Facebook excempts politicians from rules that ban "hate speech" and "false news"

In a blog post, Facebook executive Nick Clegg announced that Facebook will exempt politicians from rules that prohibit users from posting hate speech, encouraging criminal activity, inciting violence and, of course, posting fake news.

Facebook has had a newsworthiness exemption since 2016. This means that if someone makes a statement or shares a post which breaks our community standards we will still allow it on our platform if we believe the public interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm. Today, I announced that from now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard. However, in keeping with the principle that we apply different standards to content for which we receive payment, this will not apply to ads

In the same posting, Clegg disclosed that Facebook hasn't been fact-checking politicans' posts as indicated in the past:

Also, just FTR, Facebook hasn't been fact-checking posts by politicians: pic.twitter.com/PLfEgpXZ2o

— Natalie Martinez (@natijomartinez) September 24, 2019

Facebook's approach to fake news and hate speech was always a gloss on its endless supplicating to conservative politicians and pundits--the same cowering attitude long ago internalized by other media companies. This is just the mask coming off, Zuckerberg and co. whining "but we gave you everything you wanted" as the GOP and Trump set out to regulate social media.

Clegg was himself a politician, oddly enough, most famous for an ultimately humiliating stint as Britain's deputy prime minister that nearly destroyed his party. Read the rest