Political hate speech has become a persistent issue for Facebook in several countries. One Facebook India executive recently resigned under controversy involving an MP's posts, but the scope of the problem exposes conflicts between politics and policy beyond one company or country…
In a country like India where something newsworthy is always happening, I can understand why an article about one employee resigning from one company wouldn’t be headline news for long, but when the company is Facebook and the employee in question was its South Asian public policy head, then it’s worth remembering. Ankhi Das resigned late last month after testifying before an Indian parliamentary committee on issues including the platform’s decision earlier this year to not flag or delete inflammatory posts from Telangana MP T Raja Singh. The intersection of how politicians behave with how social media platforms function: worth knowing about, right?
Al Jazeera’s reporting on Das’s exit noted Facebook’s assertion that it’s content policy and public policy teams are separate, but most professionals know that no company’s teams can be totally separate from one another, especially when the product delivery (like content creation and consumption) affects strategic priorities (like public policy). If the content policy team decided on its own to keep Singh’s and other xenophobic posts up, then Facebook is implicitly admitting that its content policy needs significantly more work than we assume.
To be clear, an elected official of one country made disparaging comments about his own country’s citizens and about the Rohingya crisis, a highly sensitive issue for Myanmar’s government and citizens. Those are two points on which not to publish the post and grounds to flag or remove it. Like Twitter learned the hard way with Donald Trump this year, Facebook has to recognize that elected officials can’t be exempt from policies other users are covered by. And since Facebook is still a much more accessible tech product for people in emerging economies like India and Myanmar, this is an even more pressing issue for Facebook than it has been for Twitter. If we still believe that politicians aren’t above the laws of their countries, then why should they be above the enforcement of a company’s policies?
An underlying problem with this situation is that the line between social media user and social media regulator has been erased at a time when non-state actors like tech platforms are welding as much, if not more, power than governments. Although Bay Area’s weather is an attraction, that’s not what has made tech companies including Facebook and Google requisite stops on the US tours of international leaders. (Think about it: Despite running countries with large agriculture sectors, how many farms did Modi or Xi visit on their last US trips?)
The same agencies that regulate social media platforms also use (and need) such platforms to share and amplify their message. That’s essential if the message is an evacuation warning before a hurricane, but we know very well that not every message government officials disperse to the public is actually for the public’s benefit, even if officials are posting from government accounts. And with the rise of government officials — elected, appointed, and aspiring — who are using social media for everything from addressing constituent concerns to raising money, we now have public officials who are personally invested in how these platforms function even if they don’t own stock.
Facebook has recently been described as a company on a “war footing” as its business model and value proposition have sustained scrutiny on multiple fronts, but the company has the scale and resources to substantively address concerns. Every company has to justify its place in society beyond revenue statements and stock prices and Facebook is showing that with its recent moves to establish an advisory board and conduct civil rights audits. But Facebook’s moves to reaffirm its position and value can’t always be reactive.
One of the reasons why any tech platform would even entertain an elected official who makes inflammatory remarks wouldn’t just be because of immediate business interests, but because of a belief that in a dispute between the company and government officials, the public would side with the government. That’s understandable considering that although a lot of us are consuming more digital products and services, we’re also increasingly skeptical of them. This trend has made it easier for tech companies to end up in political crosshairs like TikTok recently has in the US and India. But instead of just acquiescencing to public skepticism and mistrust about its policies, operations, and motives, Facebook should work to win (and maintain) the goodwill of the public and civil society, not as a means to counter antitrust action, but as a genuine effort to show that a maturing company can be a great corporate citizen.
And of course this applies to platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok which have had their share of criticism for not acting on hate speech, but since Facebook receives the biggest share of scrutiny, the company should have a sense of urgency about promoting and enforcing policies that make the platform easy and healthy to use. With governments in different states of controversy globally just with digital policy, there are ample opportunities to do just that.
You can also read this piece on Medium here.
No comments:
Post a Comment