via breitbart:
PragerU’s recent Facebook shadowbanning was reportedly due to a single “employee error” — this employee has been sent for guideline re-education but is still employed by the company.
Breitbart News spoke with PragerU recently following their issues with Facebook, the conservative non-profit found that many recent posts from their page were suffering from a 99.9999 percent drop in engagement based on Facebook’s own dashboard. The Social Media Masters of the Universe also pulled down two PragerU videos, which it labeled “hate speech.”
Since then, Facebook has apologized to PragerU, stating that the removal of videos was an error. A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement: “The videos in question were mistakenly removed. While we continue to research what caused this error, we have restored the content because it does not break our Community Standards and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
According to PragerU, Facebook contacted the non-profit about the issue and explained that the reason PragerU’s videos were removed is that a large number of users flagged the PragerU posts as inappropriate. The videos were then sent to a content review team where one of the employees reviewed them and decided to remove the videos as “hate speech.” Facebook told PragerU that the employee behind the removal of the videos and limiting of its Facebook page will be re-trained to better understand Facebook’s guidelines.
PragerU questioned if the SPLC had influenced Facebook’s decision to remove their videos to which Facebook replied that the SPLC does not write their hate speech policy but they send content that they think is hateful and Facebook review team reviews that. Facebook said that the SPLC is no different than any other group and that anyone can suggest hateful content. Facebook was adamant that the SPLC had nothing to do with the issues that PragerU faced.
So, accepting Facebook’s own explanation: lefties feigning offense routinely flag conservative content as “inappropriate”. Facebook then refers the material in question to it’s Content Review Team, where it is apparently reviewed by a single employee (who, given Facebook’s internal demographics, is virtually certain to be a lefty millennial), who is free to ban the material without oversight or review by anyone else.
That is not a description of an “employee error”. That’s a fatally flawed process — assuming the goal is an objective outcome — and Zuckerberg is too smart and too talented a business operator not to know that.
h/t SG