#facebook explains why it’s bad at catching hate speech

Tech

As part of Facebook’s promise to answer “hard questions,” the company has published a long explanation of how it finds and removes hate speech — or at least, why it’s often not very good at it. The post runs through the difficulties of defining hate speech across different countries, teaching AI to handle its nuances, and separating intentionally hateful posts from ones that describe hate speech to critique it.

Facebook lays out ambiguous scenarios that could flummox automated tools, including insulting terms that communities have reclaimed. It also describes some cases where it clearly got things wrong: it removed a piece of hate mail that activist Shaun King had posted in order to condemn, for example, a mistake Facebook acknowledges…

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