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Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.
Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.
Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.
[...] Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.
At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.
Before the 2016 election, the company largely saw its role in politics as courting political leaders to buy ads and broadcast their views, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
But that started to change in 2015, as Trump’s candidacy picked up speed. In December of that year, he posted a video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The video went viral on Facebook and was an early indication of the tone of his candidacy.
Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.
At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.
[...] Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.
That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:49AM (6 children)
Nice whataboutism. I'm not claiming that the far right is well behaved - they're dreadful.
My point is that the left (including the 'far'-left) is supposed to be better than that, and the major achievements made by them over the past century have been through non-violent protest. The principles of Antifa and their stated goal of disrupting the right (including through violence "if necessary") are dragging them down to the same level as the far right.
Another poster has linked to examples of violence, however I don't think that every one of them can be linked to a self-professed Antifa protester. In any event, it would be foolish to claim that Antifa are non-violent.
Oh, and for those readers who have modded me "Troll" - the actual mod you're looking for is "Disagree". I challenge you to show me how my post was Trollish in any way.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:51AM (1 child)
A disagree mod doesn't hide your post from someone browsing at default level though.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:06AM
Careful now, reality tends to trigger the trumpettes.
I know, mikl says he isn't a horn blower, but like many conservatives before him he is unable to express his true feelings. That isn't an insult like you think it is btw.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @12:19PM
Fuck you! We won't be peaceful and sit down or shut up for the government. If they send goons to beat down and arrest peaceful protesters, we /should/ start killing cops. "The tree of liberty is watered by blood"
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:39PM
Better than what?
You have refused to provide any evidence whatsoever that they've actually done anything wrong.
If you accuse someone of a crime and refuse to provide any evidence of it that's slander, not a disagreement.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:42PM (1 child)
So you admit that you have ZERO examples of all that Antifa violence you are claiming is a thing.
Accusing people of crimes they did not commit is called slander, not a disagreement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:26AM
No, I was just too lazy to do a quick Google.
Here [washingtonpost.com]
Here [nypost.com]
There are other actions attributed to Antifa such as this one [nytimes.com], however there's no definitive proof given that the perpetrators have never been identified (and would be unlikely to identify themselves as Antifa to the authorities if arrested anyway). And that's the rub - there are a whole lot of actions committed by far-left and far-right people that have not been definitively linked to groups, but have only been associated by joining the dots. Only a small percentage of lynchings were definitively linked to the Klan, however they were almost certainly guilty of nearly all of them.
Ghandi. Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr. These people managed to effect massive change against huge opposition through non-violent means and are remembered as heroes. I want today's activists to follow that example, not become the very thing that they oppose. And because I am opposed to violence, I have been labelled as a far-right extremist by other Soylentils. This is a sad symptom of the us-vs-them mentality that has been part of the right for some time and is unfortunately infecting the left now too.
Now watch this get modded to oblivion to prove my point.