A mysterious glitch on Facebook asked if every single post was 'hate speech' (FB)

pulse

May 1, 2018 5:16 PM

Facebook has struggled with hate speech on its platform. Last week, it published its previously secret guidelines for censors for the first time. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes one day to have artifical intelligence algorithms handle much of Facebook's content moderation needs.

Facebook started to ask some users if posts were 'hate speech' on Tuesday.
It appeared to be a glitch because the question was asked below every single post on some user feeds.
Some people thought they were being censored by Facebook.
Facebook said it was "

At about 11 a.m Eastern time on Tuesday, people started to notice a really odd new question on Facebook.

On some people's News Feeds, Facebook was asking if every single post was "hate speech." Business Insider observed the glitch on one of our accounts.

Here's what it looked like:

The glitch was resolved before 12 p.m. and the question no longer appeared on a News Feed seen by Business Insider.

"This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate. A bug caused it to launch publicly. It's been disabled," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.

Facebook has struggled with hate speech on its platform. Last week, it published its previously secret guidelines for censors for the first time. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes one day to have artificial intelligence algorithms handle much of Facebook's content moderation needs.

But artificial intelligence needs data so it can be trained. Data from actual users identifying hate speech may be useful in that development process.

Here's how people on Twitter reacted to the question:

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