On the one hand, Facebook will be hosting the worst kinds of online behavior. In a public note in March, Zuckerberg admitted that encryption will help facilitate “truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” (For that, he promised to “work with law enforcement.” Great.)
On the other hand, Facebook is completing its transition from being a simple platform, broadly indifferent to the content it hosts, to being a publisher that curates and is responsible for content. Getting rid of Farrakhan, Jones and the others are the easy calls for now, because they are such manifestly odious figures and they have no real political power.
But what happens with the harder calls, the ones who want to be seen publicly and can’t be swept under: alleged Islamophobes, militant anti-immigration types, the people who call for the elimination of Israel? Facebook has training documents governing hate speech, and is now set to deploy the latest generation of artificial intelligence to detect it.
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