The big myth Facebook needs everyone to believe

[Commentary] How can you possibly impose a single moral framework on a vast and varying patchwork of global communities? If you ask Facebook this question, the social-media behemoth will deny doing any such thing. Facebook says its community standards are inert, universal, agnostic to place and time. The site doesn’t advance any worldview, it claims, besides the non-controversial opinion that people should “connect” online. Facebook has modified its standards several times in response to pressure from advocacy groups – although the site has deliberately obscured those edits, and the process by which Facebook determines its guidelines remains stubbornly obtuse. On top of that, at least some of the low-level contract workers who enforce Facebook’s rules are embedded in the region – or at least the time zone – whose content they moderate. The social network staffs its moderation team in 24 languages, 24 hours a day.

In response to recent criticism that Facebook has mishandled takedown requests from users in the Middle East, Facebook’s policy director for the region assured users that “all reports are assessed by teams of multilingual, impartial and highly trained people” – including native speakers of Hebrew and Arabic, who presumably understand the region’s particular issues. And yet, observers remain deeply skeptical of Facebook’s claims that it is somehow value-neutral or globally inclusive, or that its guiding principles are solely “respect” and “safety.” Facebook will never make everyone happy, of course; nor does anyone suggest it should. But in a better world, the largest social network would at least admit that it’s not an impartial, value-neutral observer. After all, every single thing Facebook does reshapes the public space of its users.