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Civil Rights Groups Long Warned Facebook Of Hateful Private Pages

Civil Rights Groups Long Warned Facebook Of Hateful Private Pages

Facebook says its standards apply just as much in private groups as public posts, prohibiting most slurs and threats based on national origin, sex, race and immigration status.

But dozens of hateful posts in a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents raise questions about how well if at all the company is policing disturbing postings and comments made outside of public view.

Many of the posts ProPublica obtained from the 9,500-member “I’m 10-15” group (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “alien in custody”) include violent or dehumanizing speech that appears to violate Facebook’s standards. For example, a thread of comments before a visit to a troubled Border Patrol facility in Texas by Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Veronica Escobar, of Texas, included “fuck the hoes” and “No mames [fist].” Another post encouraged Border Patrol agents to respond to the Latina lawmakers visit by hurling a “burrito at these bitches.” And yet another mocked a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag. A commenter joked, “At least it’s already in a trash bag” — all probable violations of the rules.

Facebook, citing an open federal investigation into the group’s activities, declined to answer questions about whether any posts in the 10-15 group violated its terms of service or had been removed, or whether the company had begun scrutinizing the group’s postings since ProPublica’s story was published. It also refused to say whether it had previously flagged posts by group members or had received complaints.

Facebook’s only response, emailed by a spokeswoman who refused to let ProPublica use her name, was: “We want everyone using Facebook to feel safe. Our Community Standards apply across Facebook, including in secret Groups. We’re cooperating with federal authorities in their investigation.”

Since April, the company has been calling community groups “the center of Facebook.” It has put new emphasis on group activity in the newsfeed and has encouraged companies, communities and news organizations to shift resources into private messaging. These forums can give members a protected space to discuss painful topics like domestic violence, or to share a passion for cookbooks. Groups can be either private, which means they can be found in search results, or secret, which means they are hidden unless you have an invitation.

This is part of an intentional “pivot toward privacy.” In a March blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

But this pivot also fosters hidden forums where people can share offensive, potentially inflammatory viewpoints. “Secret” groups such as 10-15 are completely hidden from non-members. Would-be participants need an invitation to even find the landing page, and administrators of the groups have full jurisdiction to remove a person’s access at any time.

When such groups operate out of sight, like 10-15, the public has a more limited view into how people are using, or misusing, the platform. In a secret group, only members can flag or report content that might be in violation of Facebook’s policies. The administrators of the group can set stricter policies for members’ internal conversations. They cannot, however, relax broader Facebook standards. They also can’t support terrorist organizations, hate groups, murderers, criminals, sell drugs or attack individuals.

Civil rights groups say they have been noticing and raising the issue of hateful posts in hidden forums for years — with limited response from Facebook.

Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and a member of Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights groups pushing for better content moderation on Facebook, said the platform keeps creating features without “without vetting them for their implications for the use by hate groups or, in this case, Border Patrol agents acting in hateful ways.”

Posts in hidden groups have incited incidents of violence in the real world, most famously against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and at the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. The military launched an investigation of a secret Facebook group in 2017 after Marines shared naked pictures of female service members. Facebook has acknowledged the problem and has made some efforts to address it with new initiatives, such as a proposed independent review board and consultations with a group of 90 organizations, most focusing on civil rights.

ProPublica’s Border Patrol story came out the day after Facebook released an audit of civil rights issues on the platform. Recommendations included strengthening hate speech policies around national origin, enforcing a stricter ban on the promotion of white supremacy and removing an exemption that had allowed humorous posts that contained offensive content.

Facebook did not say whether it will make all of the recommended changes. But in a blog post, COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “We will continue listening to feedback from the civil rights community and address the important issues they’ve raised so Facebook can better protect and promote the civil rights of everyone who uses our services.”

Jessica Gonzalez, vice president of strategy and senior counsel at FreePress and co-founder of Change the Terms, said that even after the back and forth with auditors, she was not surprised that the hateful posts in 10-15 were not flagged.

“What Facebook released on Sunday is an improvement,” she said, “but I think Facebook has engaged in this all along in an appeasement strategy. They’ll do what they need to do to get the bad publicity off [their] backs.”

The civil rights audit also called for better transparency about civil rights issues on Facebook’s advertising portal, which became a priority for the company after multiple ProPublica investigations and lawsuits by civil rights groups.

Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Business, said the new emphasis on privacy is part of Facebook’s attempt to keep users on the platform, while reassuring investors.

“So to the extent that Facebook provides shelter to groups of all kinds — whether they are people who are sharing hateful messages or messages for the good of the world — it benefits their business model.”

 

IMAGE: Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook attends a session during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland January 20, 2016. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich/Files

Long Lines Test Voter Patience Across the Nation

Long Lines Test Voter Patience Across the Nation

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Ian MacDougall and Ariana Tobin

Voters reported waits of an hour and longer on Election Day in areas ranging from the Gulf coasts of Texas and Florida to parts of Missouri and South Carolina, up to Chicago, rural central Pennsylvania and New York City. Polling places opening late, voting machine outages, understaffing and sheer volume caused some voters to abandon the lengthy lines before casting their ballots.

In the Houston area, voters waited over half an hour for polls to open as staff struggled to get voting machinery online. Voters who were late for their jobs left polling places in Brooklyn as high turnout and downed ballot scanners led to waits of up to two hours.

While it is hard to know if the problems exceed usual Election Day hiccups, the issues in states that allow early voting, like Florida and Texas, are unexpected, said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida.

Behind the scenes, officials were addressing potential gaps in computer security. By noon Tuesday, several states reported to U.S. election-security officials that hackers tried to scan their computer systems for software vulnerabilities. Days before, a county clerk’s office said its email account was compromised and its messages forwarded to a private Gmail address, according to person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Although early voting in some states had outpaced 2014 — and experts anticipated problems if that trend continued into Election Day — the number of voters turning out at polling places on Tuesday caught many election administrators flatfooted.

The problem was particularly acute in the Houston area. At Lone Star College-Cypress Center, outside Houston, polls opened 45 minutes late because of what one voter attributed to understaffing and bewilderment among poll workers about how to operate voting machinery.

“There were people standing in line for an hour only to find out they were at the wrong polling place,” said Brianna Smith, a 31-year-old tax specialist and mother of three. “It was very discouraging for people to see a line wrapped around the corner when they have to go to work.”

The Houston Chronicle reported a similar late opening at a polling place at Notre Dame Catholic Church.

Hector de Leon, the spokesperson for the Harris County Clerk’s Office in Texas, said the county had resolved the morning’s issues. Delayed openings at some precincts, he added, are common. “Clerks are running late — they get there at 6:45 instead of 6 o’clock,” he said. “Clerks forget how to connect the equipment properly,” though he noted the county has technicians on call to help poll workers befuddled by voting machines.

Elsewhere, downed voting machines led to long delays after voting was underway.

Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, tweeted: “Single scanner breaks down at precinct” in St. Petersburg, Florida, with “some abandoning vote cause they need to work.” (The problem had been resolved by midday, and election officials hadn’t received reports of wait times prompting voters not to cast a ballot, said Dustin Chase, a spokesperson for the Pinellas County, Florida, supervisor of elections.) A Pennsylvanian named Jennifer Culbertson reported seeing fellow voters leave long lines before filling out their ballots at Spring Garden Township municipal building in York, Pennsylvania.

Farther north, voters in Brooklyn reported that, at one point Tuesday morning, all the machines that scan ballots at PS 22 were down. “They’re literally having people fill out the ballot and stuff them in locked ‘emergency’ ballot boxes that half the people in line don’t trust,” Rachael Berkey, who estimated that the wait was over two hours, wrote in an email.

Humidity may be the culprit in places like Brooklyn. “The scanner that’s being reported as jamming wants to operate in the range of 10 to 15 percent humidity, and we’re hearing about problems in New York, Boston and North Carolina, where humidity is really high today,” said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, sheer volume generated long waits. Unlike many states, New York does not offer discretionary early voting.

In a balmy school gym at PS 11, the morning line topped 200, spilling out the schoolhouse doors and onto the sidewalk. The wait was an hour and a half.

The line was “probably longer than when Obama was on the ballot,” Emily Chen said.

Election officials for New York City were not immediately available for comment.

Some voters at the school described seeing people leave the polling place because of what longtime residents described as historic turnout.

“This is the longest line in generations,” Catherine Saunders, a 68-year-old Brooklynite, said. “I’ve been voting here for 27 years.”

Voters saw similarly historic turnout numbers elsewhere in the Northeast. Theresa Marshall, of Wells, Maine, had “never seen it so busy at the polls, even for presidential elections.”

In James Island, just outside Charleston, South Carolina, where the wait reached an hour and a half on an unseasonably warm Tuesday morning, Jennifer Dukes, a 34-year-old photographer, was among a number of locals who sought to persuade their fellow voters to stick out long lines by passing out snacks and water. She saw others playing games on their cellphones to pass the time.

According to Stewart, the best recourse for voters who ran into long lines Tuesday morning is to head back to the polls during the early afternoon. Nationwide statistics show the shortest waits during those hours on Election Day, before a post-work bump later in the afternoon.

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Big Loopholes In Facebook’s New Political Ad System

Big Loopholes In Facebook’s New Political Ad System

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

What Facebook’s New Political Ad System Misses

Facebook’s long-awaited change in how it handles political advertisements is only a first step toward addressing a problem intrinsic to a social network built on the viral sharing of user posts.

The company’s approach, a searchable database of political ads and their sponsors, depends on the company’s ability to sort through huge quantities of ads and identify which ones are political. Facebook is betting that a combination of voluntary disclosure and review by both people and automated systems will close a vulnerability that was famously exploited by Russian meddlers in the 2016 election.

The company is doubling down on tactics that so far have not prevented the proliferation of hate-filled posts or ads that use Facebook’s capability to target ads particular groups.

If the policy works as Facebook hopes, users will learn who has paid for the ads they see. But the company is not revealing details about the significant aspect of how political advertisers use its platform — the specific attributes the ad buyers used to target a particular person for an ad.

Facebook’s new system is the company’s most ambitious response thus far to the now-documented efforts by Russian agents to circulate items that would boost Donald Trump’s chances or suppress Democratic turnout. The new policies announced Thursday will make it harder for somebody trying to exploit the precise vulnerabilities in Facebook’s system exploited by the Russians in 2016 in several ways:

First, political ads that you see on Facebook will now include the name of the organization or person who paid for it, reminiscent of disclaimers required on political mailers and TV ads. (The ads Facebook identified as placed by Russians carried no such tags.)

The Federal Election Commission requires political ads to carry such clear disclosures but as we have reported, many candidates and groups on Facebook haven’t been following that rule.

Second, all political ads will be published in a searchable database.

Finally, the company will now require that anyone buying a political ad in their system confirm that they’re a U.S. resident. Facebook will even mail advertisers a postcard to make certain they’re in the U.S. Facebook says ads by advertisers whose identities aren’t verified under this process will be taken down starting in about a week, and they will be blocked from buying new ads until they have verified themselves.

While the new system can still be gamed, the specific tactics used by the Russian Internet Research Agency, such as an overseas purchase of ads promoting a Black Lives Matter rally under the name “Blacktivist,” will become harder — or at least harder to do without getting caught.

The company has also pledged to devote more employees to the issue, including 3,000-4,000 more content moderators. But Facebook says these will not be additional hires — they will be included in the 20,000 already promised to tackle various moderation issues in the coming months.

What Is Facebook Missing?

The most obvious flaw in Facebook’s new system is that it misses ads it should catch. Right now, it’s easy to find political ads that are missing from their archive. Take this one, from the Washington State Democratic Party. Just minutes after Facebook finished announcing its launch of the tool, a participant in ProPublica’s Facebook Political Ad Collector project saw this ad, criticizing Republican Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers… but it wasn’t in the database.

And there are others.

The company acknowledged that the process is still a work in progress, reiterating its request that users pitch in by reporting the political ads that lack disclosures.

Even as Facebook’s system gets better at identifying political ads, the company is withholding a critical piece of information in the ads it’s publishing. While we’ll see some demographic information about who saw a given ad, Facebook is not indicating which audiences the advertiser intended to target — categories that often include racial or political characteristics and which have been controversial in the past.

This information is critical to researchers and journalists trying to make sense of political advertising on Facebook. Take, for instance, this ad promoting the environmental benefits of nuclear power, from a group called Nuclear Matters: the group chose specifically to show it to people interested in veganism — a fact we wouldn’t know from looking at the demographics of the users who saw the ad.

Facebook said it considers the information about who saw an ad — age, gender, and location — sufficient. Rob Leathern, Facebook’s Director of Product Management, said that the limited demographics-only breakdown “offers more transparency than the intent, in terms of showing the targeting.”

The company is also promising to launch an API, a technical tool which will allow outsiders to write software that would look for patterns in the new ad database. The company says it will launch an API “later this summer” but hasn’t said what data it will contain or who will have access to it.

ProPublica’s own Facebook Ad Collector tool, which also collects political ads spotted on Facebook, has an API that can be accessed by anyone. It also includes the targeting information — which users can also see on each ad that they view.

Facebook said it would not release data about ads flagged by users as political and then rejected by the system. We’re curious about those, and we know firsthand that their software can be imperfect. We’ve attempted to buy ads specifically about our journalism that were flagged as problematic — because the ads “contained profanity,” or were misclassified as discriminatory ads for “employment, credit or housing opportunities” by mistake.

Facebook’s track record on initiatives aimed at improving the transparency of its massively profitable advertising system is spotty. The company has said it’s going to rely in part on artificial intelligence to review ads — the same sort of technology that the company said in the past it would use to block discriminatory ads for housing, employment and credit opportunities.

When we tested the system almost a year after a ProPublica story showed Facebook was allowing advertisers to target housing ads in a way that violated Fair Housing Act protections, we found that the company was still approving housing ads that excluded African-Americans and other “multicultural affinities” from seeing them. The company was pressured to implement several changes to its ad portal and a Fair Housing group filed a lawsuit against the company.

Facebook also plans to rely in part on users to find and report political ads that get through the system without the required disclosures.

But its track record of moderating user-flagged content — when it comes to both hate speech and advertising — has been uneven. Last December, ProPublica brought 49 cases of user-flagged offensive speech to Facebook, and the company acknowledged that its moderators had made the wrong call in 22 of them.

The company admits it’s playing a “cat and mouse game” with people trying to pass political ads through their system unnoticed. Just last month, Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray’s campaign ran Facebook ads criticizing his opponent — but from a page called “Ohio Primary Info.”

The need for ad transparency goes way beyond Russian bad actors. Our tool has already caught scams and malware disguised as politics, which users raised as a problem years before Facebook made any meaningful change.

If you flag an ad to Facebook, please report them to us as well by sending an email to political.ads@propublica.org. We will be watching to see how well Facebook responds when users flag an ad.

How Will They Enforce the New Rules?

It’s one thing to create a set of rules, and another to enforce them consistently and on a large scale.

Facebook, which kept its content moderation and hate speech policies secret until they were revealed by ProPublica, won’t share the specific rules governing political ad content or details about the instructions moderators receive.

Leathern said the company is keeping the rules secret to frustrate the efforts of “bad actors who try to game our enforcement systems”

Facebook has said it’s looking to flag both electoral ads and those that take a position on its list of twenty “national legislative issues of public importance”. These range from the concrete, like “abortion” and “taxes,” to broad topics like “health” and “values.”

Facebook acknowledges its system will make mistakes and says it will improve over time. Ads for specific candidates are relatively easy to detect. “We’ll likely miss ads when they aim to persuade,” said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s Global Politics and Government Outreach Director.

We plan to keep an eye out for ads that don’t make it into the archive. We’ll be looking for ads that our Political Ad Collector tool finds that aren’t in Facebook’s database.

Want to Help?

We need your help building out our independent database of political ads! If you’re still reading this article, we’re giving you permission to stop and install the Political Ad Collector extension. Here’s what you need to know about how it works.

You can also help us find other people who can install the tool. We are especially in need of people who aren’t ProPublica readers already. We need people from a diverse set of backgrounds, and with different perspectives and political beliefs. Please encourage your friends and relatives — especially the ones you avoid talking politics with — to install it.

Do You Work at a News Outlet and Want to Partner With Us on This?

Awesome. We’re already working with quite a few newsrooms all over the world, including the CBC in Canada, Bridge Magazine in Michigan, The Guardian in Australia and more.

In the U.S., we’re trying to get eyes and ears on the ground in as many local elections as possible. If your readers would be interested in joining our transparency effort, please reach out. We’re happy to send more information about this and our larger Electionland project.

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