Facebook, Twitter, and Google Executives Testify on Hate Speech and Conservative Bias : April 9 and 10, 2019

Social Media Platforms Work to Eliminate Hateful Content

Throughout 2019, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) all expanded policies and announced new plans to combat the proliferation of hate speech on their platforms. In March, Facebook announced it was enhancing its effort to ban white nationalism and separatism—not just white supremacy, which it had previously banned. Two months later, the company began removing the accounts of far-right figures for violating its hate speech policies. Deactivated accounts included those held by InfoWars founder Alex Jones (and all InfoWars fan pages); conservative commentators Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, and Laura Loomer; and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In an announcement, Facebook defended the move, saying it has “always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of their ideology.” Jones called the decision “authoritarian,” while Watson told followers on Twitter, “In an authoritarian society controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley giants, all dissent must be purged.”

In June, YouTube expanded its own long-standing policy against hate speech. “We’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.” The announcement said the platform would also “remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, [Page 212]took place.” YouTube expressed a hope that this expanded policy would add to the success of its earlier regulation, introduced in 2017, that limited the ability to share and comment on white supremacist content. According to the company, that policy reduced views of videos supporting white supremacy by an average of 80 percent.

In July, Twitter issued a policy on hate speech that targets religious groups to better fall in line with regulations already in place on Facebook and YouTube. Citing evidence that dehumanizing language increases the risk of offline violence against certain groups, Twitter said, “We’re expanding our rules against hateful conduct to include language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion.” Twitter also indicated that it would in the future consider banning hateful content targeted at marginalized groups, including homosexuals or racial minorities, but that it needed first to identify the most sensitive way to do that. “There are additional factors we need to better understand and be able to address before we expand this rule to address language directed at other protected groups,” the company said. In October, Twitter released a policy addressing hate speech by world leaders, making clear that those individuals “are not above our policies entirely.” Therefore, it would remove content or entire accounts held by world leaders if their content fell into a set of categories, including promotion of terrorism, direct threats of violence, encouraging self-harm, or posting a private individual’s personal information. “In other cases involving a world leader, we will err on the side of leaving the content up if there is a clear public interest in doing so,” Twitter said. That last statement drew the ire of some on the left, who were pushing the social media company to remove content shared by President Donald Trump that it claimed incites violence. In response, Twitter said that decisions about content or account removal are “not that simple” and that “the actions we take and policies we develop will set precedent around online speech and we owe it to the people we serve to be deliberate and considered in what we do,” adding that “context matters.”

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