--- title: "Leaked Documents Show How Facebook Controls Speech Across the Globe" description: "Leaked documents showing how Facebook controls speech online raise deep questions about the future of the company's role in international discourse." date: "2018-12-29" modified: "2018-12-29" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/leaked-documents-show-facebook-controls-speech" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Meta" tags: - "content moderation" - "facebook" - "free speech" - "politics" --- # Leaked Documents Show How Facebook Controls Speech Across the Globe ![Leaked documents showing how Facebook controls speech online raise deep questions about the future of the company's role in international discourse.]() *\Image: Tag Hartman-Simkins\* ## Unfriended Documents [obtained by the ]()*New York Times* show how the social giant's international content moderation strategy is dictated by thousands of pages of PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets that "sometimes clumsily" tell thousands of moderators what to allow and what to delete. The revelation raises deep questions about the future of Facebook's role in international discourse — especially in the wake of [damaging revelations]() about how the platform allowed propaganda during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. "Facebook’s role has become so hegemonic, so monopolistic, that it has become a force unto itself," political scientist Jasmin Mujanovic told the *Times*. "No one entity, especially not a for-profit venture like Facebook, should have that kind of power to influence public debate and policy." ## It's Complicated Facebook moderators who spoke to the *Times* under condition of anonymity said they felt hamstrung by the extraordinarily complex rule set, which forces them to make rapid decisions, sometimes using Google Translate, about fraught topics including terrorism and sectarian violence. "You feel like you killed someone by not acting," said a moderator who spoke to the paper on condition of anonymity. The result, according to the *Times*, is that Facebook has become a "far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself." ## "A Lot of Mistakes" Facebook executives pushed back against the implication that its [content moderation efforts]() were murky or disorganized, arguing that the platform has a responsibility to moderate the content its users post and defending its efforts to do so. "We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems," Facebook's head of global policy management Monika Bickert told the *Times*. “At that scale, even if you’re 99 percent accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes." **READ MORE:** [Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech]() \[*The New York Times*\] ***More on Facebook:** [India’s Government Blames Facebook's WhatsApp for Mob Violence]()* ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()