Ask HN: Why are Twitter and Facebook so poor at moderating hate speech?

8 points by helpfulanon 9 years ago | 12 comments

In response to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/11/get-some-of-them-to-kill-themselves-popular-neo-nazi-site-urges-readers-to-troll-liberals-into-suicide/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_3_na

I want to understand why social media companies don't seem to look as though they are taking responsibility for moderating extremists and coordinated hate groups trolling on their platforms. This problem has been escalating exponentially for years, especially over the US election cycle, and is a critical issue. Why does Silicon Valley feel as though it must not take a position on this?

Twitter, Facebook in my belief are no longer politically neutral organizations when they allow vindictive trolling and misinformation to proliferate and serve the agenda of alt-right hate groups. Do the people working at these companies ever ask themselves these questions or are they purposely oblivious to what's going on?

erichocean 9 years ago |

> Why does Silicon Valley feel as though it must not take a position on this?

Twitter and Facebook already do take positions: they actively kick people and groups off their services. Literally happens every day.

Prior to kicking people off, they actively "shadow ban" unsavory elements of their user base to prevent their ideas/hate speech from spreading.

Twitter even does this kind of shadow banning on a per-tweet basis. For instance, I follow a journalist named Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson). She would always retweet Trump and Clinton in pairs, but I almost never got the Trump retweets (which gave me the distinct impression she was pro-Clinton). I only found out about the per-tweet suppression Twitter employed when she started tweeting about it.

Twitter even goes so far as to put up big ass warnings now when you click on web links to content that violates Twitter's (progressive-friendly, anti-hate) terms of service! The one I saw most recently was for links to https://voxday.blogspot.com/, which is (apparently) some kind of white nationalist site. Presumably, some people who try and follow such a link in their feed will not actually read it, thinking it's some kind of malware site.

What more do you expect them to do? From my perspective, they're already doing a lot.

PaulHoule 9 years ago |

Part of it is that there is not a clear line of where legitimate discourse ends and "hate speech" starts.

helpfulanon 9 years ago | |

Sure there is. Posting an article that was contrived by hate groups, is hate speech. Convincing someone to commit suicide because of their sexual orientation, political views, is hate speech. It's not that hard

UnoriginalGuy 9 years ago | | |

Who defines what groups are a "hate group?"

Is Black Lives Matter a "hate group?" What about Blue Lives Matter? What about an anti-BML group? Who decides? And once they're a hate group, according to you everything they publish is automatically considered "hate speech" and therefore banned. Seems overly broad.

Honestly yelling "it is just obvious" is very naive and unworkable. People have tried for years to come up with black and white definitions of these things and they've all failed. It often boils down to "when I see it, I know it" but that varies per individual.

PaulHoule 9 years ago | | |

That particular case looks cut and dry, but companies like that need to have a policy they can apply consistently and scalably.

Even there it is very hard to prove things. Was a particular message inspired by a particular post? People get bullied into suicide without there being a concerted effort and conspiracy, etc.

It is a tough issue and please don't frame it as left vs right because one thing history shows is that a law meant for one cause will be used for another. For instance, the "religious freedom" laws that boomed in the 1990s started as an attempt to legalize the use of peyote by the Native American Church. The association with anti-gay causes is entiely new. In reality, the biggest benefactor of those laws has probably been the Church of Scientology.

akavi 9 years ago | | |

For the first part, who decides what a hate group is?

For the second, you've merely provided (what I assume are) non-exhaustive examples.

cnnsucks 9 years ago |

Anyone know if Twitter is acting on users calling for the assassination of president elect Trump? Twitter seems to be pretty aggressive at inferring violations of their policies when someone squabbles with an SJW favored party. Trump is prolific Twitter user with a lot of followers ... are they just supposed to look the other way and ignore all the public death threats?

x1798DE 9 years ago | |

"Someone should kill you." Or "I hope someone kills you." are not, by the way, death threats. A death threat would be, "I'm going to kill you."

That said, I'm only inferring the nature of the "threats" from your description, I don't make a habit of looking at politicians' twitter feeds.

lj3 9 years ago |

Wow, damned if you do, damned if you don't. From the right's perspective, Facebook and Twitter actively censors unfavorable political opinions. This goes way beyond just policing hate speech and is one of the biggest reasons the Left didn't see Trump's victory coming. Silencing dissenting opinions doesn't mean those dissenting opinions just go away. But it is funny watching an entire industry fall over themselves trying to figure out the obvious.

throwaway420 9 years ago |

Maybe spreading the idea of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" rather than creating generations of people who need safe spaces and crumble at the smallest unpleasant thought would work better than trying to curb an element of human behavior that has gone on forever and will continue to go on (unfortunately) for a long time.

zer00eyz 9 years ago |

Trolling and misinformation exists on BOTH sides of the fence.

Lets look at one side: Your black so your automatically less

Lets look at the other side: Your a white male so you privileged

One of these is hate speech, the other is a protest/complaint about the current state of things. Functionally both are the same.

For years the courts have been cautious about dealing with language and the first amendment. If you sit down to think about WHY it is because it is a slippery slope.