LONDON (Bywire News) – Facebook’s parent company Meta has taken the decision to allow hate speech directed at Russian soldiers and Russians in the context of their government’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s also allowing praise of neo-Nazis. But after you’ve gone this far down the rabbit hole, smashed the looking glass and ended up in Narnia – where does it all end?
As the Guardian reported (and broke), internal Meta emails showed the change of policy. They said:
“We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the hate speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, except prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (eg content mentions the invasion, self-defence, etc)…
We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, ‘Russian soldiers’ is being used as a proxy for the Russian military. The hate speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians”.
But Meta has gone further – if that’s possible. Because a spokesperson also said it was allowing praise of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment across its platforms:
“for the time being, making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard”.
It’s important to note this isn’t a global change. Meta said it’s adjusting its policies in the following countries:
“Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine”.
It comes after Meta restricted users’ access to Russian state media across platforms like Facebook and YouTube. The Russian government reacted angrily to both this and Meta’s decision to allow certain hate speech, saying that it showed the West’s “information war without rules”.
There’s no denying that Meta’s actions are dangerous, at best. For example, the oblique wording led to originally running with the headline:
“Facebook and Instagram to temporarily allow calls for violence against Russians”
In the age of the attention economy, this over-simplification of the story could have incited violence in itself. clearly realised its gross error/intentional sensationalism, and a few hours later updated the headline to:
“Facebook allows Ukraine war posts urging violence against invading Russians, Putin”
Still, regardless of how you dress it up Meta’s actions show it’s far from impartial over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This poses more questions in broader debates about social media in recent years, where governments have been arguing that sites like Facebook behave more like publishers, and therefore have responsibility for content users post.
People were already concerned, pre-Ukraine, that sites like Facebook were heavily restricting people’s access to content – for example, left-wing independent media. With Facebook admitting it knew this was happening, it’s hard to have seen this as anything more than the company pandering to governments and corporations.
Now, we have Meta actively taking a side in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – cementing its status as a partisan publisher. Of course, it’s a private company so it can technically behave how it wants. But this also feeds into another debate around the role of social media in 21st-century society: where internet access is now largely viewed as a human right – but one which is completely under the control of private corporations, which in turn are often under the thumb of governments and shareholders.
Meta’s move to allow hate speech against Russians and praise of neo-Nazis comes against a backdrop of ever-increasing government interference in social media, too. For example, in the UK the government is trying to make the Online Safety Bill law. This would see it force social media companies to crack down further on government-defined “harmful” content or risk being fined. Yes, you read that correctly – the government (in the UK’s case, a far-right, authoritarian Conservative one) will decide what people can and can’t say on social media – and companies like Meta will enforce it.
So, its decision to allow hate speech in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must be viewed in the round. With social media becoming less and less social and more an arm of government (with shareholders pulling some strings), Meta’s latest decision is the thin end of the wedge. When we’ve reached the point where big tech and governments allow calls to kill people when it suits their politics, social media is surely more broken than ever. And it’s only going to get worse.
(Writing by Steve Topple, editing by Klaudia Fior)
This news is republished from another source. You can check the original article here
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