The Jewish website Facebook announced that they are holding a competition for software developers to develop an anti-hate algorithm.
AFP:
Facebook unveiled an initiative Tuesday to take on “hateful memes” by using artificial intelligence, backed by crowd sourcing, to identify maliciously motivated posts.
The leading social network said it had already created a database of 10,000 memes — images often blended with text to deliver a specific message — as part of a ramped-up effort against hate speech.
Facebook said it was releasing the database to researchers as part of a “hateful memes challenge” to develop improved algorithms to detect hate-driven visual messages, with a prize pool of $100,000.
“These efforts will spur the broader AI research community to test new methods, compare their work, and benchmark their results in order to accelerate work on detecting multimodal hate speech,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Facebook’s effort comes as it leans more heavily on AI to filter out objectionable content during the coronavirus pandemic that has sidelined most of its human moderators.
Its quarterly transparency report said Facebook removed some 9.6 million posts for violating “hate speech” policies in the first three months of this year, including 4.7 million pieces of content “connected to organized hate.”
Facebook said AI has become better tuned at filtering as the social network turns more to machines as a result of the lockdowns.
Guy Rosen, Facebook vice president for integrity, said that with AI, “we are able to find more content and can now detect almost 90 percent of the content we remove before anyone reports it to us.”
Facebook said it made a commitment to “disrupt” organized hateful conduct a year ago following the deadly mosque attacks in New Zealand which prompted a “call to action” by governments to curb the spread of online extremism.
Automated systems and artificial intelligence can be useful, Facebook said, for detecting extremist content in various languages and analyzing text embedded in images and videos to understand its full context.
This contest seems like a publicity stunt more than anything else. Facebook already has enormous software development resources. So holding this competition is less about building a working censorship algorithm and more about public relations. They just want people like the Jews at the Anti-Defamation League to think that they’re taking the issue of “online hate” seriously.
Specifically, the Jewish actor Sacha Baron Cohen has been working closely with the ADL in pushing Facebook to get even more restrictive with their censorship.
This also comes after Facebook paid a $52 million settlement to their moderators who developed post-traumatic stress disorder from their censorship duties. So what they’re trying to do is automate their censorship to lessen their reliance on human moderators.
But the scale of automated censorship that Facebook is attempting to implement is totally impractical. How is an algorithm supposed to detect satire? And even if you ban keywords like “kike” or “nigger” people will just come up with workaround terms and phrases to articulate the same meaning.
Facebook has already implemented some of the most draconian censorship measures imaginable, so it is hard to see how much further they can push the limits with this, automated or not.
