KEY FACTS

· The letter, sent by Senators Robert Menendez, Mazie Hirono, and Mark Warner, takes issue with Facebook’s failure to address white supremacy on its platform despite its stated commitment to racial justice and combating hate speech.

· The senators cite a study from the Tech Transparency Project that outlines how far-right extremists from the “boogaloo” movement are using Facebook to organize a “militant uprising,” as well as a 2016 Facebook presentation reported by the Wall Street Journal, which shared that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”

· Zuckerberg will have until July 10 to respond to the senators with information on the company’s efforts to combat hate speech and white supremacy, and who is responsible at Facebook for those efforts.

· The letter also raises the possibility that the lawmakers will oppose the current liability protections Facebook enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, with the senators asking Zuckerberg: “When violent extremist groups actively and openly use a platform’s tools to coordinate violence, should federal law continue to protect the platform from civil liability for its role in facilitating that activity?”

KEY BACKGROUND

Facebook’s repeated permissiveness of misinformation and offensive speech has reached a boiling point in recent days, with a growing number of high-profile advertisers—including Ford, Starbucks, and Unilever—joining the “Stop Hate for Profit” movement and pulling their advertising from the social media network. As the Democrats’ letter suggests, the mounting pressure against Facebook may now make its way to Washington D.C., where lawmakers and regulators had already been taking on the company through a series of antitrust investigations by House lawmakers, the Federal Trade Commission, and U.S. Department of Justice. (A separate antitrust investigation by state attorneys general is also ongoing.) Social media companies including Facebook may also face challenges in regards to Section 230, which protects platforms from being sued over the content their users publish. President Donald Trump signed an executive order involving Section 230 and political bias after Twitter fact-checked one of his tweets, but lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns about the regulation, with Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who’s leading a House antitrust panel against Facebook and other tech giants, telling Bloomberg that “we have to look at Section 230 very carefully.”

CHIEF CRITIC
Facebook has defended its efforts against hate speech amid the ongoing attacks and taken steps to address some of the criticism. The company announced Friday that it will now label newsworthy posts that violate its guidelines, including from major figures like Trump, and previously removed accounts associated with far-right extremist groups and Trump-sponsored ads that used a symbol commonly associated with Nazis. “We do not profit from hate, and we have no incentive to have hate on our platform,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, said on Bloomberg TV Monday. “We don’t like it. Crucially, our users don’t like it.” The company has also stressed the challenge of getting rid of hate speech entirely on the platform, with Facebook vice president of Northern Europe Steve Hatch telling the BBC Tuesday that while the company “[does] its very best” to combat hate speech, “when there’s hate in the world there will also be hate on Facebook.”