Big Tech’s Fake Ethics

On May 15, Facebook released its first-ever “Community Standards Enforcement Report.” Despite its numbingly bureaucratic title, the report contains startling details about the scope of the challenge facing the company as it tries to monitor violent, extremist, and false content on its platform; Facebook has tagged and taken down millions of instances of such content in just the past few months.

In a note on the report’s release, Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics, wrote, “We built Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss different ideas, even ideas that some people may find controversial or offensive. But we also want to make sure our service is safe for everyone. Sometimes that is a hard balance to strike.”