When it comes to mistakenly allowing a militia’s event page to remain on Facebook, even after concerned users reported it at least 455 times, Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that the buck stops with his contractors.
In a Friday video announcement, the Facebook CEO attempted to explain away his company’s failure to remove the Kenosha Guard’s event page as an “operational mistake” made by third-party reviewers working on behalf of Facebook. Notably, The Verge reports that the event page issued a “call to arms” — not in response to Wisconsin police shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back, but rather the protests demanding justice for the shooting.
“The page violated our policies, and there have been a bunch of media reports asking, you know, why this page and event weren’t removed sooner, especially when in this case a bunch of people did report the page,” said Zuckerberg. “And, the reason for this, it was largely an operational mistake.”
That’s right. According to Zuckerberg, the reason Facebook chose to tacitly approve an event page that, by his own admission, violated the site’s own rules, is because the non-Facebook employees tasked with enforcing his company’s Byzantine policies didn’t understand them well enough.
After the Kenosha Guard’s “call to arms,” a white teenager, whose Facebook page depicted an obsession with police, Donald Trump, and guns, allegedly shot and killed two protesters, and injured a third.
In his Friday speech, Zuckerberg was quick to point out that Facebook has yet to definitively prove that shooter had seen the Kenosha Guard event page.
“At this point we haven’t yet found any evidence that the shooter was following this Kenosha Guard page, or was connected to the event or invited to the event in any way,” insisted the CEO.
As for the Kenosha Guard event page, Zuckerberg really wants you to know that the “call to arms” was beyond the comprehension of his contractors.
SEE ALSO: A militia group posted a ‘call to arms’ on Facebook. Now two people in Kenosha are dead.
“The team that enforces our policy against dangerous organizations is a specialized team, you know, that is trained to look for symbolism and innuendo and different things that require a significant amount of training in some of these cases to understand the details or the nuances of how certain militias or certain conspiracy networks or other dangerous organizations operate,” the CEO rambled. “And the contractors and the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to didn’t basically didn’t pick this up.”
What a reassuring statement of accountability from one of the richest and most powerful people in the world.