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Facebook employees tried to censor Donald Trump posts



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Posted by   October 22, 2016 
This is what happens when social justice warriors move from college to social media companies.
https://twitter.com/Tumblrisms/status/711009722741231617?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This should surprise no one. 
These are probably the same people who in college demanded intellectual safe spaces and trigger warnings.
We have seen it at Twitter, where conservative accounts seem to be targeted, and also at Facebook, where there were allegations of the same.
Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year, with some employees arguing certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision to allow Mr. Trump’s posts went all the way to Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who ruled in December that it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate, according to the people familiar with the matter. That decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook’s internal messaging service and in person to Mr. Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site’s rules for Mr. Trump, and some employees who work in a group charged with reviewing content on Facebook threatened to quit, the people said.
Keep in mind this is not an issue of a post calling for violence. This was a matter of considering the post offensive, as the Journal further reported:
Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Mr. Trump has since backed away from an outright ban based on religion, saying his policies would target immigrants from countries with a record of terrorism.
Users flagged the December content as hate speech, a move that triggered a review by Facebook’s community-operations team, with hundreds of employees in several offices world-wide. Some Facebook employees said in internal chat rooms that the post broke Facebook’s rules on hate speech as detailed in its internal guidelines, according to people familiar with the matter.
Content reviewers were asked by their managers not to remove the post, according to some of the people familiar. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, later explained in an internal post that the company wouldn’t take down any of Mr. Trump’s posts because it strives to be impartial in the election season, according to people who saw the post.
There is a movement to purge Trump support not only from the pages of Facebook, but also to kick Peter Thiel off the Facebook Board because of his support for Trump, the Journal reported:
The internal debates shed light on how Facebook has grappled with its position as one of the biggest sources of political information during a particularly contentious election cycle.
This week, a controversy bubbled up around Facebook director Peter Thiel, who recently pledged $1.25 million to support Mr. Trump. In an internal post to employees confirmed by the company, Mr. Zuckerberg urged tolerance of Mr. Thiel’s political activity, saying it was key to cultivating diversity. Facebook declined to comment further on the matter, and Mr. Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
We report regularly on the anti-free speech mania on campuses, in which minority political positions are driven off campus both physically (shout downs, disruptions) and intellectually (trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaced).
You laugh at it, but it’s not funny. That attitude increasingly is entrenched at social media giants because yesterday’s campus social justice warriors are today’s content review specialists.