Inventing the Black Country

Heaven knows we’re all on the lookout for a little bit of light relief at the moment, so perhaps it was no surprise to see the Black Country’s top-trending story last week was the “Facebook Faggot Farce”.

For those who missed it (where were you?!), the social media giant was under fire in our region after users whose posts included the name of our local delicacy were threatened with bans by automated systems for using “derogatory language”. A local history group with almost 14,000 members came to particular attention because of the number of posts over several months discussing Black Country cuisine.

Thankfully complaints from group members finally got through to some non-robots who, not for the first time, found that their algorithms had mistakenly targeted the popular meaty treats. Apologies were made and Facebook promised that they were “looking into what happened” and were “taking steps to rectify the error”.

Clearly this was an upsetting sequence of events for the users wrongly accused of using offensive language and particularly distressing for the group administrators, for whom years of fantastic work building an online local history community were put at jeopardy by the company.

A lot of the media reports seemed to put the whole debacle down to “political correctness gone mad” and some local politicians were quick to claim it was part of some wider “woke agenda” (whatever that means!?) attacking our heritage. Not only is this not true, sadly it also misses the real story here which is Facebook’s interest in putting its profits before its responsibilities to users and wider society with this lazy approach to policing its content.

I’m sure readers will appreciate how important online communities, particularly Facebook pages and groups, have become to the celebrating of local history. Like me, many will have shared photographs and questions and managed to discover valuable information and hear stories we would otherwise have missed out on. Not only does social media create networks and connections that allow us to reinforce our sense of shared identity, these groups often become vital repositories of our heritage, particularly for unique personal memories not captured elsewhere.

A couple of years ago I interviewed over 100 family historians across the world about their research and found everywhere how essential Facebook groups had become to modern historical practice. In Australia and the United States, for example, researchers tracing their British genealogy found the ability to connect with groups all over the country allowed them to make discoveries that would otherwise be impossible. In some cases they even made new friends on the other side of the world who thought nothing of nipping down to the local graveyard or library to photograph a headstone or document for them!

Given these positive impacts of social media we rarely think about the vast importance that the platforms have come to play in so many aspects of our lives, particularly how they dominate the way we share information and news and connect with other people. Every time we post or even just browse and interact online, we are creating valuable data and content, which is translated into colossal profits for Facebook’s shareholders, not to mention making Mark Zuckerberg the fourth richest man in the world.

While they are making billions from hosting photos, videos, comments, and conversations that we have created and posted, there have continually been huge problems with the posting of dangerous and malicious “fake news” and conspiracy theories as well as online abuse and harassment using Facebook’s platforms. Most prominently in recent months we have seen vile and illegal racist abuse aimed at professional footballers where many perpetrators have escaped punishment while others have received only short bans.

For Facebook to admit that it has legal responsibility over this content as its publisher would be potentially very costly as it would mean assuming more responsibility for stamping out misinformation and abuse. Employing human beings to check potentially offensive posts would have prevented any issues related to our beloved faggots. Instead they have been deliberately lazy and have used automatic systems which clearly can’t understand when people are referring to inoffensive local delicacies.

Knowing the importance that these groups play in fostering and archiving our local heritage we should therefore be annoyed and upset about this. Not because it’s “political correctness gone mad”, which it isn’t, but because as the workers and consumers creating gigantic wealth for Facebook, we should be demanding they step up to their responsibilities.

Perhaps if politicians and newspapers spend less time inventing non-existent “woke agendas” and more time pressuring Facebook to use its vast profits and power responsibly we can avoid future faggot farces.