Karl Stennienibarra On Facebook’s New Satire Guidelines

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Facebook has announced, following a recommendation from its Oversight Board, that it will be clearer in how it handles satirical content. The message comes after a meme was, by many people’s reasoning, incorrectly flagged, so we spoke to Malta’s expert on satire, his excellency Karl Stennienibarra.

“Human touch always welcome”

In a blog post, Facebook indicated that investigating teams will take satire into account when reviewing potential Hate Speech violations. After Facebook’s Oversight Board (read: self-appointed) deemed that the tech giant was wrong to remove a meme in particular, and that a change in guidelines was required.

Facebook in the past has said that it will make exceptions for satire, however, it appears that it never got around to specifying what qualifies as satire and what doesn’t. Since satire is very context-driven, local expert Stennienibarra welcomed the Board’s decision.

“Since I started posting again in 2019, I’ve only ever had one thing removed by Facebook”, he revealed. Though the image in question did not show any violence taking place, the algorithm still flagged it, and it was promptly removed, which is where Stennienibarra rests his case.

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“Satire is an inherently human trait, so anything that involves a human making a judgement on content rather than an algorithm is always welcome”. The reason this affects all of us, is because the image that was removed was not posted by a page, but by a regular user in the comments section.

Meme & recommendations

The Oversight Board pointed out in its recommendation that while Facebook has said it will make exceptions for satire, it doesn’t specify how or what qualifies as satire in its guidelines. Facebook said in its post that in addition to making its guidelines around satire clearer, it would “initiate a review of identical content with parallel context,” and may take further action.

Following a recommendation from its Oversight Board, Facebook says it will update its community standards to be clearer about how it handles satirical content, the company said in a blog post.

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The meme was a reference to the Turkish government, based on the two buttons meme. The Oversight Board described it:

This meme featured the same split-screen cartoon from the original meme, but with the cartoon character’s face substituted for a Turkish flag. The cartoon character has their right hand on their head and appears to be sweating. Above the cartoon character, in the other half of the split-screen, there are two red buttons with corresponding labels, in English: “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” and “The Armenians were terrorists who deserved it.” The meme was preceded and followed by “thinking face” emoji.

Should satirical content receive preferential treatment, or should the algorithms continue as they are?

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