Facebook bans white supremacists and anti-Semites from one platform: NPR

This combination of 2018 file photos shows Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Facebook has banned their accounts for violating the rules against hate speech.

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This combination of 2018 file photos shows Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Facebook has banned their accounts for violating the rules against hate speech.

AP

The right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, are running out of space to espouse their views online.

Facebook banned these prominent personalities and several others from its social media platforms on Thursday, becoming the latest technology company to officially declare them. persona non grata. Many of them have already been banned from Twitter, YouTube and the Apple Podcasts app.

In addition to Jones and Farrakhan, Facebook has also eliminated right-wing extremists Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer and Joseph Watson, who work for InfoWars. White supremacist Paul Nehlen, who unsuccessfully presented to Congress in 2016 and 2018; and Jones' company, Infowars. The groups will also lose their accounts on Instagram, which belongs to Facebook.

"We have always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hatred, regardless of their ideology," said Facebook in a statement, according to The Verge. "The process of assessing potential offenders is complex and this is what led us to our decision to delete these accounts today."

Facebook prohibits "dangerous people and organizations" who engage in violence or who have an ideology that attacks individuals because of their race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. A Facebook spokesman told CNN that the company was undergoing a lengthy review process prior to the ban, seeking to determine whether a person had called for violence and whether he used hateful insults to describe himself in his section "About".

Jones told the Washington Post that Facebook's actions were "authoritarian," claiming that they had never warned her directly that they found her messages "dangerous."

The social media network is under pressure to allow hatred to spread online. The move comes shortly after the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which the killer had broadcast a video that had been viewed more than 4,000 times on Facebook before it was removed.

"The moment is never accidental," Angelo Carusone, chairman of the Liberal Media Matters organization, told the press. To post. "The reality is that people are being killed, there are shootings and mass killings that are clearly linked to ideas like the white genocide that are fueling radicalization, the conditions have changed, when you have those huge catalyzing moments that are related to consequences on life, this forces Facebook and others to look in the mirror. "

Some advocates for freedom of expression have warned that Facebook's attempts to suppress hate speech could have unintended consequences. In March, when Facebook announced that it was intensifying its efforts to ban white nationalism from its platform, ACLU's attorney, Vera Eidelman, warned that "every time Facebook chooses to remove content, only one company exercises the uncontrolled power to silence them from what has become an indispensable platform. "

Eidelman told NPR that nothing prevented Facebook or other platforms from using this same power to censor content on other topics, such as the right to abortion or climate change. "For the same reason that the Constitution prevents the government from exercising such power, we must be careful to encourage it to do so by companies that depend on their private shareholders rather than by the interest public, "she said.

In publications on other platforms, forbidden people have expressed dissatisfaction with this decision. "The reports are true – I've been banned by Facebook," Watson wrote on Twitter. "In an authoritarian society controlled by a handful of giants in Silicon Valley, all dissent must be served."

Because Facebook took longer than expected to purge the accounts, forbidden people were able to let their subscribers know what other platforms they were on. Loomer was pessimistic about his chances of being heard in the future. "It sounds like you will probably never hear about me again, it's only a matter of time before I ban it here too," wrote Loomer on Instagram. "Thank you for all your support, but I guess it's time for me to go to the gulag." She added "#StopTheBias", a hashtag that she adopted to protest what some conservatives see as a bias for major social media platforms.

Last month, Facebook, Trump's social media director Dan Scavino, temporarily banned comments after his posts were flagged by an algorithm. A Facebook spokesman apologized, explaining that Scavino had been banned because he had marked in his comments so many people that automated robots thought he was a spammer. "I will look at it!" Asset tweeted on the ban of Scavino, adding: "#StopTheBias."

Although the six people were banned from the site, "users can still praise these numbers on Instagram and share content about them that does not violate other terms of use." Instagram and Facebook, "according to The Atlantic.