From the
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech
Ruling by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to keep presidential candidate’s posts spurred heated internal debates
By Deepa Seetharaman
October 21, 2016
Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year, with some employees arguing certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision to allow Mr. Trump’s posts went all the way to Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who ruled in December that it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate, according to the people familiar with the matter. That decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook’s internal messaging service and in person to Mr. Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site’s rules for Mr. Trump, and some employees who work in a group charged with reviewing content on Facebook threatened to quit, the people said.
Mr. Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement provided Wednesday evening, a Facebook spokeswoman said its reviewers consider the context of a post when assessing whether to take it down. “That context can include the value of political discourse,” she said. “Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next U.S. president will be.”[More ]
Of course, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be seen as trying to rig the election. And banning Muslims is very popular. However, it seems that Zuckerberg has a number of Muslim employees, who objected. Why does Zuckerberg have a number of Muslim employees? Cheap immigrant labor, that’s why!
Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Mr. Trump has since backed away from an outright ban based on religion, saying his policies would target immigrants from countries with a record of terrorism.
Users flagged the December content as hate speech, a move that triggered a review by Facebook’s community-operations team, with hundreds of employees in several offices world-wide. Some Facebook employees said in internal chat rooms that the post broke Facebook’s rules on hate speech as detailed in its internal guidelines, according to people familiar with the matter.
Content reviewers were asked by their managers not to remove the post, according to some of the people familiar. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, later explained in an internal post that the company wouldn’t take down any of Mr. Trump’s posts because it strives to be impartial in the election season, according to people who saw the post.
During one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s weekly town hall meetings in late January at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, a Muslim employee asked how the executive could condone Mr. Trump’s comments. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s call for a ban did qualify as hate speech, but said the implications of removing them were too drastic, according to two people who attended the meeting. Mr. Zuckerberg said he backed Ms. Bickert’s call, they said.
Many employees supported the decision. “Banning a U.S. presidential candidate is not something you do lightly,” said one person familiar with the decision.
But others, including some Muslim employees at Facebook, were upset that the platform would make an exception. In Dublin, where many of Facebook’s content reviewers work, more than a dozen Muslim employees met with their managers to discuss the policy, according to another person familiar with the matter. Some created internal Facebook groups protesting the decision, while others threatened to leave.
And of course this discussion was hidden from the public until someone leaked to the
Journal. But Facebook has many ways to shape traffic short of actually taking down a post. [
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News, by Michael Nunez, gizmodo, May 9, 2016] Here’s the hateful post on stopping Muslim immigration, still up for now:
Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration:
Posted by Donald J. Trump on Monday, December 7, 2015
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