Facebook & YouTube Confirm That Politicians Can Say Whatever They Want, Just Like On Twitter

Social media platforms claim to have rules regarding what a person can or can't post online. The problem is, they've long-since indicated that political leaders are exempt from this.

And now, the biggest social networks have come out and said as much.

Images courtesy: Reuters

In 2018, Twitter came under fire for allowing US President Donald Trump to get away with abusing other users on the platform, spewing hate speech as well as racist and xenophobic extremism, and even inciting violence. However, Twitter's response was that politicians aren't included among the rest of its users that have their content policed. So Trump was given the green light to say whatever he wanted with no repercussions.

Now, Facebook and YouTube have also caught up to the debate with the most depressing answer possible. Apparently, executives from both platforms also agree that some political content is not for them to filter.

"When you have a political officer that is making information that is really important for their constituents to see, or for other global leaders to see, that is content that we would leave up because we think it's important for other people to see," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said on Wednesday at the Atlantic Festival.

The company later attempted to clarify that it does crack down on content that break the rules, even it it's from politicians. However, they hold exempt content with "educational, documentary/news, scientific or artistic value". "News" content people, which can be considered to be everything a political leader might say, no matter how horrendous.

A Facebook executive said the same thing earlier this week. They say they've held newsworthy content exempt from policing since 2016. More importantly though, this week's announcement confirmed that it means most political content fits.

"From now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard," said Nick Clegg, Facebook's top policy official, in a statement on Tuesday.

Clegg goes on to say that Facebook will allow anything politicians say "even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules," except in sponsored ads or when there's a possibility to incite violence.

Either way, it's not exactly a change to the policies of any of these companies. In fact, where this was the perfect opportunity to revise their guidelines to make them more stringent, the biggest social networks in the world have doubled down.

In fact, because an unspoken rule has now effectively become codified, it could open the floodgates to worse consequences of hate speech online than we've seen before.