Facebook censorship continues, bans ‘white nationalism and white separatism’
Facebook banned white nationalism and white separatism on its platform Tuesday., allegedly in response to the horrific New Zealand terrorist attack on mosques.
The move marks a major reversal for the social media platform, whose previous internal policies told content moderators that white nationalist and white separatist content should be treated differently than white supremacist content.
The social media giant hadn’t applied the same rationale to white nationalism, “because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.”
It said it had reconsidered that after “conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world” who said, according to Facebook, “that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.”
As part of the policy update, Facebook will also direct users searching for content related to white supremacy on its platform to Life After Hate, a nonprofit organization that provides support and education to help people leave hate groups and movements.
More specifically, the company is going to ban “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism” on both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook said that it would start enforcing the new rules next week.
Facebook promised to utilize tools such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to weed out white supremacy from its site.
Like Twitter, Facebook wants to regulate content and pretend that it promotes free speech. At some point, these entities have become “publishers” and not a platform. Once there is a regulator, deciding who can get on the platform, or most importantly, who gets removed, then that is a form of censorship.
Public domain image/Piotr VaGla Waglowski, http://www.vagla.pl
