Bouncer and Banhammer: Facebook's Internal Terms for Censoring Users Exposed
As further internal Facebook documents leak, internal company code words and terms used to refer to users and issues have been revealed.
Some of the 35 internal terms revealed relate specifically to censoring and punishing users, such as “bouncer,” which is an internal tool used by the company’s “integrity team” to crack down on pages or lists of users. Gizmodo reports that as more internal Facebook documents leak, revealed by far-left “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, a number of internal Facebook terms used to refer to users, projects, and issues have come to light. “Whistleblower”Frances Haugen dishes on Facebook (Jim Watson/Getty) Many of the terms used internally are branded with positive names such as “CORGI!” which refers to a complex mathematical model used by Facebook researchers, or or “Yoda!” which is a text processing tool. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is applauded as he delivers the opening keynote introducing new Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram privacy features at the Facebook F8 Conference at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on April 30, 2019. – Got a crush on another Facebook user? The social network will help you connect, as part of a revamp unveiled Tuesday that aims to foster real-world relationships and make the platform a more intimate place for small groups of friends. (Photo by Amy Osborne / AFP) (Photo credit should read AMY OSBORNE/AFP/Getty Images) But some of these terms refer to major company issues like mass censorship and human exploitation. Gizmodo outlined some of the most commonly used terms, including: A tool used internally to remove all of the likes or follows from a given Facebook user, or group of Facebook users. One use-case brought up internally for the Banhammer was cutting out all the likes/follows from a user after they’d been banned from the platform.
The team’s internal term to refer to “human exploitation,” or human trafficking. An internal tool that the Integrity team used in order to crack down on “relatively small” lists of pages or people. Because we’re talking about a company with Facebook’s scale, “small” in this case means “on the order of thousands,” according to an internal document. Short for “Mark As Disturbing,” MAD refers to content that might be reported by users (and flagged by Facebook’s content moderators) for, you guessed it, being “disturbing.” Frequent offenders, according to other Facebook documents that we’ve reviewed, include “borderline nudity,” “gross medical videos or wounds,” and content that tries “minimizing or denying [the] Holocaust.” (It’s unclear whether Mark Zuckerberg signed off on that last one.) These are just some of the terms that Facebook refers to in a casual manner internally. Read the full list at Gizmodo here. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com.
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