It was also the occasion for Facebook to flag me for a comment that violates community standards on hate speech, for my first time since they began cracking down on this the past two years.
Before you gird yourself for my revealing an anti-Asian bias you never knew I had, that wasn't it at all. I'll reproduce the comment and see if you can figure out what it was.
First, though, some context. In my post about the movie I had talked about how the movie's shape-shifting raccoons were more properly identified as tanuki, or Japanese raccoon dogs, only the English translation of the subtitles simplified it by calling them raccoons. I put "Japanese raccoon dogs" in quotation marks as though tanuki were an invention of the movie, not a real thing. Another commenter assured me they were real and sent me to the Wikipedia page. Here was my response:
"Oh yeah I knew they were, I guess putting it in quotation marks made it look like I thought they weren't. These movies are so full of fantastical terminology that I wonder why they couldn't have just referred to them as tanuki rather than raccoons. Even dumb Americans would have figured it out!"
Did I offend quotation marks? Was fantastical terminology the source of my hate speech?
No, of course it was the term "dumb Americans."
It's all about the context, Facebook. Of course, Facebook has so many billions of comments to monitor that context is not possible. But I'm not using the phrase "dumb Americans" the way it might legitimately be used as some sort of epithet. I'm using it as a member of the very group I'm teasing, part of the unofficial license any group has to make fun of itself. And I'm not accusing "dumb Americans" of being racist or otherwise ignorant, I'm only accusing them of exposing themselves to foreign culture only tepidly, suggesting they don't want to do the work involved in such things as reading subtitles or adjusting their view to incorporate cultural concepts with which they may not already be familiar.
Facebook advised me that the comment violates community standards on hate speech and that only I and the author of the post can see the comment. At least I believe that's what it said. I clicked through a flurry of screens this morning on my phone before I even had my coffee, and now I can no longer get back to their original message. I only have a message that tells me I can appeal the decision to take down my comment.
Which I think I will. I need to clear my good name. Plus, I don't know how many warnings about stuff like this I get before they limit my account access on a short-term basis. Who knows the next time I will carelessly drop hate speech into a neutral exchange about raccoon-like creatures who are depicted as having very large testicles.
Okay, so I just clicked on the link for the appeals process, and there was a huge section with specific ways speech can violate the community standards. This includes all sorts of racial groups and the words or images designed to proliferate the existing stereotypes about them. Plus dozens of other things.
The one that seemed most relevant to my situation was this:
Intellectual capacity, including, but not limited to: dumb, stupid, idiots.
This made me pause in the process. Strictly speaking, I am in fact insulting the intellectual capacity of Americans. Just because I am one, it doesn't change the intention behind my comment. (And besides, I'm located in Australia, so they would have know way of knowing I am one.)
I tend to think of Americans as being the geopolitical equivalent of white people in terms of their historical lack of a protected status. It's fair game to tease white people, especially if you are one, because we have all informally agreed that the astronomical level of privilege involved with being white vastly outweighs any negative effects of the teasing. You can't say the same for other ethnic groups. To me, the same logic should apply to being American.
But Facebook doesn't want to get into the business of deciding which groups are fit to survive such an "attack" and which ones aren't. Which you can totally understand.
Then later I came across this passage:
In certain cases, we will allow content that may otherwise violate the Community Standards when it is determined that the content is satirical. Content will only be allowed if the violating elements of the content are being satirised or attributed to something or someone else in order to mock or criticise them.
This seemed to support my case. I'd get a chance to plead my perspective and I could argue that it was satirical. Maybe a human being reading what I had written, in the context I had written it, would get that no harm was intended by the comment and would side with me.
Ultimately, though, I abandoned my appeal. Facebook is trying to be a responsible corporate megagiant, and the result is inevitably going to be some false positives as part of an overall beneficial mission to curb hate speech.
But now that I've got a strike against me, I guess I do have to be more careful about what I say and who I say it about. Of course, I don't usually make broad generalizations about anybody on Facebook, but I didn't consciously think I was doing so here, either. Or if I was, that the group in question could take it.
I guess in the future, if I want to suggest that Americans are intellectually lazy and slightly xenophobic, I'll have to restrict that particular hate speech to this here blog.
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