German policeman finds a way to fight hatred on Facebook (in his city)

Shane Thomas McMillan contributed to this report.

The rumor started, like many others, on Facebook.

A group of Muslim refugees from southern Germany reportedly dragged an eleven-year-old girl into a pedestrian gap and raped her. When the police denied the accusation, it was said that politicians engaged in the European Union had ordered that the attack be concealed.

The rumor proved unfounded, but it caused waves of fear and anger as it spread throughout Germany in Germany. the news section of Facebook. The users insulted themselves to the point of exploding with fury and concluded that these dangerous refugees and the politicians who were protecting them had to be expelled from the country.

In most of the world, rumor-related crises are considered part of reality, a product of Facebook's predisposition to extract the worst impulses from people.

However, Andreas Guske, a thin police inspector with a penetrating look in the Bavarian town of Traunstein, where many refugees live and where the rumor circulates, did not think that his community could afford to let go. Attacks on refugees were already on the rise. In addition, the south of Germany is a front line in the battle of Europe in terms of identity and immigration.

"Facebook is not like a bulletin board where people hang things and others read them," Guske said in an interview. "Facebook influences people with their algorithm."

The researchers agree and found that the platform took into account negative and primitive emotions and could even skew people's awareness of what was right and wrong.

In addition, rumors are circulating faster in the era of social networks and often become more dangerous as they spread, said Guske, director of the communications office of the police department.

"It was not like that before Facebook," he said.

The police inspector and his two deputies went to work. Their goal: Thanks to police field work and door-to-door communication, online and real-life rumors would be eradicated and taken seriously, just like a pandemic or a new drug. from the street.

"We are finding that people's sense of security and real security are far apart, like a pair of scissors opening up," Guske said. "We are trying to narrow this gap as much as possible, hatred can flow from this situation and we have seen that this could lead the population to attack migrants and refugees."

A spokeswoman for Facebook said the company "worked closely with the German authorities" and had "trained hundreds of German officials in recent years on the use of our tools".

The company notes that it has taken steps to combat hate speech and has instituted special rules against anti-refugee publications. He is also working with fact-finding organizations, also in Germany, to refute false information published on the platform.

Facebook recruits thousands of moderators to eliminate publications that violate its rules. However, recently, to deal with its impact on the real world or to fight against hatred and misinformation that are in line with the rules, like many rumors circulating in Traunstein.

Guske takes a more practical approach.

To end the rumor about the alleged violation of the young woman in the ditch, Guske began by identifying local residents who had shared the news on Facebook. He then traced the way the story went from a social media post to a buzzword, reminding that Facebook moderators, who only monitor the platform, can not prevent the disclosure of false information in the media. Real world-.

Guske had two goals: to convince the rumor writers to publicly deny their statements and to discover the least gram of truth that there was in this fictional story. As he believed, showing the residents that Facebook had distorted reality was the only way to convince them to reject what they saw as false information.

They discovered that the rumor had begun when the police arrested an Afghan citizen accused of touching and carrying some of the clothes of a 17-year-old girl in two cities in the city. .

While Facebook users shared the number of incidents, they added fake details. An attacker has become several. Touching has become a violation. And the 17-year-old victim was turned into an 11-year-old victim.

The police issued a statement in which he reconstructed the disclosure of the rumor. However, Guske knew that sober fact checking would never be as popular as a scandalous rumor in Facebook's news section, which promotes content based on its ability to maintain the interaction users with the platform.

His team went to the users who had revealed the rumor at the beginning and showed them that they were not right. All but one eliminated or edited their publications.

Karolin Schwarz, who runs a Berlin-based organization that monitors misinformation in the media, said he often worked with the German police to combat misinformation spread on social media. The Guske team in Traunstein is "by far the best I've ever seen," he said.

"Police services should take more action like this," Schwarz said. "It's something great."

At the end of last year, a police chief from Gadwal, in southern India, called attention to adopting a similar approach to Guske's fight against rumors on social media. Asian and African countries, which represent the future of Facebook's activities, have proved to be the most vulnerable to platform-related violence, experts say.

However, in these countries, few police services have the resources available in a tourist town such as Traunstein.

Other German police departments, where skepticism about Facebook is rooted, are examining social networks in more detail.

Gerhard Pauli, state prosecutor in Hagen, a small town in the north-west of the country, said his department was recording more and more cases of violence that appeared to come from Facebook and other platforms.

When Andreas Hollstein, mayor of Altena, the neighboring town, was stabbed by an angry resident, the police concluded that the outrage of social networks about the mayor's policy in favor of refugees had contributed to provoke the aggressor.

"It's a danger we've always had in the history of humanity," he said. "However, we are currently witnessing an explosion of technical capabilities."

Although Facebook has worked with the German government, which is adept at imposing regulations, Pauli said the German police still struggled to attract the attention of the social network.

When asked if he was working in coordination with Facebook, Guske replied, "Not really, it's difficult, it's a problem."

Guske thinks that all rumors undermine the credibility of police officers like him who try to deny them.

Moreover, since he leads his own experience, he can only fight the poison that comes from his jurisdiction.

Social networks allow anyone to spread rumors about where they live. Some white nationalists, who took a special interest in the Bavarian cultural wars, have done so, and Guske is unable to stop them.

"It's hard to prevent false news, because as soon as Facebook reveals them … what else can you do?" He said, hitting the table with his fingertips.

Copyright: 2019 New York Times News Service