Facebook to add 3k people to community operations team to improve moderation
Why doesn&#x27;t Facebook give people a way to have input to their &#x27;community standards&#x27;? Basically it&#x27;s a black box that&#x27;s presumably stuffed with lawyers, marketers, and some analytics people. I see zero evidence that there is any actual input from the people who use FB. It&#x27;s essentially a dictatorship dressed in a costume of democracy, and I would far prefer it if the &#x27;community standards&#x27; were called what they are, &#x27;Rules of Mark&#x27;s Club.&#x27;<p>This is a sore point for me as an artist. It&#x27;s tedious when posts are removed because they depict or seem to depict nudity and you have to go through and assure some anonymous and wholly unaccountable person that they&#x27;re not. One of my friends teaches art history at UCLA and - surprise - he posts lots of fine art on his wall. He has to have 8 or 10 accounts because he is constantly getting temp banned for posting famous paintings of people with no clothes.<p>It also bothers me on a more general level, eg it&#x27;s fine if I take a picture of myself with my shirt off but if one of my female friends does the same thing she risks being restricted from posting or having her account terminated because her breasts are apparently a worse thing than extreme gory graphic violence that comes with a warning but is nevertheless acceptable to post.<p>That&#x27;s sexist bullshit that turns women into second class citizens. I utterly fail to understand how it&#x27;s OK to share pictures of just about any violent subject matter, but any kind of nudity, sexual or not, is grounds for having your account terminated.<p>Here&#x27;s a list of some of the things I&#x27;ve seen on FB over the last year, some with an automatic clickthrough content warning (which is a good idea and mostly well implemented) and some not. As far as I&#x27;m aware none of these have resulted in account terminations for people who posted them:<p>Beheadings (video, multiple examples); hanging; people being shot&#x2F;have been shot; serial killers and their refrigerators stuffed with human meat; disembowelments; autopsy photos. In each of these cases I don&#x27;t mean grimy thumbnails where you can sort of imagine what was going on, but photos and video of sufficient clarity to be used in a news broadcast if not for the disturbing nature of their subject matter.<p>I&#x27;m leaving out other stuff that I found sufficiently disturbing that I prefer not to even describe it. I&#x27;m not into gore, beyond watching a few horror movies in a given year. But I&#x27;m pretty open with my friends list and allow people to join me to groups, so I&#x27;m exposed to a certain amount from trolls and of course there are episodes of violence in the real world that are newsworthy, and I prefer my news without censorship of any kind.<p>You&#x27;ll notice that I&#x27;m not calling for this stuff to be removed or banned from FB. I think the &#x27;graphic content, are you sure?&#x27; warning strikes a sensible balance between protecting people&#x27;s sensibilities and allowing free discussion and information. We live in a world that is often violent and I believe that concealing the ugliness of violence often allows it to proceed unchecked. It&#x27;s also true that some people become obsessed with or celebrate violence, and that admitting it as cultural currency risks desensitization or normalization of violence. Those are tricky questions to which I do not believe any one person, firm, or society has a perfect answer, but given that the instinct of criminal persons and regimes is generally to conceal rather than reveal transgressions, exposure and condemnation is probably a more effective response than obscurity and censorship.<p>After that unpleasant detour into the pits of human awfulness, I <i>really</i> want to hear from someone at Facebook:<p>a) why it&#x27;s OK to engage with the reality of people inflicting horrible violence on others, but it&#x27;s not OK to let people engage with the reality of sexual or aesthetic expression, and<p>b) why the 51% female majority of the population are subject to tighter restrictions than the male minority, and<p>c) why the &#x27;community standards&#x27; don&#x27;t offer any formal mechanism for community input and decision-making.<p>Think about it, Folks. A picture of a healthy naked body is grounds for account suspension or a ban, but it&#x27;s totally OK to show that same body hacked to pieces? That&#x27;s some grade A bullshit, and platitudes about how &#x27;we try to reflect the prevailing standards of society&#x27; isn&#x27;t going to cut it.<p>Automation <i>intensifies</i> whatever process you choose to automate, and if you automate a standard whereby erotic desire and self-expression are constrained but extreme violence and interpersonal aggression are less constrained, guess which you&#x27;ll end up with more of? Likewise if men are allowed freedoms that are systematically withheld from women, guess whose freedoms are going to be expanded and whose are going to be reduced?<p>I demand answers on this. Facebook is one of the most powerful political entities on the planet and those who own it need to explain why, within Facebook, there is greater tolerance for violence than nudity or sexuality, and why one half of the population is subject to greater restrictions than the other half.