Donald Trump can post things you can’t, apparently

We’re often addressing issues related to Facebook’s apparently inconsistent community standards, whether it’s questioning why they allow children to be exploited on the platform, allow graphic violence to remain on the site but ban images or videos of breastfeeding women.

That inconsistency has taken on another level this week, and at the centre of it all is – yes, you guessed it – Donald Trump.

Trump, following on from his controversial remarks about banning Muslims from entering the US, posting a video onto Facebook echoing the same sentiment.

Now we know first-hand that posts that target specific religions or ethnicities in such a manner violate Facebook’s community standards on hate speech – we’ve managed to get a number of such posts removed in the past. Facebook’s guidelines on hate speech –

Content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease is not allowed.

But certain posts, often posted by high-profile people or groups, still manage to withstand the reporting process and have their content remain that clearly violates those community standards. Yes, Trump, but also right-wing groups like Britain First from the UK.

And even filmmaker Michael Moore calling out to his substantial number of followers to report Trump’s video as hate speech failed to get it removed.

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Fast Company decided to investigate the matter further by setting up a number of dummy Facebook accounts that would simply echo Trump’s announcement that Muslims should be banned from entering the USA, using almost identical words that Donald Trump used in his video.

A few hours after being posted, the posts were removed for violating Facebook’s community standards.

Fast Company contacted Facebook who said via a spokesperson –

“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.”

This seems to amount to – because Donald Trump is running for U.S. President and is in the public eye, he can say things on Facebook that you can’t.

What do you think of Fast Company’s experiment? Are Facebook employing double standards? Do you agree with allowing Trumps video to stay on the site but removing similar content posted by others? Let us know.