Allowing RT’s content to move through its network effectively turns Facebook into something of a propaganda delivery mechanism. Facebook does have the power to limit the spread of RT content on its platform, but a decision to do so is fraught. RT has been called “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet" by the US intelligence community, making it a hot potato for Facebook, which was upbraided by Congress for enabling the Russians’ efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. “Even with an outfit like RT, the questions are going to be difficult.” Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told BuzzFeed News following the hearings. “There are going to be innumerable dilemmas which will not have easy answers,” Rep. Amid intense grilling from lawmakers, the platforms’ lawyers repeatedly promised to do better.īut just how Facebook should deliver on that promise remains a major question. Of the many complex issues Facebook faces, some of the thorniest emerged during the November hearings in Washington when Facebook, Google, and Twitter were called into Congress to discuss Russia’s manipulation of their platforms during the 2016 presidential election. “This is really a globally diverse population and people across the world are going to have really different ideas about what is appropriate to share online, and where we should draw those lines,” Facebook policy head Monika Bickert told BuzzFeed News.
Facebook’s human moderators will now be bringing the company’s values to bear on more decisions about content that falls in gray areas, a fact often lost in the discussion of the need for the company to do better.įor an increasingly interventionist Facebook, now comes the hard part: figuring out just how to wrangle the most difficult content problems on its vast platform - racism and hate speech, misinformation and propaganda, Mark Zuckerberg photoshopped into a Nazi uniform. The 2 billion–user platform is in the process of hiring 4,000 new moderators following intense public scrutiny over its bungled handling of violent content, fake news, and a Kremlin-backed effort to sow discord in the US during an election year. These tough choices, and the philosophy with which Facebook approaches them, are becoming increasingly important now that the company is in the midst of an unprecedented escalation of its content moderation efforts.
Though some of the company’s content moderation decisions have clear rationales - removing child pornography, for example - many of those it faces are similar its fake Zuckerberg picture problem: dilemmas with no easy answers and potentially fraught consequences. Neither option was particularly appealing for Facebook, but the situation was not unfamiliar. The photoshopped picture left Facebook with two undesirable choices: It could either delete the inflammatory photo and risk accusations of censorship, or willingly host an image of its CEO in a Nazi outfit. Saltzman, who wrote for "Sesame Street" from 1981 until 1990, said the duo's relationship was modeled after his own life with film editor Arnold Glassman, who was Saltzman's partner until Glassman's death in 2003.Earlier this year, a simple Facebook search for Mark Zuckerberg’s name returned an unexpected result: an image of the Facebook founder in Nazi uniform presented at the top of his photos, directly underneath his verified profile. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation,” the workshop said in a statement to NBC News.
They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. “As we have always said, Bert and Ernie are best friends. However, Sesame Workshop, which produces the show, denies the pair are together, saying they have no sexual orientation but are best friends. The other thing was, more than one person referred to Arnie and I as 'Bert and Ernie.'" "I didn’t have any other way to contextualize them.
"I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were," Saltzman told Queerty.