Facebook civil rights audit dings 'weaponized' platform
- by Emilio Sims
- in Money
- — Jul 9, 2020
As such, the boycott will go on.
We are making changes - not for financial reasons or advertiser pressure, but because it is the right thing to do.
This campaign has also had its impact outside of Facebook.
Among the improvements Facebook has made are a commitment to bring civil rights expertise in-house, as well as banning ads that are divisive and include fear-mongering statements, and expanding its voter suppression policies.
The beginning of the #StopHateforProfit boycott campaign was marked relatively small in efforts so that Facebook could be held accountable for perceived policy failings.
The auditors argued that Facebook set a precedent for other users by "exempting politicians from fact-checking".
The posts have gone unchecked on Facebook.
"Thanks to user reporting and proactive monitoring, we remove hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and block thousands of profiles each month for promoting violence and cruelty or distributing shocking content on our platform, regardless of where the offender is".
The civil rights experts Facebook hired to review its policies faulted CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to prioritize free speech over other values.
The boycott organisers are seeking a top level executive to evaluate "products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate", as well as independent audits of "identity-based hate and misinformation".
As far as positive decisions go, they cite Facebook's progress on changing policy in discriminatory housing and employment ads, expanded voter suppression policies, census interference prevention measures, more frequent meetings with civil rights leaders and changes to content moderation policies, like its prohibition of praise for white nationalism that went into effect a year ago. "Zuckerberg offered no automatic recourse for advertisers whose content runs alongside hateful posts", they said.
Victims of severe hate and harassment should be able to connect to an actual Facebook employee.
"Allowing the Trump posts to remain establishes a bad precedent that may lead other politicians and non-politicians to spread false information about legal voting methods, which would effectively allow the platform to be weaponized to suppress voting", the auditors said.
That report said "white supremacists" had been migrating to VK for several years after Facebook took measures at that time for you to crack down on hate speech. Why should Mark Zuckerberg do anything? "We've watched the conversation blossom into nothingness".
In a statement, Jessica Gonzalez, Co-CEO of Free Press, said Zuckerberg and his colleagues "delivered the same old talking points to try to placate us without meeting our demands". "We've seen over and over again how it will do anything to duck accountability by firing up its powerful PR machine and trying to spin the news".
"... This isn't over", González added.
Find and remove public and private groups that focus on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism.
"The meeting we just left was a disappointment", Color Of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson said afterwards. "Attending alone is not enough".
"To the civil rights community, there was no question that these posts fell squarely within the prohibitions of Facebook's voter interference policy", the auditors wrote.
"We had 10 demands and literally, we went through the 10, and didn't get commitments or timeframes or clear outcomes", said Greenblatt. The ultimate goal of the project was to "make sure important civil rights laws and principles are respected, embraced, and robustly incorporated" into the social network. "We know we will be judged by our actions not by our text and are grateful to these teams and quite a few other people for their ongoing engagement".