(John Ransom, Headline USA) Facebook has sent an email to its moderators saying that they have temporarily suspended the embargo against the use of violent rhetoric against people for some countries who are calling for “death” to Russia and Russians.
“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement, reported Reuters.
The policy applies to people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine, but not to people in the United States, said Sky News, which also reported that people in the cited countries can make death threats against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
We have been closely following the invasion in Ukraine and taking steps to help protect and support our community. Below are a few of the actions we’ve already taken.
— Meta (@Meta) March 4, 2022
“These are temporary measures designed to preserve voice and expression for people who are facing invasion. As always, we are prohibiting calls for violence against Russians outside of the narrow context of the current invasion,” said Facebook, according to Sky News.
Simultaneously, Facebook parent company Meta has announced via Twitter that they will institute a series of measures to help secure information for people in Ukraine, including locking profiles to protect information such as location.
“We’re fighting the spread of misinformation on our apps and putting more restrictions and transparency on state-controlled media outlets to help people know if what they see is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government,” said Meta via Twitter.
Facebook has also announce that it is raising money for Ukraine humanitarian aid.
The moves stand in stark contrast to the actions that Facebook took to punish the truckers and their supporters in the Freedom Convoy in Canada just weeks ago.
“Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta’s policies,” a Meta spokesperson told Yahoo.
“However, we have removed multiple groups and Pages for repeatedly violating our policies prohibiting QAnon content and those run by spammers in different countries around the world,” Meta said about the deletion of pages that supported the truckers.
Both policies serve as a reminder as just how closely aligned Big Tech has become to the state.
When the state points the big stick at someone, be they truckers or another country, Big Tech shakes the stick.
