The same day we heard that Unilever had decided to withdraw its top ad dollars from Facebook and Twitter for the remainder of this election year, Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that the company, after months of word-of-mouth justifications, will begin tagging posts. . by politicians who spread misinformation or violate Facebook’s policies.
Zuckerberg seems as eager as ever reading from a teleprompter on a live broadcast that he decided to share from an internal city council meeting on Facebook on Friday. During his presentation, he announced the new general policy changes, reverting to the value of a year of rhetoric about the importance of freedom of expression and the need to allow politicians and their campaigns to lie.
The company will now ban ads that denigrate people by race or religion, and will tag posts by politicians that may be newsworthy and still contain falsehoods. Furthermore, several weeks after suggesting that Donald Trump had every right to make false claims that voting by mail was largely fraudulent, Zuckerberg now he says that the company will begin to enforce its policy against voter repression, even when the president is trying to suppress them.
“I am committed to making sure Facebook remains a place where people can use their voices to discuss important issues,” said Zuckerberg. “But I am also against hate or anything that incites violence or suppresses voting, and we are committed to removing that content as well, no matter where it comes from.”
Certainly not by coincidence, if you’ve been following the free speech / fake news / non-anger-Donald-Trump-too much dance Facebook has been doing for the past four years, Zuckerberg’s big investment in this comes just as the The company’s shares sank 7 percent on news that Unilever had joined a growing boycott of its increasingly toxic company by advertisers.
Unilever said in a statement that it would stop advertising the brand for the rest of the year on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, Unilever Executive Vice President of Global Media Luis Di Como said of the decision: “Based on the current polarization and elections that we are having in the United States, there should be much more application in the hate speech area. “
As CNN reports, while other advertisers have suspended Facebook ads for a month or two amid national unrest and controversies over the company’s policies toward Trump, Unilever’s move “marks the broadest and potentially most harmful of companies that have taken a position against Facebook. ” Unilever spent $ 42 million on ads on the platform in 2019.
And, following Unilever’s announcement, rival Proctor & Gamble announced that it would also remove ads from platforms that host “hateful” or “discriminatory” content.
However, around 100 advertisers have joined the general boycott, which, as CNBC explains, is part of the #StopHateForProfit movement.
Facebook and Twitter already have anti-hate speech policies that critics say are sometimes irregularly enforced. The most important news here is that those policies, and the anti-disinformation policies, will now apply to Trump and other politicians, and their campaigns.
Zuckerberg says he “promised to review the company’s policies” only in the past three weeks, due to “everything that happens.” But it’s still notable that less than a month ago, on May 28, Zuck insisted that Facebook doesn’t need to verify the president. “I firmly believe that Facebook should not be the arbiter of the truth of everything people say online, and neither should other private companies,” he said.
This was after Twitter decided to tag one of Trump’s tweets as if he needed data verification – that is, his claim about voting by mail. “This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth,'” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “Our intention is to connect the dots of the conflicting statements and display the disputed information so that people can judge for themselves.” .
Several weeks of mass protests later, and Zuckerberg clearly discovered he could be on the wrong side of history by continuing to placate Trump and the “free speech” conservatives who love him as much as they enjoy the sound of racist whistles. But he says the impetus for these policy changes came “directly” from the company’s discussions with civil rights advocates and the company’s civil rights auditors.
“The 2020 elections were already preparing to be incredibly heated. And that was before we all faced the additional complexities of a global pandemic and protests for racial justice across the country,” said Zuckerberg. “We are now in the period when there is a risk of very serious confusion and fear.”
Last week, Facebook announced the Voting Information Project for this election, with the goal of registering 4 million new voters. Zuckerberg promoted that project, and it sounded serious when he said that “even if a politician or a government official says so, if we determine that the content can lead to violence or deprive people of their right to vote, we will remove that content. Similarly, there are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies. “
Our Supreme Leader has yet to comment on Facebook’s decision on his preferred platform, Twitter, though he’s been trying to make Parler happen lately as Twitter doesn’t like him enough these days.
