Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit The Auditors also recommended that Facebook broaden how it defined hate targeted at people based on their national origin to ensure that hate targeted at people from a region was prohibited (e.g., people from Central America, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia) in addition to hate targeting people from specific countries. Facebook made that change and now uses a more expansive definition of national origin when applying its hate speech policies. 4. Updated Reviewer Guidance In the last report, Facebook committed to providing more guidance to reviewers to improve accuracy when it comes to content condemning the use of slurs or hate speech. Recognizing that too many mistakes were being made removing content that was actually condemning hate speech, Facebook updated its reviewer guidelines to clarify the criteria for condemnation to make it clearer and more explicit that content denouncing or criticizing hate speech is permitted. Facebook reports that these changes have resulted in increased accuracy and fewer false positives where permissible content is mistakenly removed as violating. B. New Developments & Additional Recommendations 1. Hate Speech Enforcement Developments In addition to completing the pilots discussed in the last Audit Report, Facebook made a number of other improvements designed to increase the accuracy of its hate speech enforcement. For example, Facebook made the following changes to its hate speech enforcement guidance and tools: (i) Improved Reviewer Tools. Separate and apart from the commitments Facebook made as part of the content reviewer settlement, the company has further upgraded the tool reviewers use to evaluate content that has been reported or flagged as potentially violating. The review tool now highlights terms that may be slurs or references to proxies (stand-ins) for protected characteristics to more clearly bring them to reviewers’ attention. In addition, when a reviewer clicks on the highlighted term, the reviewer is provided additional context on the term, such as the definition, alternative meanings/caveats, term variations, and the targeted protected characteristic. The purpose of these changes is to help make potentially violating content more visible, and provide reviewers with more information and context to enable them to make more accurate determinations. Facebook plans to build tooling to assess whether and to what extent these changes improve reviewer accuracy. (ii) Self-Referential Use of Slurs. While Facebook’s policies have always permitted the self-referential use of certain slurs to acknowledge when communities have reclaimed the use of the slur, Facebook reports that it recently refined its guidelines on self-referential use of slurs. Specifically, Facebook indicates that it provided content reviewers with policy clarifications on the slur uses that have historically been most confusing or difficult for content reviewers to accurately evaluate. Separately, Facebook reports that it clarified what criteria must be present for the use of a slur to be treated as a permissible “self-referential” use. These refinements were made to increase accuracy, especially with respect to users’ self-referential posts. 45