Facebook Failed to Remove Militia Page Linked to Kenosha Unrest

WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com – Facebook made an “operational mistake” in not acting sooner to take down a page for a militia group that posted a call to arms in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The statement came from the company’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Friday.

The Big Tech company removed the Kenosha Guard page on Wednesday as well as an event listing there for Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property.

The page and event listing violated Facebook’s policy against “militia organizations”.

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Facebook's action came after two people were shot and killed during protests in the town on Tuesday night, part of three nights of civil unrest that followed the shooting by a white police officer that left a Black man, Jacob Blake Jr, paralyzed.

Zuckerberg, speaking in a video message published on his Facebook profile, acknowledged the company had received complaints from "a bunch of people" about the Kenosha Guard posting.

"The contractors and reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to basically didn't pick this up," he said.

"And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that's responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down."

Zuckerberg said the company had not found any evidence to show that the person charged with the fatal shooting during Tuesday's unrest followed the Kenosha Guard page.

Read also: 17-Year-Old Kyle Rittenhouse Arrested for Homicide as Unrest in Kenosha Continues

News website BuzzFeed quoted an internal Facebook report as showing the event associated with the Kenosha Guard was flagged at least 455 times, and a Facebook worker as saying it accounted for 66 percent of all event reports that day.

Facebook declined to comment on those findings, Buzzfeed said.

Facebook said it would continue to evolve its policies for identifying potentially dangerous organizations.

"This is a new policy we launched last week and we're still scaling up our enforcement of it by a team of specialists," a spokesperson said.

(Writers: Katie Paul, Mrinalika Roy, Aakriti Bhalla | Editors: Shinjini Ganguli, John Stonestreet)

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zuckerberg-kenosha/zuckerberg-says-facebooks-failure-to-remove-militia-page-an-operational-mistake-idUSKBN25O2ZJ?il=0