Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a memo Friday night “[acknowledging] the real pain” caused by his decision to leave up Donald Trump’s incendiary posts, announced that the company would revisit its content policies. The news comes following a week of backlash prompted by Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to the president’s violence-inciting posts, inaction that several Facebook staffers publicly spoke out against.
Friday’s statement, which was sent to employees and posted on Zuckerberg’s own Facebook page, said that the platform will review policies “allowing discussion and threats of state use of force” and those “around voter suppression.” CNN’s Oliver Darcy notes these measures to be in direct conversation with Trump’s recent inflammatory remarks on Twitter in a post that said “looting” leads to “shooting” and another spreading false information about mail-in ballots—both of which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took a hard line against for the first time last week. Zuckerberg said Facebook will also “review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions,” another aspect of the memo that Darcy highlights as particularly relevant to the varied approach that the two social media giants took to Trump last week.
“Previously Zuckerberg had subtly jabbed Twitter for labeling a post as glorifying violence, but leaving it up,” Darcy writes. “At the time, Zuckerberg said that if Facebook found a post to be threatening, the company would simply take it down. Now, it seems Zuckerberg might be rethinking that approach.” But as Politico notes, the memo “contained little to no concrete commitments,” something Zuckerberg himself prefaced his follow-up actions with. “I want to be clear that while we are looking at all of these areas, we may not come up with changes we want to make in all of them,” he wrote.
Former Facebook employee Mark Luckie voiced dismay for such non-committal “fluffy, PR-friendly statements” in a statement to Buzzfeed’s Ryan Mac, per CNN. “In classic Mark Zuckerberg fashion there is very little in his note that he and the company can be held accountable for. Most of the bullet points are ‘we are going to review’ and the most concrete effort—a voter hub—is something that has already been executed previously,” Luckie said, calling on Zuckerberg to do more than just “say he stands by the Black community”—which he wrote at the end of his memo—and “[show] us actual proof of this.”
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