A secret blacklist of individuals and groups used to regulate speech across Facebook’s platforms, instituted by the company in 2012 in the face of growing public concerns over terrorists being recruited through the site – was recently published in its entirety by The Intercept, on October 12, 2021.
The 100-page Dangerous Individuals and Organisations (DIO) list contains more than 4000 people and groups, both categorised into Terror, Crime, and Hate, with two additional categories for groups, i.e., Violent Non-State Actor and Militarised Social Movement. Supposedly, no one on the DIO list is allowed to maintain a presence on Facebook platforms, nor are individuals allowed to represent themselves as members of the listed groups.
Having operated over the years with deliberate obfuscation of its processes and motivations, including ignoring its Oversight Board’s recommendations to make this list public, Facebook’s content moderation – and the DIO policy specifically – has been criticised as an unaccountable system disproportionately punishing certain communities.
The leaked list’s demographic composition reveals the ways in which Facebook principally echoes American values and conceptions of danger. The disproportionate focus to groups in the Middle East and South Asia as compared with white nationalist groups in the DIO list has been described as reflecting American anxieties, political concerns, and foreign
— source thewire.in | Shambhavi Madan | 16/Oct/2021