SAN FRANCISCO — Since 2013, Matt Bors has made a living as a
left-leaning cartoonist on the internet. His site, The Nib, runs cartoons from
him and other contributors that regularly skewer right-wing movements and
conservatives with political commentary steeped in irony.
اضافة اعلان
One cartoon in December took aim at the Proud Boys, a
far-right extremist group. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Bors titled it
“Boys Will Be Boys” and depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were
trained to be “stabby guys” and to “yell slurs at teenagers” while playing
video games.
Days later, Facebook sent Bors a message saying that it had
removed “Boys Will Be Boys” from his Facebook page for “advocating violence”
and that he was on probation for violating its content policies.
It was not the first time that Facebook had dinged him. Last
year, the company briefly took down another Nib cartoon — an ironic critique of
former President Donald Trump’s pandemic response, the substance of which
supported wearing masks in public — for “spreading misinformation” about the
coronavirus. Instagram, which Facebook owns, removed one of his sardonic
anti-violence cartoons in 2019 because, the photo-sharing app said, it promoted
violence.
What Bors encountered was the result of two opposing forces
unfolding at Facebook. In recent years, the company has become more proactive
at restricting certain kinds of political speech, clamping down on posts about
fringe extremist groups and on calls for violence. In January, Facebook barred
Trump from posting on its site altogether after he incited a crowd that stormed
the US Capitol.
At the same time, misinformation researchers said, Facebook
has had trouble identifying the slipperiest and subtlest of political content:
satire. While satire and irony are common in everyday speech, the company’s
artificial intelligence systems — and even its human moderators — can have
difficulty distinguishing them. That’s because such discourse relies on nuance,
implication, exaggeration and parody to make a point.
That means Facebook has sometimes misunderstood the intent
of political cartoons, leading to takedowns. The company has acknowledged that
some of the cartoons it expunged — including those from Bors — were removed by
mistake and later reinstated them.
“If social media companies are going to take on the
responsibility of finally regulating incitement, conspiracies and hate speech,
then they are going to have to develop some literacy around satire,” Bors, 37,
said.
Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow for the Atlantic
Council who studies digital platforms, said Facebook “does not have a good
answer for satire because a good answer doesn’t exist.” Satire shows the limits
of a content moderation policy and may mean that a social media company needs
to become more hands-on to identify that type of speech, he added.
Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken
down by Facebook were left-leaning, in a sign of how the social network has
sometimes clipped liberal voices. Conservatives have previously accused
Facebook and other internet platforms of suppressing only right-wing views.
In a statement, Facebook did not address whether it has
trouble spotting satire. Instead, the company said it made room for satirical
content — but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist
content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally
discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.
Facebook’s struggles to moderate content across its core
social network, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp have been well documented.
After Russians manipulated the platform before the 2016 presidential election
by spreading inflammatory posts, the company recruited thousands of third-party
moderators to prevent a recurrence. It also developed sophisticated algorithms
to sift through content.
Facebook also created a process so that only verified buyers
could purchase political ads, and instituted policies against hate speech to
limit posts that contained anti-Semitic or white supremacist content.
Last year, Facebook said it had stopped more than 2.2
million political ad submissions that had not yet been verified and that
targeted US users. It also cracked down on the conspiracy group QAnon and the
Proud Boys, removed vaccine misinformation, and displayed warnings on more than
150 million pieces of content viewed in the United States that third-party fact
checkers debunked.
But satire kept popping up as a blind spot. In 2019 and
2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used
“satire” claims to protect their presence on the platform, Brooking said. For
example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in
misinformation under the guise of satire.
“At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and
adopted a more aggressive posture,” Brooking said.
For Bors, who lives in Ontario, the issue with Facebook is
existential. While his main source of income is paid memberships to The Nib and
book sales on his personal site, he gets most of his traffic and new readership
through Facebook and Instagram.
The takedowns, which have resulted in “strikes” against his
Facebook page, could upend that. If he accumulates more strikes, his page could
be erased, something that Bors said would cut 60 percent of his readership.
“Removing someone from social media can end their career
these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence
from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement,” he said.
Bors said he had also heard from the Proud Boys. A group of
them recently organized on the messaging chat app Telegram to mass-report his
critical cartoons to Facebook for violating the site’s community standards, he
said.
“You just wake up and find you’re in danger of being shut
down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic,” he said
Facebook has sometimes recognized its errors and corrected
them after he has made appeals, Bors said. But the back-and-forth and the
potential for expulsion from the site have been frustrating and made him
question his work, he said.
“Sometimes I do think about if a joke is worth it, or if
it’s going to get us banned,” he said. “The problem with that is, where is the
line on that kind of thinking? How will it affect my work in the long run?”
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