Facebook says it doesn't fact-check politicians' speech or block their content, generally assuming it is newsworthy, even if it violates Facebook policies
Facebook confirms it won't fact-check politicians' speech or block their content if it's newsworthy even if it violates the site's hatespeech rules or other policies.
TechCrunchJosh Constine
Context & Ripple Effects
This September 2019 confirmation is the anchor document for Facebook's political-speech carve-out: posts by politicians are treated as newsworthy and left up even when they break the platform's own rules, and they stay outside the fact-checking pipeline entirely. Within weeks the exemption widened from organic posts to paid media — Facebook decided political ads count as opinion and skip fact-checking, then applied the same hands-off rule to party and candidate ads in the December UK election while still fact-checking groups like Leave.EU.
First-order effects
Politicians gain a de facto policy immunity on Facebook: hatespeech and other violations go unenforced against their accounts as long as the content is judged newsworthy, while ordinary users remain fully subject to the rules.
Second-order effects
The party-versus-group line in the UK election coverage creates an arbitrage route — campaigns can route claims through affiliated political actors that don't qualify for the candidate exemption, forcing critics and regulators to attack the newsworthiness standard itself rather than individual takedowns.
Third-order effects
The corpus shows the exemption proved unsustainable: by June 2021 Facebook announced politicians' posts would no longer be exempt from its harmful-speech rules, a reversal that signals platform carve-outs for elected officials tend to collapse once enforcement asymmetry becomes politically costly.
The trend: Platforms first treated politicians' speech as exempt from their own moderation rules, then were forced to unwind those carve-outs as the asymmetry between officials and ordinary users became untenable.
As the country waits to find out if a formal impeachment inquiry will happen, Facebook has just announced it will not be submitting content from politicians to independent factcheckers... ...even when it would normally violate their community guidelines. https://newsroom.fb.com/.…
It's a good thing no politicians have ever run Facebook disinformation campaigns in order to tip elections or sow division, that'd be bad. https://twitter.com/...
my understanding: If Trump says, “Climate change is a myth” in a speech, Facebook will now *by default* allow that content. But if he shares a video of “the myth of climate change,” and that video's been debunked, FB will demote that content & won't let it be an ad. https://twitt…
Facebook just announced that today onwards, the social network will treat speech from politicians as “newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.” FB has also exempted politicians from 3rd party fact checking for over a year. https://newsroom.fb.com/... …
Fun fact: Nick Clegg isn't only former member of British Parliament at Facebook, at least for now. Richard Allan, who held the same House of Commons seat as Clegg, has been at Facebook for a decade, but is retiring. Also, here's my interview with Clegg. https://www.axios.com/...
“We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules,” says @facebook's @nick_clegg https://newsroom.fb.com/...
FB arguing their responsibility is not to restrict political speech from politicians but to 1) Protect against outside inteference 2) Provide transparency around political ads 3) Act against speech that endangers people Tough call, but seems right to me? https://newsroom.fb.com/.…
This is possibly the worst of all policy decisions on Facebook's part: “valued political customers” should be subject to special, more (not less) stringent policy enforcement criteria — as they have a bigger responsibility to the public in terms of truth, dignity and trust. https…
Why should Facebook perform this role? Facebook does not have the capacity or legitimacy to perform this democratic function. We have existing regulative and communicative institutions to perform this role. https://twitter.com/...
Curious who gets to be a “politician” under this definition. Are fake candidates running for the lulz now going to be taken seriously under this policy? https://twitter.com/...
@kevinroose So who, specifically? And who gets that power? The “these companies should control political speech by politicians in democracies” argument is completely incompatible with everything the same proponents say about antitrust, platform power and unaccountable executives.
twitter: if a politician breaks our rules, we might consider one day putting the offending tweet behind a grey interstitial, maybe facebook: honestly fuck it https://twitter.com/...