Facebook: Hate Speech Against White People Isn’t All That Important

Facebook has been monitoring and censoring “hate speech” for a while now, but things are about to change. Apparently, the company has figured out that they are spending far too many of their precious resources tracking down and deleting hateful speech that targets white people, men, and Americans. So, in a change of policy, the company will reportedly de-prioritize this kind of speech and repurpose their moderators and algorithms to focus on the “worst of the worst” forms of hate speech: “Slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews.”

The Washington Post, which reported on the changes based on internal Facebook documents, said that the company’s original policies saw Facebook “being more vigilant about removing slurs lobbed against White users while flagging and deleting innocuous posts by people of color on the platform.”

“In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about ‘Whites,’ ‘men’ and ‘Americans,’” the Post reported. “Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as ‘low-sensitivity’ — or less likely to be harmful — so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms. That means roughly 10,000 fewer posts are now being deleted each day, according to the document.”

So basically, yeah, if you see someone on Facebook saying, “kill Whitey” or something, you can report it and maybe they’ll do something about it and maybe they won’t. It’s just really not that important.

“We know that hate speech targeted towards underrepresented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “Over the past year, we’ve also updated our policies to catch more implicit hate speech, such as content depicting Blackface, stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world, and banned Holocaust denial.”

The Post spoke to one of these supposed experts – Professor Danielle Citron of Boston Law School. She said: “We can’t combat systemic racism if we can’t talk about it, and challenging white supremacy and White men is an important part of having dialogue about racism. But you can’t have the conversation if it is being filtered out, bizarrely, by overly blunt hate speech algorithms.”

See, we can’t have progress if we can’t use Facebook to slander white people, call them racist bigots, and blame them for all the evils of the world!

Evils such as…inventing Facebook.