It’s past time for Facebook to act on hate speech
They had submitted 10 recommendations they said could result immediately in “real progress.” Facebook had stated that it takes “a zero tolerance approach” to hateful posts on its services by removing them.
Yet the very morning of the meeting, ADL researchers turned up a posting on Facebook from a group headed “Exposing the Rothschilds,” which was “filled with grotesque anti-Semitic conspiracies,” Greenblatt told me.
Things only got more dispiriting that day, as Zuckerberg and Sandberg essentially fobbed the group off with what they considered to be empty promises to take their concerns under advisement.
“We thought we’d talk about commitments and timetables” for implementing the recommendations, he says. “We didn’t get anything of the sort.”
That’s a bad look for Facebook, coming at an especially delicate moment for the $71-billion company.
Companies ranging from small businesses to some of its largest corporate clients have suspended their advertising on Facebook sites this month in response to a boycott campaign initiated by civil rights groups, including the ADL.
Meanwhile, an independent civil rights auditor completed her three-year investigation with a blistering report, published the day of the meeting, that percolated with exasperation.
Although Facebook had made “significant improvements” in dealing with civil rights issues on its main platform, wrote the auditor, former ACLU official Laura W. Murphy, “we have also watched the company make painful decisions over the last nine months with real world consequences that are serious setbacks for civil rights.”
Among them was a decision to tolerate misinformation from politicians, including President Trump, whose posts falsely claiming that mail-in ballots were illegally distributed in some states Facebook refused to take down.
The company says that politicians’ posts warranted an exemption because their speech is inherently newsworthy. Yet its indulgences of politicians’ misstatements “seem to gut policies the auditors and the civil rights community worked hard to get Facebook to adopt,” Murphy wrote.
It’s long past time for Facebook to take complaints about hate speech as more than occasions for omphaloskepsis, the bellybutton-gazing that has been Mark Zuckerberg’s go-to response to questions about his company’s treatment of everything from violations of its users’ privacy to its hosting of noxious speech.
Throughout most of its history as a major public corporation, Facebook and Zuckerberg have behaved as if they’re impervious to criticism. They’ve flouted legal limits, confident that violating even the most stringent regulatory actions would lead at worst to fines that would have minimal effect on the company’s financial picture.
The advertising boycott, however, could force a sea change in Facebook’s treatment of hate speech and disinformation. The campaign originated in mid-June with an ad in the Los Angeles Times calling on companies to suspend their Facebook advertising during July to “send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism and violence.”
To date, more than 1,000 advertisers have signed on to the #StopHateForProfit campaign, including Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Ford, Levi’s, Microsoft, Patagonia, Pepsi and Verizon.
“I know that we’re not going to transform Mark Zuckerberg from a billionaire to a millionaire, and that was never our intent,” says Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy group Free Press. But the campaign “definitely registered — they’d never met with this collection of groups before.” Facebook didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Tuesday’s meeting was the product of an invitation from Facebook, the participants say. Yet Zuckerberg and Sandberg came unprepared with a specific response to all but one of their 10 recommendations.
They called for the banning of “groups focused on white supremacy, militia, anti-Semitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism”; the removal of the exemption of oversight for politicians; and a means for targets of hate and harassment on Facebook to connect with a live Facebook employee for redress.
The company acknowledged only a recommendation for a top-level executive with responsibility to evaluate company policies and programs for “discrimination, bias, and hate.” The company said it would appoint someone with that responsibility, but only at the vice president level.
The company maintains that it’s doing its level best to keep its platforms, which include WhatsApp and Instagram, cleansed.
In the words of Nick Clegg, a former British politician who is its head of communications, its users “don’t want to see hateful content, our advertisers don’t want to see it, and we don’t want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.”
But the task of filtering out what Clegg says is a small proportion of hateful speech from the “more than 100 billion messages ... sent on our services every day” is daunting.
The civil rights groups don’t entirely buy that. Nor should they.
“We’re talking about literally the most sophisticated advertising platform in the history of capitalism,” Greenblatt says. “The idea that they can’t find the Nazis on their platform is just laughable.”
The real problem, he says, isn’t technology but values. Zuckerberg continues to maintain that the paramount principle on which Facebook operates is free expression.
“His interpretation of ‘free expression’ could use a more thorough examination of the history of oppression in our society,” González says. “He has a responsibility to members of groups that are facing oppression and that have always paid a higher cost for their speech.”
Some of the noxious groups that still find a home on Facebook would be out of bounds almost anywhere else. “Find me a community center, a library, a Starbucks that would host any of these groups,” Greenblatt says. “Find me a Marriott hotel that would allow them to have a conference. None would. Zero.”
One wonders whether the ground is shifting beneath Facebook’s feet and if so, whether Zuckerberg feels the tremors. He would be well advised to pay attention.
