Facebook pledges action to stop hate posts

FACEBOOK bosses want users running special interest groups and fan pages to help them police trolls and hate speech, after being accused of failing to combat extremists.

The social network announced today that group administrators will meet at a first London summit in February, to learn new “skills and tools” to combat bullying.

Steve Hatch, its managing director for northern Europe, said the new move would build on a US conference last year which pledged to keep ADVERTS that discriminate on the basis of race, religion and disability are still being allowed on Facebook a year after bosses promised the problem had been sorted out, an investigation by the ProPublica website says. Facebook blamed the rogue ads on “technical failure”.

“communities safe”. Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said it was hiring 3,000 extra staff to work on suicide prevention and tackle revenge porn. Mr Hatch said: “There is no place for hate speech and our community standards are applicable right the way across the Facebook platform, whether that’s the news feed or in groups. The purpose of the summit is to hear from them what tools they would like.”

Facebook has two billion users, with half in groups on subjects such as politics, sports, music and charities. The Commons home affairs select committee last year said that Facebook , Twitter and Google needed to show a “greater sense of responsibility” to prevent groups from using them to promote terrorism. Critics say the new move is a bid to head off government regulation.