Facebook Confirms Its 'Standards' Don't Apply To Politicians (arstechnica.com) 89
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook this week finally put into writing what users -- especially politically powerful users -- have known for years: its community "standards" do not, in fact, apply across the whole community. Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform's fact checking and decency standards, the company has clarified, with a few exceptions. Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg, himself a former member of the UK Parliament, outlined the policy in a speech and company blog post Tuesday. Facebook has had a "newsworthiness exemption" to its content guidelines since 2016. That policy was formalized in late October of that year amid a contentious and chaotic US political season and three weeks before the presidential election that would land Donald Trump the White House.
Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate's rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service's hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy. "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," Facebook wrote at the time. Facebook by default "will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard." It won't be subject to fact-checking because the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "referee political debates" or prevent a politician's speech from both reaching its intended audience and "being subject to public debate and scrutiny."
Newsworthiness, Clegg added, will be determined by weighing the "public interest value of the piece of speech" against the risk of harm. The exception to all of this is advertising. "Standards are different for content for which the company receives payment, so if someone -- even a politician or political candidate -- posts ads to Facebook, those ads in theory must still meet both the community standards and Facebook's advertising policies," reports Ars.
Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate's rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service's hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy. "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," Facebook wrote at the time. Facebook by default "will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard." It won't be subject to fact-checking because the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "referee political debates" or prevent a politician's speech from both reaching its intended audience and "being subject to public debate and scrutiny."
Newsworthiness, Clegg added, will be determined by weighing the "public interest value of the piece of speech" against the risk of harm. The exception to all of this is advertising. "Standards are different for content for which the company receives payment, so if someone -- even a politician or political candidate -- posts ads to Facebook, those ads in theory must still meet both the community standards and Facebook's advertising policies," reports Ars.
Hooray (Score:1)
Finally the ruling class can express it's racism, hatred or the poor and general inability to tell the truth with complete freedom while the speech of the peasants is still suppressed.
Clearly that's what the founding fathers wanted with that whole first amendment business.
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I don't think they intended us to hand it over to private gatekeepers to police the speech of the COMMON CITIZEN either.
Social media, if they're going to do this, then let's classifying them as full blown Publishers, since they are obviously curating the data to be published on their sites.
Take away the protections the currently have and let them publish away without the
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If you say "X", then the news is "X".
If Trump says "X", then the news is "Trump says X".
In the 2nd case, the news should be reported even when "X" is false and offensive. In fact, especially when "X" is false and offensive.
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I don't think they intended us to hand over the public square to private gatekeepers to police the speech of people who seek to lead us.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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hand over the public square to private gatekeepers to police the speech of people who seek to lead us.
How do you define lead us? How are those "privileged few" selected?
Example, I speak on Facebook that the direction of the shadows on the MH017 videos used as evidence cannot exist in this universe (it actually cannot) : https://www.fagain.co.uk/node/... [fagain.co.uk]
How does Facebook decide that this should or should or should not be censored? How does it know it should remove it because I am a worthless pleb or left alone because it is by a dear leader. I know how it does for real, I am just asking this question rh
Re: Hooray (Score:2)
All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.
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Exempt (Score:1)
Politicians exempt themselves from most things. If you stop their speech, they will come after your site with new laws or the threat of them.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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yeah, never insult white men or you will be banned... general racism needs to stay directed at (American) minorities in order to get past their filters.
Re: That's real news (Score:3)
Never been on Facebook, I see ...
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It was surely satire?
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Actually it was not. I called a white guy puerile because he was, in fact, being childish, my comment was banned. First time ever. Later when I ran across a blatantly racist comment about Kapernic (the football player who is not in the NFL anymore after he decided to kneel during the Anthem, in case you haven't followed that) I decided to see what the review process is like from the other side. They reversed the ban even after I requested a second review.
I know its only 2 samples but it does jive with th
Re: That's real news (Score:2)
That's so out of touch with reality it's really hard to believe that you're not just playing at satire ...
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>> Facebook actually has standards?!?
They have standards of corruption.
Nick Clegg (Score:2)
Facebook actually has standards?!?
Not really if they have Nick Clegg implementing them. He was infamous in the UK for making a central promise of his campaign a promise to not raise University tuition fees - even going so far as to sign a pledge to that effect - only to turn around in government and he not only raised them but he actually tripled them i.e. increased them by 200%!
It comes at no surprise that he wants politicians to be exempt from community standards - he certainly seemed to think he was while in office although you can t
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You make it sound as though he won the election. His party was one sixth of the governing coalition. In those circumstances you don't get to implement your manifesto.
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You do however get to retain your integrity and refuse to abandon a key manifesto commitment for which people voted.
Ah, shit, I'm sorry, I couldn't say that with a straight face; it's the Liberal Democrats we're talking about here. The party whose leader demands a second referendum on leaving the EU because she dislikes the result of the first then states she won't recognise the result of the second either if it's not what she wants.
Integrity? Not in their vocabulary.
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The party whose leader demands a second referendum
Not anymore - their policy is now to just flat-out repeal the article 50 notification if they get elected. While I oppose Brexit the only sensible way to cancel it is to have a second referendum but hopefully one that is properly democratic. The first one excluded millions of British citizens aboard, many of whom were living in the rest of the EU, and disallowing millions of citizens most affected by the decision from voting is in no way democratic.
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The first one excluded millions of British citizens aboard, many of whom were living in the rest of the EU
Millions, hmm? You have a reference for that?
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You fail to acknowledge that most of those 5-13m people were able to vote.
Try 700,000 - fewer than the margin by which the referendum was won.
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
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The staff in change of enforcing the standards are complaining of getting PTSD and other mental illnesses from the extreme material they are exposed to. Apparently moderating Facebook is like being force fed concentrated human misery, the kind of stuff you hadn't even imagined until someone put it on Facebook.
So yeah, apparently there are some standards.
Let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
They apply stricter standards to powerless who are most likely unable to make a credible threat or defend themselves for that matter, but the people who can literally destroy your life get increased freedom to wreck it ?
Makes good sense.
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This is how the world works. Thus it has always been, and thus shall it ever be.
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It makes more sense if you change "destroy your life" to "give trouble to Facebook".
In other words, self-preservation. It's all about exploiting you and me, but if you get the power to do something bad to Facebook, then you get special treatment.
That actually makes a lot of sense (Score:1)
They apply stricter standards to powerless who are most likely unable to make a credible threat or defend themselves for that matter, but the people who can literally destroy your life get increased freedom to wreck it ?
Makes good sense.
It actually makes good sense. The elected are held accountable at each election. This keeps Facebook from having to weigh in on overtly racist posts from Donald Trump and Steve King. So yeah...you want to be an overt racist troll, you have to jump through a hoop and get elected. If you don't like it, vote the fucker out. It's a reasonable gate to control trolling and yet appear to be politically neutral. Now that Facebook has a greater audience that's over 50 than under, they will cater more to the se
Re:That actually makes a lot of sense (Score:4, Informative)
Not when their support is based on a set of lies they tell the electorate and amplified by Facebook.
This policy makes Facebook (and Yahoo) complicit in the lies. But that's the point -- don't regulate us and we won't call out the bullshit and lies you spew.
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This policy makes Facebook (and Yahoo) complicit in the lies. But that's the point -- don't regulate us and we won't call out the bullshit and lies you spew.
I hope you do not expect to be permitted to call out their lies on their social media platforms.
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Now, whether that would actually happen in real life...seems more and more doubtful by the day.
Then why fact check anyone? (Score:1)
Ask anyone, right or left, authoritarian or libertarian, statist or anarchist, and one thing they'll all agree on is that politicians are less honest than everyone else. It's an attitude you've heard all your life, so you might think of it as cliche or joke, but no, it's actually a sincere consensus.
If you're not going to fact-check them, then why fact-check anyone? They're the ones most in need. That's especially true now, as we seem to be continually lowering the quality bar on the kind of people we elect
Re:Then why fact check anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
'' politicians are less honest than everyone else. ''
Thank god..
signed
The American Bar Association
National Auto Dealer Association
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Isn't that where most politicians apprentice? Though you did leave out the realtors.
How badly do you want facebook fact checking? (Score:2)
Re: How badly do you want facebook fact checking? (Score:2)
What do you mean "to become"? Pretty sure thats the wrong tense there.
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What do you mean "to become"? Pretty sure thats the wrong tense there.
That's why this change is good. It takes them out of the moderation game for at least the focus points for political speech. That's the politician.
If you note in the summary, it talks about Trump's "hate speech" and the "Muslim ban". That is a not quite correct interpretation of what was actually said. But, if you have one political viewpoint you believe it, and you'd enforce "hate speech" standards on everything he says. If you have the other, you'd be seeing a completely subjective standard being appli
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The alternative is facebook goes bankrupt and disappears
Zuckerberg doesn't believe in equality (Score:3)
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Word vomit.
Thank you for, having provided this critique, responding to the content of the 'vomit'. It's so rare to see online someone that can understand a sentence like that, respond appropriately to it, and also so succinctly point out its unnecessary length without allowing that to obscure the point being made.
(It's also been hard to write this without using long words myself. Sigh)
Youtube announced the same thing (Score:3)
Youtube said the same thing a few days ago too. Which is unfair to segregate access to your service based on a profession.
How about banning all political speech? (Score:2)
No matter what, politicians and their supporters will claim that the social media platform is biased against them.
I would think that Facebook would be better off just with posts with pictures of cute kittens, how to get stains out from said kittens and pictures of the kittens' owners drunk in a bar (or drunk at a baseball game or drunk at a cottage or...).
Make Facebook a happy place that is free from politics.
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No matter what, politicians and their supporters will claim that the social media platform is biased against them.
When moderation is done based on subjective rules and moderator political beliefs, it is.
Make Facebook a happy place that is free from politics.
If only we could make /. that way.
Another generation learning why censorship is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
There is so much sad and wrong here I can hardly figure out where to begin.
Speech from politicians is officially exempt
So politicians have special rights to speech that the rest of us don't have. No problems so far!
The company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "referee political debates"
But they do referee political debates, but only debates between citizens not politicians.
Facebook... no, the internet as a whole... the bastion of free speech - is starting to look like Putin's Russia. Did everyone forget why censorship is bad? It's not generational: I hear the cry for censorship from college students up to retirees. How did an entire population forget why this fails every time? You can't "half" censor stuff, or sensor just "bad stuff" or just sensor stuff from some people. Just stop. From Patrick Henry to Howard Stern; from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. Nobody is special: Not politicians, or journalists, or criminals; not minors, not immigrants; not socialists, not fascists, not capitalists, not nazis; not gays, nor white men, nor black women; not Christians, not Mulsims, not Jews; not presidents, not lunatics. No censorship. Free speech is for everyone.
If you don't like someone's speech, stop listening. It's freedom OF speech, not freedom FROM speech.
Why do we have this debate every time? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you don't like it, stop mistaking private for-profit advertising companies as public services. Why does everyone forget that half of the tech giants are nothing but advertising firms? The primary reason Facebook/Google/Twitter exist is to show you ads, not provide free speech, n
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Fine, but when people try that, the private company types support every hosting company, ISP, CDN, and payment processor banning them for the same reason.
At some point it starts to feel like the Matrix "What good is a phone call, if you can't speak?".
I'm fine with saying that platforms don't have to host you, but at some point the whole of The Internet runs on someone else's gear. So I think it's fair to say we need to discuss where the line is.
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but at some point the whole of The Internet runs on someone else's gear.
"The systems" belong to someone, and if that someone is a private company then you have no rights there. "The Internet" is the network that connects the systems. Net neutrality is a thing; note that it does not mean that every system connected to The Net must support your "right" to use their hardware to promote your speech.
So I think it's fair to say we need to discuss where the line is.
I don't think it's hard to identify that line.
Re: Why do we have this debate every time? (Score:2)
I don't think it is though. At some point, someone has to lose. If you want to say edge providers don't have to host/serve anything they don't want to, fine. But that should apply to everything. If Facebook wants to outright ban Republicans, so be it.
The next step down would probably be hosting providers. VPS, dedicated servers, collocation. Do they have to work with everyone? Can they boot the Democrats?
How about things like DDOS protection? There was an article recently where Cloudflare didn't want to do
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I don't think it is though. At some point, someone has to lose.
The line is where you cross from transport to content. Getting packets to Facebook is transport; postings to Facebook are content.
You cannot lose what you never had in the first place. You do not have free speech rights on any of the web servers I run just because they are connected to the Internet. You never had.
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The line is where you cross from transport to content.
That sounds reasonable. We should also make sure no private company controls both. That is bad for other reasons as well that are beyond the scope of this comment thread.
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>Facebook is a private platform in a free market.
Nope. To be a free market, there must be low barriers to entry. The barriers to entry in social media is high, because social media sites are incompatible with one another, and people want to be on popular platforms. In that sense, they are a natural monopoly, until such time as an interoperability standard comes into play.
The supreme court has already stated that social media is the modern public square. "the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his
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The barriers to entry in social media is high, because social media sites are incompatible with one another,
Irrelevant. Compatibility does not define a barrier to entry.
and people want to be on popular platforms.
Also irrelevant. This is a barrier to success, perhaps, but not a barrier to entry.
I understand that the /. code is freely available. Find a hosting site, pay your money, and you too can enter the social media market. Whether you are a success or not is a different matter.
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Find a hosting site, pay your money, and you too can enter the social media market.
I wish this was true. The problem is the ISPs the DNS providers and the CDNs are playing politics too and blocking controversial content. When US companies have to move to 3rd-world nations to get free speech on the internet, something has gone very wrong in the US.
Compatibility does not define a barrier to entry.
This is also a worthy discussion. We started having these problems when the internet switched from multiple web sites coupled with open protocols, to closed sites where you cannot exfiltrate data out of them. Facebook should not be a web site
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Why do we have this debate every time?
Because people you are limiting your understanding of censorship to only government censorship, and misunderstanding what a "public" versus a "private" space means. This misunderstanding often happens in the US because people confuse "free speech" with "the first amendment to the US constitution."
Facebook is a private platform in a free market. They owe no one free speech.
They do, in the same way that I owe you free speech, and you owe it to me. Free speech is a concept every citizen of a modern democracy should grant to every other citizen. Free speech is useless if the only pla
Drowning in bullshit is why. (Score:2)
Let me lead by saying that I do not have a solution to this problem, and do not advocate for what Facebook and Youtube et al are doing.
But there is a fundamental problem -- it takes an order of magnitude as much effort to debunk bullshit as it does to create it. When there's essentially no cost to creating bullshit, and a high cost to debunking it, you're going to get (((global conspiracies))) and flat earth and creationism entrenching themselves. This has undeniably happened. But it's just as easy to lever
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You make a really good point. I do understand why they are trying. But please understand that this problem isn't new.
Visit a grocery store in 1985: there were magazines at every checkout line (still are in some places). 5 out of 10 magazines were tabloids. 4 out of 10 were gossip magazines. 1 out of 10 was "Time Magazine" or "US News and World Report." The grocery stores knew what sold: "fake news" as we call it today. Television was the same way: you had "clickbait" headlines teasing the 11pm news.
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First off, it doesn't matter if tabloids are full of shit stories, since you would have to buy one in order to be disappointed. It's not like you're relying on said tabloids for actual social signals.
Television is a problem, as is talk radio. People get into one little bubble (usually but not always on the right) and get stuck there, with their own cocoon of insanity. It's happening to generations far younger than Boomers, but yes, I think Boomers not being as sharp as they still fancy themselves (if they e
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So politicians have special rights to speech that the rest of us don't have.
Well, yeah... I mean, you aren't allowed to just go and give a Whitehouse Press Conference but the President is. That's just the normal way that the world works.
I think your mistake was thinking that Facebook is some kind of democratic forum that upholds freedom of speech. It's just a corporate advertising platform where the users are plankton for data whales to feed off.
You could try Gab, or hope Jordan Peterson gets out of rehab and finishes his free speech platform, but Facebook isn't what you are lookin
Standards and rules never apply (Score:2)
See, the aristocracy got smart. They realized you can't put their heads in a guillotine if you don't know who's head belongs there.
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the sooner we can reign it in.
I see what you did.
That's fair... (Score:2)
When Mitch McConnell brings disrepute to himself and the country saying crude expletives on the Senate Floor, I want to know about it.
Facebook is a publisher. (Score:5, Insightful)
They exert editorial control.
At this point, yank their states as a platform.
Hold them responsible for anything illegal posted to FB.
When was political speech factual? (Score:2)
Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform's fact checking and decency standards
It should be obvious that most of what politicians say belongs firmly in the fiction category, just label it as such clearly and move on.
I'm a politician too (Score:2)
I don't agree with any form of censorship, I'm also a politician, now stop blocking my speech. I'm sure both left and right partisans will see themselves as politicians.
Or are they going to define what makes a politician? Sounds like you're just moving the goalposts then, good luck defining a qualified politician in places like China and the other 75% of the world where dissent or opposing political parties aren't allowed
Congressional Accountability Act. H.R. 349 (Score:1)
Good in a way (Score:2)
I'd like it if a politician felt free to be overtly Fascist or Marxist.
Then I know not to vote for them.
No slippery slope at all (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you even define a "politician"?
Does it only include people who have gotten elected to public office?
Or ones who are currently running?
What about someone who ran for office in the past and didn't get elected?
What if they've never run for office, but are testing the waters for a possible future run?
Do they have to be from a major party, or does it include minor parties you've never heard of?
Does this only include major offices, or also people running for their local town council?
What if they aren't running for office themself, but they're working on someone else's campaign?
I expect that will end up being another of those "policies" that's so vaguely defined it doesn't really solve anything. You can allow unrestricted speech, or you can ban hate speech. There are arguments for each. But doing one for some people and the other for other people doesn't seem like a solution to anything. It just reinforces that powerful people don't have to follow the rules.
Better (Score:1)
So, we all just become politicians. (Score:1)
Easy fix.
Good (Score:2)
Nor should they. I want to know every last crappy thing barfed out the mouths of politicians. This is a unique situation different from some nebulous community standards driven by corporate interests to satisfy lemming social media explosions they are terrified of.
standards=laws (Score:2)
What about deep fakes? (Score:2)
If political campaign FB pages can start sharing deep fakes without any repercussion on the platform then all this does is muddy the waters even more and spread more disinformation.
Next up in your feed, "Can you believe Warren said the N-word?!?!"
What's a Face Book (Score:2)
Is that something in a plastic surgeons office for showing you different facelifts? I never bought into a Face book. Kind of like My Space on steroids. Look where it went...
Nick Clegg (Score:1)
Free speech is only for politicians. (Score:2)
Normal people would just misuse it.
Why is AOC allowed to block posters on twitter . . (Score:2)
When Trump is not?
Slight correction (Score:2)
"It won't be subject to fact-checking because the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "piss off its conservative shareholders" or prevent a politician's speech from normalizing gaslighting in the public discourse and "being subject to the standards of ACTUAL FACTS."
I mean what kind of country would this be if you couldn't bold faced lie to get elected?! We would implode!