Facebook’s leaked hate speech quiz looks bad, but the alternative could be worse
Earlier today, ProPublica published Facebook slides bluntly detailing the company’s hate speech policy in the form of a quiz. Facebook bans attacks on specific protected classes, which include people of a given race, gender, or sexual orientation. But it’s more lenient on statements about subsets of these categories, and about “quasi-protected” categories like refugees.
In practice, the results look more like a parody of anti-hate speech rules. One slide, for example, asked whether “black children” or “white men” were a protected subset of people on Facebook. The answer? White men, because men and white people were both protected classes, while “children” are not. Similarly, calling to hunt down and kill “radicalized” Muslims is...