MP threat breaches standards after all
A threat of violence made against a sitting MP does not breach Facebook’s community standards – at least not till Parliamentary Security steps in.
A member of a New Zealand hunting Facebook group was commenting in response to an attack post against Green MP Eugenie Sage back in January.
Stuff has chosen not to republish the comment, as it involved a threat of physical violence against Sage.
A Wellington man, who reported the comment to Facebook, was told: ‘‘We reviewed the comment you reported and found it doesn’t violate our community standards.’’
The man felt his complaint was not taken seriously enough as the comment ‘‘quite possibly violated the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act’’.
‘‘The same day I forwarded all of this to Eugenie’s office, who pretty quickly thanked me and informed me that it had been referred to Parliamentary Security, who were taking it to the police.’’
It was only then that he got a second message from Facebook: ‘‘We reviewed the comment you reported, as well as the post where it appeared.
‘‘Since we have found the post goes against our community standards, we removed both the post and all its comments, including the one you reported.’’
Police and Sage’s office refused to comment. Facebook was asked why it first said the post was OK, then decided, after police involvement, it wasn’t.
‘‘It is a violation of our community standards for people to post credible calls for violence of t hreats against someone, and we will remove this content as soon as we are made aware of it.
‘‘In this instance, we made an error and did not remove the comment when it was first reported to us. Subsequently, the post was then removed by our team for violating . . . standards.’’
The man who reported the post said he did so as ‘‘my little bit to stop crazy going unreported’’.
‘‘But after the events of last Friday, and also the attack on James Shaw, it feels slightly more important and a part of a bigger concern about nutters with access to guns in our country.’’