Facebook deletes 288,000 “hate speech” posts monthly, including counter-jihad posts, Hamas-linked CAIR still plays victim
Leave it to the Washington Post to ignore the real story — Facebook’s massive smearing of legitimate perspectives as “hate speech” and wholesale blocking or removal of counter-jihad material — and to focus on Muslims, and specifically the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, as if they were the real victims of this censorship. In reality, it is being done on their behalf: Facebook’s Vice President Joel Kaplan traveled to Pakistan in July to assure the Pakistani government that it would remove “anti-Islam” material.
“In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to ‘mitigate the bad’ effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era.”
In mid-February, traffic to Jihad Watch from Facebook dropped suddenly by 90% and has never recovered. We do not post any hateful or provocative material and neither incite nor approve of violence, but Facebook is acting as judge, jury and executioner in all this. There is no appeal and no recourse.
This is at heart a Sharia endeavor, an Islamic supremacist attempt to compel the West to adopt Sharia blasphemy laws forbidding criticism of Islam, and it’s working well. So well, in fact, that as it goes on, as the ground is being cut out from under the feet of those whom she opposes, Hamas-linked CAIR’s Zahra Balloo can play the victim in the Washington Post.
A white man called her kids the n-word. Facebook stopped her from sharing it.,” by Tracy Jan and Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post, July 31, 2017:
…In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building.
The company says it now deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month.
But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.
The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. In the case of Latour and her family, she was simply repeating what the man who verbally assaulted her children said: “What the f— is up with those f—ing n—-r heads?”
Compounding their pain, Facebook will often go from censoring posts to locking users out of their accounts for 24 hours or more, without explanation — a punishment known among activists as “Facebook jail.”
“In the era of mass incarceration, you come into this digital space — this one space that seems safe — and then you get attacked by the trolls and put in Facebook jail,” said Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore. “It totally contradicts Mr. Zuckerberg’s mission to create a public square.”
In June, the company said that nearly 2 billion people now log onto Facebook each month. With the company’s dramatic growth comes the challenge of maintaining internally consistent standards as its content moderators are faced with a growing number of judgment calls.
“Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”
The company recently admitted, in a blog post, that “too often we get it wrong,” particularly in cases when people are using certain terms to describe hateful experiences that happened to them. The company has promised to hire 3,000 more content moderators before the year’s end, bringing the total to 7,500, and is looking to improve the software it uses to flag hate speech, a spokeswoman said.
“We know this is a problem,” said Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja, adding that the company has been meeting with community activists for several years. “We’re working on evolving not just our policies but our tools. We are listening.”
Two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidency, Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office for the San Francisco Bay area, posted to Facebook an image of a handwritten letter mailed to a San Jose mosque and quoted from it: “He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”
The post — made to four Facebook accounts — contained a notation clarifying that the statement came from hate mail sent to the mosque, as Facebook guidelines advise.
Facebook removed the post from two of the accounts — Billoo’s personal page and the council’s local chapter page — but allowed identical posts to remain on two others — the organization’s national page and Billoo’s public one. The civil rights attorney was baffled. After she re-posted the message on her personal page, it was again removed, and Billoo received a notice saying she would be locked out of Facebook for 24 hours.
“How am I supposed to do my work of challenging hate if I can’t even share information showing that hate?” she said.
Billoo eventually received an automated apology from Facebook, and the post was restored to the local chapter page — but not her personal one…