Connect with us

Business

Facebook Bans Holocaust Denial, Reversing Previous Policy

Published

2 years ago

on

  • Facebook announced Monday that it was expanding its hate speech policy to ban content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, a significant reversal from Mark Zuckerberg, who previously said he would leave the content up because it was not “intentional.”
  • In a blog post, the company cited the rise of antisemitism and lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among young people as the reasoning behind their decision.
  • While many applauded the move, they also argued that Facebook could have done this years ago and that the company was only taking action now because of pressure campaigns like Stop Hate for Profit.
  • Others also noted that the company made similar changes this week like banning QAnon and anti-vax ads, and argued Facebook was only reversing these policies to get good press ahead of the election.

Facebook Reverses Holocaust Denial Policy

Facebook will now ban all content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, the company announced Monday, reversing a years-long policy promoted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has long argued that his platform should not be an “arbiter of truth” and intervene in questions of free speech. In 2018, he told Recode that while he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive,” as a Jewish person himself, he did not think Facebook should regulate it.

“At the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” 

Now, Zuckerberg seems to have backtracked entirely, and in a Facebook post on Monday, he said the company would be expanding its hate speech policy to include Holocaust denial.

“We’ve long taken down posts that praise hate crimes or mass murder, including the Holocaust,” he wrote. “But with rising anti-Semitism, we’re expanding our policy to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust as well.”

“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” Zuckerberg continued.

“My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech.” 

Rise in Antisemitic Violence and Holocaust Ignorance

The claim that antisemitism and anti-Semitic violence is rising is one that has been backed up by numerous recent reports. In May, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that 2019 saw the highest level of antisemitic incidents since the organization first started tracking in 1979.

This general trend has been supported by other organizations, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which reported that in 2018 that the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes had increased by nearly 40% from 2014.

However, that rise also goes beyond the U.S., which is something Facebook noted in the official blogpost announcing the policy change. In addition to “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally,” the platform also said its decision was supported by “the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.”

The company specifically noted a recent study that found that almost one in four U.S. adults aged 18-39 “said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure.”

The study, which went viral last month following its publication, also found generally shocking levels of ignorance that Gen Z and Millenial Americans had about the Holocaust.

Among other things, that study reported that nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and one in every eight said they had not even heard about it before.

Perhaps most relevant to Facebook’s new policy, the study also found that nearly half of people said had seen Holocaust denial or distortion in posts on social media or elsewhere online. 

Facebook Accused of Fostering Antisemitism

As is the case with other forms of hate speech and conspiracies, Facebook has long been accused of letting antisemitism flourish by allowing Holocaust denial on the platform.

In July, the ADL published an extensive report on the issue titled “Facebook Has a Holocaust Denial Problem.” Among other things, that report found that both public and private Holocaust denial groups that the platform shared anti-Semitic content that violated Facebook’s existing and long-held community guidelines.

The same month that report was published, the ADL also launched the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which involved an ad boycott of Facebook from over 1,000 major companies as well as a separate campaign where celebrities froze their Instagram and/or Facebook accounts for one day. 

While some said those efforts fell short, a number of people applauded Facebook’s Monday announcement and called the move a win for the campaign.

“Good news—another win for #StopHateForProfit: Facebook should have banned Holocaust denial long ago, but better late than never,” actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who has been a vocal critic of Facebook, tweeted.

Many others also hit on the point that this decision from Facebook was a good step, but it should have been done long ago. In a statement, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt commended the move, but noted that the ADL had been encouraging the platform to take this step for almost 10 years.

Greenblatt also implied that despite how Facebook may have presented the decision in their remarks, the company was not taking the action out of goodwill for the Jewish community, but rather because of external pressure from Stop Hate for Profit and other campaigns.

“As Facebook finally decides to take a stance against Holocaust denial and distortion, they claim it is because of their work with the Jewish community over the past year,” he said. “We question this claim because if they had wanted to support the Jewish community, this change could have been implemented at any point in the last nine years.”

Questions Over Timing

Other’s also had similar questions about the timing of the decision, noting that in the last two weeks alone, Facebook has made some major reversals, including saying it will temporarily stop all political ads after the election and announcing it will ban QAnon. On Tuesday morning, the company also announced it will start banning anti-vax ads.

As a result, many argued that, despite years of pressure, Facebook is only choosing to crack down on these issues now to get good press and appear as though they are addressing deep-rooted issues ahead of Election Day.

While plenty of people have still said these new changes are better late than never, others claim they were too little too late, pointing out that Facebook had four years to address these issues, but waited until the election was already well underway.

Facebook has been criticized both for its oversized role in allowing the spread of misinformation on the platform in the lead-up to the 2016 election and for not doing enough to address those issues in preparation for the 2020 election.

Also on Monday, a new study published by the German Marshall Fund Digital reported that engagement with misleading websites on Facebook has more than tripled since the 2016 election, despite all the so-called achievements Facebook has touted in this area, and all the millions of dollars it poured into these efforts.

See what others are saying: (The New York Times) (TIME) (The Guardian)

Related Topics:

Business

Instagram Testing New Tools To Verify Users Are Over 18

Published

4 days ago

on

June 23, 2022

By

The new tools include AI software that analyzes video footage of a person’s face to verify their age.

Instagram Cracks Down on Underage Users

Instagram is testing new features in the United States to verify the age of users who claim to be over 18 years old. 

According to a statement from Instagram’s parent company, Meta, the tools will only apply to users who seek to change their age from under 18 to over 18. The platform previously asked for users to upload their ID for verification in this process, but on Thursday, it announced there will be two new methods for confirming age. 

One of the strategies was referred to as “social vouching.” Using this option, people can request that three mutual Instagram followers over the age of 18 confirm their age on the platform.

The other method allows users to upload a video selfie of themselves to be analyzed by Yoti, third-party age verification software. Yoti then estimates a person’s age based on their facial features, sends that estimate to Meta, and both companies delete the recording. 

According to Meta, Yoti cannot recognize or identify a face based on the recording and only looks at the pixels to determine an age. Meta said that Yoti “is the leading age verification provider for several industries around the world,” as it has been used and promoted by social media companies and governmental organizations. 

Still, some question how effective it will be for this specific use. According to The Verge, while the software does have a high accuracy rate among certain age groups and demographics, data also shows it is less precise for female faces and faces with darker skin tones. 

Issues With Kids on Instagram

Meta argues that it is important for Instagram to be able to discern who is and is not 18, as it impacts what version of the app users have access to.

“We’re testing this so we can make sure teens and adults are in the right experience for their age group,” the company’s statement said. 

“When we know if someone is a teen (13-17), we provide them with age-appropriate experiences like defaulting them into private accounts, preventing unwanted contact from adults they don’t know and limiting the options advertisers have to reach them with ads,” it continued. 

These changes come as Instagram has been facing increased pressure to address the way its app impacts younger users. 

Only children 13 and older are allowed to have Instagram accounts, but the service has faced criticism for not doing enough to enforce this. A 2021 survey of high school students found that nearly half of the respondents had created a social media account of some kind before they were 13.

The company also recently came under fire after The Wall Street Journal published internal Meta documents revealing that the company knew that it harmed teens, including by worsening body image issues for young girls and women.

See what others are saying: (The Verge) (The Wall Street Journal) (Axios)

Continue Reading

Business

Elon Musk Threatens to Fire Employees Unless They Work in Person Full-Time

Published

4 weeks ago

on

June 1, 2022

By

The world’s richest man in the world previously suggested that the popularity of remote work has “tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard.”

“If You Don’t Show up, We Will Assume You Have Resigned”

On Wednesday, Electrek published two leaked emails apparently sent from Elon Musk to Tesla’s executive staff threatening to fire them if they don’t return to work in person.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” he wrote. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”

“If there are particularly exceptional contributors for whom this is impossible, I will review and approve those exceptions directly,” he continued.

Musk then clarified that the “office” must be a main office, not a “remote branch office unrelated to the job duties.”

“There are of course companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while,” he wrote in the second email.

Later on Wednesday, a Twitter user asked Musk to comment on the idea that coming into work is an antiquated concept.

He replied, “They should pretend to work somewhere else.”

The Billionaire Pushes People to Work Harder

Musk has a history of pressuring his employees and criticizing them for not working hard enough.

“All the Covid stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard. Rude awakening inbound,” he tweeted last month.

Three economists told Insider that remote work during the pandemic did not damage productivity.

“Most of the evidence shows that productivity has increased while people stayed at home,” Natacha Postel-Vinay, an economic and financial historian at the London School of Economics, told the outlet.

Musk is notorious for criticizing lockdown mandates and went so far as to call them “fascist” during a Tesla earnings call in April 2020.

Not long before that, Tesla announced that it would keep its Fremont, California plant open in defiance of shelter-in-place orders across the state.

In an interview with The Financial Times last month, Musk blasted American workers for trying to stay home, comparing them to their Chinese counterparts whom he said work harder.

“They won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3 a.m. oil,” he said. “They won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

That same day, Fortune published an article detailing how Tesla workers in Shanghai work 12-hour shifts, six days out of the week, sometimes sleeping on the factory floor.

See what others are saying: (CNBC) (Electrek) (Business Insider)

Continue Reading

Business

Apple Raises Worker Pay as Unions Gain Ground

Published

1 month ago

on

May 26, 2022

By

The company’s vice president of people and retail was caught trying to dissuade employees from unionizing in a leaked video.

Labor Squeezes Apple into Submission

Apple announced Wednesday that its U.S. corporate and retail employees will see a pay increase later this year, with starting wages bumped from $20 per hour to $22, though stores in certain regions may get more depending on market conditions.

Starting salaries are also expected to increase.

“Supporting and retaining the best team members in the world enables us to deliver the best, most innovative, products and services for our customers,” an Apple spokesman said in a statement. “This year as part of our annual performance review process, we’re increasing our overall compensation budget.”

Some workers were told their annual reviews would be moved up three months and that their pay increases would take effect in early July, according to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, they were told the increased compensation budget would be in addition to pay increases and special awards already received within the past year.

Feeling squeezed by low unemployment and high inflation, tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have changed their compensation structures in recent weeks to pay workers more, and Apple is the latest to bend to market pressure.

Unions Gaining Traction

On Wednesday, The Verge received a leaked video of Apple’s vice president of people and retail, Deirdre O’Brien, explicitly dissuading employees from unionizing.

“I worry about what it would mean to put another organization in the middle of our relationship,” she said. “An organization that does not have a deep understanding of Apple or our business. And most importantly one that I do not believe shares our commitment to you.”

She vocalized more anti-union talking points, like the idea that the company will not be able to make important decisions as quickly with a collective bargaining agreement.

O’Brien has been personally visiting retail stores over the past few weeks in an apparent bid to combat budding union activity.

Apple stores in three locations — New York, Georgia, and Maryland — are currently pushing to unionize, with the latter two set to vote in elections on June 2 and 15, respectively. In response to these efforts, Apple has hired anti-union lawyers, given managers anti-union scripts, and held anti-union captive audience meetings.

In the United States, unionized workers make about 13.2% more than non-unionized workers in the same sector, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

As of Wednesday, Apple’s shares had fallen 21% since the start of the year, but sales grew 34% last year to almost $300 billion.

See what others are saying: (The Wall Street Journal) (CNBC) (The Verge)

Continue Reading