Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit The Auditors shared the civil rights community’s concerns, and strongly urged Facebook to remove the post, but did not have the opportunity to speak directly to any decision-makers until after Facebook had already decided to leave it up. As with the company’s decisions regarding President Trump’s recent voting-related posts, the external criticism of this decision was far from limited to the civil rights community. Some Facebook employees posted public messages disagreeing with the decision and staged a virtual walkout. Several former employees of the company published a joint letter criticizing the decision — warning that, “We know the speech of the powerful matters most of all. It establishes norms, creates a permission structure, and implicitly authorizes violence, all of which is made worse by algorithmic amplification.” Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter demanding an explanation for the decision, explaining “There is a difference between being a platform that facilitates public discourse and one that peddles incendiary, race-baiting innuendo guised as political speech for profit.” After the company publicly left up the looting and shooting post, more than five political and merchandise ads have run on Facebook sending the same dangerous message that “looters” and “ANTIFA terrorists” can or should be shot by armed citizens. These have ranged from ads by Congressional candidate Paul Broun referring to this AR-15 rifle as a “liberty machine” and urging its use against “looting hordes from Atlanta”, to T-shirts depicting guns saying “loot this” or targets to be used as shooting practice for when “looters” come. To be clear, Facebook agreed these ads violated their policies (ads for T-shirts or targets are clearly not “warnings about state action”). Facebook ultimately removed the ads after they were brought to Facebook’s attention, although only after the ads collectively received more than two hundred thousand impressions. The civil rights community expressed concern that the ads illustrated how Facebook’s public decision to permit the President’s looting and shooting post could have ripple effects that magnify the impact of the decision and further spread its violent messages on the platform. The fact that these violating ads calling for violence were not initially caught and taken down by Facebook’s content reviewers is also concerning to the Auditors. Facebook has since announced a willingness to revisit its Violence and Incitement Policy and the scope of its exception for threats of state action. As of this writing, it is unclear whether that revisiting will result in any policy or enforcement changes, and if so, what those changes will be. However, to many in the civil rights community the damage has already been done — the trust that the company will interpret and enforce its policies in ways that reflect a prioritization of civil rights has been broken. (ii) Polarization. The civil rights groups and members of Congress also have questions about Facebook’s potential role in pushing people toward extreme and divisive content. A number of them have flagged an article in the Wall Street Journal that asserts that Facebook leadership “shut down efforts to make the site less divisive” and “largely shelved” internal research on whether social media increases polarization. Additionally, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on June 18, 2020, “I’m concerned about whether social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others, wittingly or otherwise, optimize for extreme content. 55