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Facebook reportedly made an exception to its hate speech policy for Donald Trump
In a widely criticized move, Donald Trumpcalled Monday for a "complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the U.S. The Republican presidential hopeful had posted a video of him reading the campaign statement on Facebook.
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore reported Trump's statement to Facebook as hate speech, and asked others to do the same.
But Facebook, despite having a policy against hate speech defined as "calling for violence, exclusion, or segregation for a protected category," "degrading generalizations," and "dismissing an entire protected category," didn't remove Trump's post, Fast Company reports.
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So Fast Company ran a little test, using a dummy account to post an Islamaphobic message similar to Trump's. Theirs was taken down within a few hours of being flagged. Facebook said the difference with Trump's post is the context:
When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse. Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next U.S. president will be. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis. [Fast Company]
In other words, presidential candidates can get away with things you can't.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
