Facebook to Start Taking Down Posts That Could Lead to Violence
July 18 2018 - 9:28PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. said Wednesday it will start removing
misinformation that could spark violence, a response to mounting
criticism that the flow of rumors on its platform has led to
physical harm to people in countries around the world.
The new policy is a shift in Facebook's broader approach to
misinformation, which until now has been focused on suppressing its
popularity on the platform without scrubbing the problematic
content entirely. But the company has also faced more questions
about the platform's role as a vector for false information that
can inflame social tensions.
The company will rely on local organizations of its choosing to
decide whether specific posts contain false information and could
lead to physical violence, company officials said. If both hold
true, the posts will be taken down.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the company will implement the new
policy first in Sri Lanka and later in Myanmar, two countries where
some people and groups have used Facebook to spread rumors that
ultimately lead to physical violence. The attacks in those
countries have garnered significant media attention.
"There were instances of misinformation that didn't violate our
distinct community standards but that did contribute to physical
violence in countries around the world," said Tessa Lyons, a
product manager on Facebook's news feed, citing Sri Lanka and
Myanmar specifically. "This is a new policy created because of that
feedback and those conversations."
The new policy raises a number of questions that company
officials said it is too early to answer, including who its
partners will be and what the criteria is for becoming one. A
Facebook spokeswoman said she couldn't provide a list of
organizations Facebook plans to team up with or countries where
they could deploy this new policy.
It also isn't clear how those partners will determine whether or
not content is false or could lead to violence. Nor was it clear
how Facebook would ensure those organizations remain independent or
relatively free from political bias.
Ms. Lyons said Facebook was in the early stages of creating
these policies and didn't have details to share publicly. In an
interview, she said Facebook will rely on outside organizations'
judgment because they have "local context and local expertise."
Facebook has relied on third-party organizations to help it
navigate other thorny issues in the past. In December 2016, while
facing mounting pressure for allowing misinformation to proliferate
on the platform during the U.S. election, Facebook said it would
team up with fact-checking organizations in the U.S. to help
suppress false news reports on the platform. The organizations
determine which claims are true and false. If enough organizations
say it's false, Facebook will lower the rank of the posts.
The social-media company has struggled to address criticism that
its content policies and enforcement muscle fail to mitigate social
harm caused by misinformation, some of which includes physical
violence. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said it is Facebook's
responsibility to manage the downsides of its platform.
Earlier this month, India's government rebuked the
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp for allowing rumors and
false reports to circulate on its service after a series of deadly
attacks on victims mistakenly accused of kidnapping children.
Over the past week, Facebook officials have faced repeated
questions from lawmakers and reporters about why the company allows
InfoWars, a site that has spread discredited conspiracy theories
about school shootings and other issues, to remain on the site. On
Tuesday, a company official said at a congressional hearing that
InfoWars hadn't yet met a threshold required to remove the page
from Facebook, without explaining what the threshold is.
In an interview with Recode published Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg
sparked more controversy when he said Holocaust denial should be a
protected form of speech on Facebook. "I don't believe that our
platform should take that down because I think there are things
that different people get wrong," he said. "I don't think that
they're intentionally getting it wrong."
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation
League, said this speech causes harm. "Holocaust denial is a
willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by
anti-Semites that is incontrovertibly hateful, hurtful, and
threatening to Jews," Mr. Greenblatt said in a statement. "Facebook
has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its
dissemination."
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 18, 2018 21:13 ET (01:13 GMT)
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