Max Fisher @Max_Fisher
I spent months reporting on an aspect of Facebook that's far more significant than most realize: moderation.
Facebook, I found, is going further than it has acknowledged, exerting tremendous — and largely unseen — power over our politics and societies
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html
Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook
Facebook maintains a secret catalog of guidelines and rulebooks telling moderators what to allow or remove. It has sprawled to more than 1,400 pages — which I know because they were leaked to me. We have included a number of them in our story. They are ... a doozy.
This investigation is based on the 1,400 pages of FB internal documents, internal Facebook emails, interviews with moderators who spoke to me at personal risk, interviews with top Facebook executives, and reporting on multiple continents. I think the results are concerning.
There are two things I want you to take away from this story:
(1) Facebook, to address hate and misinformation epidemics of its own creation, is intervening into political and social matters the world over. Like an unseen branch of government, it is governing without our consent
(2) Facebook is doing this all on the cheap, shipping disorganized PowerPoint slides to outsourcing companies it can barely control. And it is making many, many mistakes along the way.
In Myanmar, for instance, a paperwork error in Facebook's rulebooks meant that moderators were explicitly told to ALLOW posts from MaBaTha — a pro-genocide group accused of organizing mass violence, that Facebook had claimed to have banned months earlier.
Another example: guidelines for the Balkans, where ultranationalist groups increasingly weaponize Facebook. But Facebook's guidelines for the region — which shape what users can and can't say, what groups can and can't operate — hasn't been updated since 2016. Filled with errors.
Facebook's moderation policies, which we combed through with the help of regional and legal experts, appear to repeatedly skew in favor of governments, which can fine or regulate Facebook. Some explicitly tell moderators: if you upset the govt, we could get blocked.
One worrying discovery: Facebook's India guidelines tell moderators to flag, as likely illegal, any post criticizing a religion. In reality, most criticism of religion is legal in India. Facebook is huge in India. Its policy — mistake? overcaution? — could have profound effects.
Key paragraph from the article itself
An examination of the files revealed numerous gaps, biases and outright errors. As Facebook employees grope for the right answers, they have allowed extremist language to flourish in some countries while censoring mainstream speech in others.
and
The Facebook employees who meet to set the guidelines, mostly young engineers and lawyers, try to distill highly complex issues into simple yes-or-no rules. Then the company outsources much of the actual post-by-post moderation to companies that enlist largely unskilled workers, many hired out of call centers.
Those moderators, at times relying on Google Translate, have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to “jihad,” for example, forbidden? When is a “crying laughter” emoji a warning sign?
Moderators express frustration at rules they say don’t always make sense and sometimes require them to leave up posts they fear could lead to violence. “You feel like you killed someone by not acting,” one said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.
I have no doubt whatsoever that twitter is similar - or that its possible simply to have a single friend 'on the inside' who can make decisions like this without transparency or oversight.
The whole thing is not just about the trans subject but about much wider issues. And you don't have to be a liberatarian to have concerns - equally if you believe in transparency and governing by consent you should be very concerned.
This is also why MN is disliked - because it does not follow the same rules as the big social media companies so is a direct threat to their power. Kiwifarms is just entering into this combat zone for ultimately the same reason. And its NOT because of trans rights but something much wider and bigger relating to power and control.