American Senator Michael Bennett, from Colorado State, sent an open letter to Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg urging him to curb hate speech on the social media platform.
In his letter to The Guardian, Bennett referred to what Zuckerberg wrote in the British Financial Times that "Facebook is not waiting for the organization" and that it "continues to make progress" on issues ranging from misinformation in the election to the harmful content on its platform.
He expressed deep concern that Facebook's actions have so far fall short of what its unprecedented global impact requires, despite the new policies and investments it describes.
And he hinted that Facebook, after the number of users of its platforms that include Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, reached 2.9 billion people, it had unparalleled power in dozens of countries to form democratic rules, debate and elections.
Senator Bennett says he is concerned that Facebook, as an American company, has not taken enough steps to prevent its platforms from undermining basic democratic values around the world, and that abuse of their platforms globally appears to be worsening. For example, the Oxford Internet Institute found that governments and political parties organized "social media manipulation" campaigns in 70 countries in 2019 (up from 28 in 2017 and 48 in 2018).
The Oxford Institute found that at least 26 authoritarian regimes use social media "as a tool for controlling information ... (and) to suppress basic human rights, discredit political opponents and transcend opposing opinions". The institute also mentioned that Facebook was the "preferred platform" for tyrants.
Tracking some cases, Bennett indicated that Facebook in the Philippines trained President Rodrigo Duterte's campaign that took advantage of the platform at the time to spread misleading information, and since his victory, Dotert pushed armies of online trolls to harass journalists and political opponents on Facebook and publish misleading information about them.
In Myanmar, military leaders have used Facebook since 2012 to ignite tensions between the Buddhist majority and the minority Rohingya Muslims, and the United Nations has even said that Facebook played a "critical role" in paving the way for a military attack that has displaced at least 700,000 people.
In his message, Bennett warned that with a critical election approaching in 2020 not only in the United States, but also in countries such as Egypt, Georgia, Iraq and Sri Lanka, Facebook should quickly adopt stronger policies to reduce violations of its platforms, and to understand the lessons learned from the aforementioned cases. He asked Zuckerberg to provide updates on some questions no later than April 1, 2020:
What steps does Facebook take to reduce the effectiveness of misleading information and hate speech?
- How does Facebook handle misleading information published by government officials or state-sponsored accounts? Does it modify the recommendation algorithms in these cases?
- What steps did Facebook take to improve its ability to translate non-English scripts to ensure that its automated systems could discover content that violates community standards?
Does Facebook make in-depth assessments, such as human rights audits, of the markets in which it operates? And if so, how often does these assessments update?
Other than applying societal standards, what steps does Facebook plan to take to protect vulnerable groups such as journalists or ethnic, racial and religious minorities from threats or harassment on its platforms?