What Mark Zuckerberg Gets Wrong--and Right--About Hate Speech

When he testified before Congress last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the problem of using artificial intelligence to identify online hate speech. He said he was optimistic that in five to 10 years, "We will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging content for our systems, but today we're not just there on that." Brittan Heller (@brittanheller) is director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center for Technology and Society and works with social media companies to reduce cyberhate and online harassment. As an expert on hate speech who recently developed an AI-based system to study online hate, I can confidently say that Zuckerberg is both right and wrong. He is right that AI is not a panacea, since hate speech relies on nuances that algorithms cannot fully detect. At the same time, just because AI does not solve the problem entirely doesn't mean it's useless.