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| By Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook |
Civil rights are the foundation of a free and just society — and
something we care deeply about as a company. We want to make sure we’re
advancing civil rights on our platform, and today we’re sharing a second report
that details our efforts.
Laura Murphy, a
highly respected civil rights and civil liberties advocate, began leading an
audit more than a year ago with support from the noted civil rights law firm
Relman, Dane and Colfax. She’s spoken to more than 90 civil rights
organizations and people from Facebook’s policy, product and enforcement teams.
Last December, she shared her first update, which focused on our US election-related
work, including steps to prevent voter suppression and encourage voter
participation.
Today’s report, which
you can read here, gives another update on our progress and points
out where we need to do more. It highlights four areas where we’ve made
changes:
Strengthening Our Policies and
Enforcement Against Harmful Content
Our Community Standards, the policies for what’s allowed on
Facebook, are key to making sure people can freely and safely connect and share
with each other. In March, we built upon our longstanding ban against white
supremacy after speaking with civil rights leaders, experts across the
political spectrum and academics in race relations. We now ban praise, support
and representation of white nationalism and white separatism. Today’s report
recommends we go further to include content that supports white nationalist
ideology even if the terms “white nationalism” and “white separatism” aren’t
explicitly used. We’re addressing this by identifying hate slogans and symbols
connected to white nationalism and white separatism to better enforce our
policy.
We also recently updated our policies so Facebook isn’t used to
organize events that intimidate or harass people based on their race, religion,
or other parts of their identity. We now ban posts from people who intend to
bring weapons anywhere to intimidate or harass others, or who encourage people
to do the same. Civil rights leaders first flagged this trend to us, and it’s
exactly the type of content our policies are meant to protect against.
Getting our policies right is just one part of the solution. We
also need to get better at enforcement — both in taking down and leaving up the
right content. For example, civil rights groups have been concerned about us
mistakenly taking down content meant to draw attention to and fight
discrimination rather than promote it. We’re taking steps to address this,
including a US pilot program where some of the people who review content on
Facebook only focus on hate speech instead of a range of content that can
include bullying, nudity, and misrepresentation. We believe allowing reviewers
to specialize only in hate speech could help them further build the expertise
that may lead to increased accuracy over time.
Fighting Discrimination in
Facebook Ads
Our ads tools help
businesses reach people all over the world and we need to make sure they aren’t
misused. In March 2019, we announced historic settlement agreements with
leading civil rights organizations to change how US housing, employment and
credit ads are run on Facebook.
Our policies have always prohibited advertisers from using our
tools to discriminate. In 2018, we went further by removing thousands of
categories from targeting related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity,
sexual orientation and religion. But we can do better. As a result of the settlement,
we’re rolling out updates so anyone who wants to run US housing, employment and
credit ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code and
will have a much smaller set of targeting categories overall. We’re building
ways to make sure advertisers follow these rules with plans for full
enforcement by the end of the year. We will also have a tool where you can
search for and view current US housing ads by advertiser and location,
regardless of whether the ads are shown to you.
We’re committed to going beyond the settlement agreement to let
people search US employment and credit ads on Facebook too. These ads are
crucial to helping people buy homes, find jobs, and gain access to credit — and
it’s important that everyone on Facebook has access to these opportunities.
Protecting the 2020 Census and
Elections Against Intimidation
With both the US Census and the US presidential elections, 2020
will be big year. An accurate census count is crucial to governments for
functions like distributing federal funds and to businesses and researchers.
That’s why we’re going to treat next year’s census like an election — with
people, policies and technology in place to protect against census
interference.
We’re building a team dedicated to these census efforts and
introducing a new policy in the fall that protects against misinformation
related to the census. We’ll enforce it using artificial intelligence. We’ll
also partner with non-partisan groups to help promote proactive participation
in the census.
To protect elections, we have a team across product,
engineering, data science, policy, legal and operations dedicated full time to
these efforts. They’re already working to ban ads that discourage people from
voting, and we expect to finalize a new policy and its enforcement before the
2019 gubernatorial elections. This is a direct response to the types of ads we
saw on Facebook in 2016. It builds on the work we’ve done over the past year to
prevent voter suppression and stay ahead of people trying to misuse our
products.
Just as civil rights groups helped us better prepare for the
2018 elections, their guidance has been key as we prepare for the 2020 Census
and upcoming elections around the world.
Formalizing Facebook’s Civil
Rights Task Force
Perhaps most importantly, today we’re announcing plans to build
greater awareness about civil rights on Facebook and long-term accountability
across the company. Since the first audit update in December, I created a civil
rights task force made up of senior leaders across key areas of the company.
Today, we’re going one step further and formalizing this task force so it lives
on after the audit is finished.
The task force will onboard civil rights expertise to ensure it
is effective in addressing areas like content policy, fairness in artificial
intelligence, privacy, and elections. For example, we will work with voting
rights experts to make sure key members of our election team are trained on
trends in voter intimidation and suppression so they can remove this content
from Facebook more effectively.
We’re also introducing civil rights training for all senior
leaders on the task force and key employees who work in the early stages of
developing relevant products and policies. The training is designed to increase
awareness of civil rights issues and build civil rights considerations into
decisions, products and policies at the company. We know these are the first
steps to developing long-term accountability. We plan on making further changes
to build a culture that explicitly protects and promotes civil rights on
Facebook.
Laura’s second report includes more information about the
updates we’re making. Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of meeting
with many key leaders, and our conversations have been humbling and invaluable.
We will continue listening to feedback from the civil rights community and
address the important issues they’ve raised so Facebook can better protect and
promote the civil rights of everyone who uses our services.
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