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Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech (usatoday.com) 235

An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Facebook employees pushed to remove some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's Facebook posts -- such as one proposing the ban of Muslims from entering the U.S. -- from the service as hate speech that violated the giant social network's policies, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The decision not to remove the Trump posts was made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the newspaper reported. Employees complained that Facebook was changing the rules for Trump and some who review content on Facebook threatened to quit. "When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse," Facebook said in an emailed statement. "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. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis." Senior members of Facebook's policy team posted more details on its policy on Friday: "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."
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Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @06:56PM (#53126649)

    The system is fixed hillary for prison!

  • by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @06:56PM (#53126653)

    Let's ban ideas we don't like because uncomfortable ideas make us uncomfortable. The world should be a safe space, one where we can focus on how great we are instead of possibly thinking about the disturbing thoughts of others.

    • I don't mind a string of racist bile on 4chan or in my eye during Team Fortress. I might object to it at my kid's Christmas pageant or in this case their Facebook wall.
      • by DaHat ( 247651 )

        I might object to it at my kid's Christmas pageant

        When exactly is Trump saying such things at your kid's Christmas pageant? Or is Facebook showing up and re-posting such things while the kids are performing?

        in this case their Facebook wall.

        Perhaps you need to do a better job of controlling the safe space you keep your offspring in, as well as how they respond to such things when they encounter it.

        Did you know there is also violent imagery and porn on the internet? Best keep them offline. TV has some of it t

    • Ah, such is the mind of a millennial. Their parents tried to protect them from different ideas, thus leaving them unable to think for themselves. Fucking little twerps.

  • by redmid17 ( 1217076 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @06:56PM (#53126655)
    FTS: Employees complained that Facebook was changing the rules for Trump and some who review content on Facebook threatened to quit.

    Well, bye. Yes Trump is terrible and his viewpoints are awful. He's awful the GOP candidate for President. By squelching his speech content, you're both tacitly endorsing a specific party as a platform -- a big no no from Zuckerberg -- and stripping people of newsworthy information, be it for good or bad. Needless to say it does not surprise me they threatened to quit. If I were Zuckerberg, they'd have been gone anyway. They were moderating content on Facebook, a job not relegated to rocket scientists, and failed at it.

    Good work ladies and gentlemen.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      By squelching his speech content

      Content that was in violation of Facebook's then-current terms and conditions

      you're both tacitly endorsing a specific party as a platform

      Which party is that? Democratic, Libertarian, or Green? American Independent, American Socialist, or yet another of the political parties?

      a big no no from Zuckerberg

      And changing the rules so that the original candidate no longer is violating Facebook's terms isn't tacitly endorsing that candidate or their party?

      and stripping people of newsworthy information

      Because Facebook, first of all, positions their service as a primary source of news, and is completely not just a place to keep in contact with peopl

      • Nice job Anon coward. You almost, nearly gave a kind-of-accurate, coherent, useful response.

        Your talents might be more useful in the real of horse shoes or hand grenades.
  • I'd wager that many of the people working at Facebook are not Trump supporters. The ones who moderate are on the bottom rung, in low paid, low skill jobs where the whip is being cracked because they aren't flagging stuff fast enough.

    Facebook is a normal company full of mostly normal people. Of course some of them will try to do this, just like their users go around flagging Clinton's stuff and just like every other site. Now if Facebook suddenly officially endorsed Trump, or Breitbart decided to back Clinto

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @06:59PM (#53126673)

    If said employees feel free to delete others posts, it's not hard to imagine they are reading private messages, monitoring to make sure BadThought is stamped out...

    Have these employees been fired? If not, why not?

  • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @07:13PM (#53126741)

    I'm quite left of center and the hate for Hillary among my group is probably as bad as the Trump fan hate for Hillary, and people have been complaining about posts disappearing.

    Editing content makes you responsible for the content itself, as you are exerting control over it.

    I believe practices like this are ridiculously dumb.

    Especially since I consider "hate speech" a great idiot filter. It allows me to keep my friends list trimmed. Just like a Confederate flag is, or Trump signs in the yard. But that's my own choosing. I don't want Facebook choosing for me.

    Yeah, I know, if it's free you are the product. The problem is that the telnet chat that everyone used has been abandoned (even though it's still up after all these years).

    --
    BMO

    • by ADRA ( 37398 )

      Hate speech, profanity, spam, threats, etc.. they all run rampant throughout content sites that don't actively fight against them. Sure, Facebook doesn't have to censor nudity, but they chose to draw the line on where they did. That was their choice to make, just as its your choice to use a more free service.

      My only burn is that Zuk specifically went out of the way to break his own policies to assuage further political backlash. Trump clicked 'I understand these onerous speech restricted privileges' when he

  • by kfsone ( 63008 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @07:26PM (#53126799) Homepage

    "Employees" and "pushed for". According to Google, Facebook had over 12,500 employees in 2015. So some employees felt strongly enough about Trump's posts to raise a discussion, and the company said "No". Zero conspiracy. Nobody stole the secret codes to the hidden filter chamber.

    Basically, this articles takes Facebook taking things seriously, doing what I think most of us would hope it would do, and tries to paint it as beastial. I would *hope* that Facebook /doesn't/ hire based on political perspective, so I would hope it has employees of all ends of the political perspective and seeks to maintain a neutral stance. That doesn't mean that it's employees shouldn't be able to raise their concerns internally either way.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @07:26PM (#53126807)
    that this election is so bat-$h!t (yeah, I know, it's the Internet, I can swear, but I like this better) that Facebook has to change their posting guidelines to allow what's become "normal" political speech?
    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      It's less the election and more that Facebook employs (and empowers) totalitarian-minded censors. A less censor-happy organization (like Slashdot) wouldn't feel the need to change anything.

    • Facebook has to change their posting guidelines to allow what's become "normal" political speech?

      Right-wing political speech becomes less extreme every year. What Trump has said, while baseless and unsupported, is far less offensive than what we've previously seen from them.

      "The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power⦠That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today." -Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK)

  • If my employees tried to kill my company, they would no longer be my employees.

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