Report: Facebook knows that right-wing pages spread hate speech and has decided to do nothing about it

A data scientist departing from Facebook: “They all create dozens or hundreds of posts like this [a] day, each eliciting endless volumes of hateful vile comments—and we reward them fantastically for it”

Written by John Whitehouse

Published 12/11/20 3:24 PM EST

Go read this entire story from Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman about Facebook employees fleeing the company. Here’s a key part:

Using data from a Facebook tool called the “Hate Bait dashboard,” which can track content from groups and pages that leads to hateful interactions, the [departing Facebook] data scientist listed the 10 US pages with the “largest concentrated volume of likely violating Hate Speech comments” in the past 14 days. All were pages associated with conservative outlets or personalities, including Breitbart News, Fox News, the Daily Caller, Donald Trump’s campaign and main account, and Ben Shapiro. They also shared a sample of the hateful comments posted on a recent Breitbart News post about Nancy Pelosi’s support for transgender athletes.

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“They all create dozens or hundreds of posts like this [a] day, each eliciting endless volumes of hateful vile comments—and we reward them fantastically for it,” they wrote, emphasizing their own words.

The data scientist’s comments about preferential treatment of US conservative pages and voices follow other internal concerns and evidence. In November, a departing member of Facebook’s policy organization wrote that “right-leaning US accounts are far more likely than others to engage in hate speech and violence incitement and far more likely to spread misinformation.” The person declined to speak with BuzzFeed News and asked that their name not be published for fear of online abuse and reprisal.

If this all sounds familiar, it should.

A cottage industry, which includes Media Matters, has spent years documenting Facebook’s preferential treatment of far-right media, as well as the platform’s generally awful track record on civil rights issues (and on plenty of other issues). And now we’re reaping the results of Facebook’s cowardice. We’re in the midst of a pandemic that will soon have killed 300,000 in this country alone, while the political party driven by these right-wing media outlets abandons democracy after losing an election. And Facebook has been focused on appeasing right-wing media all along.

None of this was inevitable. This was a choice, and few people are as responsible for driving the country to this point as the executives at Facebook.

Anyway, once you’re done reading the piece, take a look at our compilation of how Facebook has pandered to the right for years. It’s truly staggering.