ArcaMax

As if Facebook didn't give social network users enough to be frustrated about, a Texas newspaper has discovered another. The social network's algorithm apparently thinks the Declaration of Independence is hate speech.

As shocked as I was to hear about this story, I also felt oddly relieved by a comforting thought: Maybe computers aren't all that brilliant after all.

Or as my dad used to riddle me: "What's the most important part of a car? The nut behind the wheel."

Or in this digital age, we could say it's the nut who's pecking away on his or her keyboard.

The humans at the Liberty County Vindicator in the Lone Star State discovered an unexpected example when they serialized the Declaration of Independence on the paper's Facebook page in the final 12 days leading up to July 4.

So far, so good. But after the first nine excerpts were posted, the tenth, consisting of paragraphs 27 to 31, didn't appear. As Casey Stinnett, the paper's managing editor, explained in a later post, the Vindicator received a notice from Facebook saying that the post "goes against our standards on hate speech."

Hate speech? If Thomas Jefferson was alive, as an old saying goes, he'd be rolling in his grave.

What triggered Facebook's hate-speech filter? Stinnett guessed it was two words in the censored excerpt: "Indian savages."

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us," the text says in its "Bill of Particulars" against King George III, "and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Stinnett offers no defense of the reference to "savages" and agrees with Reason assistant editor Christian Britschgi, who called the phrasing "clearly racist" and an example of the American Revolution's mixed legacy, winning "crucial liberties" for some while enslaving others.

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