FACEBOOK SAYS USERS CAN WISH FOR TRUMP’S DEATH BY COVID SO LONG AS THEY DON’T TAG HIM
“We distinguish between public figures and private individuals because we want to allow discussion”
Facebook’s notoriously strict and convoluted hate speech and Community Standards policies will allow users to post hopes, dreams, and wishes that President Donald Trump dies from COVID-19, as long as they don’t make the effort to deliberately search for his Facebook page and manually tag his account.
Section 9 of Facebook’s Community Standards states, “We distinguish between public figures and private individuals because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news or who have a large public audience. For public figures, we remove attacks that are severe as well as certain attacks where the public figure is directly tagged in the post or comment.”
Facebook’s restrictions on “Calls for death, serious disease, epidemic disease, or disability” only apply to private individuals or public figures who are of minor age, meaning wishing death, serious disease and the other referenced attacks on adult public figures is not considered actionable by Facebook so long as the public figure’s account is not manually tagged in the post or comment.
The political policy direction of Facebook’s Community Standards traditionally skews far to the extreme view of censoring all forms of derogatory speech, causing the company’s stance on allowing those same forms of speech towards adult political figures to stand out somewhat paradoxically.
