Facebook, Reddit receive low marks for Holocaust denial content
Facebook has been under pressure to combat more hate speech.
Angela Lang/CNET
Facebook, Reddit, Discord and Steam received low grades from the Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday for the handling of Holocaust denial content on their platforms. The ADL issued the report to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The ADL, an advocacy group focused on fighting antisemitism and hate, gave the four platforms Ds in a report card based on a range of criteria, including whether they had policies against Holocaust denial content and how difficult such content was to find on their platforms. The group said it also reported Holocaust denial content from “non-official accounts” in January to see how these companies enforced their rules. Enforcement was weighted more heavily in the grade, the ADL said in the report.
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A total of nine companies were evaluated by the ADL and no platform earned an A. Twitch, a live video streaming service, got a B, the highest grade given. Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and Roblox received Cs. While both Twitch and Facebook have rules against Holocaust denial content, Twitch took action against reported content while Facebook didn’t, the report said. The ADL cited several examples of Holocaust denial content that was reported to Facebook, including videos with captions such as “Holohoax tales.” The group received a message from Facebook stating the videos didn’t violate its rules but noted the content could be offensive.
“In recent years, content denying the Holocaust has appeared on an array of social media platforms, largely because those companies have not been nimble enough or taken the issue seriously,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “While some platforms have finally stepped up their efforts to stop the amplification of denial, others are still struggling to address antisemitism and Holocaust denial effectively.”
The report raises questions about how well Facebook and other platforms are enforcing their rules against Holocaust denial content specifically. The ADL helped organize a campaign last year that urged advertisers to pause spending on Facebook ads to pressure the company to do a better job of combating hate speech. The group recommends the platforms enforce its rules against Holocaust denial consistently, provide more information to users about how content moderation decisions are made and change products so they’re focused more on user safety.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company disagreed with the grade it received. The social network said starting on Wednesday people who search for terms associated with the Holocaust or Holocaust denial will get a message directing them to credible information about the genocide. The message says “the Holocaust was the organized persecution and killing of 6 million Jewish people, alongside other targeted groups, by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.” It encourages users to visit a website about the Holocaust.
“We don’t agree — we’ve made major progress in fighting Holocaust denial on Facebook by implementing a new policy prohibiting it and enforcing against these hateful lies in every country around the world,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We’ve removed the content mentioned in this report and will continue working to keep Holocaust denial off of our platform.”
Facebook banned Holocaust denial content in October. In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, sparked outrage after he said that Holocaust denial content shouldn’t be removed from the social network because he didn’t think “that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” He then said in an October Facebook post “his thinking evolved” after he saw data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence.
Reddit said it removed the content cited in the ADL report. “Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit any content that incites violence or promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, including Holocaust denial content,” a Reddit spokeswoman said in a statement. The company also “quarantines” communities that share offensive content including posts that deny the Holocaust happened. That means users have to click through a warning to view this content.
Discord said in a statement it views Holocaust denial content as “deeply harmful” and it doesn’t allow it on its service. The company has an internal policy against that type of content and said it would take action against the content found by the ADL. Twitch and TikTok said hateful conduct isn’t allowed on its platform either. “We work closely with experts in the fields of hate speech, including anti-semitism, to ensure our policies are comprehensive and are pleased to see that our efforts to keep this content off our service are having a measurable impact,” a Twitch spokesperson said.
TikTok said it continually updates its policies and systems to combat hateful behavior. “We welcome guidance from experts like the ADL as we strive to promote a safe community environment,” a company spokeswoman said.
Twitter didn’t immediately have a statement. Google-owned YouTube, Steam and Roblox didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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