BY PETR SVAB |
The Epoch Times
Facebook has
encouraged some of its employees to probe the background of conservative
commentator Candace Owens for anything that could give the social media giant
grounds to kick her off its platforms, an internal Facebook document described
and partially leaked to Breitbart indicates.
The document is a spreadsheet on “Policy Review” of what
the company calls “hate agents.” It was created in early April and was related
to prominent figures recently banned from the platform, a
Facebook spokesperson said. Owens was listed on the document under the note,
“Extra Credit (We should look into these after we’re done with the above
designation analysis).” The spokesperson believed Owens hadn’t yet been
investigated.
Owens, who is black, came out as a
conservative in a July 2017
YouTube videoand has since become one of the most popular conservative
speakers in America. She’s argued that liberal policies have hurt black
communities, such as by weakening family structure through welfare incentives,
undercutting black workers through supporting illegal immigration, and
suppressing black birthrates through promoting abortion.
Her Facebook account was suspended on May 17 for
seven days after she posted a picture of her Twitter post that listed the
disparity between poverty rates among blacks and whites in the United States,
as well as the high father absence rate in black households. She blamed liberal
policies.
“Black America must wake up to the great liberal hoax,”
she wrote. “White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is.”
A Facebook spokesperson said the account was suspended by
mistake and restored later that day. The suspension was unrelated to the
internal document, the spokesperson said.
Ideology, Affiliations
The document indicated that Facebook employees were to
look into what Owens is “known for,” including her “ideology, actions, major
news, etc.”
They were also supposed to list “Affiliated Hate
Entities” of Owens. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions on what
Facebook considers a “Hate Entity,” what constitutes an affiliation, and how
can users avoid such affiliations.
The spokesperson also didn’t respond to
questions on why Owens was singled out for such scrutiny and why was it
relevant for Facebook to determine Owens’s ideology.
“To the brave employee who leaked this— thank you,” Owens responded in a May 18 tweet. “To lawyers that follow
me— is this legal? I am taking this very seriously.”
Facebook maintains that it doesn’t look at people’s
political views when deciding whom to ban, but its Community Standards are,
to a degree, a partisan manifesto. The standards heavily focus on
suppressing “hate speech,” even though Americans are divided sharply along
political lines on what does and doesn’t constitute “hateful” speech, a 2017
Cato survey (pdf) showed.
Hate Speech
While in the United States, most of what Facebook
labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First
Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate
speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could
theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s
lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine,
tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.
The document with Owens’s name was posted into an
internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian
Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.
“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise
awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content
policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s
comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and
investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of
their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”
The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook
executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige
deemed misguided.
“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t
be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’
decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic
misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free
expression.”
Facebook not only acknowledged that it can’t draw a clear
line between what is and isn’t “hate speech,” but that it also keeps a portion
of its rules secret.
A Facebook spokesperson previously told The Epoch Times
that users are partially kept in the dark to prevent them from circumventing
the rules, but didn’t respond when asked why the company doesn’t spell out its
policies in full and add a rule against rule circumvention.
