Facebook Bans White Nationalism in Effort to Curb Racism

Facebook will ban content that references white nationalism and white separatism, taking a major step toward curbing racism and hate speech on the site, according to Bloomberg.

The social media giant’s policies have long excluded posts on white supremacy. Facebook said it didn’t apply the same lens to expressions of white nationalism because it wanted to be able to include “broader concepts“ of nationalism such as American pride and Basque separatism, which are linked to people’s identity.

After an investigation by tech publication Motherboard and conversations with experts in race and civil rights groups, Facebook said in a blog post that it concluded “white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.“

Going forward, people who search for terms associated with white supremacy will be directed to resources that combat hate groups, such as Life After Hate, an organization founded by former violent extremists that provides crisis intervention, education, support groups and outreach, Facebook said.

The company also acknowledged that it needs to get “better and faster“ at identifying and taking down hate from its sites. Machine learning and artificial intelligence help, but the company said “we know we have a lot more work to do.“ They will begin enforcing the new policy beginning next week.

Facebook built a content scanning system that over the years has added rules based on reactions to changes in user behavior or public uproar after an incident such as the New Zealand mass shooting. When the website’s users or computer systems report posts as problematic, they are sent to one of the company’s 15,000 content moderators around the world, who are allowed to take content down only if it violates a rule.