Facebook Finally Goes After White Nationalists (Terrorists)

Facebook has finally caved in to pressure from activists. From now on the social media giant will block “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism” from its two platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

This is after the social media giant was sued for allowing a video showing the Christchurch mosque shootings to be uploaded on its platform. Facebook waited until the video had been viewed about 4 000 times before deleting the video. If the victims had been white and the perptrators Muslim I dare say this would not have happened and the video would have been removed earlier.

The Western world has really never had a problem with Islamic extremism. Whenever someone of Eastern Origin commits a heinous crime their media is quick to speculate that whoever committed the crime could motivated by terrorism even without a shred of evidence.

In contrast when white people even the most vile, Dylann Roof, who walked into a prayer meeting taking place at the iconic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina and proceeded to murder nine unarmed black people, the western media and the relevant authorities were extremely reluctant to call him what he was, a terrorist. Why? Well Mr Roof is white so eventually everyone concluded that he was mentally ill. Because white people cannot be terrorists. Everyone knows this, even when they tick every box in the terrorists.

In a blog post explaining this new policy Facebook seem to acknoledge white terrorists have enjoyed a bit more leeway than Muslim extremists too:

Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion — and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and white separatism 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.

Facebook is again being reactionary instead of being proactive but we neverthless welcome this change.