Facebook is hiring a director of human rights policy to work on “conflict prevention” and “peace-building”
Facebook is hiring a director of human
rights policy to work on “conflict prevention” and “peace-building”
By Natasha Lomas
Facebook is
advertising for a human rights
policy director to join its business, located either at its
Menlo Park HQ or in Washington DC — with “conflict prevention” and
“peace-building” among the listed responsibilities.
In the job ad, Facebook writes that as the
reach and impact of its various products continues to grow “so does the
responsibility we have to respect the individual and human rights of the
members of our diverse global community”, saying it’s:
… looking for a Director of Human Rights Policy to
coordinate our company-wide effort to address human rights abuses, including by
both state and non-state actors. This role will be responsible for: (1) Working
with product teams to ensure that Facebook is a positive force for human rights
and apply the lessons we learn from our investigations, (2) representing
Facebook with key stakeholders in civil society, government, international
institutions, and industry, (3) driving our investigations into and disruptions
of human rights abusers on our platforms, and (4) crafting policies to
counteract bad actors and help us ensure that we continue to operate our
platforms consistent with human rights principles.
Among the minimum requirements for the
role, Facebook lists experience “working in developing nations and with
governments and civil society organizations around the world”.
It adds that “global travel to support our
international teams is expected”.
The company has faced fierce criticism in
recent years over its failure to take greater responsibility for the spread of
disinformation and hate speech on its platform. Especially in international
markets it has targeted for business growth via its Internet.org initiative
which seeks to get more people ‘connected’ to the Internet (and thus to
Facebook).
More connections means more users for
Facebook’s business and growth for its shareholders. But the costs of that
growth have been cast into sharp relief over the past several years as the
human impact of handing millions of people lacking in digital literacy some
very powerful social sharing tools — without a commensurately large investment
in local education programs (or even in moderating and policing Facebook’s own
platform) — has become all too clear.
In Myanmar Facebook’s
tools have been used to spread hate and accelerate ethnic cleansing and/or the
targeting of political critics of authoritarian governments — earning the
company widespread condemnation, including a rebuke from the UN earlier this
year which blamed the platform for accelerating ethnic violence
against Myanmar’s Muslim minority.
In the Philippines Facebook
also played a pivotal role in the election of president Rodrigo Duterte — who
now stands accused of plunging the country into its worst human rights crisis
since the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 80s.
While in India the popularity of the Facebook-owned
WhatsApp messaging platform has been blamed for accelerating the spread of
misinformation — leading to mob violence and the deaths of
several people.
Facebook famously failed even to spot mass
manipulation campaigns going on in its own backyard — when in
2016 Kremlin-backed disinformation agents injected masses of anti-Clinton,
pro-Trump propaganda into its platform and garnered hundreds of millions of
American voters’ eyeballs at a bargain basement price.
So it’s hardly surprising the company has
been equally naive in markets it understands far less. Though also hardly
excusable — given all the signals it has access to.
In Myanmar, for example, local
organizations that are sensitive to the cultural context repeatedly complained
to Facebook that it lacked Burmese-speaking staff — complaints that
apparently fell on deaf
ears for the longest time.
The cost to American society of social
media enabled political manipulation and increased social division is certainly
very high. The costs of the weaponization of digital information in markets
such as Myanmar looks incalculable.
In the Philippines Facebook also
indirectly has blood on its hands — having provided services to the Duterte
government to help it make more effective use of its tools. This same
government is now waging a bloody ‘war on drugs’ that Human Rights Watch says
has claimed the lives of around 12,000 people, including children.
Facebook’s job ad for a human rights
policy director includes the pledge that “we’re just getting started” —
referring to its stated mission of helping people “build stronger communities”.
But when you consider the impact its
business decisions have already had in certain corners of the world it’s hard
not to read that line with a shudder.
Citing the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights (and “our commitments
as a member of the Global Network Initiative”), Facebook writes that its
product policy team is dedicated to “understanding the human rights impacts of
our platform and to crafting policies that allow us both to act against those
who would use Facebook to enable harm, stifle expression, and undermine human
rights, and to support those who seek to advance rights, promote peace, and
build strong communities”.
Clearly it has an awful lot of
“understanding” to do on this front. And hopefully it will now move fast to
understand the impact of its own platform, circa fifteen years into its great
‘society reshaping experience’, and prevent Facebook from being repeatedly used
to trash human rights.
As well as representing the company in
meetings with politicians, policymakers, NGOs and civil society groups,
Facebook says the new human rights director will work on formulating internal policies
governing user, advertiser, and developer behavior on Facebook. “This includes policies to
encourage responsible online activity as well as policies that deter or
mitigate the risk of human rights violations or the escalation of targeted
violence,” it notes.
The director will also work with internal
public policy, community ops and security teams to try to spot and disrupt
“actors that seek to misuse our platforms and target our users” — while also
working to support “those using our platforms to foster peace-building and
enable transitional justice”.
So you have to wonder how, for example, Holocaust denial
continuing to be being protected speech on Facebook will square
with that stated mission for the human rights policy director.
At the same time, Facebook is currently
hiring for a public policy
manager in Francophone, Africa — who it writes can
“combine a passion for technology’s potential to create opportunity and to make
Africa more open and connected, with deep knowledge of the political and
regulatory dynamics across key Francophone countries in Africa”.
That job ad does not explicitly reference
human rights — talking only about “interesting public policy challenges…
including privacy, safety and security, freedom of expression, Internet
shutdowns, the impact of the Internet on economic growth, and new opportunities
for democratic engagement”.
As well as “new opportunities for
democratic engagement”, among the role’s other listed responsibilities is
working with Facebook’s Politics & Government team to “promote the use of
Facebook as a platform for citizen and voter engagement to policymakers and
NGOs and other political influencers”.
So here, in a second policy job, Facebook
looks to be continuing its ‘business as usual’ strategy of pushing for more
political activity to take place on Facebook.
And if Facebook wants an accelerated
understanding of human rights issues around the world it might be better
advised to take a more joined up approach to human rights across its own policy
staff board, and at least include it among the listed responsibilities of all
the policy shapers it’s looking to hire.
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