Facebook an Anti-Stereotyping Tool: A Case Study (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Media: Complexities and Contradictions
The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020
The concept of social media has been closely linked to social mediators since the first developments of digital communication. These platforms connect different agents, from ordinary users to state institutions, social movements, and journalists. The characteristics of communication processes enabled by social media are considered as forms of interaction which also generate opinion bubbles. Furthermore, the technical affordances of social media facilitate the circulation of information and the development of deliberative spaces which give visibility to minority groups, allowing the creation and strengthening of identity ties. On the one hand, social media have been beneficial for the denouncement of violence against women or LGBTQ people, especially regarding demands for equality, human rights, and political mobilization. On the other hand, these media are also problematic for minority groups, since they allow the dissemination of information based on prejudice through (sometimes anonymous) comments, which can be radical and violent. Even though they are not a definitive solution for achieving more equality, social media can help to reduce the gap of representation, especially of minorities, and expose people to a larger cross‐section of content.
Facebook and the public sphere: an analysis of the Facebook Guidelines from a democratic perspective
Facebook has been facing heavy criticism in the last few years. Fake news, Russian propaganda, the targeting of insecure teens and former employees explaining how bad Facebook really is for your health: they all undermined the image of Facebook as a force of good. Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 New Year's resolutions to fix Facebook, even though they were carefully wrapped in idealistic rhetoric, are bad news for anyone who cares about diversity in the field of media and democracy in general.
Governing Hate: Facebook and Digital Racism
Television and New Media, 2021
This article is concerned with identifying the ideological and techno-material parameters that inform Facebook's approach to racism and racist contents. The analysis aims to contribute to studies of digital racism by showing Facebook's ideological position on racism and identifying its implications. To understand Facebook's approach to racism, the article deconstructs its governance structures, locating racism as a sub-category of hate speech. The key findings show that Facebook adopts a post-racial, race-blind approach that does not consider history and material differences, while its main focus is on enforcement, data, and efficiency. In making sense of these findings, we argue that Facebook's content governance turns hate speech from a question of ethics, politics, and justice into a technical and logistical problem. Secondly, it socializes users into developing behaviors/contents that adapt to race-blindness, leading to the circulation of a kind of flexible racism. Finally, it spreads this approach from Silicon Valley to the rest of the world.
MAIN ARGUMENT: The line of this article is that Digital Social Media outlets must have the same “traditional old media” vetting criteria’s (in-house standards), compliance, standards, in refusing to broadcast and print hate, bigotry, racism, Antisemitism and terrorism content: in print, sound or images. While the traditional media (Press, Radio, TV) is exerting a strong degree of reservation, editorial standards and criteria to refuse racism, rage, hate, Antisemitism and terrorism propaganda content, the Social Media is exactly the opposite: leaving all platforms free to abuse, to give haters and terrorists a free pass and a tribune.. We, The People, will have to take the fear, bigotry, anti-Semitism and terrorism OUT of Social Media. Big Digital Social Media needs immediate reform, criteria and supervision or will become a very dangerous place. As Facebook faced escalating problems with disinformation, hate speech and privacy, the company’s leaders sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the crisis. And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and sparked a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack. Just an expert for Nov. 15, 2018 NYTimes: "Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company"...
Facebook framed: Portraying the role of social media in activism
Journal of Language and Politics, 2019
The study explores how Facebook was framed during the "tent protest"-the largest social protest in Israel's history. Findings from of a content analysis of the local Israeli press indicate that Facebook was framed mainly as a political instrument assisting the protest, especially in the stages of recruitment, organization and dissemination of information to protesters. Alongside such positive framing, also evident, albeit less frequently, was negative framing that portrayed Facebook activities as incompatible with genuine political action, and portrayed the "Facebook generation" as lazy and spoiled.
Paul Levinson lists Facebook, along with the blogosphere, Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Digg and Twitter, as a new “new medium”. There is no doubt that that is true, but only part of a whole truth. From a technical point of view the Internet consists of few layers, starting from the layer of physical medium as cables and routers, ending with the application layer, that let us chat, read emails or view internet sites. Global popularity of Facebook giving an easy way not only to share content, but also to integrate external sites with it brought nowadays a new layer of the global network about — a meta-application layer. After Microsoft, Apple, and Google, the company makes a following element in the chain of commercial agents that gradually formed the way we use computer mediated communication today. This “facebookisation” of the Internet has several cultural ramifications, some of which I would like to examine in my paper. One of them could be a claim that it finally put into practice the idea of Web 2.0 and spread it into masses. Even though such technical possibilities existed already for a long time, it has never been so easy to create someone's own site (in a form of fan-page) or just embed a discussion forum provided by Facebook at an external site. Facebook provided easy tools to create a secondary social net over primary net of WWW. In Henry Jenkins' terms one could utter that the threshold of participation has finally gotten low enough. Therefore almost all currently created internet sites make part of truly interactive network of Web 2.0, allowing for fully bilateral communication. One of the consequences of the latter happened to be something we could call an “eruption of privacy”, an avalanche of passport-like photos accompanied by names and surnames and other personal data, a genuine great book of faces, a census. This fact alone has a lot of exciting effects, I'd deeper get into two of them. The first one could express sententiously: if you are not public, you are not reliable. It's much more that fifteen minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol: it's an informal obligation to be present with your true name and surname somewhere in the Net. Otherwise, one's possible future employer or collaborator can perceive you as unsociable and alienated person at best and as fake personality at worst. Welcome to the brave new world, where everyone is to play a role of a celebrity and her own paparazzi in the same time. The second one, paradoxically enough, is that the principle “Make it all public!”, imposed by a big companies, gives a powerful arm to fight with big companies. Since everything and everyone must be on Facebook, that from its essence yields two-sided, symmetrical communication channels, every user can speak with a big company and the company spokesman has no choice but to answer it in a proper way.
‘Stop Fake Hate Profiles on Facebook’: Challenges for crowdsourced activism on social media
2017
This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation.
Governing Hate. Facebook and Hate Speech
Viejo Other, Paloma, 2022
This research investigates the relationship between Facebook and hate speech. In doing so, it deconstructs the governance structures of Facebook and analyses the principles and values that underpin Facebook’s schemes of intervention. This thesis argues that, from the perspective of Facebook, hate speech is approached less in terms of its substance and more in terms of a practical problem that needs to be resolved in an operational manner. They therefore conceive of relevant policy in terms of its fit within Facebook’s overall structure of governance, by which we mean the techniques or mechanisms used to internally order the various actors and actions. Theoretically, this thesis frames different approaches to hate speech regulation and adopts an understanding of governance as the means by which to regulate and order behaviours and actions, by using the work of Foucault and Miller and Rose to study governing systems. The research question concerns the ways (including the mechanisms, instruments, features and action sequences and above all the discourses) by which Facebook orders and regulates the creation and circulation of content when it comes to hate speech. The empirical materials upon which the thesis relied in order to identify the parameters of the governmentality of digital hate include: Mark Zuckerberg’s publications (May 2016 to November 2020), Facebook Principles and Values (2009 -2021), Facebook Community Standards (2016 2021), Content Standards (2018 2021), user’s settings (2016-2021), and the Oversight Board (2019-2021). To supplement these materials, the thesis makes use of three in depth interviews with Facebook’s Director of Public Policy, Campaigns and Programs (EMEA) Siobahn Cummiskey in 2016 and 2019 and with Facebook’s Public Policy officer Aibhinn Kelleher in 2017. Finally, the thesis makes use of secondary data that includes internal Facebook training materials for content moderators leaked to Pro-Republica and The Guardian. The key findings show that, while Facebook articulates its hate speech policies following a traditional liberal approach to hate speech, they operationationalise hateful content as a question of user safety. This results in an overall approach that is far removed from questions of social justice and emancipation. Instead, the focus is on procedural enforcement that produces more and more data. This emphasis on data, in turn, feeds into techno solutions relying on artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that are currently used moderately but which are planned as the preferred solution to what is constructed as a technical problem of content regulation.