Photo: Getty Images
The NAACP is calling for a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg following the shocking revelations about its handling of online hate speech.
Frances Haugen, a formerFacebook employee testified before Congress on Tuesday (October 5) after revealing thousands of pages of data from the company showing most of the violent hate speech on the site is not being taken down–– that only 3 to 5% of the content is getting removed.
A day after Haugen revealed the data on an episode of 60 Minutes, Facebook and its social media network sites experienced hours-long outages. Now that the sites are back online, the civil rights organization wants to address the issues at hand.
"Vaccine hesitation, political violence and white supremacy are rampant," NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement to Bloomberg. "Profiting on hate and disinformation is sickening and evil."
Previous studies have shown how misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines were specifically targeting Black communities, who've been disproportionately impacted by the virus for nearly two years.
According to The Hill, Facebook has argued that the data Haugen cited only covers the hate speech automatically removed by the platform and not what's also taken down by a human reviewer. The social media giant has also claimed that hate speech is only a fraction of the content on the platform.
Earlier this year, the NAACP and multiple other civil rights organizations launched a boycott against the platform over hate speech concerns which prompted a meeting with Zuckerberg.
"We urged Mark Zuckerberg to address these issues over a year ago in our meeting, he simply danced around the severity of his company's failures, showing no interest in taking action," Johnson said.
"We've since experienced an insurrection, election disinformation has brainwashed a significant portion of the country, and Covid falsehoods are spreading as rapidly as new variants are."
Get the latest news 24/7 on The Black Information Network. Listen now on the iHeartRadio app or click HERE to tune in live