L’archivio del 18 Maggio 2015

Ucraina e Zuckerberg: conclusione

In continuazione del mio post di giovedì
Per il solo dovere di cronaca pubblico la scontata risposta di Mark Zuckerberg alle pretese degli ucraini:

There has been a bunch of content that has been posted that violates the rules that we have around hate speech. We don’t allow people to post content on Facebook that is overtly hateful toward another group, that has ethnic slurs, that tries to incite violence toward an ethnic group, or anything like that. Unfortunately there were a few posts that folks were posting that kind of tripped that rule. Other folks in our community reported that in, and we looked at those and made the determination that some of those posts included ethnic slurs against some Russian folks, and we took down those posts.

I looked into this personally because this question had 45,000 votes on it, so I wanted to make sure that I understood what I was talking about before we got up here, and I stand by that. I think we did the right thing, according to our policies, in taking down those posts, and I agree with the policies we have around not supporting hate speech. I think that is a good set of rules that we have on the system.

There are a couple of questions that folks were asking about were these posts by Ukrainians moderated by Russians. There’s the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. There’s this meme that was floating around about this policy and the content moderation was done out of a Russian office by Russians who were anti-Ukrainian. And that’s not true. First of all, we don’t actually have a Russian office, so anyone who thinks that this was done out of a Russian office, this should probably put that to rest. We also don’t have a Ukrainian office, and we don’t have offices in lots of other countries around the world, but maybe over time.

What we try to do when people write in and report content, we try to have folks who speak that language review it. We have a European headquarters in Dublin, where we have folks who speak a lot of different languages around the world look at the different content, and that’s what we did here.

We did make one mistake, which was when we reached out to some of the folks to tell them about the content that we had taken down, there was a bug in the system where we accidentally told folks that the content had been taken down because the posts contained nudity, instead of hate speech. That was a mistake. There was a bug in the software we are running. We fixed that. We have reached out and apologized to folks. It’s pretty clear if you look at the posts that they don’t contain nudity, so we understand why that was the source of some confusion. We’ll try not to make that mistake anymore.