Civil rights leaders thought they’d figured out how to deal with Facebook. But now they are ‘livid.’

By Craig Timberg
Oct. 25, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. EDT

As civil rights leaders prepared for a town hall event in Atlanta last month featuring Facebook’s second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg, optimism ran high that company officials would address long-standing concerns about racism on the platform. Near the top of the list were the voter suppression messages that flooded Facebook during the 2016 presidential election and, the civil rights leaders feared, would do so again as another election season was dawning.

But as they began to arrive in Atlanta for the Sept. 26 event, that hope turned to outrage as civil rights leaders learned that Facebook had announced what many now call the “Trump exemption” — meaning the policy allowing any politician to lie freely in ads or free posts without consequences.

Though Facebook has portrayed this decision as reflecting the nation’s ideals of unfettered political speech, civil rights leaders say they see another value emerging preeminent in Facebook’s calculations: the unfettered quest to profit from political advertising.

“The only principle is business as usual and trying to line their pockets,” said Arisha Hatch, vice president for Color of Change, one of several civil rights groups that had been in regular contact with Sandberg and others at the company. “There is no principled stand that people can take that would allow them to behave on the platform as voter suppressionists have behaved in our country for decades.”

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