Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 85
violate the company’s hate-speech policies.21
But as always with Facebook, there are loopholes —
especially for Trump. His previous posts threatening
violence and delegitimizing mail-in voting remain up.22
Even after Facebook’s smear campaign came to light,
racial-justice and civil-rights groups continued to engage
with Facebook despite their rightful mistrust of the
company.
This episode demonstrates how big tech companies —
like other big media organizations before them — have
worked to appease the powerful in pursuit of their own
political and economic goals. These companies are part
of our nation’s white-power structure and protect a
white-racial hierarchy. The design of their algorithms has
resulted in weaponized narratives that dehumanize Black,
Latinx, Indigenous and Asian American people, the Black
LGBTQIA+ community and other marginalized groups and
identities.
In July 2020, Facebook released a final version of its
independent civil-rights audit, a project it initiated in
2018 at the request of civil-rights groups and members
of Congress.26 Lead auditor Laura Murphy, a longtime
civil-rights and civil-liberties leader and former ACLU
legislative director, wrote that “Facebook’s approach
to civil rights remains too reactive and piecemeal” and
noted that civil-rights groups have grown “disheartened,
frustrated and angry after years of engagement.”27
In recent years, as criticisms against Facebook grew, the
company hired a Republican opposition research firm to
smear its vocal critics. The New York Times found that the
firm targeted billionaire philanthropist George Soros and
falsely claimed that he was the person behind the antiFacebook movement. The firm also urged reporters to
examine the financial ties of groups funded by the Soros
family or his foundation. One of these groups was Color
Of Change.23
The auditors were also troubled after Facebook announced
in September 2019 that it would exempt politicians from
its third-party fact-checking program and after Zuckerberg
gave a speech the following month at Georgetown
University to amplify his prioritization of a definition of
free expression as a governing principle of the platform.”28
In Murphy’s view, Zuckerberg’s speech revealed a
“selective view of free expression” and showed that
Facebook wasn’t willing to enforce its own policies when
it came to politicians’ posts. She wrote:
In a blistering statement, Color Of Change’s Rashad
Robinson denounced Facebook for endangering the lives
of the organization’s employees:24
I want you to know that your public
relations campaign, built on dangerous
narratives and steadily pushed to rightwing and mainstream media outlets,
has threatened the safety of my team
and countless others affiliated with the
organization. Over the last year, we have
seen a dramatic uptick in attacks to our
platform and death threats, against which
we have had to fortify ourselves. It is hard
to fully explain the terror that comes from
walking down the street by myself at night
and being approached by a white man
wearing camouflage, spouting details about
me and our organization while yelling
racist rhetoric. That is concerning enough,
but what keeps me up at night are the
untold risks to the people who do this work
alongside me.25
Elevating free expression is a good
thing, but it should apply to everyone.
When it means that powerful politicians
do not have to abide by the same rules
that everyone else does, a hierarchy of
speech is created that privileges certain
voices over less powerful voices. The
prioritization of free expression over all
other values, such as equality and nondiscrimination, is deeply troubling to the
Auditors.
Murphy noted that Facebook has been far too reluctant
to adopt strong rules to limit disinformation and voter
suppression.”29 Facebook’s failure to take down Trump
posts that seek to suppress the vote and threaten violence
against Black Lives Matter demonstrators troubled the
auditors and the broader civil-rights community.
“These decisions exposed a major hole in Facebook’s
understanding and application of civil rights,” Murphy
wrote. “While these decisions were made ultimately at
the highest level, we believe civil rights expertise was
not sought and applied to the degree it should have been
and the resulting decisions were devastating. Our fear
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