Monthly Archives: May 2017

With nearly 2 billion users, Facebook reaches nearly a quarter of the people on the planet. And while its broadcasting power can be used for promoting good causes and unleashing viral cat videos, it can also be used to distribute hateful and violent content. This has put Facebook in the uncomfortable position of making judgment calls about whether the millions of posts flagged by its users as objectionable each week should be allowed to stay, flagged to other users as disturbing, or removed completely. Its an unprecedented responsibility at this scale.

The range of issues is broadfrom bullying and hate speech to terrorism and war crimesand complex, Monika Bickert, Facebooks head of global policy management, recently wrote in an op-ed. To meet this challenge, she said, our approach is to try to set policies that keep people safe and enable them to share freely.

Once Facebook sets these rules, it relies on 4,000 human content moderators to apply them to individual flagged posts.

The job isnt straightforward. According to a Guardian report based on thousands of pages of Facebooks content moderator training materials, Someone shoot Trump should be permitted, but not the phrase Lets beat up fat kids. Digitally created art showing sexual activity should be removed, but all handmade erotic art is fine. Videos showing abortions are also permittedas long as they dont feature nudity.

Guidelines like these illustrate the complexity of content regulation, which until social media came around, involved questions that, for the most part, only governments faced at scale. What constitutes dangerous speech? Should some peoplesuch as the presidentbe treated differently when they make criticisms or threats, or hate speech (paywall)? When is it in the public interest to show obscenity or violence? Should nudity be permitted, and in what contexts?

Some of Facebooks answers to these difficult questions mimic content regulation laws created by democratic governments. According to the Guardian, for instance, Facebook tolerates some violent content, unless it gives us a reasonable ground to accept that there is no longer simply an expression of emotion but a transition to a plot or design. This is somewhat similar to how the US views violent content, which tends to be protected unless it incites immediate violence. (Many European countries, meanwhile, have laws that prohibit violent content or hate speech.)

But the process Facebook uses to create and apply these policies has little in common with democratic governments, which have long, often-transparent processes for creating new laws and courts that weigh each case with considerations that arent available to Facebook moderators. Facebook could improve its content moderation policies, some suggest, by also borrowing some of these ideasrelated to process rather than policyfrom democratic governments.

The multiplication of guidelines, says Agns Callamard, the director of Global Freedom of Expression at Columbia University, as well meaning and well written as they may be, cannot be the answer.

Time to a decision: Facebook relies on thousands of content moderators to make decisions about whether to remove, permit, or label specific content as disturbing based on its rules. To deal with the massive scale on Facebook, the company recently said it would hire 3,000 additional people to review posts. It has also invested in artificial intelligence that could reduce the amount of work for human moderators.

For now, according to one report, a typical Facebook content moderator makes a decision about a flagged piece of content about once every 10 seconds (a Facebook spokesperson declined to confirm or deny this number, saying she didnt have the data). Context is so important, Facebooks Bickert told NPR last year. Its critical when we are looking to determine whether or not something is hate speech, or a credible threat of violence, she said. We look at how a specific person shared a specific post or word or photo to Facebook. So were looking to see why did this particular share happen on Facebook? Why did this particular post happen? Those questions take time to evaluate effectively.

Thats one reason why in most democratic countries, Callamard says, content regulation by media regulators and the courts involve decisions that take days or weeks.

Debate: Content moderators on Facebook dont hear arguments for why they should either permit or remove a piece of content. Users whose pages or accounts they remove do have an option to appeal the decision by submitting it for another review (Facebook recommends they remove the violating content first).

Government content regulators usually have more input from opposing sides. [Decisions] will often involve a judicial process, including several parties arguing one side or the other [as well as] judges reviewing the various arguments and making a decision, Callamard says.

Open discussion of rules: Facebook publishes broad guidelines for what it allows and disallows on its site, but, to keep users from gaming the system, the specifics are only shared in internal documents like the hundreds of training manuals, spreadsheets, and flowcharts that leaked to the Guardian.

A Facebook spokesperson says the company consults experts and local organizations to inform its community standards, but the public doesnt know all of Facebooks content moderation rules, nor is it part of creating them.

By contrast, Callamard says, in a democratic government, the laws upon which these decisions are made have been discussed and debated in Parliament by members of Parliament; by government ministers and where they exist by regional inter-governmental bodies. These laws or decrees would have been the object of several readings, and in the best case scenarios, the general public (including those particularly concerned by the law, e.g. the media) would have been brought in a formal consultation process.

Fundamental context: Governments have different goals than Facebook. In a democratic society, fundamental guiding principles include freedom of expression, freedom of political debate, and protecting content related to the public interest. At an advertising business like Facebook, success involves attracting and retaining users, many of whom dont want to visit a website that shows them offensive or dangerous content. This is a fundamental dimension of the way, in my opinion, Facebook always approaches content regulation, Callamard says. It cannot go so far and so as to undermine or weaken a business model based upon, and driven by data and more data (individuals data).

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Facebook has a government-size censorship responsibility without the structure to handle it - Quartz

"Knowledge is power," as the old saying goes, so it's no surprise that Wikipediaone of the largest repositories of general knowledge ever createdis a frequent target of government censorship around the world. In Turkey, Wikipedia articles about female genitals have been banned; Russia has censored articles about weed; in the UK, articles about German metal bands have been blocked; in China, the entire site has been banned on multiple occasions.

Determining how to prevent these acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption.

In 2011, Wikipedia added support for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which is the encrypted version of its predecessor HTTP. Both of these protocols are used to transfer data from a website's server to the browser on your computer, but when you try to connect to a website using HTTPS, your browser will first ask the web server to identify itself. Then the server will send its unique public key which is used by the browser to create and encrypt a session key. This session key is then sent back to the server which it decrypts with its private key. Now all data sent between the browser and server is encrypted for the remainder of the session.

"The decision to shift to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge."

In short, HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.

The researchers saw a sharp drop in traffic to the Chinese language Wikipedia around May 19, 2015, indicating a censorship event. This did in fact turn out to be the casethe site had been blocked in anticipation of the upcoming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Image: Harvard

Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. The thinking was that this would force the hand of restrictive governments when it came to censorshipdue to how this protocol works, governments could no longer block individual Wikipedia entries. It was an all or nothing deal.

Critics of this plan argued that this move would just result in more total censorship of Wikipedia and that access to some information was better than no information at all. But Wikipedia stayed the course, at least partly because its co-founder Jimmy Wales is a strong advocate for encryption. Now, new research from Harvard shows that Wales' intuition was correctfull encryption did actually result in a decrease in censorship incidents around the world.

The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia's global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. At the end of their year-long data collection, the Harvard researchers also did a client-side analysis, where they would try to access various Wikipedia articles in a variety of languages as they would be seen by a resident in a particular country.

Read More: Jimmy Wales to China After Blocking Wikipedia: I Can Outwait You

After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia's switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015.

Although countries like China, Thailand and Uzbekistan were still censoring part or all of Wikipedia by the time the researchers wrapped up their study, they remained optimistic: "this initial data suggests the decision to shift to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge."

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Wikipedia's Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship - Motherboard

The new Netflix adaptation has young readers (and their parents, and their teachers) casting a curious eye at Jay Ashers Thirteen Reasons Why and if the suicide of its main character is likely to influence real-life tragedies. A librarian tackles this subject for Book Riot, pointing to an instance in Colorado where the book was briefly banned from a high school campus in the wake oflosing several students to suicide.The pain ofsuch an incident overwhelms the reason of even the most reasonable adult, creating the ideal conditions for censorship: In response, we become desperate to do something. Thats good, writes Amy Diegelman. The trouble, though, is that we want something to do now and there are no fast or easy answers. She goes on to list some of the other steps a community can take to ensure that the needs of its young people are taken care of.

By handing its Best Director award to Sofia Coppola, the Cannes Film Festival seems to have set a new standard for representation in the film world, but according to Jessica Chastain, ifyou watch all the movies themselves, you might get a different impression. Speaking out asthe eventconcluded, the actress (and festival judge) offered a grimdiagnosis, having just watched twenty movies in ten days: The one thing I really took away from this experience is how the world views women from the female characters that I saw represented. And it was quite disturbing to me to be honest. (She did note there were some exceptions.) The article also points out that, despite Coppolas historic win and an overall increase of films directed by women, they still only made up 15.8% of the competition. While these moments of progress are definitely something to celebrate, this is hardly the time to start feeling complacent.

Speaking of female directors, Patty Jenkins may have achieved the impossible with her newWonder Woman adaptation, which is already a hit with the critics. Unlike so many of the superhero movies that have preceded it, Jenkinss Wonder Woman required very few reshoots (which means there are almost no deleted scenes), nor did we change the order of one scene in this movie from the script that we went in shooting with. In the age of action films that end up mostly being made (and re-made) in the editing room, this is a terrific accomplishment. Just dont expect to see a teaser about the sequel in the closing credits, because so far no one (including Jenkins) has any idea what happens next.

David Sedaris has opened some of his diaries to the public in the new bookTheft by Finding, but the author claims thatanythinghe found while diggingthrough these old records is somewhat outshone by the material thatsnotably absent. Sedaris explains how growing up in the pre-digital era putlimits on what he was willing to commit to paper: I think thats one of the reasons that Ive never written about sex. Because early on you had to worry that someone was going to find your diary, so its bad enough to be writing like Joan Didion, but writing like Joan Didion about sex acts youd performed with somebody you had known for twenty minutes, thats a bit worse. So I would write in my diary, I met J. and we had sex five times last night. But I would never write about what we did. Now Id give anything to know what I did. Id give anything to know!

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The Case Against School Censorship of 'Thirteen Reasons Why' - Signature Reads