Facebook announced the hiring of civil rights lawyer Roy Austin Jr. as the first vice president of civil rights. The company is working to to improve its handling of racial insensitivity, discrimination and extremism issues.
Austin is a veteran civil rights attorney and served in the Obama administration as Deputy Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs, Justice, and Opportunity. At Facebook Austin will set up Facebook’s civil rights organization and become a deputy general counsel. Facebook has not specified the full scope or goals of the organization.
Austin’s hiring comes as the company faces deeper scrutiny of its handling of racism, violent rhetoric and misinformation in the wake of last week’s pro-Trump riots on Capitol Hill. Acting to quell the potential for more violence Facebook and Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump after he failed to condemn the mob attacking the Capitol.
The pressure on Facebook has been building for months. Last summer the company was hit with a major advertising boycott organized by civil rights groups in response to what they described as Facebook’s “long history of allowing racist, violent and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform.” Around the same time, Facebook pledged to hire a civil rights leader and to place employees with civil rights expertise in core teams.
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, wrote that while the company had made progress on those fronts, it still had “a long way to go” after failing to more effectively control the problem. The authors of Facebook’s audit determined that Facebook’s leaders had made decisions “with real world consequences that are serious setbacks for civil rights.” The audit warned that the platform could become an echo chamber for extremism.
Austin issued a statement saying; “I am excited to join Facebook at this moment when there is a national and global awakening happening around civil rights.”
Austin’s previous work in the Obama administration including authoring a report on big data and civil rights. He went on to say, “Technology plays a role in nearly every part of our lives, and it’s important that it be used to overcome the historic discrimination and hate which so many underrepresented groups have faced, rather than to exacerbate it.”
