According to Reuters, the US company Meta said in an internal email on March 10th that during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, users of its facebook and Instagram platforms would be allowed to post violent remarks against Russia, even including death curses against Russian and Belarusian presidents.
According to the previous hate speech policy of Facebook and Photo Wall, users will be deleted if they make violent remarks against soldiers of a country other than war criminals.
The email said: "We will issue a policy guideline to allow these violent remarks not to be deleted under the hate speech policy: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, except prisoners of war; (b) For Russians whose background is obviously Russia’s "invasion" of Ukraine (for example, the content involves "invasion" and "self-defense"). "
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the news in a statement:
"Because of’ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’, we temporarily allow political expressions that usually violate our rules, such as’ Russian invaders die’ and other violent remarks. But we still will not allow violent appeals against Russian civilians. "
"As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our r ules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians" .
Reuters said that this was a temporary change of Facebook’s hate speech policy. This change policy will apply to users in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Estonia.
This change in Facebook has attracted many netizens’ criticism.
"Controlled freedom of speech … this is terrible."
"Hatred is the new peace? How can we accept this absurd decision? "
Some netizens pointed out that Facebook’s behavior was "double standard". One netizen sneered: "When the people in the Middle East who were invaded by the United States made violent remarks, we not only blocked their tweets, but also called them terrorists."
"Did Cosmos adopt the same measures/principles when the United States and its allies rampaged and nearly annihilated the Middle East countries to maintain their control over the oil reserves and production in the region?"
There are also many netizens who have appealed that under any circumstances, the act of advocating violent speech should not be allowed.