Zuckerberg blames contractors for failing to remove Kenosha militia's 'call to arms' // A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.

 

Zuckerberg blames contractors for failing to remove Kenosha militia's 'call to arms'

 

Facebook CEO points to ‘operational mistake’ by teams meant to bar organizations deemed dangerous

 

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

 @juliacarriew  Email

Sat 29 Aug 2020 02.20 BSTFirst published on Fri 28 Aug 2020 23.52 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/28/facebook-militia-posts-kenosha-protests

 

Mark Zuckerberg blamed an “operational mistake” by contractors for Facebook’s failure to remove the “call to arms” of a Kenosha, Wisconsin, militia prior to the shooting Tuesday night that left two people dead and another injured.

 

The Kenosha Guard militia had established a Facebook page in June 2020 and this week used a Facebook event page to invite “any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs”, referencing those protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Facebook has admitted that both the page and the event should have been banned under the company’s new policy addressing groups linked to violence, such as militias. The company nevertheless failed to remove the page or event despite multiple users who reported the content to Facebook, the Verge reported.

 

“It was largely an operational mistake,” Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said in remarks during a weekly meeting with staff. Facebook has a specially trained team dedicated to enforcing its ban on “dangerous organizations”, Zuckerberg said. “The contractors and the reviewers who the initial complaints were were funneled to … basically didn’t pick this up.” Once reports were sent to the specialized team – after the fatal shooting – both the page and the event were removed.

 

Zuckerberg said Facebook had found no evidence to suggest the alleged shooter responded to the Facebook “call to arms”, which was also amplified by the conspiracy site InfoWars.

 

Facebook published a portion of Zuckerberg’s remarks following a report by BuzzFeed News on the anger and pushback among Facebook employees over the company’s handling of the violence in Kenosha.

 

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? [A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services,” one employee wrote to Zuckerberg, according to the report.

 

“We need to get better at avoiding mistakes and being more proactive,” another wrote. “Feels like we’re caught in a cycle of responding to damage after it’s already been done rather than constructing mechanisms to nip these issues before they result in real harm.”

 

In the publicized remarks, Zuckerberg continued: “What we’re trying to do here now is we have our teams proactively out there looking for content and removing content that praises the shooting, or the shooter … We are going to continue to enforce our policies and continue evolving the policies, to be able to identify more potential dangerous organizations and improve our execution in order to keep on getting ahead of this.”

 

On Thursday, the Guardian reported on Facebook and Instagram’s failure to keep content praising the alleged shooter off of their platforms. Two fundraisers for the alleged shooter were shared more than 19,000 times on Facebook, and Instagram memes praising the alleged shooter attracted tens of thousands of likes. Until Friday morning, Instagram was also auto-completing search results with hashtags that praised the alleged shooter or called him a hero.

 

The initial two fundraisers were removed by the online fundraising platforms that hosted them, but a third was launched Thursday on the Christian site GiveSendGo and has raised more than $125,000. The new fundraiser has been shared more than 3,500 times on Facebook since Thursday, and many of those posts remain live, despite Facebook’s ban.

 

Facebook’s rules ban “content that praises, supports, or represents events that Facebook designates as terrorist attacks, hate events, mass murders or attempted mass murders, serial murders, hate crimes and violating events”. Extremist groups often adulate mass killers, and several recent mass shooters have indicated that they took inspiration from figures such as the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik.

 

A Facebook spokesperson said on Friday that the company had removed specific posts praising the shooter that the Guardian had shared with it. The company also banned the page of Joshua Feuerstein, an evangelical Christian social media influencer with 2.6m Facebook fans, for repeatedly violating its rules. Feuerstein had shared a meme in support of the alleged shooter with the caption, “SHARE THIS BEFORE THEY TAKE IT DOWN AGAIN!”, garnering more than 3,700 shares in about two hours on Thursday. Feuerstein also has an Instagram account, where his “story” currently includes a meme mocking the Kenosha victim who was shot in the arm.

 

The spokesperson said the company is blocking certain hashtags and searches and removing fundraisers in order to enforce its ban on content that praises the shooter or the shooting. The company is also “hashing” photos and videos that violate this ban, a process that involves applying a unique digital fingerprint to digital images, allowing systems to automatically block users from re-uploading an image that has already been deemed to violate a rule.

 

“This is a highly adversarial space and we know that people will continue trying to skirt our detection – so our teams are working around the clock to stay ahead of them and help us keep content related to the attack off of the platform,” the spokesperson said.

 

A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.

 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the reason the militia page and an associated event remained online after a shooting that killed two people was due to “an operational mistake.”

 

Ryan Mac

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on August 28, 2020, at 6:45 p.m. ET

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/kenosha-militia-facebook-reported-455-times-moderators

 

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night.

 

The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it “non-violating.” The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting.

 

"To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day."

“To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day,” one Facebook worker wrote in the internal “Violence and Incitement Working Group” to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event.

 

BuzzFeed News could not verify the content on the militia page or its associated event because they had been removed from the platform. A previous story from the Verge noted that the page had issued a “call to arms” and hosted a number of commenters advocating for violence in Kenosha following the police shooting of 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake.

 

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

 

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News reveals the extent to which concerned Facebook users went to warn the company of a group calling for public violence, and how the company failed to act. “The event is highly unusual in retrospect,” reads the report, which notes that the next highest event for the day had been flagged 18 times by users compared to the 455 times of the Kenosha Guard event.

 

After militia gathered in Kenosha on Tuesday night, a 17-year-old with a rifle allegedly killed two protesters. Facebook has maintained that the suspect, whose Facebook and Instagram profiles were taken down after the incident, had no direct connection with the Kenosha Guard page or event.

 

During Facebook’s Thursday all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg said that the images from Wisconsin were “painful and really discouraging,” before acknowledging that the company had made a mistake in not taking the Kenosha Guard page and event down sooner. The page had violated Facebook’s new rules introduced last week that labeled militia and QAnon groups as “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” for their celebrations of violence.

 

The company did not catch the page despite user reports, Zuckerberg said, because the complaints had been sent to content moderation contractors who were not versed in “how certain militias” operate. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that was responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

 

During the talk, Facebook employees hammered Zuckerberg for continuing to allow the spread of hatred on the platform.

 

 

Provided to BuzzFeed News

One Facebook user received this response after trying to report the Kenosha Guard Facebook page noting that it did not "go against one of our specific Community Standards."

 

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”

 

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News sheds more light on Facebook’s failure.

 

“Organizers… advocated for attendees to bring weapons to an event in the event description,” the internal report reads. “There are multiple news articles about our delay in taking down the event.”

 

One Facebook user who flagged the Kenosha Guard page “for a credible threat of violence” was told “it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards,” according to a screenshot they sent to BuzzFeed News.

 

In addition to the four manual reviews that determined the Kenosha Guard page to be non-violative, the Facebook report also noted a number of reviews that “were handled by automation” had reached the same conclusion. As part of a proposed change, the Facebook employee writing the report said that the company should monitor spikes in feedback reports for events and “trigger investigation immediately given this has proved to be a good signal for imminent harm.”

 

The report seems to acknowledge that Facebook was late to act.

 

“This post provides more details around what happened and changes we are making to detect and investigate similar events sooner,” the worker wrote. “This is a sobering reminder of the importance of the work we do, especially during this charged period.”