Facebook: Gospel praise song blocked as Political Ad......
Facebook Removes a Gospel Group’s Music Video
The Indianapolis gospel group Zion’s Joy! in the video
for a new song, “What Would Heaven Look Like.” Facebook removed it for
“political content.”
By Ben Sisario July 5, 2018
Facebook’s recent crackdown on advertising that it
considers political has already affected news publishers and small businesses
like hair salons and day-care centers.
Now a gospel music group can be added to the list.
Last month, Zion’s Joy!, a vocal ensemble from
Indianapolis, posted a video to its Facebook page for a new song, “What Would
Heaven Look Like.” The video opens with images of strife and protests —
including scenes of demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. — as the group sings
lines including, “I know it might feel like this trouble will stay, but this
world will soon fade away.”
“We want to touch people’s hearts and let people know
that we can do better than the world is doing right now,” Robert W. Stevenson,
the group’s founder, said in an interview.
After a week, Zion’s Joy! decided to promote the video by
paying Facebook for a “boost.” That’s when the social media giant’s algorithm
flagged “What Would Heaven Look Like” as “political content” and blocked the
video altogether, Mr. Stevenson said.
In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said Thursday that
its political ad policy is “new, broad and exists to prevent election
interference, so we’re asking people with content that falls under those rules
to simply get authorized and show who paid for the ad in order for it to run.”
“Separately,” the statement continued, “we made an error
by deleting the original post. As soon as we identified what happened, we
restored the post since it does not violate our Community Standards and have
apologized to Zion’s Joy.”
The removal of the video is only the latest example of
how Facebook’s rules for identifying political content — tightened in the wake
of political pressure over the company’s role in the 2016 presidential election
— have labeled various forms of content as political, stirring objections from
users and publishers.
The New York Times has complained that its paid promotions
for its reporting on politics — and even for posts on subjects as innocuous as
a cake recipe — have been treated as political advertising by Facebook. More
recently, Facebook notified a publisher in Texas that it had violated the
social network’s standards on hate speech by posting an excerpt from the
Declaration of Independence. (In the company’s defense, the excerpt included
the term “Indian Savages,” and Facebook told Gizmodo that it had removed the
post “by mistake and restored it as soon as we looked into it.”)
Under Facebook’s new rules, all “election-related and
issue ads” — including posts that are promoted through paid boosts — must
contain a disclosure about who paid for them, and the ads will be collected
into a searchable archive.
The first 30 seconds of the four-minute video for “What
Would Heaven Look Like” include scenes of protesters crying, waving the
American flag and being carried away in stretchers. There is also a brief image
of a demonstrator, standing in front of a building bearing a “Trump” logo, who
is holding a sign critical of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The rest of the video, for the most part, shows the
group’s singers lip-syncing in a recording studio and on a rooftop.
Because it included specific, recognizable protests, the
video counted as engaging with “issues of public importance,” which led to its
being flagged as political.
Mr. Stevenson, 64, who noted that he once toured with
Marvin Gaye, said the group had been careful to remove any explicit
sloganeering from the work.
“We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t leaning one way or
the other,” he said. “That it was just how we felt — people loving each other,
regardless of race, creed or color.”
The song’s lyric imagines all people praising God and
pictures a world in which “bigotry and hate are absent, only love and peace are
present.”
Mr. Stevenson said Zion’s Joy!, whose Facebook page has
just over 1,000 followers, first paid $100 to boost the video in the Midwest.
Facebook treated it as a political ad — and removed it from the platform — only
after the group tried to pay for a second, national boost.
The company asked Mr. Stevenson to verify his identify as
part of the process of handling such an ad, but he said he had not decided
whether or not to go through with it.
“That would be like admitting that it’s political
content, and it’s not,” Mr. Stevenson said. “We’re preaching peace and love and
coming together.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2018,
on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Too Political? Gospel
Video Is Removed By Facebook.
Comments
Post a Comment