Showing posts with label Facebook jail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook jail. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 09, 2018


Hate speech has always been difficult to define. Facebook, caught with its fingers in the cookie jar of our private information, has decided that teaching us what hate speech means is sufficient penance. But penance or contrition isn’t something Mark Zuckerberg understands. Giving us at long last a glimpse into Facebook’s mysterious Community Standards is MZ’s way of saying, “Okay. We stole your information, so here’s what we’ll give you.”
As if this is a business exchange.
Which it most assuredly is not.
For years, private individuals have reported anti-Israel Facebook pages that threaten Jews with violence and death, and defame the Jewish people in coarse and disgusting ways. The response from Facebook support has always been: we reviewed your report and determined that this page/content does not violate our community standards.
But we were never told what those standards were.
As far as we were concerned, a page called Death to Israel, for instance, violates ALL standards of permitted speech and human decency, leading us to believe that Facebook’s Community Standards were no standards at all.
Even worse, when trolls would report pro-Israel advocacy pages, Facebook would accede to demands to censor the pages or close them down. It seems that Facebook had initiated a concerted effort to bolster anti-Israel voices while squelching those of the pro-Israel community. This repugnant policy smelled all the worse for the fact that Zuckerberg is Jewish, if in name, only.
After a while, we discovered a go-around: that if enough people reported those awful antisemitic hate pages, Facebook would usually take them down. But then they’d go right back up, a few days or weeks later. They thought that once we won, we’d stop paying attention and they could allow those pages to tiptoe right back in.
It is a disgusting, disheartening experience that mirrors the process by which trolls are able to keep pro-Israel advocates endlessly in jail.
Now Zuckerberg is at long last being called on the carpet to come clean. In a statement he issued prior to his testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee, the guy admitted he was only reassessing Facebook’s hate speech policies because the media was on him like white on rice.
“… it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”
In other words, it was a mistake only because he got CAUGHT.
One result of this was this release explaining, at long last, Facebook’s Community Standards. Here’s an excerpt from the section that defines hate speech:
We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disability or disease. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation. We separate attacks into three tiers of severity, as described below.
Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. Similarly, in some cases, words or terms that might otherwise violate our standards are used self-referentially or in an empowering way. When this is the case, we allow the content, but we expect people to clearly indicate their intent, which helps us better understand why they shared it. Where the intention is unclear, we may remove the content.
We allow humor and social commentary related to these topics. In addition, we believe that people are more responsible when they share this kind of commentary using their authentic identity.
While some welcomed this attempt to finally lay out for us what Facebook deems hate speech, this document did not at all explain why a page called Death to Israel is allowed to stand, while a page that expresses love for Israel, is not, the minute a troll reports it.
I tend to be courteous on public fora. I avoid coarse language, bias, and bigotry. To the best of my ability, I don’t use insulting language. This approach has served me well. I’ve been in Facebook jail exactly once, and that was years ago, for a comment I shouldn’t have made, calling out a woman for claiming to be a Jew when she had privately admitted to me she was not. I embarrassed her. And I got the equivalent of a Facebook slap on the hand when the woman reported my comment.
Imagine my surprise then, when one week ago, out of the blue, I go to Facebook and confronting me is this text:
This post goes against our community standards.
Only you can see this post because it goes against our standards on hate speech.
Under this was a comment I only vaguely remembered from some years ago. It was a reply on a thread and it read:
Seeing things through rose-colored glasses is also discrimination-an idea you’ve come to with no proof-a generalization about an entire people. You actually don’t know that most Arabs are not terrorists and neither do I. I don’t make generalizations one way or the other. Because it is wrong to do so when you don’t know it for a fact. It is misleading.
I am not frightened of Arabs because I see all of them as terrorists. I am not discriminating against them. I am frightened of Arabs because of Arab terror. It is prudent to be cautious, realistic, considering our reality.
At the bottom of the comment was a button reading: “continue.”
When I went to the next page, there was an explanation that I probably didn’t know enough about Facebook Community standards to realize that this was hate speech, so they were hiding the post, as a kind of first warning. Only I would be able to see it. That is if I wanted to. If I wanted to dig through years and years of hundreds of thousands of comments to find it.
Not that anyone else would be digging through hundreds of thousands of comments to find it either. Although clearly someone in a cubicle at Facebook is busily perusing my comment history, scouring it for something, anything, that would offend the unfathomable Facebook Community Standards.
I would like to say that this little lesson from Mark Z. illuminated everything I needed to know about hate speech. I’d like to say that I learned something about being polite on a public forum, about being a kind, moral, and loving person. But reviewing the comment deemed by the Facebook powers that be as “hate speech,” I’m left more confused and upset than ever.
What I wrote was not hate speech. It was the opposite of hate speech.
I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t love Arabs. I am cordial to Arabs in stores and in public places and count some Arabs among my friends. But I also fear Arabs.
Which is not the same as hate.
The other night, my husband and I drove to my son’s army base in an out of the way settlement, which had years ago suffered a brutal infiltration and terror attack. We didn’t know our way around and it was night. We waited until a Jewish resident was traveling the last several miles up the lonely highway to the settlement and tagged along behind.
At one point, two cars with PA licenses passed us, one on the right and on the left. My husband thought they were about to do a pincer movement to create a barrier on the road that would trap us, so they could attack us and the Jewish family car ahead of us. It was just a split second and then the Arabs in those cars appeared to reconsider and drove on, leaving us unscathed.
Did we imagine it? I honestly do not know. What I do know: we had to be ready. Things like this can and do happen in Israel. And it isn’t Jewish Israelis that do these things, but Arabs. Arabs like the men in these two cars. In the dark, we had very little information to go on.
In the back of our minds, we must always be cautious in our dealings with Arabs we don’t know. It’s not about hate. It’s because of actual things a significant number of Arabs have done to Jews in Israel.
I try to be fair. I try to be open in my dealings with all people, no matter their ethnic identity or color. I don’t hate any people as a group with the exception, for instance, of known terrorists. My fear on that road was a reasonable fear and it was not even a little bit powered by hatred.
With the lecture it gave me on the comment it hid, Facebook taught me exactly nothing about hate speech. What it did teach me is that Facebook is running around in circles to continue in its Big Brother ways—making arbitrary and thoughtless rulings on the limits of free speech.
What a shame to waste all that power and influence when Facebook arguably could have been a force for good.



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Wednesday, April 04, 2018


A rather neat coincidence, I thought, that my husband was released from Facebook “jail” an hour before the Passover holiday began. Another name for Passover, is, after all, Zman Cheruteinu, the time we mark our freedom; our liberation from bondage. Four days later, however, while the holiday celebrating our freedom was still in full force, my husband landed back in the (Facebook) slammer once more.
This was getting ridiculous.
Both times, my husband was reported for comments that were several years old. There appears to be no Facebook statute of limitations for reporting comments. Though the notifications, telling of a ban, offer a way to mark a "sentence" as a “mistake,” doing so yields no response. There is, in actuality, no way to appeal a ban, no recourse to justice. Anyone can troll your timeline, report a random comment, and Facebook duly puts you, the “offender” in jail.
Why choose an old comment? In doing so, the troll protects his identity. There is no way to connect the anonymous report to an actual thread, hence no way to connect the report to an actual person.
In the pro-Israel community, getting trolled for an old comment and put into Facebook jail has become a badge of honor. If you’re getting banned, you have the right politics. But it’s an ugly thing when social media is used to still the pro-Israel voice; where dissent is disallowed, at least temporarily, with Facebook a willing assistant/enabler.
Ryan Bellerose is a staunch Israel advocate and blogger. He’s been banned—put in Facebook jail—five times thus far, each time for way old comments. In one of the reported comments, Ryan jokingly called his friend a “vampire” for staying up so late on social media. This is the comment that was reported as “offensive.” No appeal possible, no recourse, no sane person to whom one might explain that the charge is drummed up, false, ridiculous. Facebook is an omniscient Big Brother. Justice is what Facebook says it is.
But you know how in TV shows, the villain always has to brag and give himself away? The guy who reported Ryan bragged about it using a fake profile. And a friend recognized that fake profile.

By the way, Ryan tells me he only uses his own name for the Facebook profiles he creates. Mark Rowan and Krista Kay are real people in their own right. The troll is not just a troll, but a paranoid troll at that.

Here is the troll using another alias, laughing at Ryan, bragging in an obscenity-laced screed of his prowess in silencing Ryan's important voice for Israel .


Indefatigable pro-Israel blogger Ari Fuld has also been put in Facebook jail numerous times. Like Ryan and like my husband, Ari has discovered the workaround is each time creating a new Facebook profile. But the troll watches out for and targets the new profiles, encouraging others to follow suit:



The troll sees fake profiles everywhere. The Morris Goldberg profile is not Ari, by the way. Just as Ryan is not Mark Rowan or Krista.

Here the troll (varying the spelling of his/her name) brags about reporting Ari's old comment, posting screenshots:




I put a call out: be in touch with me if you've been in FB jail for a way old comment. I was inundated with responses. But perhaps the Guinness Book record for most time in FB jail should go to David Meir, who writes, “Since 2010, I have been so much in FB jail that it makes at least 3 or 4 years.
“I'm not joking.
“I just got out of FB jail and the account went back in [jail] after less than an hour and so did my second David Meir [Facebook profile] after less than a day.
“Thing is that as soon as I go out of FB jail I go right back in so obviously someone is watching my posting pattern and when he (or she) sees I don't comment anymore, wait for a month and then reports again so I am almost continuously in FB jail.
“Something must be done, it is simply criminal that a nobody can report comments you've made years ago and have so much power to virtually block you from ever being on FB.”
Lea Yarden has three alternating Facebook profiles, and all three have often been in “jail” for comments made many years previously. She too is an Israel advocate, and proud Zionist. “One day I got suspended from Facebook for old comments. And it kept happening over and over again. Not just me. All my friends. They were from hate groups where antisemites gang up on Jews and Zionists.
“They called us awful names. ‘Kike.’ ‘Dirty Jew pigs.’ ‘Monkeys.’ Then the icing on the cake were the words ‘Jump back in the ovens dirty Jews’ and ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job.’
“We thought we could change minds with facts. But they didn’t want facts. They wanted to degrade us. We reported every antisemitic comment. But Facebook didn’t think ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘jump back in the ovens’ violated their community standards.
“I removed myself from the groups. Sometime later the bans started. A 1-day ban, 3 days, one week and then the 30-day ban. You would have a few days when the 30 days were over then get hit with another 30-day ban from three and four-year-old comments. Three and four-year-old comments!! What was going on?
“This was happening to all my friends. It was surreal. Why would Facebook ban us over years old comments? We just can’t figure it out.”
Karen Shlomo is in Facebook “jail” for the ninth time in three years. She too, is being reported for old comments. I asked Karen the age of the comments that are being reported. She told me that they are three years old. 
Karen knows the age of the comments because she recognized a word that she stopped using three years ago on Facebook. She found out the hard way that certain language is bound to be reported, and learned to phrase things more carefully to escape censorship. But when someone is obsessively trolling your timeline, they’re going to find those old comments with the politically incorrect wording, and yes, they’re going to use those ancient comments to stifle your voice.
S, like my husband, Ryan, and Ari, knows the identity of the man who is trolling her. It’s actually the same person trolling all four of them, using fake profiles most of the time. But in one case, the troll outed himself, using his real email address, phone number, and signature when complaining about S to S’s husband at his work address (!), accusing S of infidelity (among other iniquities), and threatening litigation.






In similar fashion, the troll attempted to damage Ari’s reputation and even his livelihood: “I have posts that people sent to the TV station I work in [suggesting] that I have an ‘attraction’ to little boys," relates Ari.
While comments can only be reported anonymously, sometimes the nature of a reported comment outs the reporter as in this comment of Ari’s that landed him once again in jail (for "bullying"):
And in this case too, the troll could not resist bragging:
One unifying thread between the troll and the people he reports is that he sees himself as a defender of Sarah Tuttle-Singer, the new media editor of the Times of Israel. The friendship between the two is quite public.






Which is why S tried writing to the Times of Israel. She thought perhaps they’d stop the harassment. But she received no response. Not from TOI and not from Facebook.
As she did her research on the troll, however, she saw he was using a corrupted swastika to decorate his blog’s homepage, along with a quote that speaks of restoring a "free and Christian Germany."


Considering the threatening nature of his comments (whether under his real name or an alias) to her and her husband or to a Facebook audience at large. . . 
 . . . S felt quite within her rights reporting him to the FBI.
Will the FBI respond? I don’t know. But I do know that Facebook must be held to account for its practice of allowing old, innocuous comments to be reported, for stifling free speech, for listening to and acceding to the demands of horrid, anti-Israel trolls.



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