#Facebook’s ‘anti-hate’ algorithm assumes only some bigotry matters

Facebook is overhauling its algorithms for removing hate speech, The Washington Post reports, because policies it thought were race-blind were upsetting a lot of black users and employees.

Specifically, it’s telling its robots to focus on “the worst of the worst,” according to internal documents the paper obtained: “slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews.”

Bigotry against men, whites and Americans won’t be automatically flagged, as they’re “low sensitivity.”

“We know that hate speech targeted towards underrepresented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious,” Facebook spokeswoman Sally Aldous told The Post.

The old algorithms apparently auto-deleted posts in which blacks were simply recounting experiences of racism. But rather than rectifying that problem, Facebook decided that racism against whites either isn’t racism — or doesn’t really count. You can write “whites are stupid” for instance, and not get flagged. But if you said it about another race . . .

How is this the answer? If Facebook feels its algorithms aren’t finding hate speech, improve them. But how does flagging less of one thing mean you’re going to find more of another?

This doesn’t seem like a fix at all: It sounds like Facebook’s employees have decided that only certain kinds of bigotry matter.