Facebook announced an update to its “Terms of Service” that will take effect on Oct. 1, giving the technology company greater power to censor and manipulate information before the 2020 election.
The biggest change to terms of service is that Facebook will give itself the discretion to ban users, Reclaim the Net reported.
“We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook,” according to the updated terms of service.
Facebook will have the sole discretion to define what is “reasonably necessary.”
The company also will block access to users whose account has been “previously disabled … for violations of our Terms or Policies.”
Users will not be able to post or share any information that violates the terms of service or the Community Guidelines, that “is unlawful, misleading, discriminatory or fraudulent,” or that “infringes or violates someone else’s rights, including their intellectual property rights.”
A review process will not be available to some people who break the platform’s rules, if, for example, they “harm our community of users.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly that Congress should regulate the internet to avoid Chinese-style regulation that is ideologically motivated, Reclaim the Net reported.
“I worry about that kind of model spreading to other countries and I think that the best antidote to that is having a clear regulatory framework that comes out of Western democratic countries and that become a standard around the world,” he said in May while talking to European Union Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton.
Even as Zuckerberg encourages non-authoritarian forms of regulation, Facebook engages in widespread censorship by removing more than 100 million posts for coronavirus “misinformation” and another 22 million posts for “hate speech.”
