In the latest episode of Inside the Hive, Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at the nation’s largest online civil rights group, Color of Change, describes the group’s years-long struggle to bring attention and oversight to hate speech, propaganda, and misinformation on Facebook. There’s still, she says, much work to be done. In a recent conference call between civil rights groups, founder Mark Zuckerberg made clear the company would not hold President Donald Trump or his campaign responsible for his incendiary and false claims, including the infamous tweet in which he seemed to suggest that police might shoot looters and his charge that mail-in voting was tantamount to fraud.
“It means that all the time you spend trying to deal with disinformation, trying to deal with voter suppression, it is for naught,” explains Collins-Dexter. “Because when the president gets to immediately beam out that disinformation and not be censored on it, it doesn’t matter what you do with the smaller sites.”
The meeting with Zuckerberg included Color of Change president Rashad Robinson as well as leaders of two other civil rights groups, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Robinson later reported that he was “disappointed and stunned” by Zuckerberg’s response, or lack thereof. As Collins-Dexter describes it, Zuckerberg, as well as Sheryl Sandberg “framed it as partisan, when civil rights, the right to vote, and right to have access to accurate information is not a partisan issue,” she adds, “it is an issue that impacts all of us. And really they were urging [Zuckerberg] to really step up to the plate and do better.”
Read the full interview transcript on The Hive here.