#counterspeech

[girlactionfigure]

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“Go ahead, privileged little white boy from far away, tell me what’s REALLY going on here.” - via matanperetz___

stopterrornow

[zigcarnivorous]

Feels like a great to to bring up when tumblr zionists, hasbara, tried to mock and dogpile someone for bringing up this issue of military greenhouse emissions.

It is well established that israel's bombardment has generated more greenhouse emissions than several countries, combined. And yet, it's a greater issue if the spectre of antisemitism is present??? Give me a goddamn break! It's literally government sanctioned cyberbullying. And whether it's from a unit 8200 bootlicker or a bluemaga brat lib, that shit don't fly🤗

Check out this ACT.IL PROMOTIONAL COMMERCIAL FROM FIVE YEARS AGO they literally give people little mobile app goals to go harass people for posting about Palestine. Not kidding

[mondonews]

Elon Musk’s Twitter won’t censor hate speech but won’t boost it either

Elon Musk’s Twitter won’t censor hate speech but won’t boost it either

The account explained that blanket removal or suppression of tweets containing hateful comments will not be an option. “Context matters, and not all occurrences of slur words are used in a hateful way,” the anonymous official posted. “Slur words may be used in counterspeech, reclaimed phrases, and song lyrics, for example.” Category: Technology Source: NYPost Technology

[truthbombmemes]

#Ivermectin side-effects **PLEASE SHARE** #counterspeech #VaccinesRfreedom https://www.instagram.com/p/CXjUMSOLLAL/?utm_medium=tumblr

[newmusick]

trans people's are just the new gay folks .. nothing new here ! as far as trans-misogyny that is dysphoria its just gay -phobia if as a homosexual you expect the  94% to stand up and welcome you why are you trying to make folks like you that never will ? why not just be you unapologetically this way the one's you attract will be mentally healthy for you too be around !!

care for your friends and family that you love *no matter what* !

smile laugh & live (bodhi)

No joke this vine has a better understanding of transmisogyny than 40% of this website

[dermedienwolf]

#Hashtags #Memes und #GIFs - #Counterspeech meets #Jugendmedienkultur. Vielen Dank für das tolle Panel - mit super Fragen aus dem Publikum. #ZGO19 (hier: Berlin) https://www.instagram.com/p/BwKXyuvHYgK/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=w1c5aqxsziqb

[ambivalenz-der-macht]

Schon mal vormerken: Donnerstag 20:10 Uhr spannende O-Töne auf Deutschlandfunk zu "Lernender Demokratie". Zum Beispiel, wie wichtig politische Bildung ist und dass dazu auch gehört, wie man sich in Konflikten verhält. Und dass beides ja auch Spaß machen kann! Wir hören uns :-) 

[schraubd]

My Thoughts on the Weiss Resignation

You may have heard that Bari Weiss has not-so-quietly resigned from her position at the New York Times. Her publicly-posted resignation letter is a wide-spanning critique of the culture at the Times and what she takes to be a narrowing of the bounds of acceptable opinion and intellectual curiosity. I have a few thoughts, in no particular order of importance:

I have never been particularly impressed with the bulk of Bari Weiss' work, or her general "cancel culture/fearlessly asking the questions" oeuvre. I've often found it to be lazy, self-satisfied, and/or hypocritical. I don't think she has a coherent theory distinguishing "criticism" (good) from "cancellation" (bad), and most damningly, I don't think she seems to even recognize that there's a tension here that appears to be resolved in a partisan way (my retort is criticism, yours is cancellation).

That said, Weiss is not even close to the only major political pundit who embodies these vices. The degree to which she nonetheless became, for many, the public avatar of those sins always made me uncomfortable, because it always felt like it was tied up to her identity as a prominent Jewish woman. Call it misojewny, call it antisemisogyny, but it stunk.

The eagerness with which people bring up Weiss' college escapades (she participated in projects which exposed the allegedly anti-Israel/antisemitic practices of several professors at Columbia, where she was a student) is a bit to gloating in nature for my tastes (again, many public figures have done things while in college that are not fully thought out or perfectly-tailored to keep a pristine PR file). However, consistent with my above sense that Weiss lacks a theory distinguishing "good" versus "bad" critical counterspeech, she isn't helped by the fact that she hasn't to my knowledge even seriously grappled with the tension in this issue close to her heart. A more thoughtful participant in these debates might have drawn upon her experience seeking to "cancel" figures for alleged antisemitism to by more sympathetic to other actors who seek to "cancel" figures for alleged racism. Weiss did not usually extend that sympathy, and so the juxtaposition is going to reflect poorly on her.

In her letter, Weiss claims that the terms which describe what happened to her are "unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong." She is, indeed, no legal expert. The conduct she describes in the letter -- whether it is "wrong" or not -- would be very unlikely to sustain a legal complaint for unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, or constructive discharge. 

Weiss' confusion is in line with something I've noticed from many conservative observers of anti-discrimination law. They wildly underestimate how high the barriers are to winning a discrimination claim -- probably because they're ideologically committed to the notion that minorities get their discrimination claims rubber-stamped (when the reality is such claims are overwhelmingly rejected by the courts, often before reaching a jury). So when they experience something that is in the family of discrimination, they assume that (a) it must be illegal ("if these whiny minorities are winning, surely my very real pain and trauma must present a winning case too!")and (b) if it isn't treated as illegal, that must be because of some latent anti-conservative(/white/male/whatever) bias, rather than the normal functioning of a legal system they generally endorse.

On the other hand, if we step away from the legal aspect of it all I think few of the people mocking Weiss' contention that the environment at the Times had gotten so toxic that she had to resign take the same view when members of other minority groups write of toxic environments in their workplaces that end up driving them out of prestigious jobs. Surely, we on the left are familiar enough with, and historically expressed enough sympathy towards, this style of claim such that the current sneering mockery -- LOL, someone claims that coworkers being mean to them made working at their job impossible -- rings hollow. Of course, many of those sympathetic to Weiss would be derisive of claims of this sort when made by members of other minority groups. Hypocrisy, as always, is a double-edged sword.

Weiss situates her initial hiring as an effort by the Times to understand Trump voters, and I've seen several writers lamenting her departure defending her presence along that line -- that it's important to have voices like her available to liberals because, after all, almost half the country backs Donald Trump. This argument is a bit odd, though, since Weiss was not herself a Trump-backer either. I've alluded to this problem before in relation to how one justifies hiring "conservative" voices at mainstream newspapers -- is the goal to reflect the views that are held by a large portion of the populace, or is the goal to legitimate certain views which are thought to present genuinely important and worthy contributions to public debate? Weiss' defenders effectively are claiming the former as a defense against the latter -- even if Weiss' opinions aren't objectively all that worthwhile, it's important to hear them lest liberal NYT readers silo themselves off from views which carry support in a considerable swath of the country. But the issue with Weiss is that she doesn't actually reflect the modal example of a pro-Trump opinion in American politics -- the modal pro-Trump perspective would level opinions far more grotesque than anything Weiss ever produced. Ironically, Weiss was hired by the Times because she misrepresents the average content of contemporary conservative viewpoints by giving them a patina of liberal plausibility that makes them more palatable to a liberal audience. Actual conservatives right now scarcely bother with the patina.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2ZrnFzq

[pieceoplastic]

ruff linkage 201811

ruff linkage 201811 - my weekly linkdump, somewhat edited.

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited from my diigo] #tumblr #twitter Everything wrong with Fox News in one video pic.twitter.com/MhnApiQ3pG — NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 16, 2018 Pieceocast 084 – All your space are belong to us. Listen to my latest podcast. Of sorts. https://t.co/sIS1ok4js8 pic.twitter.com/IBDiYSJlha — 🐭 (A)nticapitalist(A) 🐭 (@pieceoplastic) March 16, 2018 This has had me in…

[thelibertybeaconproject-blog]

The Thought Police for the 21st Century: Protecting the Elites

Thought Police for the 21st Century CHRIS HEDGES

The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to…

[amazingreveal]

Facebook expands its hate-fighting counterspeech initiative in Europe

Facebook expands its hate-fighting counterspeech initiative in Europe

SOURCE:techcrunch.com Facebook has launched a third counterspeech initiative in Europe, partnering with the not-for-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue for the launch of the Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI), which is aimed at tackling online extremism and hate speech. COO Sheryl Sandberg launched the initiative in London this morning along with Sasha Havlicek, CEO of the Institute for…

[eretzyisrael]

JC: I’m glad you raised the issue of education a moment ago. You’re particularly troubled, I know, by the BDS movement, partly I imagine because you have two children now on college campuses and two more on the way. What can be done through the law or otherwise to address the campus crisis today?

DW: First, the law must deal firmly and forcefully with violence and with threats of violence. Second, university administrators must act and speak vigorously against Jew-haters on their campuses. It’s been very disturbing to see how weak and cowardly many college presidents have been in confronting anti-Semitic events and expressions occurring right under their noses.

And there’s another dimension as well. It’s even more disturbing, because it cuts close to home, because it’s about us.

Part of the campus problem today lies at the feet of Jewish parents for failing to educate their children to be committed, proud Jews. To be Jews who speak up for themselves, who advocate for Jewish interests and who support the U.S.-Israel relationship. If those who hate Jews see that many Jews themselves are ashamed to be Jewish, those haters are only encouraged to express more anti-Semitism, more anti-Zionism. Many of those who attack Israel and express anti-Semitic sentiments on campus are emboldened by the cowardice and the ignorance of Jewish students who are ashamed to be Jewish. That is the fault of the parents of those Jewish students. The university often is an echo chamber in which Israel is demeaned obsessively and fashionably. The remedy is counterspeech, countereducation, counteraction. Too many Jewish students and faculty don’t speak up. They’re intimidated. That’s unacceptable.

JC: We’ve sort of almost been using the concepts of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism interchangeably. Are they really interchangeable?

DW: Yes, I’m convinced that they are. Anyone who knows Jewish and world history should know that an attack on the Jewish state as a Jewish state is an attack on the Jewish people. Anyone who has ever read the Bible knows you can’t separate it from Eretz Yisrael. When Jews pray, they pray about Zion and the land of Israel. Unfortunately, many Jews today are brought up knowing nothing about Judaism. That’s not to say that Orthodoxy is favored over Conservative or Reform Judaism. I’m certainly not an Orthodox Jew. But every Jew should be brought up with an appreciation of Jewish heritage. Some understanding of our Torah. Some understanding of our history. If every Jew had some sort of Jewish education it would be impossible to grow up without cherishing Eretz Yisrael. It’s central to Jewish heritage and identity—whether you pray to God or not. It’s ironic to think that many people on campus and elsewhere invoke their own Jewish identity to attack the Jewish state. I’m entirely confident that the grandchildren of these people will not be Jews.

JC: Still, when non-Jews on campus are troubled by the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis you see that as being anti-Semitic—even if they aren’t arguing that Israel shouldn’t exist?

DW: People have an absolute right to criticize any government, including that of Israel. It’s curious, though, that these criticisms are only ever about Israel, and obsessively so. You never see or hear any protests about China or Syria or Sudan, or Hamas torturing Gazans, or massacres in Congo or Yemen or anywhere else in the world. I’m not fooled. Are you?

JC: True, but does that mean that they’re anti-Semites because they criticize Israel over the Palestinian issue but not over these other regimes?

DW: I think that’s one point of proof, yes. When a person or a group compulsively and habitually criticizes only Israel and ignores all of the massive atrocities elsewhere in the world, that’s an indication to me that they’re obsessively focused on Israel and likely anti-Jewish, yes.

[carinaaa-y]

Meta Expands the “Redirect Initiative” to Tackle Radicalization

In order to stop the potential radicalization via its social media apps, Meta expanded its “Redirect Initiative” in its search engine into two more regions: Pakistan and the UK. When the user searches for keywords relative to organized hate, violence, and extremism, the top search result will be alternative links to resources that support ideas and methods of anti-violence.

The Redirect Initiative is already available in Australia, the US, Germany, and Indonesia. The data has shown the effectiveness of this program in preventing people’s access to violent and extreme content. According to Meta’s evaluation of the program, during a 3-month period from November 2019 to March 2020, the Redirect Initiative has redirected 2,288 of the 57,523 users who search for such content to alternate resources. Although the rate of 4% seems not to be a great amount, any tiny effort still could be meaningful to Meta’s pursuit of ameliorating radicalization.

As Meta mentioned, it’s only more effective to combat extremism and violence through counterspeech with “empathy and alternative perspectives” rather than entire disruption. And they are taking more effort in seeking partnerships with various NGOs and credible groups to further propel the application of the Redirect Initiative.

Social media as a mass media has significant psychological power in communication and affects the ideology and people’s behaviors. People from a wider range of ages and regions have possessed the ability to have access to social media. According to World Economic Forum, from decades of study and the construction of the database PIRUS, the result turns out that the Internet is the primary and unique medium to foster extremism. As the social media industry is further boosted because of Covid-19 and it’s easy for information on social media to be manipulated by means, it’s essential for social media companies, such as Meta, to guarantee certain supervision and interception. It might be a wise decision for these companies to collaborate with psychologists and data scientists to develop more effective and targeted mechanisms. (339 Words)

[dermedienwolf]

Freiwillige von #tjfbg #Berlin sagen Nein zu #HateSpeech! #Weltfrieden #Online jetzt! #nohatespeech #counterspeech (hier: Berlin, Germany)

[jesseturri]

Censorship, Counterspeech, and Cancel Culture

“As the philosopher Rae Langton argues, we can also ‘undo’ hateful speech from the inside, by dismantling the conditions needed for the speech act to have its force in the first place. As we saw, some speech acts require the speaker to have authority. And some presuppose content that gets smuggled into the ‘conversational score’. For instance, saying: ‘Even George could win’ presupposes that George is not a promising candidate, signalled by the ‘even’. According to Langton, this serves as a ‘back-door’ speech act that, if left unchallenged, gets accommodated and added to the ‘common ground’, changing what’s permissible to think and infer about the discussed subject. It becomes accepted that George is *ranked* as inferior.

We undo such speech by being active hearers. Langton observes how we can ‘block’ presuppositions and their back-door speech acts: ‘Whaddya mean – even George could win?’ Calling out presuppositions spotlights the content that might otherwise have gone under the radar. Once exposed, this content can then be challenged or rejected, preventing it from entering the common ground.”

I’ve encountered two really good pieces of media recently that both, for the most part, deal with the related topics of censorship and “cancel culture.” These are topics that interest me and ones in which I’ve blogged a bit about before (here, here, here).

The quote above comes from an Aeon article written by philosopher of art, Daisy Dixon, and it offers some ways to deal with offensive art; ways that I am definitely liking, for sure! Dixon begins by framing art as a form of visual speech and then discusses a couple of tactics that essentially block and undo hateful speech. She writes:

“Instead of censorship, some have opted for an alternative response to hate speech. We can challenge, refute or even undo the harms of hate speech with more speech. Speaking back presents counternarratives and counterevidence to the falsehoods expressed. This might involve publicly denouncing instances of hate speech and affirming the dignity of the groups targeted, or refuting transphobic speech in social media forums, or challenging racist speech on public transport or at home.”

I really like the idea mentioned in Dixon’s article of “undoing” bad art with better art and, additionally, I’m also keen on the idea of transparent curation, or curation that that gives an accurate and true narrative surrounding the art. This doesn’t sound far off from trigger warnings to me which are also sometimes necessary because I still think Roland Barthes has a point when he inidicates that the artist’s intention (whether it be positive or negative) has little to nothing to do with how a work is received by a viewer. We all have our own histories, our own experiences, our own traumas, and ways of perceiving that we bring to a work of art. So even though the artist’s intent it’s really just another piece of interesting information that gets mixed in with everything else for the viewer, I would imagine that it’s still best for one to seek the most comprehensive understanding.

The second related piece of media I enjoyed recently was an episode of You’re Wrong About (YWA), which is a podcast that features two really smart journalists, Sarah Marshal and Mike Hobbes, discussing people or events that have been miscast in the public imagination. This particular YWA episode focussed on cancel culture and the hosts did a fantastic amount of research for the episode. They trace the origins of the phrase and make some pretty great observations, for instance Hobbes indicates at one point that:

“The entire concept of cancellation is, in part, counterfeit. Because to cancel someone you have to take away something that they had. Whereas a much larger problem in society is people never being given something in the first place. Like it’s basically impossible to cancel a transgender executive of a Fortune 500 company because there are no transgender executives of Fortune 500 companies…part of me feels like, structurally, the entire construction of the cancel culture moral panic is [coming from] people in power who are afraid of losing that power.”

Mike and Sarah also make the astute observation that a significant contributing factor in the manifestation of “cancel culture” is the incredible shift in collective consciousness occurring due to our adoption of the communication medium generated by html and flickering pixels which we collectively call the internet. Interestingly, this paradigm shift is akin in many ways to the one that seemed to occur in tandem with the advent of movable type and the printing press. The printing press allowed people access to information on a far greater scale and so does the internet. Not just that but cancel culture, the YWA episode points out, is closely tied to Twitter which has allowed marginal voices that were previously complaining about injustice in virtual isolation to organize and band together to begin movements with more force, speed, and efficiency. In other words cancel culture isn’t new, it’s been around for at least as long as the Gutenberg Bible and Martin Luther’s sola fide cancellation of the Catholic Church.

Censorship, Counterspeech, and Cancel Culture was originally published on TURRI

[wsmith215]

Facebook is using more AI to detect hate speech

In Q1 2020, 9.6 million pieces of content posted on Facebook were removed for violation of company hate speech policy, the “largest gain in a period of time,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer told journalists today. For context, as recently as four years ago, Facebook removed no content with AI. The data comes from Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER) report, which says AI detected 88.8% of the hate speech content removed by Facebook in Q1 2020, up from 80.2% in the previous quarter. Schroepfer attributes the growth to advances in language models like XLM. Another potential factor: As a result of COVID-19, Facebook also sent some of its human moderators home, though Schroepfer said Facebook moderators can now do some work from home.

“I’m not naive; AI is not the answer to every single problem,” Schroepfer said. “I think humans are going to be in the loop for the indefinite future. I think these problems are fundamentally human problems about life and communication, and so we want humans in control and making the final decisions, especially when the problems are nuanced. But what we can do with AI is, you know, take the common tasks, the billion scale tasks, the drudgery out.”

Facebook AI Research today also launched the Hateful Memes data set of 10,000 mean memes scraped from public Facebook groups in the U.S. The Hateful Memes challenge will offer $100,000 in prizes for top-performing networks, with a final competition at leading machine learning conference NeurIPS in December. Hateful Memes at NeurIPS follows the Facebook Deepfake Detection Challenge held at NeurIPS in 2019.

The Hateful Memes data set is made to assess the performance of models for removing hate speech and to fine-tune and test multimodal learning models, which take input from multiple forms of media to measure multimodal understanding and reasoning. The paper includes documentation on the performance of a range of BERT-derived unimodal and multimodal models. The most accurate AI-driven multimodal model — Visual BERT COCO — achieves 64.7% accuracy, while humans demonstrated 85% accuracy on the data set, reflecting the difficulty of the challenge.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17: Join leading AI executives at the AI event of the year. Register today and save 30% off digital access passes.

Put together by an external team of annotators (not including Facebook moderators), the most common memes in the data set target race, ethnicity, or gender. Memes categorized as comparing people with animals, invoking negative stereotypes, or using mocking hate speech — which Facebook community standards considers a form of hate speech — are also common in the data set.

Facebook today also shared additional information about how it’s using AI to combat COVID-19 misinformation and stop merchants scamming on the platform. Under development for years at Facebook, SimSearchNet is a convolutional neural network for recognizing duplicate content, and it’s being used to apply warning labels to content deemed untrustworthy by dozens of independent human fact-checker organizations around the world. Warning labels were applied to 50 million posts in the month of April. Encouragingly, Facebook users click through to content with warning labels only 5% of the time, on average. Computer vision is also being used to automatically detect and reject ads for COVID-19 testing kits, medical face masks, and other items Facebook does not allow on its platform.

Multimodal learning

Machine learning experts like Google AI chief Jeff Dean called progress on multimodal models a trend in 2020. Indeed, multimodal learning has been used to do things like automatically comment on videos and caption images. Multimodal systems like CLEVRER from MIT-IBM Watson Lab are also applying NLP and computer vision to improve AI systems’ ability to carry out accurate visual reasoning.

Excluded from the data set are memes that call for violence, self injury, or nudity or encourage terrorism or human trafficking.

The memes were made using a custom tool and text scraped from meme imagery in public Facebook groups. In order to overcome licensing issues common to memes, Getty Images API photos are used to replace the background image and create new memes. Annotators were required to verify that each new meme retained the meaning and intent of the original.

The Hateful Meme data set learns with what Facebook calls benign confounders, or memes whose meaning shifts based on changing images that appear behind meme text.

“Hate speech is an important societal problem, and addressing it requires improvements in the capabilities of modern machine learning systems. Detecting hate speech in memes requires reasoning about subtle cues, and the task was constructed such that unimodal models find it difficult, by including ‘benign confounders’ that flip the label of a multimodal hateful meme,” Facebook AI Research coauthors said in a paper detailing the Hateful Memes data set that was shared with VentureBeat.

The evolution of visual reasoning like the kind sought by the Hateful Meme data set and challenge can help AI better detect hate speech and determine whether memes violate Facebook policy. Accurate multimodal systems may also mean Facebook avoids engaging in counterspeech, when human or AI moderators unintentionally censor content from activists speaking out against hate speech instead of actual hate speech.

Removing hate speech from the internet is the right thing to do, but quick hate speech detection is also in Facebook’s economic interests. After EU regulators spent years urging Facebook to adopt stricter measures, German lawmakers passed a law requiring social media companies with more than 1 million users to quickly remove hate speech or face fines of up to €50 million.

Governments have urged Facebook to moderate content in order to address problems like terrorist propaganda and election meddling, particularly following backlash from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have promised more human and AI moderation.

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