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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:46AM (4 children)
Well, it is true, and well, there is a need to protect speech. So...?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:10PM (3 children)
No, it isn't, in fact you've had multiple opportunities to bear witness to exactly the opposite in the last two months. 🙄
We're actually on the same side of this debate, the problem is your willful oversimplification of it means stepping on people's rights. You'll always be arguing, but never actually progressing.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:06AM (2 children)
Why is that supposed to be a problem rather than evidence to support the abandonment of your position? There's been multiple times my "bearing witness" didn't support your claims. That sounds like evidence to me - just not in your favor.
What rights are being stepped on by the hate speech?
What particularly gets me here is the vagueness of the accusations. I just read through all your posts in this discussion and I still don't get what's supposed to be the problem here, much less that there is an actual problem.
Perhaps an example would help? Suppose I believe the Jews are responsible for everything wrong in the world and I write a journal where I state my opinions on the matter (if it helps, I can point to several such real world journals on SN that do some variation of that). As far as I can tell, that qualifies as hate speech. Whose rights were stepped on by that speech?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:07AM
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:20PM
Sorry, I'm just not interested in digesting a shit-ton of events for you that you've almost certainly have been watching unfold.
You brought up hatred of the Jews... and don't see how acting out on that led to their rights being taken away. Willful.
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