Facebook partner with French regulators to monitor their content moderation processes

French President Emmanuel Macron earlier yesterday announced that regulators from France will now be allowed to study Facebook and its attempts to moderate hate speech on its platform, which will give French officials legitimate access into how the company deals with offensive content.

French regulators will have access in 2019 to Facebook’s content policies and how Facebook removes posts that may discriminate against or focus on a majority set of people or others based on gender, or religion.t

According to a statement from Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications Nick Clegg yesterday, “It is in that context significant and welcome that the French government and Facebook are going to announce a new initiative.” “That model of co-regulation of the public tech sector is absolutely key.”

Facebook has made many new hires in 2017 to impose moderation rules more consistent with the existing internal rules that disallow hateful speech on their platforms. With Facebook’s investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, it will help the company to remove offensive content before publishing it. These are processes that the French regulators would be looking into.

This will be the second attempt for the French president Macron in regulating online speech. He makes his first attempt earlier this year when he announced that he would introduce a draft law that would ban fake news online. If this law is passed, it will allow France’s political parties to bring up complaints online, and gives the judges the ability to call for the posts to be taken down. Other European countries have also make a similar draft law. Germany launched its own law earlier this year to tackle disinformation.

However, The United States is having a more difficult time in implementing the regulation over content moderation than its European counterparts. Their First Amendment generally protests hate speech. Lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) have been outspoken about platforms taking down what he would call conservation leaning content, and claiming that the platforms are biased against Republican speech.