Zuckerberg’s Holocaust comment puts Facebook on the spot
Zuckerberg’s Holocaust comment puts Facebook on the spot
By BARBARA ORTUTAY July 19, 2018
NEW YORK (AP) — Denying the Holocaust happened is
probably OK on Facebook. Calling for a mob to kill Jews is not.
Mark Zuckerberg’s awkward and eyebrow-raising attempt
this week to explain where Facebook draws the line illustrates the complexities
social media platforms face as they take on the unwanted role of referee in
this age of online misinformation, manipulation and hate speech.
Facebook, with 2.2 billion users, disallows such things
as nudity, the selling of guns, credible threats of violence, and direct
attacks on people because of their race, sex or sexual orientation.
Hours after the Facebook founder’s comments about
Holocaust deniers aired on Wednesday, the company announced it will also start
removing misinformation that could lead to bloodshed. The policy will begin in
Sri Lanka and expand to Myanmar, where Facebook users have been accused of
inciting anti-Muslim violence.
But beyond those guidelines, there are large gray areas.
What, exactly, qualifies as supporting terrorist groups versus merely posting
about them? Or mocking someone’s premature death — something that is also
prohibited?
If Facebook were to ban Holocaust denial, it might also
be called on to prohibit the denial of other historical events, such as the
Armenian genocide or the massacre of Native Americans by European colonizers.
This, Facebook might argue, could lead to a slippery slope where the company finds
itself trying to verify the historical accuracy of users’ posts.
So, where it can, Facebook stays out of policing content.
While thousands of Facebook moderators around the world
are assigned to review potentially objectionable content, aided by artificial
intelligence, executives like to say the company doesn’t want to become an
“arbiter of truth” and instead tries to let users decide for themselves.
This is why fake news isn’t actually banned from
Facebook, though you might see less of it these days thanks to the company’s
algorithms and third-party fact-checking efforts. Instead, Facebook might label
disputed news stories as such and show you related content that might change
your mind.
YouTube recently started doing this too. Twitter has been
even more freewheeling in what sorts of content it allows, only recently
ramping up a crackdown on hate and abuse.
“Facebook doesn’t want to put time and resources to
policing content. It’s costly and difficult,” said Steve Jones a professor of
communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s a difficult job,
I’m sure an emotionally draining job, and given the scale of Facebook, it would
take a lot of people to monitor what goes through that platform.”
At the same time, Jones said he has his doubts that
throwing more moderators (Facebook’s goal is to increase the number from 10,000
to 20,000 this year) and more technology at the problem would make a
difference. He said he has no idea how Facebook can fix things.
“If I knew,” he said, “I’d probably be sitting next to
Mr. Zuckerberg asking for a big fat check.”
Why these companies try to stay out of regulating speech
goes back to their roots. They were all founded by engineers as tech companies
that shun labels such as “media” and “editor.” Facebook’s chief operating
officer, Sheryl Sandberg, even said in an interview last year that, as a tech
company, Facebook hires engineers — not reporters and journalists.
Then there’s the legal shield. While a newspaper can be
held responsible for something printed on its pages, internet companies by law
are not responsible for the content others post on their sites. If they start
policing content too much — editing, if you will — tech companies risk becoming
media companies.
Zeynep Tufekci, a prominent techno-sociologist, said on
Twitter that the notion that you can “fight bad speech with good speech”
doesn’t really work in a Facebook world, if it ever did.
“Facebook is in over its head,” she tweeted Thursday, but
she also confessed that “nobody has a full answer.”
In an interview with Recode , Zuckerberg, who is Jewish,
said posts denying the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews took place would not
necessarily be removed. Zuckerberg said that as long as posts are not calling
for harm or violence, even offensive content should be protected.
While this has been a longstanding position at the
company, Zuckerberg’s statement and his reasoning — that he doesn’t think
Holocaust deniers are “intentionally” getting it wrong — caused an uproar.
The Anti-Defamation League said Facebook has a “moral and
ethical obligation” not to allow people to disseminate Holocaust denial.
Zuckerberg later tried to explain his words, saying in an
email to Recode’s Kara Swisher that he personally finds “Holocaust denial
deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people
who deny that.”
Still, for now the policy is not changing.
AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode
Island, contributed to this story.
Comments
Post a Comment