Facebook to Detail Its ‘Satire Exception’ in Content Moderation

Facebook introduced that it could add data to its neighborhood requirements about its so-called satire exception when moderating content material. The change was made in response to a latest decision by its Oversight Board that required it to reinstate a remark with an adaption of the “two buttons” meme commenting on Turkey’s response to the Armenian genocide.

This week, in a news announcement concerning the case, Facebook mentioned the knowledge replace would permit groups to contemplate satire when assessing potential hate speech violations, which was the difficulty in query with the 2 buttons meme. The firm mentioned the replace can be accomplished by the top of the yr. Facebook is simply absolutely implementing the board advice on the satire exception and is assessing feasibility of the opposite suggestions made primarily based on the case.

In response to one of many board’s different suggestions, which suggested Facebook to make sure it has enough procedures in place to “assess satirical content and relevant context properly including by providing content moderators with additional resources,” the corporate revealed that it had already been engaged on a brand new satire framework for its regional and escalation groups. However, it’s at the moment figuring out “apply this review at scale.”

Facebook said that stakeholders—starting from educational consultants and journalists to comedians and representatives of satire publications—it had engaged with for its framework had identified that humor and satire are extremely subjective throughout individuals and cultures. The firm was additionally instructed that you will need to institute human evaluation of humor and satire by people with cultural content material.

“Given the context-specific nature of satire, we are not immediately able to scale this kind of assessment or additional consultation to our content moderators,” Facebook mentioned. “We need time to assess the potential tradeoffs between identifying and escalating more content that may qualify for our satire exception, against prioritizing escalations for the highest severity policies, increasing the amount of content that would be escalated, and potentially slower review times among our content moderators.”

The remark with the meme was posted by a Facebook person within the U.S. in December 2020. Although some may scratch their heads over the outline of the “two buttons” meme, like yours really, there’s likelihood you’ve seen it. Created by Jake Clark in 2014, the meme incorporates a horizontal split-screen cartoon: the highest display is a picture of a hand poised to click on one in every of two purple buttons, whereas the underside incorporates a cartoon character with their hand on their head sweating over which button to decide on.

People routinely adapt the meme with loopy, dumb, and benign textual content over every of the buttons. Memerino highlights some nice ones equivalent to “get to eat a turkey” and “get to eat a ham”; “infinite power” and “the Marvel superheroes; or “add more Easter eggs” and “make more games,” to call a couple of.

In this case, as described by the Oversight Board, the U.S. Facebook person substituted the cartoon character’s face within the decrease split-screen for a Turkish flag. In the split-screen above, the person included two selections: “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” and “The Armenians were terrorists that deserved it.” The meme was preceded and adopted by the pondering face emoji, the board mentioned.

According to the Oversight Board, Facebook mentioned it eliminated the remark as a result of the phrase, “The Armenians were terrorists that deserved it,” contained assertions that Armenians had been criminals primarily based on their nationality and ethnicity, which violates the corporate’s neighborhood normal for hate speech. Facebook additionally claimed that the meme was not coated underneath an exception that permits customers to share hateful content material to sentence it or elevate consciousness, because the cartoon character may very well be seen as “condemning or embracing the two statements featured in the meme.”

The majority of Facebook’s Oversight Board disagreed, although, and located that the meme was coated by this exception, overturning the corporate’s resolution on the matter.

“The ‘two buttons’ meme contrasts two different options not to show support for them, but to highlight potential contradictions. As such, [the majority of the board] found that the user shared the meme to raise awareness of and condemn the Turkish government’s efforts to deny the Armenian genocide while, at the same time, justifying these same historic atrocities,” the board mentioned in a information announcement in May. “The majority also believed that the content could be covered by Facebook’s satire exception, which is not included in the Community Standards.”