Mastodawn

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

This article by Tekendra Parmar is heartbreaking. Makes my blood boil that people like Yann LeCun still go around gaslighting us about "94% of hate speech taken down by AI" nonsense.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-local-partners-say-hate-speech-stays-on-the-platform-2023-4

""One of the things that Facebook said was, 'We are not arbiters of truth,'"... "I remember asking, wouldn't it be better if Facebook was taking down posts, [rather] than having posts stay on the platform that could hurt people," the partner said.

Facebook's local partners say hate speech stays on the platform

Facebook's "trusted partners" in Ethiopia say the platform was slow to reply to urgent hate speech warnings and allowed hateful content to stay online.

Insider

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"The posts got hundreds of likes, and, among dozens of comments, users urged people to "get organized and clean them," which Abrham and others understood as veiled threats...""I have social capital that I built before you were born," Abrham Amare remembers his father saying. "I'm an innocent person. I have nothing to hide." Surely, a community where he'd spent four decades as an educator would not turn on him."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"people who knew Professor Amare well had become suspicious. A neighbor he'd known for many years confronted him about the allegations. The harassment became incessant. Five days before his murder, Amare resigned from his teaching post..."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"On November 3, 2021, Professor Amare was killed outside his home...As the professor lay bleeding, the group of men encircled him & "chanted the same insulting slander from the inciteful Facebook post," & kept away anyone who might have tried to bring him to a nearby hospital..But according to Abrham Amare's lawsuit, Facebook informed him that post about his father was in violation of its community standards and had been removed."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

"In fact, the post that had destroyed Meareg Amare's good name and, his son believed, led to his murder, was still up...almost a year later as Abrham Amare was preparing his lawsuit against Meta.."...Network Against Hate Speech...ended its relationship with Facebook last month & allowed Insider to review some of its communications...

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

Network reached out to Facebook to say that 60% of the posts & individual accounts they had reported a month earlier remained online..."the grueling work of reviewing traumatic content had left the trusted partners we spoke to struggling with PTSD and depression.

One member of the network said he got rid of all the knives in his kitchen because they were too triggering after watching so much violent content."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"The complaints of the six trusted partners echoed allegations made in Abrham Amare's lawsuit, which accused Meta of "blatant human rights violations and human suffering caused by its business decisions," and called for changes to Facebook's content-moderation practices."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

""In a country where there was an unprecedented civil war & widespread ethnic violence, to take several months to review and take down consequential hate speech is to allow it to cause violence until it's dealt with," a member of the Network Against Hate Speech told Insider."

"This is not the first time that Meta has faced allegations of this kind.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

The slaughter of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2017 exposed how failures in content moderation could be exploited by bad actors to stir up hatred."

And what has changed except them gaslighting us more?

"Meta has also faced accusations that its algorithm allows for the rapid spread of disinformation and has helped propel authoritarian leaders to power in India and the Philippines."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"Meta's global network of trusted partners now includes more than 400 NGOs in hot spots where it may not otherwise have a presence."

Doing all that work with all the PTSD and threats that come with it, for free, and to no avail.

"Some of the trusted partners declined to be named because they've faced death threats and fear for their own safety."

You cannot live in a country undergoing this and report without putting your life in grave danger."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

""Local civil-society organizations are very weak, they accept the money because they need it to work on projects,"..."But they shut down their mouth when it comes to criticizing Facebook. They keep quiet. Just like I'm doing right now by choosing anonymity...Moderators are given "impossible targets in terms of the volume of content to be reviewed per day" and make decisions about posts within "a matter of seconds," the lawsuit said."

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"According to Berhan Taye, the former Africa policy manager at Access Now...the larger question is why a multibillion-dollar company is relying on a network of under-resourced social organizations to help moderate hate speech in crisis zones,...In Ethiopia, phrases like "get organized and clean them" or "take action" appeared in posts and were understood to be calls to violence, ...

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

...according to Abrham Amare's lawsuit and the trusted partners who spoke to Insider."

I saw that on good'ol twitter too....Just 10 percent of Facebook's revenue comes from Rest of World, the accounting term used for countries outside of North America and Western Europe,"

So like most of the world is called "rest of world." Great start.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"We weren't allowed to cry out loud," Abrham said. "The whole atmosphere was against Tigrayans."

To this day, the identity of the killer is unknown.

For Abrham, one of the hardest things has been contending with the destruction of his father's good name.

💔

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 15, 2023

"..his father had for years covered school fees and bought school supplies for underprivileged kids in Bahir Dar. He enjoyed traditional Tigrigna music, & on long drives he'd sing along to the music of Yemane Ghebremichael & Tsehaytu Beraki, Eritrean musicians he adored."

""The cycle needs to stop somewhere," Abrham said. "I don't want other families to suffer the same things we suffered. I want to stop these kinds of things from happening again."

PJ "Vote Green" Coffey Apr 16, 2023

That's really heart breaking. I had no idea that moderation was being given to community groups to do. The whole situation is horrendous and unsustainable.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)Apr 17, 2023

@timnitGebru I used to report fake accounts there when I used it. Even back in 2014, it was not unusual to find hundreds a day. By 2017–18, Facebook left virtually all (well above 60 per cent) reported accounts up. There were many reasons I stopped using that site, but that was one of them: the sheer futility of reporting bots since none of them were ever considered to violate their T&Cs.