Two weeks after a white-supremacist attacked two New Zealand mosques, killing 49 people, Facebook announced that will ban white nationalist and separatist content from Facebook and Instagram.
The killer was able to broadcast the attack live on Facebook.
According to a statement issued by Facebook on Wednesday “white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.”
Facebook has already banned hate speech, racist content as well as white supremacist content but had hesitated to extend that ban to include white nationalism and separatism since the term is associated to American pride or Basque separatism, Reuters reports.
“We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and 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,” the company announced on Wednesday.
Facebook and Instagram will no longer allow “praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism. It’s clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services,” the company announced.
There is more. People who search for terms like white supremacy will be directed to a platform called Life After Hate. It is a creation of former far-right and racist activists they seek to help people to abandon extremist groups.
