Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Governor of Saint Petersburg Alexander Beglov in Moscow, Russia March 1, 2022.
Alexey Nikolskyi | Sputnik | Reuters
In an internal post on Sunday, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote the company is “now narrowing its focus to make explicitly clear in the guidance that it is never to be interpreted as condoning violence against Russians in general.”
“We also do not permit calls to assassinate a head of state,” Clegg wrote in the post, which was first reported by Bloomberg on Sunday.
Meta confirmed the contents of Clegg’s post to CNBC.
Clegg tweeted on Friday about the rationale for the easing of Meta’s hate speech policy.
“I want to be crystal clear: Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country,” he wrote.
“The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable.
Clegg added: “To be clear, we are only going to apply this policy in Ukraine itself. We have no quarrel with the Russian people. There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform.”
