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Facebook Algorithm Found To 'Actively Promote' Holocaust Denial (theguardian.com) 176

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the you're-really-not-going-to-like-it dept.
AmiMoJo writes: Facebook's algorithm "actively promotes" Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide. An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing "holocaust" in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving. The findings coincide with mounting international demands from Holocaust survivors to Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to remove such material from the site. Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people "controlling the world." However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a "conceptual blind spot." The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.
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Facebook Algorithm Found To 'Actively Promote' Holocaust Denial More

Facebook Algorithm Found To 'Actively Promote' Holocaust Denial

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @12:24PM (#60410537)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I'm pretty sure facebook is promoting that. How else to explain it

      • Re:Dont forget Nickelback (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @01:31PM (#60410867)

        I think they're promoting it, but not really intentionally. Their algorithms are tuned to provide something that the user will click on: user engagement is how they make money. This tends to tilt it towards extreme content. Holocaust denial is natural clickbait--even if you don't believe in it, you'll tend to click on the links to find out what outrageous things they say.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by radja ( 58949 )

          facebook intentionally promotes almost anything it can make money off. Yes, it intentionally promotes holocaust denial too. It is a choice, like not promoting nude pictures is a choice.

    • your post, while amusing, implies that we can dismiss the articles points because the promotion of Holocaust denial is due not to a concerted effort on the part of bad actors and potentially Facebook themselves to promote these pages but is just a minor consequence of particular quirks of certain programming languages and/or tools.

      Ironically these kind of flippant posts are part of what ends up promoting the Holocaust denial pages. They become the first step down the rabbit hole. In Facebook land you cl
    • If Bonzi Buddy is back we better act quickly

  • The difference between a Library and an algorithm is the curation by a human. Algorithms are good at spotting latent patterns and idenitifying cluster attributes not at making decisions.

    I'm not sure why this is news.

    Let's all go back to Yahoo's original curated pages.

  • 'Acting like they give a ... care'.
    There offical line SHOULD be , we don't care, what is said on our platform is NON OF OUR BUSINESS. Then they would not have to deal with literally thousands of groups and potental law suits , from the far right, the far left and everywhere in between. Perhapse they could just put up 'walled gardens' and you can take personlity test to see what type of informtion/ misinformation you perfer? The whole point is supposed to be. I look at stuff from 'my friends' and that

    • Facebook is responding to the shrill cries of Congressfolk, who don't understand any of this, saying 'you regulate yourselves, or we will regulate you." The thing they don't understand is that, even if they actually want to do that, there are technical, as well as moral issues that Facebook shouldn't have to bother with involved. But they will never understand it. And as a result, Facebook, cowering in fear of having their business model gutted by some ill considered legislation, is using algorithms, whic

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      4chan tried that and the advertisers said "okay, bye."

      Facebook isn't going to give up their ad business.

    • The problem is that the advertisers which are the bulk of Facebook's revenue do care, and do not want their products and services associated with Holocaust Denial. Putting up a disclaimer will hardly make Coca Cola or Walmart go "Oh, okay, as long as there's a warning, it's just fine". Advertisers are extremely risk averse, and with good reason, and so far as they're concerned, whether its Facebook, Twitter or any other social media company, if they find themselves showing up next to posts that promote Anti

      • Some peoples' idea of 'freedom of speech' seems to make a basic assumption that just isn't true: that all speech is weighted exactly the same, that all voices are equal volume. This just isn't true. John Jones posting on his Facebook wall that 'racism is disgusting and needs to stop' is, say, weighted as 'one'. But some white supremacist group, with their 10000 'followers' all post and re-post 'PROTESTORS ARE ALL CRIMINALS AND NEED TO BE ARRESTED!' then that one original voice of some white supremacist grou

        • This is constant approach when moderation comes up. Some of it is the deliberate confusion of state censorship and private censorship. The Constitution only forbids Congress from abridging freedom of speech. The Constitution is silent on the matter of people abridging speech on their property. Property rights afford an owner of any property to decide what can and cannot be said on their property. Whether this is my living room, or my website, I have the right to censor any post I choose.

          In particular, dema

          • I agree with you.
            I also believe that people who think that a NGO like Facebook or Twitter should allow their websites to be the Digital Wild West fall into one of two groups: either myopians who do not see the implications of what they're asking for, and the racists, bigots, white supremacists, neo-nazis, and so on, who wish to have free reign to not only spread their sewage as they see fit, but silence anyone who dares to oppose them.

            I do not like 'social media', I think it is cancerous to our society

  • Any time you have an algorithm that ranks things, you will have people optimizing their results.

    And every time you change the algorithm, you disrupt them only temporarily. On the web, SEO survived the transition from a hodgepodge of search engines to the Google hegemony and beyond.

    Ongoing human curation is the only solution. If Facebook is making billions from our personal data, then they can afford the overhead.

  • Algorithmic Bias or User Activity? (Score:3)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @12:30PM (#60410571)
    Disclaimer: I'm not a Facebook User... Never have been, never will be.

    The OP describes that "typing "holocaust" in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving."

    But doesn't face book use an algorithm to look at what is trending across its user community and use that as a means to offer users the equivalent of "If you liked that, maybe you'll like this?"

    Could this just be a case of "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity?" Or, put another way: "Don't "blame Facebook" for merely reflecting the opinions of the majority of its user community?

  • highly refined libertarian sensibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moblaster ( 521614 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @12:33PM (#60410583)

    This real issue here is not the algorithm, or whether Facebook can actively filter this content or not. They have great, talented developers. They can filter it all out if they wish.

    The issue is that Mark Zuckerberg is intentionally supporting a semi-pure libertarian/free-speech philosophy, almost unconstrained except where limited by local laws (like in Germany), in order to make his platform appeal to as many personality types as possible. The philosophy itself is not the point. The point is the philosophy allows for maximum eyeballs and thus maximum advertising dollars.

    Most of the time, people who don't want to see specific content will not see it. The edge cases (like this) he could care less about. He wants to maximize ad dollars and doesn't give a crap about other considerations unless they are so egregious they affect the bottom line. The big-advertiser hate-speech boycott hasn't done much to slow him down because small-to-medium size advertisers are desperate for business in the age of covid, and keeping the money coming in.

    So he's content agnostic, as long as the money keeps flowing. Barring a tangible hit to his bottom line, the only way to regulate this kind of speech off the platform would be through local (national) legal restrictions. Because morals be damned, the free (including hate) speech policy is making money, and the side-effect externalities on society of spreading disinformation are -- most of the time -- none of his concern.

    • Filters only work temporarily because people find ways around the filters. It becomes an endless game of whac-a-mole.
    • if he was he wouldn't be so buddy buddy with China. Rather it's more likely that Zuckerberg is doing whatever it takes to keep eyeballs glued to Facebook (and to Facebook's adverts).

      If that means serving up conspiracy theories about the Holocaust then he'll do it. Twitter, in contrast, is leaving money on the table.

  • Holocaust Denial is only hate speech ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Old97 ( 1341297 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @12:50PM (#60410655)
    Holocaust Denial is not some legitimate alternate perspective of history. It denies facts which in many cases are the documents created by the people who devised and implemented the Holocaust. There is also plenty of film footage and witness accounts by non-Jewish people. That is not History and it is not a perspective and a shared set of facts. It's a dishonest attempt at gaslighting people so they are less sympathetic to Jewish concerns. The algorithms are tuned to provoke page views and enhance ad revenue. Zuckerberg, et al is either willfully blind or just too greedy and dishonest to care. I think it's the latter.

    • It is also fact that Palestine exists and existed before 1947.

      • You realize that whataboutism doesn't actually refute anything, right?

        • You realize that whataboutism doesn't actually refute anything, right?

          The previous post reminds me of an interesting interview on cable news years ago. I think it was Larry King interviewing Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, asking him why he was at a Holocaust Denier conference. Ahmedinejad followed by saying he didn't deny the holocaust happened, rather he was there as a sympathizer for Palestine. As he pointed out the Palestinians had nothing to do with the holocaust yet they lost a large amount of their land as a result of it. I certainly don't hang out with anyone who identifies

    • So, it's like the moon landing. So, should we ban discussions of the moon landing being fake? This is what free speech means. You are free to believe stupid shit. And free to try to convince others of your stupid beliefs. It's an American tradition.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Old97 ( 1341297 )
        When someone claims the moon landing is fake or that the earth is flat, unless they connect it to an attack on some group it is not hate speech. Hate speech against NASA engineers, maybe?

  • I see a lot of comments suggestions that content neutrality and absolute free speech on facebook is a good thing.

    Why?

    Why should the largest social media site in the non-China tolerate hate-based content?

    "Who gets to decide what is hate" - Society, Facebook, a combination.

    Free speech is a positive policy of governments, that people are not arrested for what they say or believe. There is nothing inherently good about absolute free speech on social media. There is no moral reason Facebook should be obliged to keep hate on its site.

      A libertarian solution, so called, would be an informed-consumer approach: Facebook labeling denial groups as unfounded in fact, and peddling hate, but allowing it to stay up.

    • One counter argument is the "slippery slope." I'm not endorsing that myself, just striving to answer your question. Once FB starts down the path of removing content because it offends some people, sooner or later they will end up banning everything. If they aren't willing to take a stand for an open platform, good or bad content, they certainly won't be willing to take a stand on any intermediate point like 'overwhelmingly false information' either. They will just keep giving in until there is nothing left.

      • I get your assertion, but I disagree.

        >If they aren't willing to take a stand for an open platform, good or bad content, they certainly won't be willing to take a stand on any intermediate point like 'overwhelmingly false information' either.

        Who says? Why can't we acknowledge there is a line between "Allow all racist, anti-fact, and/or foreign-government-propo on our site" and "Remove everything that any small group of hashtaggers say is offensive?

        There is a chasm between those two extremes.

        • I thought the same thing. After all, it is the same approach we use for a lot of decisions we make. Even the law enshrines the "reasonable person" standard. But Facebook is a corporation, and corporations generally don't behave that way. For example, someone posts something about "the vast majority of black people murdered in the United States are murdered by other Black people." Many people would label that as hate speech, as it is usually an attempt to divert attention from a real and ongoing problem with
        • Coincidentally, just bumbled across this link which touches on the same kind of issue: Techdirt: Why Content Moderation at Scale is Impossible to Do Well [techdirt.com] One interesting excerpt:

          We've seen this directly. Last year, when we turned an entire conference of "content moderation" specialists into content moderators for an hour, we found that there were exactly zero cases where we could get all attendees to agree on what should be done in any of the eight cases we presented.

      • One counter argument is the "slippery slope."

        "The slippery slope" is a form of argument that is generally classified as a logical fallacy, alongside other argumentation fallacies like ad hominem, proof by assertion, etc. So, any time you find yourself tempted to argue that something is a slippery slope, you need to stop and think hard about it because you're making a very, very strong and hard-to-support claim, namely that taking the first step on this path will inevitably (or at least with very high probability) lead to sliding all the way to the "lo

    • I see a lot of comments suggestions that content neutrality and absolute free speech on facebook is a good thing.

      Why?

      There's a whole lot of people on Slashdot whose political or ideological discussion would get them thrown out of Thanksgiving dinner. Having yet another platform let them know that their ideas are really that fringe is not something they want.

      Also, one of the primary ways that these semi-cults keep people in the fold is by claiming they are being unfairly attacked on all sides by those people, no matter how ascendant they are. Discussion of Facebook cutting them off helps reinforce the "we're under attack

      • Yeah, they're annoying with their holocaust denial and conspiracy theories, but the leftists around here are generally allowed to post as long as they don't get too far into the weeds with their TDS...

    • "A libertarian solution, so called, would be an informed-consumer approach: Facebook labeling denial groups as unfounded in fact, and peddling hate, but allowing it to stay up."

      By no means does a "libertarian" solution involve some overarching authority deciding what is and isn't true, and what is "peddling hate".
      That would be the authoritarian solution, you know, like how China decides what's tolerable and what isn't.

      Do you have the slightest idea what Libertarian means?

      • Ah yes, no true Libertarian defense comes into play.

        Most non-textbook (see: practical, living on Earth vs. in their head) Libertarians tend to recognize that an informed consumer is critical to all parties being treated equitably in a transaction. And that in many transactions, it is difficult to expect a consumer (human) to be optimally informed about a transaction, so government can encourage consumers be informed. See: Nutritional guidelines and nutritional/health information on foods and drink.

        Stripping

        • "Ah yes, no true Libertarian defense comes into play."

          No, you're simply wrong about what "Libertarian" means. No True Scotsmen needed.
          If you said "A doctor is a person who shelves books in a library!" and I said "No, that's nothing like what a doctor does" - that's not a No True Scotsman. That's correcting ignorance.

          If you said "A libertarian solution to X is to have a massive quasi-government entity (in the context of FB) interpose itself between posts and users, filtering, grading, and framing them as "

    • "doxxing" is a single word to disprove the "free speech = whatever consequences as long as it's not the government" nonsense

      Most people want wrong speech to have "consequences" so that people don't feel free to say those wrong things. Non-anonymous speech cannot be free because that would infringe on other people's right to free speech, and more notably on other people's right to freedom of association (eg boycotting whoever hired the guy who said a nasty unless they fire him). Non-government responses to s

  • How do you passively promote holocaust denial?

  • The problem isn't that the content exists. It has always been out there and similar content will always continue to exist. The problem is that facebook's algorithm has a preference for content that provokes engagement because engagement drives ad impressions and, as such, always promotes content which is controversial and/or offensive if it has the chance, because that draws consumers to that content. It is what is driving conspiracy theories like QAnon, holocaust denial, and other nonsense into ever more

  • Primary sources please... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @02:00PM (#60411047)

    Here is the report: https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-c... [isdglobal.org]

    And as always, the report, even coming from a partisan organization, is much more nuanced than the Guardian article. Just read it instead, it is well written, easy to read, and goes to the point without sensationalism.

    What the organization did was to search for "holohoax", found holocaust denial content (no shit...), then liked the content they found in order to build a profile, and only then searched for "holocaust". And unsurprisingly, they were matched to other content and people related to holocaust denial. It is a social network working as intended, and while the article mentions active promotion, I wouldn't call it that. More like a lack of censorship, or in their own words "preventing its recommendation to users would be the minimal first step that Facebook could take in order to reduce the visibility and accessibility of such content".

  • Who knows a person named Holocaust and why are you looking them up on Facebook? Is this about the band?

    If it's about the topic, then I see the problem: You got Facebook confused with Wikipedia.

  • Purple heading, why? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zidium ( 2550286 ) on Monday August 17, 2020 @04:42PM (#60411901) Homepage

    Why does this article have a purple heading?

    I have been on Slashdot since the late 1990s and I have never seen that...

  • .. fake news.

    ie - a brand new news site with no traffic that was brought from a lapsed domain (for driveway heating) by a Washington PR company and an RSS fed content farm was put on the domain, who then subsequently tried to anonymize their ownership (thank you DNS transfer history and Alexa webstats) was suddenly Trending during the runup to the election with attack articles.

    The stories trending were of the fake news FUD type - way worse than the 'Can't stop masturbating? Jesus will lend you a hand' type

  • You won't dispel holocaust denial by hiding it somewhere it can fester unimpeded, you do so by letting it come to light and countering it with evidence.
  • By "Holocaust" do you mean what happened to Jews in the years 1940-1944 or what they did to others in 1947-2020?

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