Stefan Mileschin

They are our betters and must always grace us with their views

Facebook has admitted that its community "standards" do not, apply to politicians.

Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform's fact-checking and decency standards; the company has clarified, with a few exceptions.

Writing in his bog, Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg, himself a former member of the UK Parliament, outlined the policy in a speech and company blog post.

He said that Facebook had had a "newsworthiness exemption" to its content guidelines since 2016 which was formalised in late October of that year amid a contentious and chaotic US political season and three weeks before the presidential election that would land Donald Trump the White House.

Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, and Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate's rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt violated the service's hate speech standards.

Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed indirectly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.

"We're going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest -- even if they might otherwise violate our standards," Facebook wrote at the time. Facebook by default "will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard." It won't be subject to fact-checking because the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "referee political debates" or prevent a politician's speech from both reaching its intended audience and "being subject to public debate and scrutiny."


https://fudzilla.com/news/49475-face...what-they-like