Mark Zuckerberg Says He'll Review Policies That Allowed Trump's Inflammatory Post
It turns out protests work.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company will conduct a review of the policy he cited when allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post to remain up on the site.
“We’re going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt,” Zuckerberg wrote in a lengthy statement days after his employees staged a virtual walkout in protest of his response to Trump’s post.
The outrage at Zuckerberg started after Trump published an inflammatory post on the platform about anti-racism protests, warning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The phrase originated with a combative Miami police chief threatening the young, largely Black, people involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Facing calls to take the post down or put a warning on it, as Twitter did, Zuckerberg initially responded to upset civil rights leaders and his own employees by saying the post did not violate any of Facebook’s policies. In a leaked call with around 25,000 employees this week, he argued that the language Trump used “has no history of being read as a dog whistle for vigilante supporters to take justice into their own hands.” He made the same argument in a statement earlier that week.
The statement Zuckerberg issued Friday signals he’s taken some of that criticism to heart. He said Facebook will consider new rules for two specific types of posts.
The first category is posts of excessive use of police or state force. “Given the sensitive history in the US, this deserves special consideration,” he wrote. He added that in cases of ongoing unrest or conflict, “We already have precedents for imposing greater restrictions during emergencies and when countries are in ongoing states of conflict, so there may be additional policies or integrity measures to consider around discussion or threats of state use...
