For several weeks, Facebook has been under pressure from activists and part of its employees, who demand more uncompromising moderation of content deemed hateful. Mark Zuckerberg has announced new measures in this direction.
Facebook is embarking on a turning point on content moderation. The social network will ban more types of hate messages in advertisements and plans to add warnings to publications deemed problematic that it leaves online.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday June 26 that the platform will now remove ads that claim people of certain backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, genders or sexual orientation pose a threat to the safety or health of others, a indicated the boss in a text published on his Facebook profile.
The network has been facing increasing pressure for several weeks from activists, as well as some of its employees, users and customers, aimed at moderating more intransigent content deemed hateful. American civil society organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called on advertisers to boycott Facebook in July to better regulate groups that incite hatred, racism or violence. Food and cosmetics giant Unilever, American telecoms company Verizon, glacier Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever), manufacturers of outdoor leisure items Patagonia, North Face and REI, as well as Upwork recruitment responded in the affirmative.
Mark Zuckerberg said the action came “directly from feedback from human rights organizations”. “The 2020 elections were already looking hot, and that was before facing the additional complexities linked to the pandemic and protests for racial justice across the country,” he said in the preamble. He undertook that his teams would be mobilized to counter any move to suppress the vote (in particular for minorities).
Creation of a “warning” for certain content
Mark Zuckerberg also returned, without explicitly mentioning it, to the incident that sparked outcry against his network. Unlike Twitter, Facebook refused to intervene on controversial messages from the President of the United States at the end of May: one on postal voting, which he compared to electoral fraud; and another on the protests and riots that followed the death of George Floyd, an African-American asphyxiated by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Twitter had chosen to hide the president’s remarks and reduce their potential circulation, while leaving them available for consultation.
Facebook is now moving away from its “nothing or nothing” policy and is taking a position halfway. “Users will be able to share this content to condemn it […] but we’ll add a warning to let people know that the content they share can break our rules, ”said Mark Zuckerberg.
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