Facebook announces civil rights task force in audit report
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg will chair a civil rights task force at the social network, she announced Sunday as the company released its latest report from an audit prompted by complaints about racially discriminatory content policies.
The company is improving but has a lot of work to do when it comes to serving its minority users, the report says. The civil rights task force, which will include leaders from throughout Facebook’s departments, is meant to ensure that the tech giant continues to prioritize issues affecting those users.
“The task force will onboard civil rights expertise to ensure it is effective in addressing areas like content policy, fairness in artificial intelligence, privacy, and elections,” Sandberg wrote in a blog post. “For example, we will work with voting rights experts to make sure key members of our election team are trained on trends in voter intimidation and suppression so they can remove this content from Facebook more effectively.”
The audit, which began last year at the request of advocacy groups after years of complaints about discriminatory policies, has prompted some changes that include Facebook’s new policy of banning white nationalists in addition to white supremacists. The company also is promising to pay special attention to content involving elections and the U.S. census.
“Since I initiated my audit of Facebook, I’ve observed a greater willingness for Facebook to listen, adapt, and intervene through a civil rights lens,” Laura Murphy, a noted civil liberties expert who is leading the audit, said in the report. “I do believe the company is in a different place today than it was a year ago on these issues — I’ve seen employees asking the right questions, thinking about things through a civil rights lens, and poking holes in things on the front end of products and policies.”
Carolyn Wysinger, an El Cerrito-based author and activist, has been blocked and had her posts taken down by Facebook several times over the past couple of years, sometimes when calling out racism. The report says Facebook promises to do better to protect activists and journalists on the platform, which may help her.
“As a black person in America, I don’t believe anything until I see it,” she said in an interview with this news organization. “People pay lip service about creating equity all the time.”
Wysinger is also a member of Color of Change, a national civil rights advocacy group started in the Bay Area that received an apology from Sandberg late last year after Facebook was reported to have hired Republican-led Definers Public Affairs to target its critics and rivals with opposition research and news articles, including Color of Change. Shortly after that, Facebook agreed to the civil rights audit.
Sandberg’s heading of the task force gave Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, pause.
“Part of the reason we’re in this mess is that (Sandberg) ignored problems,” Carusone said. Along with Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy for Facebook, “they created the problem in the first place,” he added.
Another advocacy group wasn’t impressed by the task force, either.
“Instead of building a permanent, board and staff level civil rights infrastructure that has the expertise needed to address this crisis, Facebook has taken the easy way out by simply continuing business as usual,” Madihha Ahussain, Muslim Advocates’ special counsel for anti-Muslim bigotry, said in a statement.