Wednesday, May 09, 2018
Hate speech has always been
difficult to define. Facebook, caught with its fingers in the cookie jar of our
private
information, has decided that teaching us what hate speech means is
sufficient penance. But penance or contrition isn’t something Mark Zuckerberg
understands. Giving us at long last a glimpse into Facebook’s mysterious Community
Standards is MZ’s way of saying, “Okay. We stole your information, so here’s
what we’ll give you.”
As if this is a business
exchange.
Which it most assuredly is not.
For years, private individuals
have reported anti-Israel Facebook pages that threaten Jews with violence and
death, and defame the Jewish people in coarse and disgusting ways. The response
from Facebook support has always been: we reviewed your report and determined
that this page/content does not violate our community standards.
But we were never told what
those standards were.
As far as we were concerned, a
page called Death
to Israel, for instance, violates ALL standards of permitted speech and
human decency, leading us to believe that Facebook’s Community Standards were no
standards at all.
Even worse, when trolls would
report pro-Israel advocacy pages, Facebook would accede to demands to censor
the pages or close them down. It seems that Facebook had initiated a concerted
effort to bolster anti-Israel voices while squelching those of the pro-Israel
community. This repugnant policy smelled all the worse for the fact that
Zuckerberg is Jewish, if in name, only.
After a while, we discovered a
go-around: that if enough people reported those awful antisemitic hate pages, Facebook
would usually take them down. But then they’d go right back up, a few days or
weeks later. They thought that once we won, we’d stop paying attention and they
could allow those pages to tiptoe right back in.
It is a disgusting, disheartening
experience that mirrors the process by which trolls are able to keep pro-Israel
advocates endlessly in jail.
Now Zuckerberg is at long last
being called on the carpet to come clean. In a statement
he issued prior to his testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee, the guy
admitted he was only reassessing Facebook’s hate speech policies because the
media was on him like white on rice.
“… it’s clear now that we
didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That
goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well
as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our
responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”
In other words, it was a
mistake only because he got CAUGHT.
One result of this was this
release explaining, at long last, Facebook’s Community Standards. Here’s an
excerpt from the section that defines hate
speech:
We define hate speech as a direct attack on people
based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national
origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender
identity, and serious disability or disease. We also provide some protections
for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech,
statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation. We separate
attacks into three tiers of severity, as described below.
Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate
speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. Similarly, in
some cases, words or terms that might otherwise violate our standards are used
self-referentially or in an empowering way. When this is the case, we allow the
content, but we expect people to clearly indicate their intent, which helps us
better understand why they shared it. Where the intention is unclear, we may
remove the content.
We allow humor and social commentary related to these topics.
In addition, we believe that people are more responsible when they share this
kind of commentary using their authentic identity.
While some welcomed this
attempt to finally lay out for us what Facebook deems hate speech, this
document did not at all explain why a page called Death to Israel is allowed to
stand, while a page that expresses love for Israel, is not, the minute a troll
reports it.
I tend to be courteous on
public fora. I avoid coarse language, bias, and bigotry. To the best of my
ability, I don’t use insulting language. This approach has served me well. I’ve
been in Facebook jail exactly once, and that was years ago, for a comment I
shouldn’t have made, calling out a woman for claiming to be a Jew when she had
privately admitted to me she was not. I embarrassed her. And I got the
equivalent of a Facebook slap on the hand when the woman reported my comment.
Imagine my surprise then, when
one week ago, out of the blue, I go to Facebook and confronting me is this
text:
This post goes against our community standards.
Only you can see this post because it goes against our
standards on hate speech.
Under this was a comment I only
vaguely remembered from some years ago. It was a reply on a thread and it read:
Seeing things through rose-colored glasses is also
discrimination-an idea you’ve come to with no proof-a generalization about an
entire people. You actually don’t know that most Arabs are not terrorists and
neither do I. I don’t make generalizations one way or the other. Because it is
wrong to do so when you don’t know it for a fact. It is misleading.
I am not frightened of Arabs because I see all of them as
terrorists. I am not discriminating against them. I am frightened of Arabs
because of Arab terror. It is prudent to be cautious, realistic, considering
our reality.
At the bottom of the comment
was a button reading: “continue.”
When I went to the next page,
there was an explanation that I probably didn’t know enough about Facebook
Community standards to realize that this was hate speech, so they were hiding
the post, as a kind of first warning. Only I would be able to see it. That is
if I wanted to. If I wanted to dig through years and years of hundreds of
thousands of comments to find it.
Not that anyone else would be
digging through hundreds of thousands of comments to find it either. Although
clearly someone in a cubicle at Facebook is busily perusing my comment history,
scouring it for something, anything, that would offend the unfathomable
Facebook Community Standards.
I would like to say that this
little lesson from Mark Z. illuminated everything I needed to know about hate speech.
I’d like to say that I learned something about being polite on a public forum,
about being a kind, moral, and loving person. But reviewing the comment deemed
by the Facebook powers that be as “hate speech,” I’m left more confused and
upset than ever.
What I wrote was not hate
speech. It was the opposite of hate speech.
I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t
love Arabs. I am cordial to Arabs in stores and in public places and count some
Arabs among my friends. But I also fear Arabs.
Which is not the same as hate.
The other night, my husband and
I drove to my son’s army base in an out of the way settlement, which had years
ago suffered a brutal infiltration and terror attack. We didn’t know our way
around and it was night. We waited until a Jewish resident was traveling the
last several miles up the lonely highway to the settlement and tagged along
behind.
At one point, two cars with PA
licenses passed us, one on the right and on the left. My husband thought they
were about to do a pincer movement to create a barrier on the road that would
trap us, so they could attack us and the Jewish family car ahead of us. It was
just a split second and then the Arabs in those cars appeared to reconsider and
drove on, leaving us unscathed.
Did we imagine it? I honestly
do not know. What I do know: we had to be ready. Things like this can and do
happen in Israel. And it isn’t Jewish Israelis that do these things, but Arabs.
Arabs like the men in these two cars. In the dark, we had very little
information to go on.
In the back of our minds, we
must always be cautious in our dealings with Arabs we don’t know. It’s not
about hate. It’s because of actual things a significant number of Arabs have
done to Jews in Israel.
I try to be fair. I try to be
open in my dealings with all people, no matter their ethnic identity or color.
I don’t hate any people as a group with the exception, for instance, of known
terrorists. My fear on that road was a reasonable fear and it was not even a
little bit powered by hatred.
With the lecture it gave me on
the comment it hid, Facebook taught me exactly nothing about hate speech. What
it did teach me is that Facebook is running around in circles to continue in its Big
Brother ways—making arbitrary and thoughtless rulings on the limits of free
speech.
What a shame to waste all that
power and influence when Facebook arguably could have been a force for good.
