Democrat Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) called on Facebook today to block and ban Infowars content online on its platform.
Deutch pressured Facebook and YouTube to remove Infowars content.
They don’t even hide their hatred and intolerance anymore.
Rep. Ted Deutch, who represents Parkland, Florida, asked Facebook’s Monika Bickert about Alex Jones of InfoWars spreading fake news about the victims. He asked how many strikes a channel gets before it’s banned. Bickert said a channel typically gets three strikes.
— Marty Swant (@martyswant) July 17, 2018
Here’s the video:
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Try this (1:47.57 in hearing)
On Wednesday Recode published their interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg told Recode that Infowars can remain on Facebook.
But he followed this up by saying Infowars would be censored and shadow-banned like most top conservative websites.
Let’s talk about news. Let’s talk about news.
Sure.
This has been, everyday seems to be a new thing of people asking you to make determinations about what news is. The power you have over distribution is very clear — to publishers, to citizens and everyone else. How do you look at your role, ‘cause you’re kind of an accidental publisher, in a lot of ways? Content, there was all kinds of content, but right now you’re being asked, right now as we’re doing this interview, there’s a Congressional hearing going on. In that case, conservatives think that you’re not, you don’t give a voice to conservatives. Yesterday, I wrote a story, which I think you read, about other publications think you give too much voice to those. “You shouldn’t have InfoWars on here.” Let’s talk about InfoWars. Let’s use them as the example.
Sure.
Make the case for keeping them, and make the case for not allowing them to be distributed by you.
There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things. Within this, those principles have real trade-offs and real tug on each other. In this case, we feel like our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed.
Okay.
The approach that we’ve taken to false news is not to say, you can’t say something wrong on the internet. I think that that would be too extreme. Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that. But at the same time, I think that we have a responsibility to, when you look at… if you look at the top hundred things that are going viral or getting distribution on Facebook within any given day, I do think we have a responsibility to make sure that those aren’t hoaxes and blatant misinformation.
That’s the approach that we’ve taken. We look at the things that are getting the most distribution. If people have flag them as potential hoaxes, we send those to fact-checkers who are all well reputable and have followed standard principles for fact checking, and if those fact checkers say that it is provably false, then we will significantly reduce the distribution of that content, and if someone-
So, you move them down the line rather than get rid of them?
Yeah, in News Feed.
Why don’t you wanna just say “get off our platform?”
Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.
Even if it’s a hoax.
Yeah. I mean, at some level, it’s hard to always have a clear line between … I’m not defending any specific content here. I think a lot of the content that’s at play is terrible. I think when you get into discussions around free speech, you’re often talking at the margins of content that is terrible and what should … but defending people’s right to say things even if they can be bad. Sorry, I lost my train of thought here. Where-
There’s a difference between offensive and hoaxes.
Oh yeah. Yes.
