So now we have reports that Mark Zuckerberg, and his evil minion Joel Kaplan insisted that Facebook continued to use algorithms that discriminated against minorities.
This does not surprise me. Zuckerberg is scum, and Kaplan is a Republican apparatchik who cut his teeth as a "Brooks Brothers Rioter" using the threat of violence to prevent the vote count:
Last year, researchers at Facebook showed executives an example of the kind of hate speech circulating on the social network: an actual post featuring an image of four female Democratic lawmakers known collectively as “The Squad.”
The poster, whose name was scrubbed out for privacy, referred to the women, two of whom are Muslim, as “swami rag heads.” A comment from another person used even more vulgar language, referring to the four women of color as “black c---s,” according to internal company documents exclusively obtained by The Washington Post.
The post represented the “worst of the worst” language on Facebook — the majority of it directed at minority groups, according to a two-year effort by a large team working across the company, the document said. The researchers urged executives to adopt an aggressive overhaul of its software system that would primarily remove only those hateful posts before any Facebook users could see them.
But Facebook’s leaders balked at the plan. According to two people familiar with the internal debate, top executives including Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan feared the new system would tilt the scales by protecting some vulnerable groups over others. A policy executive prepared a document for Kaplan that raised the potential for backlash from “conservative partners,” according to the document. The people spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.
It's always Joel Kaplan who is protecting racists and right-wing terrorists, isn't it?
The previously unreported debate is an example of how Facebook’s decisions in the name of being neutral and race-blind in fact come at the expense of minorities and particularly people of color. Far from protecting Black and other minority users, Facebook executives wound up instituting half-measures after the “worst of the worst” project that left minorities more likely to encounter derogatory and racist language on the site, the people said.
“Even though [Facebook executives] don’t have any animus toward people of color, their actions are on the side of racists,” said Tatenda Musapatike, a former Facebook manager working on political ads and CEO of the Voter Formation Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses digital communication to increase participation in local state and national elections. “You are saying that the health and safety of women of color on the platform is not as important as pleasing your rich White man friends.”
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Civil rights groups have long claimed that Facebook’s algorithms and policies had a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, and particularly Black users. The “worst of the worst” documents show that those allegations were largely true in the case of which hate speech remained online.
But Facebook didn’t disclose its findings to civil rights leaders. Even the independent civil rights auditors Facebook hired in 2018 to conduct a major study of racial issues on its platform say they were not informed of the details of research that the company’s algorithms disproportionately harmed minorities. Laura Murphy, president of Laura Murphy and Associates, who led the civil rights audit process, said Facebook told her that “the company does not capture data as to the protected group(s) against whom the hate speech was directed.”
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The 10 worst examples, according to the surveyed users, were almost all directed at minority groups, documents show. Five of the posts were directed at Black people, including statements about mental inferiority and disgust. Two were directed at the LGBTQ community. The remaining three were violent comments directed at women, Mexicans and White people.
These findings about the most objectionable content held up even among self-identified White conservatives that the market research team traveled to visit in Southern states. Facebook researchers sought out the views of White conservatives in particular because they wanted to overcome potential objections from the company’s leadership, which was known to appease right-leaning viewpoints, two people said.
Yet racist posts against minorities weren’t what Facebook’s own hate speech detection algorithms were most commonly finding. The software, which the company introduced in 2015, was supposed to detect and automatically delete hate speech before users saw it. Publicly, the company said in 2019 that its algorithms proactively caught more than 80 percent of hate speech.
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“This information confirms what many of us already knew: that Facebook is an active and willing participant in the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation,” Omar said in a statement. “For years, we have raised concerns to Facebook about routine anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant content on Facebook, much of it based on outright falsehoods. It is clear that they only care about profit, and will sacrifice our democracy to maximize it.”
For years, Black users said that those same automated systems also mistook posts about racism as hate speech — sending the user to “Facebook jail” by blocking their account — and made them disproportionate targets of hate speech that the company failed to control. But when civil rights leaders complained, those content moderation issues were routinely dismissed as merely “isolated incidents” or “anecdotal,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights group that regularly sought more forceful action by the company against hate speech and incitements to violence on Facebook, and has argued that Kaplan should be fired.
While firing Joel Kaplan is an unalloyed good, one needs to remember that the Cossacks work for the Czar.
Mark Zuckerberg is a cancer on humanity.
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