Feature, Not Bug

Facebook labels a video of @RepMarieNewman placing a transgender pride flag outside her office as "hate speech" https://t.co/cducC7zqJo

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) February 25, 2021

The ghost in the machine:

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

"Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

Oh, there's more.  There's always more:

Political content was never supposed to be eligible for Facebook's "In Feed Recommendations." Yet, unsolicited conservative political content was being pushed into users' Facebook feeds via In Feed Recommendations. 

In Feed Recommendations is Facebook’s way of giving users a taste of different content by inserting posts from accounts they don’t follow into their newsfeed based on what each user already likes.

According to BuzzFeed, users even complained to the company in the spring of last year regarding right wing pundits, like Ben Shapiro, showing up in their feeds even though they never showed any interest in that type of content.

This political content wasn't supposed to be there, but it was still being inserted into feeds via In Feed Recommendations even after Facebook was made aware. Why? 

Facebook’s policy team told the company’s employees in August that it was being done to avoid complaints from prominent conservative figures.

....

The exceptions to the policy changes seem to have only applied to conservative personalities and outlets.

I really don't have any use for Facebook; never have.