Why It’s So Hard to Define What Online Hate Speech Is | WIRED

kiratebbe's bookmarks 2018-03-15

Summary:

SHORTLY AFTER A rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of a counter-protestor, YouTube removed a video of U.S. soldiers blowing up a Nazi swastika in 1945. In place of the video, users saw a message saying it had been “removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”

Around the same time, an article from the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer attacking Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed during the protest, was shared 65,000 times on Facebook before Facebook started deleting links to the post one day later for violating its community standards on hate speech. After that point, Facebook would only allow links to the post that included a caption denouncing the article or the publication, the company said.

The two incidents underscore a central challenge for technology companies as they reluctantly wade deeper into policing content. To help sort through torrents of material, platform operators increasingly rely on computer algorithms. But these software programs are imperfect tools for assessing the nuances that can distinguish acceptable from unacceptable words or images.

Link:

https://www.wired.com/story/defining-hate-speech-online-is-imperfect-art-as-much-as-science/

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Date tagged:

03/15/2018, 11:09

Date published:

03/15/2018, 07:09