Facebook has a vice president of integrity.
Yes, that's a joke. By that, I mean it's a ridiculous truth. It's actually the title of a guy (whose name is Guy) who works at the social media giant.
Guy Rosen joined Facebook's leadership team after Facebook bought his company, Onavo, in 2013 in order to use Onavo's technology to gather data about how people were using their phones.
Integrity challenges have confronted his office ever since. Following the Onavo purchase, Facebook said the company's new technology would help users block dangerous websites and keep their data traffic safe from snooping, when in fact Facebook itself was monitoring and analyzing that traffic.
Essentially, Facebook was giving users a free tool in the name of security, while secretly using that very tool to spy on their app usage and mobile browsing habits.
Emerging privacy concerns led Apple to force Facebook to pull the Onavo product from its App Store in 2018, but it remained on Google Play. Facebook then repurposed Onavo's code into a secret research app program (users didn't realize they were being recruited).
When it was later learned that the research app was used to clandestinely gather data on teens and minors, Facebook pulled the whole unpaid research program down and took Onavo off the Google Play store in 2019.
But the 2020 presidential campaign and election has taken Facebook integrity hypocrisy to new heights.
On Monday, Guy Rosen co-wrote a blog post in which Facebook announced it would remove content containing the phrase "Stop the Steal" in order to "stop misinformation and content" that could incite "further violence."
Who knew that Facebook could get so granular in finding dangerous, violence-inciting content by drilling down on phrases like that? Nearly every school shooter left a track record on his Facebook account with warnings and threatening posts about killing classmates.
Only now we're being told that Facebook could have, if it wanted, identified that content and reported it to local authorities before kids got killed?
Furthermore, Facebook has been and remains digital Ground Zero for misinformation of the first magnitude in literally countless cases--many of which can be tied to violence that makes last week's melee at the Capitol seem like symbolic child's play.
Remember how Facebook shut down all the Trump inauguration protest pages in 2017 to prevent violence in cities? Of course you don't, because it didn't happen. On the contrary, Facebook was aflutter with page after page in city after city organizing and promoting marches, which ultimately led to riots that burned buildings and destroyed businesses across the country.
The 2017 DisruptJ20 Facebook page remains up to this day, with its all-cap headline of NO PEACEFUL TRANSITION. That's fairly inciting.
Claiming it must "be the start of the resistance," DisruptJ20 urged followers to "take to the streets and protest, blockade, disrupt, intervene, sit in, walk out, rise up, and make more noise and good trouble than the establishment can bear."
The resulting headlines from the 2017 inauguration riots in the nation's capital confirmed DisruptJ20's success:
"Violence flares in Washington," Reuters wrote.
"Police injured, more than 200 arrested," CNN reported.
Numerous Facebook Black Lives Matter support and protest pages still contain blatantly untrue comments about Breonna Taylor, including repeated false claims that she was shot while she slept. The integrity standard referenced in Rosen's blog should have required those comments removed months ago.
The realm of misinformation inciting violence far transcends politics. In urban areas, as many as one in three gun-related homicides are linked with gang and/or drug activity. Yet Facebook is happy to host a large number of gang pages, groups, communities and events. The Crip Gang public group has 18,400 members and 430 posts per day (many containing predictable content related to criminal activity).
Methamphetamine drug abuse has skyrocketed since 2015, and deaths related to the drug have increased five-fold since 2010. Last year, Millennium Health named Arkansas as the nation's leading state for positivity rates for meth in 2019.
Still, Facebook sees fit to allow several large private groups centered around the devastating drug and its addicts, some of which are dedicated to ridiculing victims. One group, MethamphetaMeet, bills itself as the nation's "most successful online dating site for tweekers [meth addicts]." It has 14,400 members.
Prostitution is a proven factor in sex trafficking crimes and victims, but Facebook features a number of escort service private groups on its platform. Even pedophilia gets a free pass on Facebook, which has not removed an automatic North American Man/Boy Love Association page created in 2013.
The Nation of Islam, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a leader in organized hate, including virulent anti-Semitism, has a Facebook page with 49,000 followers. The Black Hebrew Israelites, also listed as a SPLC hate group, has Facebook pages with more than 14,000 followers.
Besides letting hypocrisy displace integrity, Facebook's censorial and editorial activities have also breached the liability line between platform and publisher, and ensuing legal troubles may well topple the dynastic social icon.
From an integrity standpoint, it'll be good riddance.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.