By Deepa Seetharaman
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."
On Friday, senior members of Facebook's policy team posted more
details on its policy. "In the weeks ahead, we're going to begin
allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or
important to the public interest -- even if they might otherwise
violate our standards," they wrote.
The internal debates shed light on how Facebook has grappled
with its position as one of the biggest sources of political
information during a particularly contentious election cycle.
This week, a controversy bubbled up around Facebook director
Peter Thiel, who recently pledged $1.25 million to support Mr.
Trump. In an internal post to employees confirmed by the company,
Mr. Zuckerberg urged tolerance of Mr. Thiel's political activity,
saying it was key to cultivating diversity. Facebook declined to
comment further on the matter, and Mr. Thiel didn't respond to a
request for comment.
Facebook -- which stands to collect an estimated $300 million
from online political advertising this year, according to Nomura
analysts -- has strived to appear nonpartisan and neutral, amid
complaints that the company and key executives favor Democrats. A
May report from tech blog Gizmodo alleged Facebook contract workers
manipulated its trending topics feature for political purposes.
Facebook denied bias, but in August, fired the contractors so that
it could run the feature largely by software.
"They are confronting in a very real way for the first time the
political dimensions of their platform," said Anna Lauren Hoffmann,
who teaches information ethics at the University of California,
Berkeley.
About 44% of Americans get at least some of their news from
Facebook, according to Pew Research.
The company insists it is a neutral platform for open debate.
Yet it has strict rules around what users can post. The rules,
which Facebook has tightened in recent years, ban discrimination
toward people based on their race and religion. Facebook typically
removes content that violates the rules.
Legal experts say Facebook isn't bound by the Federal
Communications Commission's equal-time rules, which require radio
stations and broadcast networks, with exceptions, to devote the
same airtime to political candidates.
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.
Employees continued to submit questions for Mr. Zuckerberg's
weekly town hall about Mr. Trump's posts for months after, the
person familiar said. But the internal-communications team
responded that the question had been answered and the matter was
decided, the person said.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 21, 2016 14:58 ET (18:58 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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