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Zuckerberg announces new civil-rights protections
as Facebook stares down boycott
The Facebook CEO said Friday the changes have been in
the works for months.
By NANCY
SCOLA
06/26/2020
02:54 PM EDT
Updated:
06/26/2020 04:03 PM EDT
CEO Mark
Zuckerberg announced Friday steps Facebook is taking to protect the vote in the
run-up to election day, including a more aggressive effort to combat voter
suppression based on race and ethnicity — moves that come as the company is
facing an advertising boycott led by a coalition of civil rights groups and
progressive activists.
The
changes, which include banning posts about immigration officials checking
papers at voting places and ramping up their ability to enforce false claims
about voting in the 72 hours before election day, reflect, Zuckerberg said, the
recommendations of its pre-existing civil-rights audit committee.
He said the
changes come in the context of the 2020 elections in the U.S. that were
"already shaping up to be heated — and that was before we all faced the
additional complexities of voting during a pandemic and protests for racial
justice across the country."
The
significance of what Zuck said: The changes have been in the works for months,
Zuckerberg said, and he previewed some of them in May. But there's no arguing
that their announcement comes at a useful time for Facebook. Complaints about
its civil-rights record have been building for years, and recently reached a
fever pitch around Facebook's decision in late May to leave up a post by
President Trump that used the racially charged phrase “when the looting starts,
the shooting starts” to discuss Black Lives Matter protesters.
Recently,
those complaints coalesced into an attempt by major civil rights organizations
like the NAACP and progressive activists like the group Sleeping Giants to
convince advertisers to boycott Facebook for the month of July. After a slow
start, that effort seemed to gain traction this week. The multinational
consumer product giant Unilever announced hours before Zuckerberg's remarks
that it was stopping advertising on both Facebook and Twitter through the end
of the year. Others who are temporarily pulling ads include wireless carrier
Verizon, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's and clothier Eddie Bauer.
The
significance of where he said it: Zuckerberg opened up his regular employee
townhall to the public to announce the changes — reflecting his new willingness
to throw the company, and himself, into the mix on the country's most
controversial debates.
What's
next: Boycott organizers have set July 1, or five days from now, as a kick-off
point for advertisers to pause its use of Facebook. The question becomes
whether Facebook's moves today and in the next week do anything to slow its
momentum.
The
president of one of the groups behind the boycott, Color of Change's Rashad
Robinson, said quickly after Zuckerberg wrapped that his announcement had
changed little. "Zuckerberg's address was 11 minutes of wasted opportunity
to commit to change," tweeted Robinson. "I hope companies advertising
on Facebook were watching - if they want to put their money where their mouth
is on racial justice, then it's time to #StopHateForProfit," he added,
using the hashtag for the boycott campaign.
Robinson's
tweet is particularly eye-catching because he has been in close contact with
Facebook over the years, including a sit-down dinner at Zuckerberg's house in
November of 2019. Its sharpness reflects that he and at least some other
civil-rights leaders have shifted their strategy when it comes to dealing with
Facebook. If they haven't fully given up on dialogue, they're at least pairing
it now with treating the company as something akin to a political opponent.
That said,
at the moment, Facebook's most immediate worry is advertisers. Facebook's
revenue depends nearly entirely on advertising, so the reaction to keep on eye
on now: the results of the quiet conversations happening among CEOs, chief
marketing officers and other corporate executives about what they're thinking
about Facebook.
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Verizon pulls ads from Facebook over inaction on
hate speech
Company is the biggest yet to join growing movement,
which includes Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia, to boycott the social network
The pressure on Facebook to moderate hate speech has
accelerated in recent weeks.
Kari Paul
Published
onFri 26 Jun 2020 00.05 BST
Verizon is
pulling its advertising from Instagram and Facebook, the biggest name so far in
a growing movement to boycott the social network for not doing enough to stop
hate speech on its platforms.
The company
said on Thursday it will join other companies including Ben & Jerry’s,
Patagonia and REI in suspending advertising from Facebook-owned platforms until
the company “can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable”.
“We have
strict content policies in place and have zero tolerance when they are
breached, we take action,” Verizon’s chief media officer, John Nitti, said in a
statement. “We’re pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an
acceptable solution that makes us comfortable and is consistent with what we’ve
done with YouTube and other partners.”
Facebook
acknowledged the growing pressure on a call with advertisers on Wednesday,
where a Facebook executive admitted there is a “trust deficit” with its clients
on the platform.
The “Stop
Hate for Profit” campaign was launched Wednesday by advocacy groups including
the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and Color Of Change. It asks advertisers
to pressure the tech giant to adopt stricter policies against racist and
hateful content on its platforms by pausing all spending on advertising with
the company for the month of July.
As part of
the campaign, the groups alerted Verizon that one of its advertisements on
Facebook had appeared next to a video from the conspiracy group QAnon drawing
on hateful and antisemitic rhetoric.
Facebook
makes $70bn in annual advertising revenue while “amplifying the messages of
white supremacists” and “permitting incitement to violence”, according to the
campaign.
The
advocacy groups argue Facebook has failed to address misinformation and hate
speech by making Breitbart News a “trusted news source” despite its history of
working with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, allegedly allowing housing
discrimination against communities of color, and failing to remove Holocaust
denial posts.
The
pressure on Facebook to moderate hate speech has accelerated in recent weeks as
the platform refused to flag false and incendiary statements from Donald Trump,
despite moves from rival platform Twitter to do so.
A recent
study by the Anti-Defamation League found that the vast majority (77%) of
online harassment experienced by respondents took place on Facebook.
“There is
more progress to be made but we continue to make significant investments in
technology and processes to help us remove hate, harassment and bullying from
Facebook,” a company spokesperson said in response to the study.
In response
to the advertiser boycotts, Carolyn Everson, the vice-president of Facebook’s
global business group, said in a statement: “We deeply respect any brand’s
decision, and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and
providing critical voting information.”
Down the rabbit hole: how QAnon conspiracies
thrive on Facebook
Guardian investigation finds more than 3m aggregate
followers and members support QAnon on Facebook, and their numbers are growing
Julia
Carrie Wong
@juliacarriew Email
Thu 25 Jun
2020 11.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 25 Jun 2020 11.02 BST
QAnon is a movement of people who interpret as a kind
of gospel the online messages of the anonymous figure, ‘Q’.
In early May,
QAnon braced for a purge. Facebook had removed a small subset – five pages, six
groups and 20 profiles – of the community on the social network, and as word of
the bans spread, followers of Q began preparing for a broader sweep.
Some groups
changed their names, substituting “17” for “Q” (the 17th letter of the
alphabet); others shared links to back-up accounts on alternative social media
platforms with looser rules.
More than
just another internet conspiracy theory, QAnon is a movement of people who interpret
as a kind of gospel the online messages of an anonymous figure – “Q” – who
claims knowledge of a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles and sex traffickers.
Within the constructed reality of QAnon, Donald Trump is secretly waging a
patriotic crusade against these “deep state” child abusers, and a “Great
Awakening” that will reveal the truth is on the horizon.
QAnon
evolved out of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which posited that
Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza
restaurant, and has come to incorporate numerous strands of rightwing
conspiracy mongering. Dedicated followers interpret Q’s cryptic messages in a
kind of digital scavenger hunt. Despite the fact that Q’s prognostications have
reliably failed to come true, followers rationalize the inaccuracies as part of
a larger plan.
Q’s initial
commentary on the Facebook bans was concise: “Information Warfare,” Q posted on
the website 8kun. Two days later, in a post that included a collage of dozens
of news headlines about the takedowns, Q went further, speculating that there
had been a “coordinated media roll-out designed to instill ‘fear’” in believers
and dissuade them from discussing QAnon on social media. “When do you expend
ammunition?” Q wrote. “For what purpose?”
The
anticipated purge never came. Instead, QAnon groups on Facebook have continued
to grow at a considerable pace in the weeks following the takedown, with
several adding more than 10,000 members over 30 days.
A Guardian
investigation has documented:
More than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups, and
Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each dedicated to
QAnon.
The largest of these have more than 150,000 followers
or members.
In total, the documented pages, groups and accounts
count more than 3m aggregate followers and members, though there is likely
significant overlap among these groups and accounts.
These
groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a
broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief
system, researchers say.
“Facebook
is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg,
a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social
Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think
that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the
affordances of Facebook.”
Moreover,
Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful
algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have
been exposed to them.
The
Guardian did not initially go looking for QAnon content on Facebook. Instead,
Facebook’s algorithms recommended a QAnon group to a Guardian reporter’s
account after it had joined pro-Trump, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown Facebook
groups. The list of more than 100 QAnon groups and accounts was then generated
by following Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and using simple keyword
searches. The Instagram accounts were discovered by searching for “QAnon” in
the app’s discovery page and then following Instagram’s algorithmic
recommendations.
Receiving
QAnon recommendations from Facebook does not appear to be that uncommon. “Once
I started liking those pages and joining those groups, Facebook just started
recommending more and more and more and more, to the point where I was afraid
to like them all in case Facebook would flag me as a bot,” said Friedberg. Erin
Gallagher, a researcher who studies social media extremism, said she was also
encouraged to join a QAnon group by Facebook, soon after joining an
anti-lockdown group.
Facebook’s
own internal research in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are
due to our recommendation tools”, the Wall Street Journal reported, primarily
through the same “Groups you should join” and “Discover” algorithms that
promoted QAnon content to the Guardian. “Our recommendation systems grow the
problem,” the internal research said.
I really do not
think QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the
affordances of Facebook
Brian Friedberg
Facebook
did not directly respond to questions from the Guardian about its policy
considerations around QAnon content. “Last month, we took down accounts,
Groups, and Pages tied to this conspiracy theorist movement for violating our
policies,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We also remove Groups
and Pages that violate other policies from recommendations and demote in search
results. We’re closely monitoring this activity and how our policies apply.”
The company
also claimed that “all of the Pages” and “the vast majority of Groups”
documented by the Guardian had been removed from recommendation algorithms
prior to the Guardian’s query. The company did not provide evidence for this
claim, which is contradicted by screenshots of pages and groups appearing in
recommendations that were taken in May. The Guardian also continued to receive
recommendations to join additional QAnon groups after its initial query to
Facebook.
Asked about
this discrepancy, Facebook said that the pages and groups in question had been
marked as “non-recommendable” as of 8 April 2020 for violations of policies
against clickbait, viral misinformation and hate speech, but that a page or
group can be restored to eligibility for recommendations if its behavior
improves for several months.
Over the
course of reporting this article – about one month – the aggregate membership
of the documented groups and pages grew from 2.75m to more than 3m, or
approximately 8.5%. Groups and pages that the Guardian had documented to have
been promoted through Facebook’s recommendation algorithms grew 19.9%. One page
that appeared in recommendations – “We are ‘Q’” – saw its following grow nearly
60%, from about 24,000 to about 38,000 over the month – despite the page not
having posted any new content since February.
To
Friedberg, the window for Facebook to act on QAnon may have already passed.
“I’m starting to wonder if we’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop –
another act of violence,” he said. “That seems to be what the platforms wait
for, and that in and of itself is terrifying.”
A ban that stuck
While QAnon
thrives on Facebook, another social media site took timely and decisive action
against it. Nearly two years ago, Reddit, the link-sharing network of
interest-based message boards, carried out a site-wide purge of QAnon – and
made it stick.
Reddit had
been central to the development of the QAnon movement, which began in October
2017 with the emergence of “Q” on 4chan, the anarchic image board that has
served as a launching pad for memes and internet culture but also racist
extremism and harassment campaigns. Q, whose cryptic messages and predictions
claimed to be based on a high-level government security clearance, quickly
decamped from 4chan to the even more extreme 8chan, where believers could read
Q’s latest “crumbs” directly from the source.
Q went
briefly silent in 2019 when 8chan was forced offline in the wake of the El Paso
massacre, but re-emerged on the new site founded by 8chan’s owners, 8kun.
Anonymous
internet posters claiming to be high-level government officials are not
entirely uncommon; in recent years, other so-called “anons” have emerged with
claims that they were revealing secrets from inside the FBI or CIA. But Q is
the first such figure to have achieved such a broad audience and real-world
political influence. This is largely due to the activism of three dedicated
conspiracy theorists who latched on to Q’s posts in the early days, according
to an investigation by NBC News. These activists worked to develop a mythology and
culture around QAnon and cultivated an audience for it on mainstream social
media platforms.
Reddit was
significantly easier to use for the kind of crowd-sourced research and
interpretation that forms the core of participation in QAnon, and the site was
host to a large pool of potential recruits, such as the 1.2m members of the
subreddit r/conspiracy. It had also long enjoyed and at times even earned a
reputation as one of the danker cesspools of the social web, for years
tolerating communities known as “subreddits” dedicated to sharing
non-consensual sexualized images of women or advocating rape.
But the
violent anger of adherents to QAnon crossed the line for Reddit in less than a
year. On 12 September 2018, citing its ban on content that “incites violence,
disseminates personal information, or harasses”, the company banned 18 QAnon
subreddits, the largest of which had more than 70,000 members.
Social
media bans are often difficult to maintain, but Reddit’s move was uncommonly
effective. Today, QAnon remains unwelcome on Reddit, with the few subreddits
that address it dedicated to either debunking the theory or providing support
to people who have lost friends and family members to QAnon.
‘Taking the red pill’
QAnon did
not disappear after Reddit pulled the plug, however. Instead, its believers
moved on to other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Discord and –
crucially – Facebook. At the time of the Reddit ban, one of the largest closed
Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon, “Qanon Follow the White Rabbit” had 51,000
members, according to NBC News. Today that group has grown to more than 90,000
members.
And while
YouTube and Twitter have played an important role in providing a broadcast
platform for QAnon content, the specific structures provided by Facebook are
uniquely suited to the participatory “work” of engaging with QAnon. Facebook
also provides QAnon with an even larger pool of potential recruits than Reddit
could, especially for the somewhat older, Evangelical crowd that has proven
susceptible to QAnon’s messaging.
Will
Partin, a research analyst with Data & Society, and Alice Marwick, a
professor of communication at the University of North Carolina, describe QAnon
as a “dark participatory culture”, which is to say that it is a community that
takes advantage of the infrastructure of social networking sites to bring
disparate people together and foster discussion, collaboration, research and
community, but directs those energies toward anti-democratic, regressive and
even violent ends.
“Everything
about our research suggests that these people are not irrational; they’re
hyper-literate, even if they’ve come to beliefs that are empirically inaccurate
,” Partin said. “That’s partly because they have a fundamentally different
epistemology to judge what is true and false.”
A man in
the crowd holds a QAnon sign as crowds gather to attend Donald Trump’s campaign
rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, 21 February 2020. Photograph: Patrick T
Fallon/Reuters
The digital
architecture of Facebook groups is also particularly well-suited to QAnon’s
collaborative construction of an alternative body of knowledge, Friedberg said.
The platform has created a ready-made digital pathway from public pages to
public groups to private groups and finally secret groups that mirrors the
process of “falling down the rabbit hole or taking the red pill”.
“You can
mechanically take those steps,” he said. “Very few of the contemporary
Q-following base actually need to engage with 8chan at all.”
To ban or not to ban
While
Facebook has policies banning hate speech, incitement to violence and other
types of content that it considers undesirable on a family- and
advertiser-friendly platform, QAnon does not fit neatly into any single
category.
Much of
what is shared in QAnon groups on Facebook is a mix of pro-Trump political
speech and pro-Trump political misinformation. Memes, videos and posts are
often bigoted and disconnected from reality, but not all that different from
the content that is shared in non-QAnon, pro-Trump Facebook groups.
The pages
and groups that were removed in early May violated the company’s ban on
“coordinated inauthentic behavior” – ie the kind of digital astroturf tactics
that Russian operatives used to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Those rules are aimed at operations in which actors make false representations
about their identities in order to mislead people – a description that could
encompass Q – but Facebook only applies its policy to deceptive behavior that
occurs on its platform, not on 8kun.
When a common
sense of what is real and what is correct breaks apart, it becomes nearly
impossible to reach a democratic consensus
Will Partin
To enact a
blanket ban akin to Reddit’s under its current rubric of rules, Facebook would
likely have to designate QAnon as a “dangerous organization” – the category it
uses to ban both terrorist and hate groups and any content published in support
or praise of them. QAnon is hardly an organization, though as a movement it has
certainly caused harm and could be considered dangerous.
There are
innate societal and individual harms to convincing people of a version of
reality that is simply false, as QAnon does, said Data & Society research
analyst Will Partin. “When a common sense of what is real and what is correct
breaks apart, it becomes nearly impossible to reach a democratic consensus.”
And QAnon
followers’ enthusiasm for misinformation is not confined to politics; as the
coronavirus pandemic took hold, the groups became a hotbed for medical
misinformation – something Facebook has claimed to be working hard to combat.
Analyses by Gallagher, the social media researcher, and the New York Times
demonstrated how QAnon groups fueled the viral spread of “Plandemic”, a
26-minute video chock full of dangerously false information about Covid-19 and
vaccines.
Facebook’s
algorithms appear to have detected this synergy between the QAnon and
anti-vaccine communities. Several QAnon groups are flagged with an automated
warning label from Facebook that reads, “This group discusses vaccines” and
encourages users to go to the website of the Centers for Disease Control for
reliable information on health.
It appears
that anti-vaccine propagandists are also taking notice, and attempting to
capitalize. Larry Cook, the administrator of Stop Mandatory Vaccination, one of
the largest anti-vaxx Facebook groups, has begun incorporating QAnon rhetoric
into the medical misinformation he peddles, as well as making explicit
invitations to QAnon believers to join his group.
Cook has
begun referencing the “deep state” and stoking fear of forced vaccination and
“FEMA camps”.
“I have
discussed the concept many, many, many times that vaccines destroy our
connection to God and that we are in a spiritual war with Principalities of
Darkness that have a death wish for our children, and humanity at large,” he
wrote in one QAnon-inflected post. (Cook also uses the site to aggressively
promote his various products and a subscription-only platform for “medical
freedom patriots”.)
But the
potential for damage from QAnon goes well beyond. For those individuals who
truly believe in the QAnon narrative, the crimes of the “cabal” are so grievous
as to make fighting them a moral imperative. “They’re talking about a group of
people who are operating our government against our wishes and they’re
molesting and torturing children and destroying our society,” said Joseph
Uscinski, a professor of political science who studies conspiracy theories.
“It’s an incitement to violence.”
Indeed,
there have been numerous incidents of real-world violence linked to QAnon, and
in May 2019, the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat
in an intelligence bulletin. While anti-government conspiracy theories were not
new, the bulletin stated, social media was allowing them to reach a larger
audience, and the online narratives were determining the targets of harassment
and violence for the small subset of individuals who crossed over into
real-world action.
Despite
this, Uscinski is skeptical of the idea that kicking QAnon off Facebook would
help anyone. He regularly polls conspiracy theories and consistently finds that
QAnon is “one of the least believed things” out there, well below belief in
theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, anti-vaccine hoaxes, and Holocaust
denialism. Uscinski also cautions against overly exoticizing the QAnon
narrative, noting that “most of the component parts of QAnon have been around
forever”, with parallels in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s or the plot of
Oliver Stone’s JFK. And he’s concerned about the free speech implications of
censorship by tech platforms.
“It’s a
potentially dangerous belief; it’s very disconnected from reality; I don’t
really think we want more people getting into it,” he said of QAnon. “Do the
internet companies bear some responsibility? Yes. Would it be better if they
took it down? Probably. Does that take care of it? No.”
Partin said
that he generally favored Facebook taking a “more aggressive approach to
moderation”, including addressing the recommendation algorithms and trying to
reduce the spread of misinformation out of dedicated conspiracy communities and
into the mainstream.
“If
Facebook flipped a switch and every Q post disappeared tomorrow, that probably
would be harmful for QAnon,” he said. “But there is resiliency built in. Getting
deplatformed is harmful, but the idea that it would somehow make this disappear
is fanciful.”
Friedberg
worried that it may already be too late. “Facebook should have taken action on
this a long, long time ago, and the longer that they wait, the more deeply
entrenched in mainstream politics this becomes,” he said. Facebook has been
reluctant to appear in any way biased against Republicans, and if (or when)
QAnon reaches Congress, it will be even more politically difficult for Facebook
to take a stand.
In May,
Republican voters in Oregon nominated a QAnon believer to run for the US Senate
in November. Another QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is likely to be
elected to the House of Representatives after she came first in a Republican
primary in a conservative Georgia district on 11 June.
Indeed,
Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted QAnon accounts on Twitter, which
believers take as confirmation of their alternate reality. And on 20 June, just
before Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump’s adult son Eric posted
a QAnon meme on his Instagram account. Eric Trump deleted the image relatively
quickly, but not before screenshots spread across the Facebook Q-sphere.
“So Eric
Trump posted a pic with a ‘Q’ in the imagery,” an administrator of one of the
larger QAnon groups wrote. “The pic has been taken down but the message was
received!”
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