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Report: Undercover Facebook Moderator Told to Ignore Hate Speech, Fake News

An undercover journalist also found Facebook moderators weren’t deleting racist speech from far-right groups.

An undercover journalist who posed as a moderator for Facebook claimed that the platform lets false news proliferate and ignores racist rhetoric from far-right groups. The Verge reports that the journalist, reporting for a documentary for UK’s Channel 4, found the company’s third-party moderators took a “hands-off approach” to any reported content like “graphic violence, hate speech, and racist and other bigoted rhetoric from far-right groups.” The journalist also said that the company avoided suspending or deleting far-right groups and pages from the platform, subjecting them “to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organizations.” The documentary reportedly suggests that some content wasn’t being removed because it “engages users for longer and drives up advertising revenue.” In a preemptive blog post and letter, Facebook said it would “be updating its training material” for moderators, and said it had already retrained those who were featured in the documentary.