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the_why_of_yyesterday at 2:05 PM1 replyview on HN

Facebook has always moderated (in those languages where they do moderate at all) according to policies, and politicians are exempt.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/facebook-confirm...

Joel Kaplan was hired as the VP of global policy at Facebook in 2014, and he was hired for DEI reasons, i.e., specifically because he was Republican.

Before his role in the GWB White House, he participated in the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Florida vote recount in 2000.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/img-src-images-joelk...


Replies

JuniperMesosyesterday at 8:54 PM

> 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.

This is exactly what I'm talking about - Facebook in the late 2010s had a huge number of employees who thought it was morally important to censor speech that they thought harmed groups they considered marginalized (here, Muslims in general), using anti-hate-speech standards as a tool; and eventually higher-ups at the company felt they needed to come up with some reasonably politically-neutral public rhetoric, which amounted to "we won't censor things polticians say directly in the news". This stated policy still made a lot of pro-censorship people mad, hence this 2019 Ars Technica article attacking Facebook for it. Obviously Facebook (and various other social media companies) changed their stated and de-facto policies several times over the next several years in response to the changing political landscape in the US, which is a process still going on now.

Any attempt at all to define community standards for moderation that have some definition of what hate speech even is, is tantamount to making an object level poltical statement. I am opposed to the existence of any private social media platform that even attempts to do content-based moderation at anything approaching society-wide scale.