Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech

[Eugene]

Source: Wall Street Journal

Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech

Ruling by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to keep presidential
candidate’s posts spurred heated internal debates

By DEEPA SEETHARAMAN
Updated Oct. 21, 2016 7:43 p.m. ET

Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year, with some employees arguing certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.

The decision to allow Mr. Trump’s posts went all the way to Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who ruled in December that it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate, according to the people familiar with the matter. That decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook’s internal messaging service and in person to Mr. Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site’s rules for Mr. Trump, and some employees who work in a group charged with reviewing content on Facebook threatened to quit, the people said.

“Facebook has never contacted us about employee complaints and has never removed a post,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign said. “We are not concerned about the liberal Clinton elites who are so intolerant of conservative ideas that they would seek to censor the Trump campaign’s enormously successful Facebook engagement.”

In a statement provided Wednesday evening, a Facebook spokeswoman said its reviewers consider the context of a post when assessing whether to take it down. “That context can include the value of political discourse,” she said. “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.”

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Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-employees-pushed-to-remove-trump-posts-as-hate-speech-1477075392

[forgotmylogin]

1. Ah, there it is:

“We are not concerned about the liberal Clinton elites who are so intolerant of conservative ideas that they would seek to censor the Trump campaign’s enormously successful Facebook engagement.”

They're making money, so he gets to bend the rules.

[Panich52]

2. The curse of the First Amendment...

RW has fervently picked up meme that liberals love to stifle free speech, ignoring their decades-old battle to take "Calling All Pets," "Morning Edition," "NOVA," & even "McLaughlin Report" off the air because the shows are on NPR & PBS.

Unfortunately, while their hypocrisy irks, they have a point. Not the biased claim, but that even racists have the right to air their views. It would be nice if Facebook, & other sites, could select the most offensive posts to delete. The member voting as done here on DU is a reasonable method (probably only remotely practical one). But it is censorship f/ administrator to be sole determinant of whether something reaches the level of hate speech.

It seems obvious to some when that is reached, but even one arrested f/ hate crime gets the right of jury trial.

In the meantime, there's the social media version of "just change the channel" — block 'em & urge others to do the same.