Engineering and the Meta “Hateful Conduct” Changes
TL;DR: I helped build Hate Speech detectors at Meta when I was there. Here are my thoughts on the roll-out of these changes, and where they might be difficult.
I worked at Meta for 6.5 years, and as a software engineer in the Integrity group for my final 3 years, from July 2019 through July 2022. By the time I left, I was tech lead for the ~200-person Attack Vectors team there. I was really proud of the work we did in Integrity: keeping fake users off the platform, removing malicious content, and adapting to new types of threats. This was all very important work and I found my colleagues there to be extremely intelligent, engaged, and concerned about keeping the platform safe. I don’t have up-to-date context on changes to the system so some of this is speculation, but since I left there haven’t been any big changes in the public information that is up on the web site.
Last Wednesday, Meta announced major changes in how it would approach Hate Speech (newly renamed to Hateful Conduct). They updated their posted guidelines with about 80 changes (they have been heavily discussed elsewhere, and you can see them for yourself here). Some key points are removing restrictions such as slurs, “sex- or gender-exclusive language,” religion-based comments, and most kinds of cursing. I worked at Meta on their hate-speech detection systems and here are what I think are going to be their big issues going forward.
