Zuckerberg Admits Facebook has Been Slow to Take Down Pages From White Militia Groups

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss made a joke about it last week when emceeing the Democratic National Convention last week. “If we all vote, there is nothing Facebook, Fox News and Vladimir Putin can do to stop us,” she said. 

Facebook has been somewhat problematic politically over the years. White Nationalist groups have also used the site to organize violence.

Earlier this week, a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 people in Kenosha, Wisconsin killing two of them. While there were militia calls to “defend Kenosha” it is not known yet whether one of these calls inspired the teen to Kenosha.

Following the shooting, journalists zeroed in on a post from a group called Kenosha Guard. The post, published on , asked, “any patriots [are] willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from the evil thugs?”

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Facebook took the message down on Wednesday. Zuckerberg was asked on Friday why other posts like this hadn’t been taken down despite user requests.

It’s because the team that enforces our policy against dangerous organizations is a specialized team,” said Zuckerberg. “The contractors and the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to basically didn’t pick this up, and on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team … that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

According to Buzzfeed, employees are becoming fed-up with the sites inability to take down offensive material. One asked during a recent Q and A, “At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? [A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”

Todd Neikirk

Todd Neikirk is a New Jersey based politics and technology writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books and spending time at the shore with his family.