Facebook Inc on Wednesday banned praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism, a move that drew qualified approval from New Zealand where a massacre of 50 people in mosques was live streamed earlier this month. Facebook, Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube have been under pressure to remove white supremacist and neo-Nazi content from their platforms, along with fake news and other types of abusive posts. In response, Facebook has beefed up its content monitoring teams and taken down event pages that were used to promote and organise rallies by white supremacist groups. Facebook has long banned white supremacy under its rules on “hateful” content, but did not previously consider white nationalist or separatist content to be explicitly racist. “For too long, Facebook has allowed hate speech - and the violence that it can inspire - to propagate on its platform.

Source: The Irish Times March 28, 2019 06:33 UTC