Facebook, Instagram ban blackface, anti-Semitic conspiracies

Facebook says the photos have always been against the “spirit” of its hate speech policies, but now they’re officially banned.

The world’s biggest social media platform has banned blackface and anti-Semitic conspiracies following an advertising boycott led by people who think the company isn’t doing enough to prevent hate speech.

“We’ve made progress combating hate on our apps, but we know we have more to do to ensure everyone feels comfortable using our services,” the company’s vice president of integrity Guy Rosen wrote in a blog post.

Facebook said it updated its policies to “more specifically account for certain kinds of implicit hate speech, such as content depicting blackface, or stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world”.

Facebook’s content policy chief Monika Bickert told the BBC the ban might not apply to critical posts, such as someone sharing a photo of a politician in blackface.

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Last year, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was slammed on social media over old images that surfaced of him in his youth doing blackface.

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Ms Bickert also said blackface had always been “against the spirit of our hate-speech policies” but the caricatures are difficult to define for its approximately 15,000 human moderators around the world so they can “consistently and fairly identify violations”.

The organisers of the Stop Hate For Profit campaign that organised the July boycott of advertising on the site by more than 1000 companies said Facebook was “not ready” to act on hate speech when they met with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Mr Zuckerberg reportedly told employees the boycott would have no impact on its policies.

The company appears to have gotten better at taking action on hate speech though (either that or there’s a lot more of it).

In the second quarter of 2020, Facebook content reviewers removed 22.5 million pieces of content that violated its hate speech policies, more than doubling the 9.6 million it removed between the start of January and the end of March.

Facebook’s content reviewers were all sent home in March (“a small number” have returned to offices), but the company also uses technology to find and delete content that violates its policies.

Facebook’s head of global content policy Monika Bickert said blackface had always been ‘against the spirit of our hate-speech policies’. Picture: James Croucher

The human reviewers are predominantly relied upon to act on and remove content that depicts child exploitation, self-harm or suicide on Facebook and the Instagram platform that it also owns.

Facebook has blamed the pandemic obstruction on the fact that it took action on less than half as much of that sort of content than in the previous quarter.

“With fewer content reviewers, we took action on fewer pieces of content on both Facebook and Instagram for suicide and self-injury, and child nudity and sexual exploitation on Instagram.

“Despite these decreases, we prioritised and took action on the most harmful content within these categories,” Mr Rosen wrote.

The reviewers took action on 479,000 pieces of “child nudity and sexual exploitation” on Instagram, compared to a million in the previous quarter.

Facebook also gave an update on the action it’s taking to combat hate speech, particularly in groups.

Since October last year the company has removed 23 “banned organisations”, more than half of which were white supremacist groups.