WaPo reported that a white man called a black woman kids the n-word in public and when she tried posting on her Facebook about that incident, Facebook censored her by deleting the post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi....beb9bc569001&wpisrc=al_alert-national&wpmk=1
Francie Latour was picking out produce in a suburban Boston grocery store when a white man leaned toward her two young sons and, just loudly enough for the boys to hear, unleashed a profanity-laced racist epithet.
Reeling, Latour, who is black, turned to Facebook to vent, in a post that was explicit about the hateful words hurled at her 8- and 12-year-olds on a Sunday evening in July.
I couldnt tolerate just sitting with it and being silent, Latour said in an interview. I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin, like my kids innocence was stolen in the blink of an eye.
But within 20 minutes, Facebook deleted her post, sending Latour a cursory message that her content had violated company standards. Only two friends had gotten the chance to voice their disbelief and outrage.
Experiences like Latours exemplify the challenges Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg confronts as he tries to rebrand his company as a safe space for community, expanding on its earlier goal of connecting friends and family.
But in making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities Zuckerberg says he wants to protect.
The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the worlds population that now logs on each month.
In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebooks role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to mitigate the bad effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebooks mission from connecting the world to community-building.
The company says it now deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month.
But activists say that Facebooks censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.
The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. In the case of Latour and her family, she was simply repeating what the man who verbally assaulted her children said: What the f--- is up with those f---ing n----r heads?
Compounding their pain, Facebook will often go from censoring posts to locking users out of their accounts for 24 hours or more, without explanation a punishment known among activists as Facebook jail.
In the era of mass incarceration, you come into this digital space this one space that seems safe and then you get attacked by the trolls and put in Facebook jail, said Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore. It totally contradicts Mr. Zuckerbergs mission to create a public square.
Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has, said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.
The company recently admitted, in a blog post, that too often we get it wrong, particularly in cases when people are using certain terms to describe hateful experiences that happened to them. The company has promised to hire 3,000 more content moderators before the years end, bringing the total to 7,500, and is looking to improve the software it uses to flag hate speech, a spokeswoman said.
We know this is a problem, said Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja, adding that the company has been meeting with community activists for several years. Were working on evolving not just our policies but our tools. We are listening.
Being put in Facebook jail has become a regular occurrence for Shannon Hall-Bulzone, a San Diego photographer. In June 2016, Hall-Bulzone was shut out for three days after posting an angry screed when she and her toddler were called lazy brown people as they walked to day care and her sister was called a lazy n----r as she walked to work. Within hours, Facebook removed the post.
Many activists who write about race say they break Facebook rules and keep multiple accounts in order to play a cat-and-mouse game with the companys invisible censors, some of whom are third-party contractors working on teams based in the United States or in Germany or the Philippines.
Others have started using alternate spellings for white people, such as wypipo, Y.P. Pull, or yt folkx to evade being flagged by the platform activists have nicknamed Racebook.