Is Meta Contributing to the Erosion of Democratic Values?
Meta
2024 is a pivotal year for democracy and will determine the next global order, with 83 elections scheduled and around half the global population set to vote. Nonetheless, there is a great concern that autocratic governments will use technology to undermine democracy, and Meta’s actions in Cambodia serve as a preview of how they deal with it.
On January 9th 2023, Cambodia’s strongman leader, Hun Sen, posted a video where he threatened his political critics, asserting that he, “will gather CPP [Cambodian People’s Party] people to protest and beat you up”. The 41-minute video delivered in Khmer was posted ahead of their general elections in the same year and was viewed 600,000 times.
Background
Since the video was uploaded, it has been reported five different times to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and the Oversight Board—an independent body that can make binding recommendations to Facebook.
Meta and the Board had different perspectives on whether the video should be banned from the platform. After 234 days of deliberation, the Oversight Board concluded that the video needs to be removed from the platform. Even though Meta took down the video in June 2023, it initially decided to keep it on its platform based on its newsworthiness allowance.
What is the newsworthiness allowance?
Meta’s newsworthiness allowance grants exceptions to specific posts despite violating their community standards on the basis that public interest value may outweigh the risk of harm.
Issues surrounding the newsworthiness allowance
Meta alone can dictate what stays on its platform, giving it the power to set the agenda on any issue, even elections. However, even by its own admission, determining if something is newsworthy is “highly subjective.”
In the case of Cambodia, Meta’s reviewers decided against taking down the video from their platform. This decision had irreversible damages within the country; there were seven reported acts of violence against the opposition members since the video was uploaded.
Secondly, the company applied newsworthiness allowance to 55 cases between June 2021 and June 2022. However, aside from the three examples on Meta’s website, the company does not make all its cases public. Their lack of transparency makes understanding how the exemption is applied is challenging.
Why did Meta and the Oversight Board respond differently to the same video?
In addition to the disparity in defining what constitutes a newsworthiness allowance, Meta and the Board have different understandings in assessing the risk levels in a country. The Board claimed that Hun Sen’s account should be suspended for six months under Meta’s policy of restricting accounts during civil unrest. However, Meta rejected the recommendation.
According to Meta’s assessment of the situation in Cambodia, they determined that it did not meet the criteria of Crisis Policy Protocol, and there have not been any significant reductions compared to the baseline conditions in the country.
Meta’s assessment overlooks the context of crisis and authoritarianism in Cambodia. The Cambodian government has slowly dismantled the opposition political party in the country, censored multiple independent media companies, and sentenced an opposition leader for 27 years of house arrest.
The Human Rights Watch stated that Hun Sen’s authoritarian control over the country has resulted in severe restriction of civil and political rights, and failed to protect social and economic rights of marginalized communities. Yet, Meta refused to define the situation in Cambodia as an on-going crisis.
What are the larger implications of Meta’s actions in Cambodia?
Meta’s policies on moderating content have significant implications for democracies. Especially when controversial figures such as Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Rodrigo Duterte have historically relied on social media over traditional media to communicate with their supporters and encourage violence.
In 2024, both Modi and Trump hope to run for elections. They have the capacity to spread their violent messages across their respective countries, if not the entire globe, due to gaps in Meta’s policies.
Meta is one of the least qualified entities in protecting democracy. For example, they have repeatedly failed to curtail hate speech and misleading information posted by Trump on its platforms. This raises the question: should Meta have the power of agenda-setting, given their poor track record of failing to identify authoritarian contexts and disinformation.
What can be done?
The Board made a series of recommendations for Meta to implement, from updating its newsworthiness allowance to clarifying its policies on restricting politicians from the platform.
The Board recommended that Meta prioritize political content for immediate human review, rather than relying on its algorithm. Which is an attempt to amend how the technology identifies and acts on problematic content. Even though, this does not address the issue of autocratic governments using Meta as their megaphones or the gaps in their policies, it does force them to keep a close eye on the content posted by politicians.