Civil rights groups denounce Facebook over hate speech
GEARING UP FOR 5G: WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S NOT
FBY BARBARA OƔTUTAY & AMANDA SEITZ The Associated Press
ACEBOOK keeps telling critics that it is doing everything it can to rid its service of hate, abuse and misinformation. And the company’s detractors keep not buying it. On Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg met with a group of civil rights leaders, including the organizers of a growing advertising boycott over hate speech on Facebook. One of those leaders, NAACP President Derrick Johnson, said Facebook’s executives offered little but cheap talk that skirted major commitments to new rules or actions that would curb racism and misinformation on its platform.
“We’ve watched the conversation blossom into nothingness,” Johnson said. “They lack the cultural sensitivity to understand that their platform is actually being used to cause harm. Or, they understand the harm their platform is causing and they’ve chosen to take the profit.”
The NAACP was one of several groups that sent Facebook a list of 10 demands for policy change. Those included hiring a civil rights executive; banning private groups that promote white supremacy, vaccine misinformation or violent conspiracy theories; and ending an exemption that allows politicians to post voting misinformation.
Such calls have the support of big-name companies like Coca-cola and Unilever which have yanked their Facebook ads in recent days. But nothing concrete will change for Facebook’s 2.6 billion users.
In a statement following the meeting, Facebook largely reiterated its existing policies against voter and census interference, also noting the white supremacist groups it has banned and other recent changes. “This meeting was an opportunity for us to hear from the campaign organizers and reaffirm our commitment to combating hate on our platform,” the statement read.
“We know we will be judged by our actions not by our words and are grateful to these groups and many others for their continued engagement.”
Facebook did agree to install a civil rights vice president, but didn’t say how long that would take, Jessica J. González—the CO-CEO of Free Press, a group behind the boycott—told The Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump frequently skirts Facebook’s posting rules, yet faces no consequences, dismaying both civil rights leaders and some of Facebook’s own employees.
The president made several misleading claims about mail-in-voting in May and June posts, including one that pushed a far-fetched theory that foreign countries plan to print millions of bogus ballots. Trump also used the platform to threaten violence against racial injustice protesters in Minneapolis when he wrote “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in a May post.
The posts have gone unchecked on Facebook. Twitter, meanwhile, has fact checked, removed or obscured some of Trump’s controversial tweets.
“When a politician, no matter who that politician is, when he makes a post that says ‘shoot the looters,’ it is not only racially insensitive, it could incite violence across the country,” Johnson said.
Last month, Facebook announced it would begin labeling rule-breaking posts—even from politicians—going forward. But it is not clear if Trump’s previous controversial posts would have gotten the label.
On Wednesday, Facebook will release the final results of its own “civil rights audit” of its US practices.
The audit was led by former American Civil Liberties Union executive Laura Murphy, who was hired by Facebook in May 2018 to assess its performance on vital social issues. More than 900 companies have joined the ad boycott, which runs through the end of July, although some companies plan to withhold their ad dollars for longer.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Sandberg emphasized what she called the company’s years of effort to “minimize the presence of hate” on Facebook and the billions of dollars it has spent “to find and remove hate—as well as protect the integrity of our platform more generally.”
Facebook’s 2019 revenue was more than $70 billion, nearly all of it from advertising.
Facebook’s inaction will only encourage companies to continue their boycott of advertising on the site for longer, said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Antidefamation League. “The list is growing every day,” Greenblatt said of companies joining the boycott. “It’s unfortunate to go back to them and say we haven’t seen the progress we expected.” ■
ONE of the next big things in technology is finally starting to be implemented around the world, but as the mobile tech scene gears up for 5G, it’s unavoidable for some conspiracy theories to surface—from the simplest to the more peculiar ones. What’s the real deal about 5G? Telecom giant Globe debunks five myths that surround the latest wireless technology.
■ MYTH 1: 5G IS RELATED TO THE SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019. The global health pandemic that is the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) and 5G are in no way related to each other. The theories that supported this were Covid-19 and 5G became a hot topic for the world almost at the same time, and that both are related to China. However, these aren’t enough to prove such claims that 5G can be a method to spread the disease.
First, technology for 5G was initially introduced to the world in October 2018, while the highly contagious disease stemmed from Wuhan, China, in December 2019. China wasn’t the first country to implement 5G; South Korea and the US both did it earlier. For more obvious reasons, the coronavirus disease can’t spread through 5G as it is transmitted through saliva droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
■ MYTH 2: 5G CAN CAUSE CANCER. False beliefs about wireless technologies posing risks to people for developing cancer existed for quite some time. Time and again, authorities like the World Health Organization (WHO) have been refuting this.
According to the WHO, there hasn’t been any significant finding linking wireless technologies like 5G to possible causes of cancer. A health concern which can be related to these technologies is tissue heating, which naturally occurs since it is “the main mechanism of interaction between radiofrequency fields and the human body,” which is similar to how bodies respond when doing exercises.
Both the WHO and the International Commission on Nonionizing Radiation Protection explained that there will be no detrimental health concerns from 5G as long as overall radio frequency exposure doesn’t exceed 300GHZ.
■ MYTH 3: ANYONE CAN HAVE ACCESS TO 5G. In an ideal world, yes. But in developing countries like the Philippines, this is something that might take a little longer. Globe is ramping up its expansion efforts by adding more telecommunication infrastructures across the country to bring connectivity. The company is also set to unveil the 5G mobile experience in Makati and Bonifacio Global City in Taguig by the third quarter of this year.
Another concern on 5G access is that not all smartphones support 5G. Globe stores, however, have 5G-capable phones such as Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G, Huawei P40 series, Huawei Nova 7SE, and Samsung S20 Ultra. The company is also looking to add more 5G-capable mobile devices in the coming months.
■ MYTH 4: 5G WILL REPLACE 4G. Unlike what happened during the transition from 3G to 4G when the latter was made to replace the former, 5G does not intend for 4G to be obsolete. What will happen is somehow a technology coexistence since 5G will build from 4G LTE. In a June 1 report by CNET, it stated that those using 4G LTE might experience faster speeds when 5G becomes available. The same article also cited a GSMA Intelligence report which noted that 15 percent of mobile connections around the world will utilize 5G by 2025, while 4G LTE usage will be about 59 percent.
■ MYTH 5: 5G CAN BE USED FOR MIND CONTROL. This is one of the weirdest and far-fetched theories about 5G. As mentioned, there hasn’t been any concrete study to prove that 5G has effects on the human body. However, once 5G is fully implemented, technologies that rely on connectivity for data processing like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and robotics will surely get the needed boost to develop functions useful to the real world.