04 Dec Facebook Announces “De-Prioritizing” Policing Slurs Against White People To Focus More On Attacks On Black Folks

Black privilege? Imagine that.

Source: SOPA Images / Getty

Facebook is a lightning rod for criticism and rightfully so in many regards. Mark Zuckerberg and his merry band of coders have been irresponsible on many levels but especially regarding the spread of misinformation during the 2016 election. That said, new news suggests that they will at least TRY to do better going forward.

According to DailyMail, the social network announced that they won’t be putting priority on removing epithets about white people, men, and Americans in favor of protecting Black people, the LGBT community, Jewish folks and other historically oppressed communities from hate speech.

That isn’t to say that comments that are reported by users won’t be deleted but the automated system will not be capturing these comments any longer.

‘We know that hate speech targeted towards under-represented groups can be the most harmful, which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious,’ said Facebook spokeswoman Sally Aldous.

She continued:

‘Thanks to significant investments in our technology we proactively detect 95 percent of the content we remove and we continue to improve how we enforce our rules as hate speech evolves over time,’ Aldous said.