Trump’s Facebook ban is supported – for now

[ad_1]
Facebook supervision The council is often described by Facebook as a “Supreme Court”. On Wednesday, as he acted, Mark Zuckerberg gave a detailed resolution that delayed the most difficult question posed to him.
The problem in front of the committee was that if you didn’t turn on the news this week or check Twitter, you wanted to confirm it An indefinite ban on Facebook Reported on Donald Trump’s account after the mission that sparked the January 6 riots at the Capitol. It was certainly the most anticipated decision in the young existence of the Supervisory Board. Since the company sent the case to management on January 21, it has received more than 9,000 public comments on the issue. As of Wednesday, Trump’s ban remains in place, but the decision is not yet final.
Specifically, Facebook asked the oversight committee to decide:
Given Facebook’s values, specifically its commitment to voice and security, did it rightly decide that on January 7, 2021, Donald J. Trump banned the posting of Facebook and Instagram content indefinitely?
The Commission’s response was in the affirmative and in the negative. Yes, Facebook was right to suspend Trump’s account; no, it was wrong to do it indefinitely. “By applying a vague and non-standard sentence and then resolving this case to the Commission, Facebook wants to avoid its responsibilities,” the committee wrote in its decision. “The commission rejects Facebook’s request and demands that a penalty specified by Facebook be applied and justified.” In other words, Facebook must decide whether to immediately abandon Trump, put a clear end date to the interruption, or throw it off the platforms forever.
Management refused to take a clearer stance that led to Facebook’s tasks, it also accepted the immediate logic of removal. The original decision It was done in exceptional circumstances to deactivate Trump’s account. While the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was still in full swing, Trump made numerous messages, including a video, telling his followers to go home, but he also repeated the false claim that the election had been stolen. the idea of motivating riots in his favor. “There were election scams, but we can’t play into the hands of those people,” he said in the video. “We need to have peace. So home. We love you. You’re very special. ”The next day, Facebook removed the messages and completely suspended Trump from his platform, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. (Twitter and so did YouTube.)
All the time it was clear that the content of the offensive messages was far removed from Trump — in the end, at least he told the riots to go home — and, of course, he didn’t break clear rules. Trump has been taking months to broadcast the election myth of stolen Facebook, after all. What changed was not Trump’s online behavior, then, but his offline consequences. In one blog post Explaining Facebook’s decision, Mark Zuckerberg secretly acknowledged this. “We withdrew those statements yesterday because we judged that their effect — and probably their intent — would be to cause more violence,” he wrote. While the platform previously supported Trump, “the current context is fundamentally different to use our platform to provoke a violent uprising against a democratically elected government.” Trump would be banned “indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the end of the peaceful transition of power.”
The decision deviated in two ways from Facebook’s traditional approach to moderation. First, the company not only analyzed the content of publications, but also the context of the real world. Second, he moved away from the “novelty” rule that gives political leaders in general an additional opportunity to break the rules, according to a theory that deserves to know what people have to say.
[ad_2]
Source link