Social-Media
Mark Zuckerberg claims that the decisions of the Kenosha Guard were 'an operational mistake'
At a company-wide meeting on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the recent shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, both in a seven-minute public address and in a lively series of questions from staff, which were subsequently published by Buzzfeed News.
Protests in Kenosha exploded into violence on Tuesday night, when two people were killed by a gunman who was later identified as Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois resident. In connection with the shooting, Rittenhouse was charged with two murders, as well as with imprudent risk and illegal possession of a weapon.
In the aftermath of the attack, Facebook was blamed for encouraging self-proclaimed paramilitary groups to mobilize on the site, including a party named the Kenosha Guard, which invited armed participants for an event on the night of the rally. Several Facebook users indicated that the incident was going to result in violence in the hours before the attack, only to tell Facebook administrators that the party and incident did not breach Facebook's rules.
In his speech to the staff, Zuckerberg acknowledged that "a lot of people" had identified the Kenosha Guard page as possibly inciting violence in advance of the attack, and claimed that Facebook had made a mistake in keeping the page live.
This was, to a large degree, an organizational failure, Zuckerberg said. It's because the team that enforces our policies against unsafe organisations is a professional team trained to look for meaning and innuendo ... And appreciate the specifics of how such militias and conspiratorial networks function. The consultants and analysts who had been involved with the original reports could not pick up this. On the second study, and doing so more sensitively, the team responsible for unsafe organisations realized that this was a violation of the rules, and we took it down.
Essentially, the second analysis seems to have taken place after the shooting, at which stage the violent nature of the case page has been sadly shown. The Kenosha Guard website and the case were deleted the next morning.
Zuckerberg stressed that Rittenhouse had not signed up for the event of the Kenosha Patrol, and that Facebook's investigation had not found any evidence that he had been linked to the party. Facebook has reported the incident as a mass shooting and continues to aggressively monitor associated material.
We've got our teams out there looking proactively for stories and downplaying news that celebrates the incident, Zuckerberg said. We will continue to follow our strategies and continue to build policy.
Some Facebook workers were not satisfied with the response, Buzzfeed News reported. At what stage should we take responsibility for allowing the dissemination of hate filled bile through our services? One of the workers commented on the video feed. Anti-Semitism, racism, and white nationalism are everywhere in our business.
Others became troubled that the company's practice of incremental control made it impossible to avert a catastrophe until it happened.
We need to be better at making errors and being more cautious, said another message from Buzzfeed News. It feels like we are stuck in a loop of reacting to damage after it has already been done, rather than developing structures to nip these problems until they result in real damages.
It's not clear how effective Facebook has been at deleting posts that supports the gunman, even though it's considered a mass shooting attack. The Guardian article finds widespread memes celebrating Rittenhouse and applauding the murder of the demonstrators. The study reported hundreds of tweets and memes including the term "Free Kyle" or Free Kyle Rittenhouse as of Thursday morning.
The Site Intelligence study also established the support for Rittenhouse among the neo-Nazi parties.
The conference was not exclusively focused on the shooting of Kenosha, but was also applied to new questions regarding the iOS App Store. Zuckerberg allegedly believed that Apple was charging "monopoly rentals" by collecting its 30% fee on in-app sales, a charge that has been leveled by Epic Games as part of the pending antitrust litigation.
The Facebook CEO also said he claimed that there was a major chance of civil unrest after the November election.
