Facebook will ban posts that contain blackface or that promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jewish people run the world.
The social media giant announced the extension of its policy on hate speech in a press release on Tuesday morning. Under the new policy, Facebook will no longer allow visual or written messages that are “caricatures of black people in the form of blackface” or “Jewish people running or controlling the world from major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government ”pictured.
These images represent examples of “implicit speech” that has “historically been used to restrict, intimidate or exclude people based on protected characteristics such as race or religion,” content policy Facebook VP Monika Bickert said of the call. Bickert also said the company had been working for about nine months reviewing this policy and consulted 60 outside organizations and experts on the matter. Facebook said it will immediately implement its ban on Jewish stereotypes, and the ban on blackface will begin later this month.
While it probably no longer worries about the prevalence of hate speech on Facebook’s platform, the move is a notable extension of the company’s policy limiting it. It is also the kind of restriction that includes not only open racial slurs, but also thinly veiled or disguised racism, which some civil rights groups have long called for to ban Facebook. When Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt spoke to Recode in July, he mentioned a popular Facebook group promoting non-conspiracy theories that link global political conspiracies to a prominent Jewish family as the kind of anti-Semitic content that flourishes on the platform.
ADL and other leading civil rights organizations such as Color of Change and the NAACP have long demanded that Facebook do more to stop the spread of hate speech on its platform. The organizations led a month-long boycott of Facebook in July, gaining the support of more than 1,000 advertisers and increasing pressure on the company to expand its anti-hate speech efforts.
“This is a welcome, yet too long step from Facebook. It is unfortunate that it took a long time for the platform to destroy these particular forms of hatred, when it is quite clear that they were not allowed to proliferate in the first place, ‘an ADL spokesman said in a statement to Recode . “It’s just as annoying that Facebook still doesn’t see Holocaust denial as a violation of their terms of service.”
As Facebook moves to expand its hate speech policy, the platform is still full of misinformation and sometimes racist content. Recent reports from NBC News and The Guardian show that Facebook groups promoting the QAnon conspiracy are a right-to-right concept theory about a proven “deep state” in the US government plotting against Donald Trump , have millions of members and are growing at a rapid pace. QAnon has been found to have anti-Semitic elements, and some of her followers have engaged in real physical violence in an attempt to uncover the hidden secret plot.
Facebook has long expressed an ethos of trying to moderate speech as little as possible. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said he does not want to be an ‘arbitrator of the truth’ on political issues. In 2018, Zuckerberg told co-founder Kara Swisher of Recode that people should be allowed to deny the Holocaust on Facebook, even though he, as someone who is Jewish, finds those ideas “deeply insulting.”
But the line can be blurred between what is a political opinion and what is a perpetuation of a racist conspiracy theory. It will be up to Facebook to decide how to enforce the new stricter rules.
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