Facebook’s Automated Content Moderation Tool Flagged a Post Containing Parts of the Declaration of Independence as Hate Speech by Mistake

July 2, 2018

Facebook admitted that their content moderation system incorrectly identified excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, posted by a Texas-based newspaper, as hate speech. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices in governance and the need for responsible AI like Project Cerebellum's AI incident database. To learn more about how Project Cerebellum is working to prevent harm through its HISPI TAIM (Govern) initiative, JOIN US here.

This incident highlights the critical role of trustworthy AI governance and the need for guardrails in AI systems. The mislabeling of the Declaration of Independence as hate speech demonstrates the importance of accurate and reliable AI content moderation systems.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.639, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.634, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.631, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: the-vindicator

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/283

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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