Facebook took a turning point on Friday in moderating content: the social network will ban more types of hate messages in advertisements and plans to add warnings to problematic publications it leaves online.
The platform will now remove ads that claim that people of certain origins, ethnicities, nationalities, gender or sexual orientation pose a threat to the safety or health of others, said boss Mark Zuckerberg in a speech on his Facebook profile.
The network has been facing increasing pressure from human rights activists, as well as some of its employees, users and clients, for several weeks to moderate hateful content more intransigently.
Call for boycott
American civil society organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color (NAACP) called on advertisers to boycott Facebook in July. They want better regulation of 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 recruiters answered the call.
Mark Zuckerberg spoke on Friday on the preparation of the platform for the presidential election in November. He assured that the measures taken came “directly from the rights organizations.”
Shields
“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 attempt to suppress the vote (in particular for minorities).
And he returned, without explicitly mentioning it, to the incident which sparked outcry against his network. Unlike Twitter, Facebook refused to intervene on polemical messages from the president at the end of May, one on postal voting (which he treated as electoral fraud) and another on the demonstrations 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 policy of withdrawal or nothing, and takes a position halfway.
“Users will be able to share this content to condemn it (…) but we will add a warning to tell people that the content they share may violate our rules,” said Mark Zuckerberg.
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