After years of accusations, Facebook owner Meta has released its first annual human rights report.
This report covers how companies deal with human rights implications, including the results and products of due diligence, national behavior and crisis response.
In 2021, Meta adopted a human rights policy. This is the first report covering the period from 2020 to 2021.
In its summary, Meta said: “Meta’s platform may be associated with significant human rights risks posed by third parties.” This included “advocating hate that would lead to hostility, discrimination, or violence.”
It added that the assessment did not include “accusations of content moderation bias.”
The report highlights the role of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption in protecting the privacy of individuals, especially journalists and human rights activists, and how it extends to other messaging apps.
Meta said in its report that it was studying the Indian recommendations, but did not promise to implement them as it has in other rights assessments.
India is the world’s largest metamarket for users, and for years rights groups have warned of internal tensions over anti-Islamic hate speech.
Rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have accused Meta of stalling and called for a full disclosure of India’s assessment.
In 2020, Facebook’s top public policy executive in India resigned after reports of opposition to the use of company rules against Hindu nationalists who were singled out internally for promoting violence.
Meta’s human rights team currently consists of eight people, with approximately 100 people working in human rights teams.
After last year’s rebranding, the social media giants have prioritized betting on the “Metaverse” this year, so we’ll cover a look at augmented reality and virtual reality technologies in a future report.
Source: Metro
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