Likes Vs. Hate

Facebook blew it on privacy and fake news. Can it do any better against trolls and racists? Simon van Zuylen-Wood embeds with the company’s high-level team of policy wonks who are trying to combat hate speech.

- Simon Van Zuylen-Wood

Men are scum. You can’t say that on Facebook. Men are pigs. You can’t say that either. Men are trash. Men are garbage fires. Also banned.

It’s nine A.M. on an autumn Tuesday, and I’m sitting in on a meeting about “men are scum” at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California. The trouble started a year ago, in the fall of 2017. The #MeToo movement had recently begun. Nicole Silverberg, currently a writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, had shared on her Facebook page a trove of bilious comments directed at her after she’d written a list of ways men “need to do better.” In the comments section beneath her post, another comic, Marcia Belsky, wrote, “Men are scum.” Facebook kicked Belsky off the platform for 30 days.

This seemed absurd. First of all, the news at the time was dominated by stories of men acting scummily. Second, Facebook had been leaving up plenty of well-documented crap. By then the company was deep into an extended cycle of bad press over the toxic, fraudulent, and/or covertly Russian content that had polluted its platform throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. In Western Europe, the far right was using the site to vilify Middle Eastern migrants. In Southeast Asia, authoritarian regimes were using it to dial up anger against religious minorities and political enemies. But Facebook was taking down “men are scum”?