Suit seeks to limit anti-Muslim speech on Facebook but roots of Islamophobia run far deeper
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
(THE CONVERSATION) A civil rights group is suing Facebook and its top executives in federal court over the company’s failure to crack down on hate speech against Muslims.
Muslim Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization focused on discrimination against American Muslims, alleges in the suit that Facebook has violated a series of local and federal consumer protection laws. The suit points out that the company itself, in a July 2020 internal audit, found that “Facebook has created an atmosphere where ‘Muslims feel under siege’” on the platform.
I am a scholar who tracks anti-Muslim activity such as violence, harassment, public speeches, property crimes and policies that target Muslims. This suit is right that many Muslims in the United States feel under siege – and have for quite some time.
But I am cautious about assigning too much blame to Facebook for the staggering magnitude and breadth of anti-Muslim activity in the U.S. As the author of “Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Tells Us about America,” I argue that this could be a convenient distraction – with limited overall effect – from the deeper histories and realities of white supremacy that require sustained attention.
American Muslims feel under siege
The years 2015 to 2019 saw a spike in hateful incidents against Muslims, with the news media reporting more than a 1,000 cases over this period. The incidents ranged from everyday harassment and violence to federal policies targeting Muslim communities.
State-level anti-Shari’a legislation also escalated. The idea behind these bills was that Islamic law, which was often left ill-defined or undefined by lawmakers, posed a danger to the United States. Many legislators who introduced these bills acknowledged they were not spurred by any particular cases in which Islamic law undermined the work of courts in the United States. The point was to raise suspicion of Muslims and Islam.
Additionally, the real number of hateful incidents against Muslims is likely higher. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that, in general, over 50% of hate crimes go unreported. Even when people do report them locally, there is no unified process for national tracking.
Some projects have started to document the extent and effects of these incidents. For example, I contribute to Mapping Islamophobia, a website tracking reports from reputable media outlets to capture trends over time, as well as individual stories behind them. From 2016 to 2019, ProPublica addressed the hate crime data problem with Documenting Hate, a multinewsroom and crowd-sourced collaboration to create a database of hate crimes.
Elon University computer scientist Megan Squire, whose work contributed to the new lawsuit against Facebook, has drawn on publicly available Facebook data to analyze the enormous volume of hateful content against Muslims circulating on the platform.
The common thread: white supremacy
Importantly, Squire’s research also shows that anti-Muslim activity was deeply connected to fear and suspicion of nonwhite communities. Over the past hundred-plus years, nonwhite and immigrant communities have often been portrayed as being threats to white America.
For example, legislation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries excluded Asian immigrants. The post-Civil War era of Jim Crow segregation, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, also reflected and contributed to this suspicion.
Not all Muslims in the U.S. identify as people of color. But the idea that Muslims constitute a “race” has become more common in recent years. Under the Trump administration, one way this played out was in the government’s ban on travel from some Muslim-majority countries.
But what these phenomena all have in common is that they are rooted in the history and contemporary reality of white supremacy.
This makes calling for Facebook to police anti-Muslim speech more complicated than it may seem at first glance. Facebook has on many occasions pledged to strengthen its efforts to root out hate speech on the platform, most recently in December of 2020. However, systemic racism often ends up inadvertently written into the complicated math formulas at the foundation of all internet search and content curation, including Facebook’s. This is called algorithm bias.
Given that billions of people use Facebook – and for many millions it’s the only way they access the internet – the connections between algorithms and racism on Facebook are especially significant.
Civil rights leaders have been pressuring Facebook for some time to address algorithms that are not up to the task of monitoring hate speech on the platform that targets people of color. The lawsuit filed by Muslim Advocates suggests that anti-Muslim speech remains rife despite Facebook’s effort to revise its algorithms.
The suit alleges that Facebook’s failure to more closely control hate speech on the platform results in the proliferation of anti-Muslim content for everyone to see, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Muslim Advocates say this seeds and cultivates anti-Muslim bigotry and leaves Muslims feeling under siege.
Still, tweaked algorithms are likely not enough to solve a social problem with deep roots. [Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture. Sign up for This Week in Religion.]
Suing Facebook is a small part of the picture
Sustained legal, political and cultural efforts are necessary to address more than acute symptoms of the deeper problem. Muslim Advocates’ lawsuit against Facebook is an example of using the legal system to address expressions of public hate against Muslims. The legal system does not guarantee redress, but it does offer an essential avenue for action.
Political steps could be taken as well. Congress could pass legislation creating a uniform national system for tracking hate crimes, including funding ramifications for nonparticipation. If it were implemented and maintained effectively, such a system could provide more clarity about the systemic nature of harassment, intimidation and violence against communities of color, including but not limited to Muslims.
The recently passed bill addressing anti-Asian violence, which President Biden signed into law, may be a step in the right direction. It creates stronger incentives for local and state law enforcement agencies to report data about hate crimes, even if stopping short of mandatory data reporting systems.
Critics, however, claim that the legislation will ultimately have limited effects because it does not address the underlying reasons that communities of color and other targeted groups experience public hate.
Muslims across the United States have long engaged in a concerted effort to humanize themselves to the broader American public. Many of these efforts, reflected in the rising number of Muslims running for political office at all levels of government, emphasize local connections and the shared values and interests that come with living together in a town, city or state.
But it is a burden that Muslims cannot bear themselves. Anti-Muslim hostility – online and off – is one manifestation of the nation’s deep, everyday racial inequities, and failure to come to terms with histories and realities of white supremacy will not make its effects simply disappear. As the writer James Baldwin once said, “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/suit-seeks-to-limit-anti-muslim-speech-on-facebook-but-roots-of-islamophobia-run-far-deeper-159418.
Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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
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