META Meta Platforms Inc

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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