Facebook users targeted by hate speech just won a small victory, but it’s not enough. It’s time for an audit.
Last year, people of color and other activists were routinely seeing their Facebook posts on racism taken down while violent, white-supremacist posts were thriving on the site.
That’s why, in January 2017, we went straight to Facebook with a coalition of 72 organizations to demand that Facebook reform their appeals process, create greater transparency, and allow for an external audit (1).
This morning, Facebook released its secret community guidelines for the first time ever, and announced that they are expanding their appeals process to include posts that are censored (2).
These changes will help us better understand how Facebook chooses to manage posts and will allow more people of color to push back when they are being censored.
This is a victory and a step forward, but it’s not enough. We know our communities are still facing harassment and censorship on Facebook. And dozens of groups like anti-Muslim ACT for America are still actively using their pages to spread hate speech to thousands.
We’re working with a coalition including Legal Defense Fund, Color of Change, Muslim Advocates, and others to demand that Facebook submits to an independent civil rights and safety audit and publicly shares the results. An audit would help Facebook take responsibility for the discrimination on its platform and identify where they need to fix problems.
Tell Mark Zuckerberg: We demand a Facebook civil rights audit.
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- Levin, Sam. “Civil Rights Groups Urge Facebook to Fix ‘Racially Biased’ Moderation System.” The Guardian, 18 Jan. 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/18/facebook-moderation-racial-bias-black-lives-matter.
- Bickert, Monika. “Publishing Our Internal Enforcement Guidelines and Expanding Our Appeals Process.” Facebook Newsroom, 24 Apr. 2018, newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/comprehensive-community-standards/.
