As part of a broad effort to make Facebook more inclusive as a platform, the social networking giant on Tuesday began rolling out a new option which allows users to report hate speech on individual posts. As it turns out, though, the feature remains in-testing and was rolled out to users by mistake.
Indeed, this would explain why the question “Does this post contain hate speech?” was seemingly showing up on every post earlier today. By mid-afternoon, though, it became far less prevalent and now it’s not showing up at all.
Addressing the issue, Facebook VP of Product Guy Rosen took to Twitter and explained that the initial incarnation of the “report hate speech” option was simply an internal test that went live too early and mistakenly appeared alongside every post. Presumably, the feature — once completed — will only appear when triggered by certain words or phrases.
While it’s already possible to identify Facebook posts that contain hate speech via the “Give feedback on this post” or “Report this post” options, Facebook’s new prompt will seemingly provide users with a more direct way to bring hateful content to Facebook’s attention.
A comical example of what the prompt looked like out of context can be seen below. Of course, if you couldn’t care less about F8, then perhaps the post below does, in fact, constitute hate speech.
With Facebook’s F8 developer conference ongoing, it remains to be seen if Facebook will address the company’s new plan to battle hate speech or if it will remain something to be discussed at a later date.
