Flutterby™! : Facebook's algorithm is racist

As Facebook has yet again dinged me for posting pictures of one of our cats, it's useful to look at their fuckups over time: Facebook’s race-blind policies around hate speech came at the expense of Black users, new documents show — Researchers proposed a fix to the biased algorithm, but one internal document predicted pushback from “conservative partners”

One of the reasons for these errors, the researchers discovered, was that Facebook’s “race-blind” rules of conduct on the platform didn’t distinguish among the targets of hate speech. In addition, the company had decided not to allow the algorithms to automatically delete many slurs, according to the people, on the grounds that the algorithms couldn’t easily tell the difference when a slur such as the n-word and the c-word were used positively or colloquially within a community. The algorithms were also over-indexing on detecting less harmful content that occurred more frequently, such as “men are pigs,” rather than finding less common but more harmful content.

“If you don’t do something to check structural racism in your society, you’re going to always end up amplifying it,” one of the people involved with the project told The Post. “And that is exactly what Facebook’s algorithms did.”