Facebook Bans and Wipes all Content of Independent Human Rights Platform That Criticised Facebook On Digital Rights
Human Rights Pulse, a human rights content platform managed by a global team of independent legal professionals, has been completely banned from Facebook and Instagram. All content related to the platform has been thoroughly wiped in its entirety from the social media sites.
The ban is so total that even the mere mention of the humanrightspulse.com domain name is forbidden and leads to error messages.
Human Rights Pulse is an independent, non partisan online platform dedicated to promoting human rights discussion and advocacy. The platform is run by a volunteer team of lawyers, law students and other experts and professionals based in London, New York, and Pretoria.
Content on the Human Rights Pulse platform touches on a variety of human rights issues. The inaugural Featured Post notes the failure of giant technology corporations, such as Facebook, in protecting human rights and advocates for a “Constitution of the Web” that would prevent the banning of information which is critical of those companies that commit and enable human rights abuses. Facebook has not offered any reason for banning Human Rights Pulse content on its site and so it remains plausible that criticism of the tech giant in this inaugural post could have triggered this drastic reaction.
In fact, Facebook and Instagram have refused to explain the reason for the ban as required by their own terms of service, despite repeated attempts to challenge the decision via its internal reporting mechanism, as well as the numerous emails sent to Facebook and Instagram staff. Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn have banned any content from Human Right Pulse.
The ban and erasure of content of a neutral and independent human rights platform is deeply troubling and raises concerns about Facebook’s content blocking policies. In September 2017, The Intercept reported that Facebook was censoring user accounts at the direction of the Israeli and United States government. These user accounts were critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories or were placed on sanctions lists by the United States government. In March 2018, United Nations human rights experts confirmed that Facebook had played a “determining role” in enabling grave human rights abuses, including ethnic cleansing and even genocide, against the Rohingya people in Myanmar.
“We have been totally erased from Facebook, and our domain name is Facebook blasphemy that cannot even be uttered. It is as if we never existed,” said Dave Inder Comar, business and human rights lawyer and co-founder of Human Rights Pulse.
Sending the domain name over Facebook Messenger produces the following “error” message.
“Every piece of content is an informed examination of human rights laws as they apply to various issues around the world. None of the content violates any of Facebook’s or Instagram’s community standards, or their terms of service. We have not been given any explanation for the ban. Facebook has plainly breached its terms of service and its own community standards policies by (1) banning us without providing an explanation and (2) banning us despite our adherence to community standards,” Comar concluded.
Facebook’s Community Standards, for example, bans content that is “hate speech,” “violent and graphic content,” “spam,” or that enables “human exploitation.” None of the content on the Human Rights Pulse platform would fall under any such category.
Attempts to share the domain link through Facebook are totally blocked:
Another pop up indicating that the Human Rights Pulse domain name is banned on Facebook
Similarly on Instagram, having the Human Rights Pulse domain name in one’s profile biography prevents the user from posting on any one else’s instagram profile:
More pop pops showing the ban on Instagram
Whilst Facebook has rightly endeavoured to combat some of the most serious issues facing social media platforms—problems of fake news, hate speech, and fraud, to name just a few— no serious policy would also ban human rights commentary. It has undoubtedly gone too far. The report issued in September 2018 by the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar expressed surprise and regret that Facebook—a company that monitors user activity as its core business model—was “unable to provide country-specific data about the spread of hate speech on its platform, which is imperative to assess the problem and the adequacy of its response.” Myanmar is currently being charged with the crime of genocide at the International Court of Justice.