Facebook Apologizes for Inconsistent Actions vs. Hate-Filled Posts
Facebook recently apologized for the inconsistencies in their community rules which permitted hate-filled posts to remain online.
Facebook is undeniably one of the biggest social media platforms used around the world with more than 2.07 billion monthly active user accounts as of the third quarter of 2017. With that amount of users, the company installed "community standards" that serve as a reference for their content reviewers to determine if a reported post should be taken down or not.
Pro Publica launched a a crowdsourced investigation in August 2017 to understand how Facebook's alleged "secret censorship rules" worked based on cross-examining various reported hate speech and how the company handled it.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The report claimed that they were able to gather more than 900 posts from their readers and concluded that Facebook content reviewers were inconsistent in deciding whether or not a hate speech should be removed.
For example, two readers who joined Pro Publica's investigation shared a generally similar anti-Muslim post. One user reported a very graphic photo of a man shot in the head that was captioned: "The only good Muslim is a f****** dead one" while another flagged a comment without a photo that said: "Death to the Muslims."
The two separate posts were clearly against Facebook's rule that prohibited users from spreading hate speech against people based on their religion. However, the user that reported the graphic photo was told by Facebook that it did not violate their community standards while the text comment was taken down.
The report maintained that the same case was found in other instances shared to them by hundreds of their readers.
Even Facebook Vice President Justin Osofsky recognized that the social media platform still had a lot to improve in this matter, even though they already have around 7,500 content reviewers.
Reacting to Pro Publica's report, Osofsky said: "We're sorry for the mistakes we have made — they do not reflect the community we want to help build."
He added: "We must do better."
Osofsky also revealed that Facebook was set to employ up to 20,000 additional staff within 2018 to become content reviewers as well.
