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Facebook (Meta) lets people make death threats against Putin

ended 11. March 2022

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram will allow users in some countries to call for violence against Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers. Meta says it has temporarily made allowances for some violent speech, like "death to the Russian invaders," that would usually break its rules. However, it says it won't permit calls for violence against Russian civilians.

The announcement came after Reuters news agency said it had seen internal emails outlining the policy shift. In light of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, we made a temporary exception for those affected by the war, to express violent sentiments toward invading armed forces," a Meta spokesperson told the BBC.

Under the amended policy, users in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland will also be able to call for the deaths of Russia's President Putin and Belarusian President Lukashenko.

What are your thoughts?

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Kate Allen
Owner at Finest Stays
What is so important for guiding the moral compass within society is consistency. Much like with parenting, consistency allows boundaries and expectations to be set which actually provides a sense of safety. If we follow through with what we say we are going to do, it gives power to our words, but this policy shift at Meta starts to take the sting out of their rhetoric.
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Lynsey Evans
Young Writers Manager at Young Writers
Social Media is already a hotbed of hatred with companies such as Meta failing to uphold their responsibilities to safeguard their users. Allowing this kind of speech for any specific subset of people is only going to normalise and permit vitriolic hate speech in other circumstances and push the narrative of 'evil social media' further.