The Center for Civil Rights and Technology holds industries that create and use technology accountable to ensure their platforms and products are safe and fair for everyone. The Center advocates for social media platforms to use common sense content moderation and fact-checking to combat online lies and hate and for the companies that use and create AI systems that enshrine and protect individuals’ civil rights, not harm them.
Holding Meta Accountable for Allowing Free Rein for Lies and Hate
For close to a decade now, the civil rights community has advocated for changes to online ecosystems that allow for the perpetuation of violence-inciting speech, misinformation, and disinformation. We have engaged Meta (and its previous iteration, Facebook) directly to address these policies and practices that allow our communities to be harmed, threatened, and silenced.
In a step to hold Meta accountable for their announced policy shift to remove fact-checkers and content moderation guardrails around the topics of immigration and gender, The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology launched a digital campaign to call out this failed practice, the linchpin being a petition to gather signatures opposing Meta’s content moderation rollback. Following 16,000+ individuals signing this petition, The Leadership Conference’s Maya Wiley again demanded Mark Zuckerberg and Meta restore content moderation and professional fact checking on its platforms in the United States.
Real-world consequences of online lies and hate
Online lies and hate have real-world consequences. Last year, real voters’ eligibility were thrown into question, and threats of violence hit local communities like Springfield, Ohio. Aid workers were threatened following Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Election administrators resigned because of threats they faced online for doing their jobs. Mis- and disinformation leads to dangerous policies — echoing lies about immigrant and trans communities is being used by bad actors to justify the hateful direction he hopes to take our country.
Failure of community notes
Zuckerberg announced that his company would utilize the same model of content moderation used by X (formerly Twitter) – a practice called “community notes.” Community notes without professional fact-checking do not work to combat mis- and disinformation online. Researchers estimate that Facebook and Instagram users could encounter at least 277 million more instances of hate speech and other harmful content each year because of this decision.
Content moderation keeps us all safe
Content moderation, done smartly and carefully, increases everyone’s access to accurate information. While no one method will catch all the lies, it ensures fewer dangerous ones sneak through. Our civil rights must be protected on social platforms to ensure a vibrant and open democracy and diverse online communities.
Innovation Framework: A Civil Rights Approach to AI
The Innovation Framework is a new guiding document for companies that invest in, create, and use AI to ensure that their AI systems protect and promote civil rights so that those systems are fair, trustworthy, and safe for all of us, especially communities historically pushed to the margins.
This Innovation Framework serves as a proactive vision for emerging AI products, tools, and services. It consists of four Foundational Values for managing long-term business decisions and ten specific Lifecycle Pillars aligned with the AI development and deployment pipeline. The Framework is intentionally actionable so that it can be implemented, put in practice, and ensure that the technology truly works. The Framework was built with input from a diverse array of stakeholders, from industry, including leading developers and deployers of AI, along with civil society and academic experts.
Learn more about the Innovation Framework at innovationframework.org. A one-pager is available here.