policies.
Content moderation is a "black box" that even experts
are still trying to wrap their heads around, said Liz Woolery, deputy director
of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
"If we can get a better look inside that black box, we can begin to better
understand content moderation at large."
How
mistakes happen
Social networks might mistakenly pull down or keep up content for
a host of reasons. Human reviewers sometimes have trouble interpreting the
company's rules. A machine might have mistakenly flagged a post because of a
keyword or a user's behavior.
PragerU's Strazzeri said Facebook told him that a worker on the
company's content moderation team removed both videos after labelling them as
hate speech.
"The fact that they admitted that one employee was
responsible for both of them -- it doesn't sound like a mistake. It sounds like
a deliberate action," Strazzeri said.
Facebook confirmed the mistake was due to human error but declined
to provide details about how it happened. The PragerU incident is just one of
several high-profile errors by social networks.
In June, Twitter apologized for suspending accounts critical of
the Chinese government ahead of the 30th anniversary of the violent crackdown
on pro-democracy demonstrations known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The suspensions,
which prompted concerns that the Chinese government was further suppressing
free speech, were actually mistakes
in a system designed to catch spammers and fake accounts, Twitter
said.
For its own battle with Silicon Valley, PragerU may find a
powerful ally in President Donald Trump. Trump temporarily launched a website
in May asking people to share information with the government if they believed
their social media account had been suspended, banned or reported because of political bias.
With the 2020 election cycle heating up, allegations of bias are
likely to rise. Zuckerberg attempted to preempt this at a Georgetown University speech in mid-October.
"I'm here today because I believe we must continue to stand
for free expression," he said.
Facebook and Twitter are often on high alert around events like
elections and important commemoration days. For that reason, content moderation
mistakes can be made at the most inopportune time for bloggers and
creators.
A month before the first phase of India's general election in
April, Dhruv Rathee, an Indian YouTuber who posts political videos, got a
notice from Facebook that he was banned for 30 days because one of his posts
violated the site's community standards.
Rathee's blocked post contained underlined passages from an
Encyclopaedia Britannica biography of Adolf Hitler. "These are paragraphs
from Adolf Hitler. Read the lines I underlined in red color," the post
reads. Rathee was making a comparison between the German dictator and incumbent
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but he doesn't mention the latter by name.
He was on the fence about whether it was a mistake made by a
machine or if a Facebook worker was trying to ban him from the social network
ahead of the election.
The notice Rathee received from Facebook didn't mention which rule
he violated, Rathee told CNET. There was a button to contest the decision but
no way to email or call a Facebook employee for help.
So, like PragerU, he tweeted about the ban and within the same day
he received a note from Facebook acknowledging it had made a mistake and would
unblock his account.
"I think it only happened because of the publicity I got from
my tweet," said Rathee, who has roughly 355,000 followers on Twitter.
"Someone who doesn't have that large following is helpless."
Appealing a
decision
Social media users, whether or not they're high profile, say they
have trouble appealing what they perceive as content moderation errors. Users
have complained about automated responses or links that don't work, further
fueling speculation of bias and censorship. Not everyone who has tried to
appeal a decision has been successful.
Eileen Morentz, a resident of Oakland, California, who uses
Twitter to talk politics, responded earlier this year to tweets about the topic
of unwanted touching. At some point in the conversation, Morentz said she
tweeted that the user's viewpoint about the topic was similar to men calling
women who weren't interested in sleeping with them "frigid bitches."
That's when she got a notice from Twitter saying she could delete
the tweet and have her account unlocked or appeal the decision. She chose the
latter, arguing to the company that she was making an analogy and not
name-calling a user.
She never heard back, so she ended up abandoning her account and
creating a new one.
Whether something stays up or is taken down can come down to a
moderator's interpretation of a single word or phrase. This can be harder than
it sounds because of cultural context. Often slurs have been reclaimed by
communities as their own. In 2017, Facebook came under fire from members of the
LGBTQ community after their accounts were mistakenly suspended for using the
word "dyke," according to Wired.
Strazzeri, the PragerU executive, said Facebook hasn't flagged the
organization's videos since the incident last year. But the nonprofit has
raised censorship concerns about other social networks.
PragerU has sued Google-owned YouTube twice over allegations of
conservative censorship. A California judge dismissed one of the lawsuits in
2018. The other is still ongoing. PragerU also said that Twitter banned it from
advertising.
The organization's troubles with Facebook aren't over, Strazzeri
said. Facebook users have told PragerU that they've liked a post only to go
back and discover it was unliked, or find that they've unfollowed PragerU's
page when they haven't. A Facebook spokesperson said the company would look
into these issues if PragerU provided more information.
It's unclear whether the reported changes are real, intentional or
just another mistake made by Facebook.
Comments
Post a Comment