Facebook Algorithms Take Down WordPress Lawyer's Post About Idiocy Of Algorithmic Takedowns

from the that's-an-exclamation-point dept

We've had a lot of talk lately about the idiocy of automated content blocking, whether done by Facebook or by big movie studios like Warner Bros. issuing automated DMCA takedowns on its own site. Paul Sieminski*, the General Counsel for Automattic, was asked by Corporate Counsel magazine for his opinions on the WB takedowns (warning: possible registration or paywall). In it, Sieminski notes:

In the first six months of 2016, WordPress received 4,258 DMCA takedown notices, 9 percent of which were rejected as abusive, according to the company's Transparency Report. And though those numbers are nowhere near the volume of, say, Google, the costs of those abuses are high, Sieminski says. "There's really a big chilling effect on speech, especially controversial speech, because there's a very handy tool to use to remove that type of reporting from the internet," he says. "And as a company, we have to invest in the human resources … to sift through the mountain of notices we get."

There are some more interesting quotes in there as well. Having himself featured in Corporate Counsel Magazine seems like reason enough for a Facebook post, so Paul posted a link to the story on Facebook as well, with a little blurb noting how it was "fun" to be quoted, and how such automated takedowns "happen hundreds of times a day, but make the news only occasionally."

Can you guess what happened next? Of course you can...

Facebook's automated takedown algorithms decided that Paul's brief post and link about how bad automated takedowns are... got taken down, because irony lives. Facebook claims that posting about automated takedowns and how they're problematic somehow violates its Community Standards. Obviously, this is a mistake (yet another one) by Facebook's autotakedown system, but it really does help highlight the point of how problematic this kind of system can be, when perfectly legitimate speech is silenced, because a bot thinks it's bad.

* Full disclosure: Automattic recently sponsored & hosted our event on copyright reform, and Paul was our main contact there for that event.

Filed Under: algorithms, automated takedowns, copyright, dmca, paul sieminski, social media
Companies: automattic, facebook