The Daily Dot, a site that regularly reports Internet culture and life online, recently noticed that 33 officially recognized hate groups have Facebook pages whose collective following surpasses six million people.
The group pages include ones for the rabidly anti-LGBTQ groups Alliance Defending Freedom (with 1.7 million followers) and the Family Research Council (with 254,000 followers) as well as lesser-known white supremacist groups like the innocuous sounding Federation for American Immigration Reform (with 2 million followers).
These and others have all been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One Facebook page entitled “World War 2 Uncensored” denies the Holocaust never happened. Other pages entitled “The Aryan race & Hyperborea & White Brotherhood” and “Stop White Genocide” discourage “racial mixing” and show images of black slaves being subservient to their white overseers, to the apparent delight and engagement of their followers.\
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Many of these racist groups are by extension anti-LGBTQ, even if they don’t explicitly state it.
While a Facebook spokesperson told The Daily Dot of its policies against and review processes for pages spouting hate speech, the company’s official employee training on detecting hate speech “allow[s] users to to call for the creation of white ethno-states” which outlaw the existence of non-white people.
Related: Brian Sims banned from Facebook for sharing an anti-gay slur directed at him
Facebook says it “continues to work with academics and other subject matter experts to identify hate speech.” But there are a few reasons hate continues to proliferate on the world’s largest social network.
For one, Facebook’s algorithm suggests people with common interests to follow “related pages,” “suggested groups,” or “pages liked by this page,” making it easy for white supremacists to find and radicalize one another, The Daily Dot says.
Second, Facebook just has a lot of haters. The Daily Dot reports:
In the first three quarters of 2018, Facebook acted on 2.5 million, 2.5 million, and 2.9 million instances of hate speech, respectively. Given the 1.5 billion active daily users, it logically correlates that this represents only a small fraction of a percentage of all content. But it’s still a massive amount.
And even when they don’t post hateful content on Facebook, many just link to hateful videos and blog posts offsite or post “innocuous” posts, like news stories of immigrants committing crimes, and then let commenters vent their hatred.
Third, it’s easy to skirt Facebook’s rules. Rule breakers can violate community standards several times over before they’re banned. And even after that, they can sometimes sneak back onto the social network, just like Alex Jones of the far-right conspiracy theory show Infowars did before being banned again.
Lastly, and perhaps most cynically of all, The Daily Dot suggests that Facebook might allow these hate groups to thrive because their massive followings generate tons of page views, providing Facebook additional revenue for ads while pretending to be “politically impartial” (our wording, not theirs).
The proliferation of hate speech on Facebook, combined with the company’s disregard for user privacy, recently lead the British Parliament to issue a “scathing” report demanding the social network face additional regulation and oversight.
Meanwhile, the American racial justice organization Color of Change has long clamored for Facebook to be held accountable for enabling racism.
Brian
Did anyone else always have teachers who used the KKK as an example when you were learning about freedom of speech and censorship? I’m gonna guess it’s not taught that way anymore.
(And yes, I know that freedom of speech refers to the government taking action against individuals)
ModeI
yes i have
MacAdvisor
Freedom of speech does not just refer to the government taking action, the would be a First Amendment issue. Freedom of speech is a societal value. When society values free speech, it supports the airing of all opinions, even vile and hateful ones, so everyone is free to speak their minds. Queerty’s mad rush to force all to adhere to its views is not free speech, it is censorship. I strongly support allowing even hate groups to post their ideas on Facebook because that is the best way to know their stand and argue against it. The best antidote to bad speech is more speech, not trying to remove the bad speech. Gay people have made huge progress thanks to the support of free speech in this country and I am deeply sadden to see my society start to lose that value.
PinkoOfTheGange
The Nazzis in Skokie, but all in the same.
Remember the Pew Poll about hate speech and should the Gvt be able to sensor it? 40% of Millennials thought that was a good idea.
Invader7
I bet any FB users deriding Chinese &/or Jewish people ( YES: I am talking to you Mark Zuckerberg & your wife Priscilla Chen ) would INSTANTLY be shut down!! Count on it. But the Zuck let’s other groups be defamed/threatened/stalked/etc on HIS website as the clicks make him $$$$$. He sold his soul years ago for $$$$…
MacAdvisor
So, let me clear here Invader7, your argument for closing down anti-gay speech is FB would stop the anti-speech against some other group even though you don’t have any evidence of any kind that FB has ever actually stopped the hate speech against these other groups. Ah, OK.
PinkoOfTheGange
Did ya’ll miss this in the above article?
“One Facebook page entitled “World War 2 Uncensored” denies the Holocaust never happened.”
GymMan456
When Queerty brings such an article, it is a token of something more than a gay agenda. SPLC is considered a hate group by many, i regard them a part of the Marxist and globalist agenda. If qweerty really wants to be a open minded place they better watch their steps better.
And why are these accusations of racism not exemplified? Because they are so shallow they cannot be shown without falling apart?
And this fight against hate speech – why wasn’t the laws of ‘incitement to crime’ enough? Why this war against a feeling?
Have you ever considered that the motive of banning so called hate speech against gays is just a method for getting accept for these Hate crime laws, and its real purpose is to protect other groups, like immigrants with confirmed hostile reasons and methods?
thunderball
Quick! I burn to know which groups think The Southern Poverty Law Centre
is a hate group! Many you said? Give us a dozen then. I’ll assume until further
notice they all have the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on their bookshelves.
fyins2
GymMan456 is clearly a Russian troll.
Aires the Ram
I’m asking this rhetorically, BUT, where does ANYBODY get the f’d-up idea in their head that absolutely everyone in this society MUST love & accept you for who and what you are?? That’s not even clear thinking. It’s born of the demon-seed of totalitarianism, fascism. This country has always been a mixture of many different cultures/peoples come together to form this miracle we call the United States of America. The Constitution of the United States of America, is the glue that keeps us together as “Americans”. The 1st (free speech), The 2nd (right to bear arms and end a totalitarian government), and the list goes on. It is the GLUE that holds this wonderful country together. Still, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that we have a right to NOT be ‘offended’ by something someone says, or some belief system they may have. Freedom of religion, which is enshrined in the Constitution, means that if you don’t like a particular church, or a particular religion, you have the right to worship elsewhere, or not at all. Anyone who thinks getting rid of the Constitution, because at some point in their life they were discriminated against in some way, doesn’t understand nor have the education of US History, to know that in a Totalitarian or Fascist country, if they weren’t in the majority, weren’t liked, they’d at best be marginalized, or worse, dead. They don’t understand this. They’ve been convinced of their so-called “victim-hood” to the point that they don’t understand that they can be, or do, anything they want to in this country, as compared to many many other countries. They take stock in being a professional “victim”, and not a personal success.
gymmuscleboy
@Aires the Ram Absolutely. That is an essential understanding to bring to any social political discussion. However, perhaps the reason why a noisy few on the extremes of the political spectrum fail to embrace it is because it requires at least an average IQ to understand.
thunderball
One very long paragraph from Capt Obvious.
Bill Bishop
Facebook!!!
I followed Elon Musk’s lead a while back and deleted my fb account.
Much happier.