Facebook will bar more hateful content in ads, label some posts from politicians

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday that the social network would start labeling content it finds newsworthy but would violate its rules. Facebook will also bar a wider category of hateful content in ads, a move that comes as major brands pull ads from the social network in protest. 

The labeling doesn’t apply to content that suppresses voting or incites violence, which Facebook said it will remove even if it comes from politicians. Twitter, a rival social network, has been adding notices to tweets from President Donald Trump that run afoul of its rules about glorifying violence. 

Facebook will also bar ads that contain claims that people of certain racial groups or ethnicities are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of anyone else. It’s also prohibiting ads that express contempt, dismissal or disgust of immigrants and refugees, or suggest they are somehow inferior.

“We want to do more here to prohibit the kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric that has been used to sow discord,” Zuckerberg said in an internal townhall that was live streamed on Facebook. 

The company will start attaching links to posts about voting, including from politicians, that direct users to its new Voting Information Center. “This isn’t a judgement of whether the posts themselves are accurate, but we want people to have access to authoritative information either way,” Zuckerberg said. The links will help Facebook tackle trickier posts in which it’s unclear whether the user is trying to suppress voting such as claims that a city has been identified as a COVID-19 hotspot. Facebook said it will also ban posts that make false claims that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are checking for immigration papers at polling places and coordinated threats that interfere with voting. 

Facebook doesn’t send posts and ads from politicians to fact checkers, a policy that has drawn criticism from lawmakers, advocacy groups and its own employees. In May, Twitter labeled two tweets from President Donald Trump that contained false claims about mail-in ballots but Facebook didn’t take any action against those same posts on its social network. Facebook determined that Trump was engaging in a political debate about mail-in voting, not directly discouraging people from voting. 

Facebook has been under pressure to do more to combat misinformation and hate speech including from advertisers.The Anti-Defamation League, NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Colors of Change, Free Press and Common Sense are calling on businesses to stop buying ads on Facebook for the month of July. Doing so, the groups said, will put pressure on Facebook to use its $70 billion in annual advertising revenue to support people who are targets of racism and hate and to increase safety for private groups on the site. Consumer goods giant Unilever, telecommunications company Verizon, ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s and outdoor clothing brand The North Face are some of the major brands who have joined the #StopHateforProfit campaign. 

Despite efforts to combat hate speech, civil rights advocates say that Facebook has allowed content that could incite violence against protesters who are fighting for racial justice in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks.

The ADL says nearly 100 brands have joined the boycott. The groups are asking Facebook to make several changes, including creating a separate moderation pipeline for hate speech, allowing certain people who’ve been targeted with harassment or hate to talk to a live person at Facebook, and telling advertisers how often their content was shown next to posts that Facebook removed for misinformation or hate speech.