Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit
look to expand the policy to prohibit content which expressly praises, supports, or represents white nationalist or
separatist ideology even if it does not explicitly use those terms. Facebook has not made that policy change.
Instead, Facebook reports that it is continuing to look for ways to improve its handling of white nationalist and
white separatist content in other ways. According to the company, it has 350 people who work exclusively on
combating dangerous individuals and organizations, including white nationalist and separatist groups and other
organized hate groups. This multi-disciplinary team brings together subject matter experts from policy, operations,
product, engineering, safety investigations, threat intelligence, law enforcement investigations, and legal.
Facebook further notes that the collective work of this cross-functional team has resulted in a ban on more than
250 white supremacist organizations from its platform, and that the company uses a combination of AI and human
expertise to remove content praising or supporting these organizations. Through this process, Facebook states that it
has learned behavioral patterns in organized hate and terrorist content that make them distinctive from one another,
which may aid in their detection. For example, Facebook has observed that violations for organized hate are more
likely to involve memes while terrorist propaganda is often dispersed from a central media arm of the organization
and includes formalized branding. Facebook states that understanding these nuances may help the company continue
to improve its detection of organized hate content. In its May 2020 Community Standards Enforcement Report,
Facebook reported that in the first three months of 2020, it removed about 4.7 million pieces of content connected to
organized hate — an increase of over 3 million pieces of content from the end of 2019. While this is an impressive
figure, the Auditors are unable to assess its significance without greater context (e.g., the amount of hate content that
is on the platform but goes undetected, or whether hate is increasing on the platform overall, such that removing
more does not necessarily signal better detection).
Facebook has also said that it is able to take more aggressive action against dangerous individuals and organizations
by working with its Threat Intelligence and Safety Investigations team, who are responsible for combating
coordinated inauthentic behavior. The team states that it uses signals to identify if a banned organization has a
presence on the platform and then proactively investigates associated accounts, Pages and Groups — removing them
all at once and taking steps to protect against recidivist behavior.
That being said, the civil rights community continues to express significant concern with Facebook’s detection and
removal of extremist and white nationalist content and its identification and removal of hate organizations. Civil
rights advocates continue to take issue with Facebook’s definition of a “dangerous organization,” contending that
the definition is too narrow and excludes hate figures and hate organizations designated by civil rights groups that
track such content on social media. Furthermore, civil rights groups have challenged the accuracy and effectiveness
of Facebook’s enforcement of these policies; for example, a 2020 report published by the Tech Transparency Project
(TTP) concluded that more than 100 groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center and/or Anti-Defamation
League as white supremacist organizations had a presence on Facebook.
Because Facebook uses its own criteria for designating hate organizations, they are not in agreement with the hate
designation of organizations that are identified by the TTP report. In some ways Facebook’s designations are more
expansive (e.g., Facebook indicates it has designated 15 US-based white supremacist groups as hate organizations
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