Queen Nwabueze
The news doing the rounds has it that Metaverse platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have allowed users to post violent speech against Russia and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion.
In an internal email seen by journalists, the Meta management had to tweak its hate speech policy in order to bring the controversial Russian President, Vladimir Putin to his dregs.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelThe social media giant has also allowed very inciting and treacherous posts against the former Soviet Union goliath including social media updates calling for the death of Putin or Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko.
According to the mail trails: “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.”
“The calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method.”
Similarly, many major social media platforms did also announce new content restrictions around the conflict, including blocking Russian state media RT and Sputnik in the European Union, and have demonstrated carve-outs in some of their policies during the war.
Highlighting the latest change in its hate speech policy, Meta categorically told its content moderators: “We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.).”
The mail continued: “We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, ‘Russian soldiers’ is being used as a proxy for the Russian military. The Hate Speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians.”
It will be recalled that just last week, Russia said it was banning Facebook in the country in response to what it said were restrictions of access to Russian media on the platform.
To make good the threat, Moscow went ahead to clampdown on the tech companies, including Twitter.
