[ad_1]
SAN FRANCISCO – On Monday, a search on Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing site, produced a torrent of anti-Semitic images and videos uploaded following Saturday's shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
A search for the word "Jews" posted 11,696 messages with the hashtag "# jewsdid911", claiming that the Jews orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Other hashtags on Instagram refer to Nazi ideology, including number 88, abbreviation used for the Nazi salute "Heil Hitler".
The Instagram posts have been a stark reality. Over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley's social media companies have expanded their reach and influence around the world. But it has become clear that companies have never fully understood the negative consequences of this influence, nor how to fix it – and that they can not put genius back into the bottle.
"Social media encourages people to cross the line and push the envelope to what they are willing to say to provoke and incite," said Jonathan Albright, director of research at Tow Center for Digital Journalism's Columbia University. "The problem is clearly expanding."
The impact of the inability of social media companies to deal with misinformation and hate speech has been abundant in recent days. Cesar Sayoc Jr., accused last week with the sending of explosive devices to prominent Democrats, seems to have been radicalized online by partisan publications on Twitter and Facebook. Robert D. Bowers, accused of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday, spoke of his hatred of Jews on Gab, a two-year-old social network.
The effects of social media were also evident on a global scale. The attentive observer of Sunday's Brazilian elections attributed much of the winner's call, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, to what happened on social media. The interests related to Mr. Bolsonaro's campaign seem to have flooded WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging application, of a deluge of political content that gave wrong information about places and voting hours, provided false instructions on how to vote for particular candidates and outright denigration of a candidate. of the main opponents of Mr. Bolsonaro, Fernando Haddad.
Elsewhere, senior members of the Myanmar army used falsified Facebook messages to foment anxiety and fear against the Rohingya Muslim minority group. And in India, fake stories about WhatsApp kid kidnappings have led crowds to murder more than a dozen people this year.
"Social media companies have created, allowed and allowed extremists to get their message out of the margins to the majority," said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, managing director of the Anti-Defamation League, a non-governmental organization that fights speech of hatred. "In the past, they could not find an audience for their poison, and now, with a click, a message, or a tweet, they can broadcast their ideas with unprecedented velocity."
Facebook said it was investigating antisemitic hashtags on Instagram after being published by The New York Times. Sarah Pollack, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said in a statement that Instagram was seeing new posts and other content related to the weekend's events and that she was "actively reviewing hashtags and related content." at these events and removed those who broke our rules. "
YouTube has stated that it has strict rules prohibiting content that incites hatred or incitement to violence and added that videos violating these rules were removed.
Social media companies have stated that it is difficult to identify and remove hate speech and misinformation or even define what constitutes such content. Facebook said this year that only 38% of hate speech on its site was reported by its internal systems. In contrast, his systems identified and eliminated 96% of what he defined as adult nudity and 99.5% of the terrorist content.
According to YouTube, users reported nearly 10 million videos from April to June for potential violation of community guidelines. According to the company's data, just under a million of these videos broke the rules and were removed. YouTube's automatic detection tools also recorded an additional 6.8 million videos during this time.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all announced plans to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and other technologies to detect and remove unwanted content from their sites. Facebook also announced that it would hire an additional 10,000 people to work on security issues, and YouTube has announced plans to recruit 10,000 people to watch videos. Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, recently said that although the company's long-standing tenet was freedom of expression, it was discussing how "security should come first".
Even though companies spend money and resources on their problems, some of their employees said Monday that they were thinking about whether social media services could have a positive effect.
On Twitter, for example, employees worry more and more about the company's poor treatment of toxic language and hate speech, said four employees, former and current, who had requested anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements.
The employees said that uncertainty had surfaced in August, when Apple and other companies had erased most of the publications and videos on their services written by Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and founder of the right website Infowars, but not Twitter. (Twitter did just follow two weeks later.) Saturday's shooting in the Pittsburgh synagogue led employees to urge Twitter executives to set a policy on how to deal with hate speech and white supremacist content, two people said.
Twitter did not respond to questions about its employees' concerns on Monday, but said it needed to be "thoughtful and considered" in its policies.
"Progress in this space is difficult, but we have never been so engaged and focused in our efforts," said Twitter. "Serving the public conversation and trying to make it healthier is our singular mission here."
Created to allow people to share photos of their food, cute animals and cute kids, Instagram has largely avoided reviews of misinformation and hateful content, especially when compared to Facebook, its parent. But social media researchers say the site has become a haven for hate publications and hate videos in the last year that are supposed to cause discord.
This was evident after the shooting of the Pittsburgh Synagogue, with the proliferation of new antisemitic content on the site. On Sunday, a new video added to Instagram said that the state of Israel had been created by the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family. Under the video, the hashtags read #conspiracy and #jewworldorder.
By the end of Monday, it had been viewed more than 1,640 times and shared with other social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook.
Source link
