Facebook Expands Hate Speech Ban to Block Legitimately Bad Stuff, but How Will It Be Enforced?
Facebook is extending its ban on hate speech to prohibit the promotion and support of white nationalism and white separatism.
The move comes less than two weeks after the social media network received backlash after the suspect in the New Zealand mosque shootings that killed 50 people was able to broadcast the massacre on LIVE video on Facebook.
The social network says it hadn't applied its ban to expressions of white nationalism because it previously linked such expressions with broader concepts of nationalism and separatism, such as American pride.
"So the enforcement is always a challenge. Facebook uses artificial intelligence and a whole bunch of human moderators to find objectionable material but it doesn't find everything. And people are always getting smarter at evading," AP Technology Reporter Barbara Ortutay reports. "So I think a lot of groups have praised this new ban, but there are a lot of questions as to how Facebook is going to be able to enforce it."
Facebook said it has been working on the change for three months. The company is still wrestling with several government investigations in the US and Europe over its data and privacy practices.
It's also been charged with discrimination by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) because of its ad-targeting system. HUD said Thursday that Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map.
The agency also said it's giving advertisers the option of showing ads only to men or only to women and excluding people closely aligned with the Fair Housing Act's protected classes.
