00:01What we've discovered is that these content creators are not just being given a platform
00:06by Facebook, they're being given money directly. They've been signed up to an invite only content
00:13monetization scheme that Facebook runs that rewards them for the amount of interactions
00:19they get on their content that they are putting online onto platforms like Facebook. So to
00:25give you an example of one of these, we investigated the page of Hugo Lennon. He is a white nationalist,
00:30he has close neo-Nazi ties and last month he was removed by police from a hotel in Melbourne
00:38for racially abusing the Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi. He also then posted this video
00:45of him doing that to his Facebook and it is among the content that we provided to Facebook
00:51when we asked them why these people were being allowed to profit from this content monetization
00:56scheme.
00:56And how did you find this information?
00:59So interestingly, Facebook actually publishes data about the more than 16 million content
01:05creators that it monetizes. So in a way they actually deserve some credit for this because
01:10a lot of the other platforms like YouTube, like TikTok, these big social media giants are
01:15incredibly opaque about where the money that they are paying to their content providers
01:19goes. Facebook, however, does actually publish this data and we used a third provider that
01:26collates this data into spreadsheets and did a lot of searches to have a look at some of
01:32these platforms. Another one that I'll mention is The Noticer. It is a far right white supremacist
01:37newspaper that publishes things in Australia and interestingly it's currently been banned from
01:43X because it's fallen foul of X's hateful speech guidelines. And yet this is another platform
01:51that Meta has decided is worthy of its invite-only content monetization scheme.
01:56And has Facebook had anything to say about this?
01:59Well, I approached Facebook directly with examples of four of these pages. One of them is an anti-vaxxer
02:07influencer and I provided multiple examples of this person posting anti-vax misinformation,
02:14medical misinformation. I also sent Meta the information that I discussed earlier from
02:20Hugo Lennon, this far right nationalist abusing the Indian Prime Minister. And the statement that
02:26they said to me was that, quote, creators or publishers who repeatedly breach their policies
02:31will be removed from their platforms. But they also said, quote, some speech may be offensive
02:36to many, but it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness. So what they've basically said
02:41is that these content providers are free to a certain extent to breach Meta's own guidelines
02:47on the content that they're producing. And as far as we can see, they've taken no action
02:52against the four pages that we highlighted with them.
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