social media police

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on December 13th, 2010 at 06:58 AM | | Tweet

Did you know that there’s a Facebook “hate and harassment” team?  Despite the double entendre-evoking name, they don’t conjure up dirty tricks to play on FB users—they’re the police!

But what do they do, exactly?  With more than 500 million loggers-in, Facebook couldn’t possibly have staff enough to monitor the wall posts of its users across the globe. And even if they did, the fine line between hate crime harassment and free speech is ever-so slippery. The company line on “criticism” allows for any commentary on someone deemed “a public figure.”  And by public figure, they mean, basically, anyone who’s been in a newspaper, or its online equivalent.  Like the 11-yr old girl from Orlando whose mother allowed her to be in a music video, yet balked when Facebook didn’t shut down the accounts of FB users who lampooned her.  But when the comments turned threatening, the FB police took them down.

Facebook claims that they take high-risk bullying seriously, and responds as fast as they can to the roughly two million reports of potentially abusive content that its users flag every week.

“Our intent is to triage to make sure we get to the high-priority, high-risk and high-visibility items most quickly,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer.

In early October, the H&H team spent more than a week dealing with antigay messages and threats of violence on a page inviting people to remember Tyler Clementi and other gay teenagers who have committed suicide, on so-called Spirit Day, Oct. 20. They subsequently tracked down the accounts of the offenders and shut them down. Then, using an automated technology to tap Facebook’s graph of connections between members, they tracked down more profiles for people, who, as it turned out, had also been posting violent messages.

Not surprisingly, most of the extreme, hateful comments come from fake profiles.  The H&H calls these profiles “trolls” and has gotten good at connecting the dots on some of the more egregious networks and put the kybosh to them, albeit, temporarily.

Recently, FB was instrumental in laying some groundwork on cases for two high-profile attempted bombings by outspoken jihadists.  And then there’s the whole WikiLeaks thing.

As speech becomes increasingly ubiquitous, cheap and instantaneous, certainly even the most ardent free speech enthusiasts will need to reset their gauges. And that really hearkens to a BPC caution: when it comes to slapping something up on the Interweb, read thrice, press enter once.