fbpx

Can Black America Trust Silicon Valley’s New Content Police Departments?

Can Black America Trust Silicon Valley’s New Content Police Departments?

 

Racism is no longer just in the streets, in the workplace, it’s in cyberspace. Every time one turns on a computer and visits social media sites, there is the chance to be faced with bigots and bigoted posts. And while social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter have said they are becoming more vigilant when policing content and deleting racists posts, can Black America really trust Silicon Valley’s new content police department with keeping them free from harm? And will the overzealous policing actually come to hurt free speech and in particular grassroots, minority organizations while protecting deep-pocketed, well-connected users?

So far, the evidence is piling up to the contrary. It doesn’t take a detective to see how different races are treated by various social media sites.

Black users are much more likely to be offended by hate posts by whites than vice versa. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, Black social-media users are nearly as twice as likely as whites to see race-focused content on social media. The study, “Social Media Conversations About Race,” found that 86 percent of black social-media users surveyed by Pew report seeing at least some race-related posts on their feeds, while only 35% of white users do.

“What is perhaps more striking is that the study found that Black social-media users who rarely or never discuss race are more likely to see race-related content on social media than whites who frequently talk about race by a margin of 55% to 41%, respectively,” Business Insider reported.

And some of these posts Black people are confronted with are outright racists. Conservative radio personality Alex Jones has caused a brouhaha with his posts, which has caused him to be kicked off social platforms and YouTube. Although Twitter has yet to suspend his account, even though many label his post as hate speech.

While Twitter hasn’t budged, there has been pressure on Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey, to ban Jones. But Dorsey explained the company’s position in a series of five tweets he explained: “Jones hasn’t violated Twitter’s rules; Twitter won’t ban someone just because other platforms did; Journalists should ‘document, validate, and refute’ the ‘unsubstantiated rumors’ that ‘accounts like Jones’’ spread,” The Verge reported. Those tweets received 20,000 comments in its first 24 hours.

Others did ban Jones, and Amazon even took “Amazon’s Choice” logo off of his products.

Social media claims it is taking action to prevent hate speech. In fact, Facebook boasted about hiring 10,000 moderators.  “Facebook’s plan to guard itself against misuse of its free service includes doubling the number of people working on cybersecurity and content moderation to 20,000 employees in 2018, no small feat since finding qualified tech workers is already difficult,” CNet reported.

It’s going to be costly for Facebook–it will “increase Facebook’s projected spending by up to $12.3 billion in 2018, to a potential total of more than $32.7 billion. (In 2017, it was just under $20.5 billion.),” CNet reported.

No matter how many content police are on duty, if the races are treated differently it won’t matter. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all have an apartheid content policy problem. Let’s pull out the files. “Facebook is banning content or de-monetizing with Black people speaking out against racism and white supremacy. Yet, when white males do the opposite, they are not censored as much. Leaked Facebook training documents show how the tech giant deals with white supremacy, racism–and there is a difference. The documents, which were obtained by Motherboard, were supposedly used to train Facebook moderators on white supremacy following the death of a protester in Charlottesville in August 2017,” Moguldom reported.

The culprit is in the algorithms. “An investigation was conducted earlier this year of Facebook algorithms used to differentiate between hate speech and political expression. The results? Not so shocking. Facebook trains its content reviewers to protect white men — but not black children or women — from hate speech,” Moguldom reported.

When tech giants try to curb hate speech, they have been known to go overboard. Recently,  Spotify’s new hateful-conduct policy sparked a race debate. Citing their actions had been classified as “hateful conduct,” Spotify decided to de-playlist artists including R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Observers noted that two prominent Black artists became the first victims of the new policy.

“Billboard has some (anonymous) quotes from industry executives raising the matter. ‘How many artists on the white side? We can go down the list and note all the disgusting things that they have done but they seem to still have access,’ said one major-label exec. ‘R. Kelly and Chris Brown are among those Black artists who have amassed certain power through their writing and publishing,’  adds a publishing exec. ‘And that’s always been my observation: the more content or ownership you have, the more dangerous you become as a Black artist,’” Musically reported.

Then most recently Netflix nixed airing a documentary on Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan over his history of anti-Semitic remarks, even though it aired a documentary on the KKK.

In the end, will curbing free speech hurt those in the bottom rung who want to speak out for social change?