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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Sat May 19, 2018, 07:07 PM May 2018

Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning From Its Own History of Hate

A country taps its past as it leads the way on one of the most pressing issues facing modern democracies: how to regulate the world’s biggest social network.

By Katrin Bennhold

May 19, 2018

BERLIN — Security is tight at this brick building on the western edge of Berlin. Inside, a sign warns: “Everybody without a badge is a potential spy!”

Spread over five floors, hundreds of men and women sit in rows of six scanning their computer screens. All have signed nondisclosure agreements. Four trauma specialists are at their disposal seven days a week. They are the agents of Facebook. And they have the power to decide what is free speech and what is hate speech.

This is a deletion center, one of Facebook’s largest, with more than 1,200 content moderators. They are cleaning up content — from terrorist propaganda to Nazi symbols to child abuse — that violates the law or the company’s community standards.

Germany, home to a tough new online hate speech law, has become a laboratory for one of the most pressing issues for governments today: how and whether to regulate the world’s biggest social network.

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/technology/facebook-deletion-center-germany.html

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Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning From Its Own History of Hate (Original Post) DonViejo May 2018 OP
Yes!!! Wellstone ruled May 2018 #1
Lead the way, Germany. moondust May 2018 #2
Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, "The Facebook Law" :) Hortensis May 2018 #3

moondust

(19,917 posts)
2. Lead the way, Germany.
Sat May 19, 2018, 09:12 PM
May 2018

They have the experience to lead the rest of the world in how to do this kind of thing without infringing too much on people's freedoms.

Hortensis

(58,785 posts)
3. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, "The Facebook Law" :)
Sun May 20, 2018, 04:46 AM
May 2018

I like the word (Network Enforcement Act) shortened to NetzDG or colloquially the Facebook law.

Thanks for the subject, DV. I cancelled NYT and wanted to read more, so I found an article on Motherboard about the facility in Essen, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qv37dv/facebook-content-moderation-center. Apparently some of the rougher material is handled at the Berlin facility, and the article below makes it clear why trauma specialists are provided for those doing this work. I wouldn't last long.

This is a Sueddeutsche Zeitung (apparently a large newspaper with liberal-centrist orientation) article by someone who worked at the Berlin facility, for a different subcontracting content moderation company.

Three months in hell
What I learned from three months of Content Moderation for Facebook in Berlin


...I have difficulties in conceptualizing the role I acted in. Was I acting as a censor and restricting the freedom of speech? I don't think that I acted exactly in this role. I respected the freedom to offend and to make use of the most creative forms of expression. ... I witnessed happily how the freedom to challenge and transgress values, ideas and beliefs could be energizing and creative.

I dealt indeed more often with behaviors than speech. I would say that the pictures and texts were in most cases not a form of self-expression but rather depicting attitudes. These behaviors incorporated a lot of violence and cruelty, ranging from hate speech to sadism, from bullying to self-harm. Without euphemism, the content is very violent. ...

A minority of these posts was of criminal nature. This disturbed me even more. These attitudes/behaviors/forms of expression would easily convince any non- specialist than the society had gone insane. I witnessed behaviors that didn't respect any social norm, pushed into a world, where the notion of intimacy and decency vanish, where there is no respect for privacy. Did those social media tools subconsciously encourage people to overcome all inhibition by destroying all social filters and moral barriers? ...

During the long hours at my workstation, I wished I were a social worker or a psychologist. I sometimes had the impression that I was working in the emergency services and at other times in law enforcement. I felt powerless, as I couldn't intervene. ... Trying to differentiate cursing from sexual exploitation was another major source of difficulty. It had never occurred to me previously that the cursing vocabulary could be so sexually suggestive and gendered. ... A lot of content discloses extreme graphic violence (ME: including beheadings, torture, child and animal abuse), which makes the job of the content moderator very stressful. ...

Working in the Turkish market, I got an insider view into the conflicts of the Middle East. Conflicts that particularly polarize a society have a reflection on social media. I noticed that the conflict of Iraq and Syria were spilling all over social media in Turkey. I felt as if I was embedded with the different sides of the Kurdish conflict, navigating between the insurgency and the special units. ...

https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/internet/three-months-in-hell-84381
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