Facebook is in the sights of Russian authorities.
By changing its name to Meta Platforms (FB) – Get Meta Platforms Inc. Class A Report last October, Facebook wanted to direct the spotlight away from the company after a withering series of blunders and Congressional investigations.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine immediately brought the spotlight back to the social media giant, which once again finds itself at the center of debates on a global political and geopolitical event.
Basically, it’s back to square one for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which has always wanted to be the place where the debate takes place and where people meet.
But it’s probably not the type of encounter of which Zuckerberg was thinking.
From the first days of the Russian war on Feb. 24, Facebook found itself under pressure from the Ukrainian authorities to block Russian outlets disseminating President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda on its platforms.
The company, which wants to show it has learned the lessons of its past controversial practices, reacted promptly by announcing it had detected and blocked Russian networks.
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New Controversies
The social media giant then banned access to Facebook in Europe from Russian state media and banned Russian entities from advertising on its platforms.
The group has also refused Moscow’s demands to relax all these anti-Russian measures.
Moscow immediately blocked access to Facebook in Russia. The Californian firm did not comply, and doubled down in the opposite direction.
If Facebook did not say that it took sides with the Ukrainians, its actions spoke for the group, which thus seemed to want at all costs to be on the side of the majority of world opinion.
Facebook even went so far as to relax its own policy against calls for violence by allowing users in Ukraine and a few countries in Europe to exchange and post messages calling for the murder of President Putin and Russian soldiers. This from the company which declared in 2018 that it was against violence.
It is therefore a new Facebook, which agrees to be used as a weapon for violence.
“The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable,” Nick Clegg, the new face and new voice of Facebook, defended the firm’s position on Twitter.
“There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform.”
Regardless, we are far from a statement repeated many times before by the company after the platform was blamed for worsening ethnic tensions and sparking violence in various parts of the world.
“Facebook stands against hate and violence,” Alex Warofka, product policy manager, wrote in a blog post on Nov. 5, 2018.
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‘Terrible War’
The company thus finds itself again in the hot seat.
Zuckerberg got the message. After more than two weeks of silence, the young billionaire has just spoken about this Russian invasion, which he called a “terrible war.”
In his first public comments, Zuckerberg said the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “a “massively destabilizing world event.”
The entrepreneur was speaking on Tuesday at the South by Southwest technology and entertainment conference being held in Austin, Texas.
He had dialed in by videoconference for a conversation with entrepreneur and “Shark Tank” host Daymond John.
The subject of the discussion was the metaverse and web3, the new generation of the internet. But Zuckerberg insisted on mentioning Russia and Ukraine first.
“I just wanted to mention it up front and just share my support for everyone in Ukraine,” he said. “I know it’s a bit weird to have a conversation about the future and the metaverse and Web3 and all these exciting things with everything else going on.”
“It’s really tough to find the right words that really mean anything in a situation like this,” adding that the company wants to make sure its services are up and running in the region so Ukrainians can continue using them.
In doing so, Zuckerberg has thus broken with his silence of the last few months, which was aimed at no longer expressing himself on political issues.
He leaves this task now to Nick Clegg, the former British deputy vice prime minister.
But we have to believe that Zuckerberg will have a hard time putting new distance between himself and the controversies shaking Facebook, particularly about its content moderation policy.
