META Meta Platforms Inc

By Benjamin Mullin and Deepa Seetharaman 

Tech firms, publishing executives and lawmakers broadly agree on the dangers of fake news and hate speech online. But they still can't find common ground on how to define it and what to do about it.

On Tuesday, executives for leading social-media firms said on Capitol Hill that they were committed to improving the quality of the content on their sites, but caught flak from lawmakers who took issue with where the companies draw the lines. The hearing highlighted how Facebook Inc. and other tech firms are under pressure to punish publishers of fabricated news articles without stoking broader concerns about censorship.

The testimony before the House Judiciary Committee came days after a private meeting late last week when some publishing executives criticized Facebook for being overly sensitive to conservative complaints about potential liberal bias.

Facebook in particular has come under sustained criticism in recent years for how it mediates political discourse on its platform. The social-media giant has hosted a number of meetings in the past two years with various stakeholders, including publishers, lawmakers and civil-rights groups, to discuss the issue. It also has implemented a number of changes to how it presents news and information on its platform.

But Facebook's actions have failed to quell the outcry from its critics, including Republican and Democratic lawmakers who on Tuesday continued to question the company for a range of complaints including its handling of pages that repeatedly spread hate speech and conspiracy theories.

Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) questioned why a Facebook page called Milkshakes Against the Republican Party remained up for months despite multiple posts that called for violence against Republicans. The page appeared to be down as of Tuesday; a Facebook spokeswoman said the company didn't take it down.

"How many times does a page have to encourage violence against Republican members of Congress at baseball practice before you ban the page?" Mr. Gaetz asked.

Throughout the Tuesday testimony, executives for Facebook, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Twitter Inc. were grilled on how they choose what content to remove or demote. Fake content isn't against the policies of any of these companies. However, each of the firms takes steps to prevent the spread of certain types of content, typically with a goal of reducing misinformation.

Facebook's head of global policy management Monika Bickert was asked by Democratic lawmakers why the social network hadn't suspended InfoWars, a far-right page that has promoted conspiracy theories including one saying that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting never happened and another saying the victims of the Parkland, Fla. school shooting were actors. Ms. Bickert said a page that repeatedly violated Facebook's content standards would be suspended but that the "threshold varies depending on the severity of different types of violations." She didn't provide more detail.

In February, Facebook said it would pull down posts describing the victims of the Parkland shooting as crisis actors, calling the content "abhorrent." Some InfoWars p osts questioning the reality of the Sandy Hook shooting remain on Facebook's platform.

Earlier this year, Facebook overhauled the way it presents news and information on its platform, favoring posts from individuals over those by news organizations and other businesses.

This change has increased the polarization of content on Facebook, according to Angelo Carusone, president of progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America, because the move reduces the visibility of authoritative articles, and instead focuses on pushing content that gets users riled up.

"Stuff with the most emotional appeal gets the highest levels of engagement," Mr. Carusone said.

Disagreements remain about how to find the right balance. At an off-the-record meeting between Facebook officials and publishing executives in New York, some executives argued that the tech giant has grown too deferential to conservative complaints of bias. BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith said that the number of conservative publications in attendance indicated that Facebook had bought into the idea that mainstream outlets such as the New York Times are liberal and should be counterbalanced by right-leaning opinion outlets, said people familiar with his remarks.

Mr. Smith objected in particular to the presence of the Daily Caller, a conservative-leaning outlet whose journalistic standards he called into question. Mr. Smith's assessment of the Daily Caller's journalistic standards was echoed by Lydia Polgreen, the editor in chief of HuffPost.

The co-founder and publisher of the Daily Caller, Neil Patel, defended its reporting during the meeting, according to a person familiar with the matter, saying that the publication as a matter of practice followed basic journalistic guidelines.

This meeting came one day after Facebook came under scrutiny during an on-the-record question-and-answer session with journalists at its New York offices for its decision not to ban InfoWars.

Facebook's chief of News Feed, John Hegeman, said the site doesn't want to punish sites simply because they express controversial views.

Facebook declined to further comment about the meeting. Some of the details were earlier reported by Recode.

Georgia Wells contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 17, 2018 18:51 ET (22:51 GMT)

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