person:susan benesch

  • Could Facebook Have Caught Its ’Jew Hater’ Ad Targeting? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/539964

    Facebook lives and dies by its algorithms. They decide the order of posts in your News Feed, the ads you see when you open the app, and which which news topics are trending. Algorithms make its vast platform possible, and Facebook can often seem to trust them completely—or at least thoughtlessly.

    ProPublica does not argue that Facebook actually set up an anti-Semitic demographic that can be targeted by advertising. Rather, it suggests that algorithms—which developed the list of targetable demographics—saw enough people self-describing as “Jew hater” to lump them into a single group.

    “Facebook does not know what its own algorithm is doing,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the director of the Dangerous Speech Project. “It is not the case that somebody at Facebook is sitting in a dark room cackling, and said, ‘Let’s encourage people to sell Nazi ads to Nazi sympathizers.’”

    She continued: “In some ways, that would be much easier to correct, because there would be some intention, some bad person doing this on purpose somewhere. The algorithm doesn’t have a bad intention.”

    Indeed, Facebook might not be alone in permitting unscrupulous ads to get through. The journalist Josh Benton demonstrated on Thursday that many of the same anti-Semitic keywords used by Facebook can also be used to buy ads on Google.

    #Facebook #Politique_Algorithmes #Publicité

  • Susan Benesch on dangerous speech and counterspeech
    Ethan Zuckerman

    http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/03/25/susan-benesch-on-dangerous-speech-and-counterspeech

    One of the benefits of online speech environments, Benesch posits, is that we can examine the effect of speech on people. In offline environments, it’s very hard to measure what reactions dangerous speech leads to – in online environments, it may be possible to track both responses and effects.

    Benesch’s suggestion is that we should approach dangerous speech through counterspeech, in effect, talking back to the trolls and to others. In explaining her logic, she notes that the internet doesn’t create hate speech – in some cases, it may disinhibit us from speaking. But more often, the internet creates an environment where we are aware of speech we otherwise wouldn’t hear. Most of us wouldn’t have been aware of what speech is shared at a KKK meeting, and many of us wouldn’t have heard the sexist jokes that were told in locker rooms. Now speech is crossing between formerly closed communities.