Facebook guidelines allow for users to call for death of public figures

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Facebook guidelines allow for users to call for death of public figures

Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show

Alex Hern UK technology editor
@alexhern
Tue 23 Mar 2021 19.28 GMT

Facebook’s bullying and harassment policy explicitly allows for “public figures” to be targeted in ways otherwise banned on the site, including “calls for [their] death”, according to a tranche of internal moderator guidelines leaked to the Guardian.

Public figures are defined by Facebook to include people whose claim to fame may be simply a large social media following or infrequent coverage in local newspapers. They are considered to be permissible targets for certain types of abuse “because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news”, Facebook explains to its moderators.

It comes as social networks face renewed criticism over abuse on their platforms, including of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and professional footballers, in particular black stars such as Marcus Rashford.Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has changed its policies in response to the criticism, introducing new rules to cover abuse sent through direct messages and committing to cooperate with law enforcement over hate speech.

In the detailed guidelines seen by the Guardian, running to more than 300 pages and dating from December 2020, Facebook spells out how it differentiates between protections for private and public individuals.

“For public figures, we remove attacks that are severe as well as certain attacks where the public figure is directly tagged in the post or comment. For private individuals, our protection goes further: we remove content that’s meant to degrade or shame, including, for example, claims about someone’s sexual activity,” it says.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/23/facebook-guidelines-allow-for-users-to-call-for-death-of-public-figures

[SheltieLover]

1. K&R!

[exboyfil]

2. Calling for any extrajudicial physical harm to another person should

be grounds for termination of the account. I don't care who the individual the threat is directed towards.

[ShazzieB]

4. Hard agree!

[ancianita]

3. Yet I get suspended for a month for calling someone a "parrot" of right wing media when

they called help to Texas socialism. wtf

I "didn't meet community standards." Whoever that community is, and whatever their standards are, I'm definitely not in it.