FB to call out hate speech
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that Facebook will remove posts that incite violence or attempt to suppress voting – even from political leaders – and that the company will affix labels on posts that violate hate speech or other policies.
The moves amount to major concessions amid public pressure, employee unrest and a burgeoning advertiser boycott over Facebook’s long-standing refusal to more aggressively address hate speech and other platform violations from politicians such as President Donald Trump.
The shifts are at least a partial retreat from the company’s traditional deference to speech it deems ‘‘newsworthy.’’ That includes Facebook’s decision this month to not label or remove a post by Trump that said, ‘‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’’ Other companies, such as Twitter, which affixed a warning label on a similar post, have been more forceful at responding to what they deemed to be policy violations.
‘‘There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,’’ Zuckerberg said.
The announcement did little to cool complaints from civil rights leaders, who say they’ve spent years trying to get Facebook to understand the seriousness of the problems on the platform and had won only modest concessions. They noted that Facebook already supposedly had strict policies against voter suppression and hate speech and that the announcement did little to further address those issues.
‘‘Facebook is feeling pressure, which is good,’’ said Brandi CollinsDexter, senior campaign director at Colour of Change, an activist group long critical of Facebook. ‘‘I still think, at the end of the day, they still have a long way to go.’’
The most consequential change may be Facebook’s new willingness to affix warning labels on problematic posts – a step that Zuckerberg long has resisted. The implications could reverberate far beyond the United States at a time when political leaders in many other nations have been exploiting the latitude Facebook has traditionally offered them to lie, misinform and engage in hateful characterisations of other people.
Social media companies are under an especially bright spotlight this year in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, facing pressure to control hate speech and misinformation on their sites – something that still haunts them from rampant disinformation that spread online during the 2016 campaign.
Facebook in particular has faced harsh criticism in recent weeks for its decision to leave up posts from the president that many advocates said clearly incited violence. In the May post, Trump referred to protesters as ‘‘THUGS’’ and wrote, ‘‘Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’’
The new policies are not retroactive, meaning Trump’s controversial posts over the last several weeks will remain untouched. But even if they were posted again tomorrow, Facebook’s updated policies would not apply to the May post, Facebook spokesman Tom Reynolds said. That post applies to a different policy involving ‘‘state use of force,’’ which Facebook is currently reviewing, he said.
Facebook for years has been wrestling with how to enforce its policies against hate speech, disinformation and other violations when the person posting the content is Trump or some other political leader. As the company massively ramped up its teams for detecting and acting against content that violated policies – hiring tens of thousands of people in the process – it explicitly carved out an exemption for posts or advertisements from politicians, even though they had emerged as a leading source of disinformation and other problematic content.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly expressed his reluctance to have Facebook serve as an ‘‘arbiter of truth’’. For weeks he defended his company’s decisions, even telling employees the tweet on looting did not constitute a policy violation.
But yesterday’s action suggested that Facebook’s balancing act had grown untenable in light of intense and visible employee backlash, including some high-profile departures, as well as the advertiser boycott.
That it has grown to include in recent days such prominent corporate staples as Verizon, Hershey, Coca-Cola and Unilever is a worrying sign for a company that generates its multibilliondollar profits and massive stock market valuation by maintaining a robust flow of advertising dollars.
Washington Post
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook CEO