By SERIAH Sargenton
Assitant Editor
Facebook announced on Mar. 27 that it is going to start banning posts, photos, and other content that referenced white nationalism and separatism. This was a response to criticism of their policy tolerating racism on its platform.
Facebook is the first major social media platform to take a stance against hate-speech. Political commentary and debates are common on Facebook and Twitter. Both social media sites have a huge amount of users who lean towards a political ideology.
Yet, it’s not uncommon for users to use hateful speech as way to prove a point. Political debates on social media can get heated, especially when it’s about “ripe” issues. It’s within these conversation that you can see a person’s bigoted true colors.
Hopefully, Twitter will follow Facebook’s step and delete, block, and prevent white nationalist and separatists tweets from gaining traction. This can be difficult when President Donald Trump uses Twitter to spread his prejudiced platform to his followers.
In my eyes, the ratio for racist posts between Twitter and Facebook is 1,000:100. As an avid social media consumer, I can admit that these messages exist on both platforms, however it is more overt on Twitter than it is on Facebook.
Whenever the president, Donald J. Trump appears in the news, racist twitter users are quick to throw the #MAGA, #SaveWhiteAmerica, and #MyWhitePrivilage hashtags as if the world is supposed to stop and praise them for doing nothing. The over comments are worse than the idiotic hashtags.
Twitter user @Jonas_Savimbi1 said, “Man fuck black people im glad our dumbasses were enslaved for 400 years.”
Most people would find this shocking and ask how could this occur in 2019. There’s a simple answer to that. People don’t want to hide their racism anymore since social media makes it easier to spread ideas on platform where it’s likely to get hundreds of views in a day without showing your face.
These tweets and hashtags are nothing compared to the people screaming the N’ word or F’ word to another individual in a five minute video uploaded on Facebook.
According to reports, Facebook did not consider extremist white nationalist views to be hateful prior to reviewing their policy on hate speech. Anyone who passed American History would know that white nationalist messages are often extremely hateful. In fact, I’d be surprised if there was a white nationalist group that did not use that language.
Groups such as the Klu Klux Klan and the Neo-Nazis use hurtful language towards members outside of their community as if it’s the only thing in the dictionary. A white nationalist Facebook page dedicated to preserving southern history and confederate ancestors, often share articles related to modern slavery and racism both in America and globally.
On Mar. 29, the page shared an article about slavery in Libya, where you can buy an African man for $400. Commenters were quick to talk about maybe they can buy workers for farms and factories to help ease their workloads since Africans have been enslaving their own since before the colonizers. I hope that after announcing this they will begun deleting all public pages similar to this one.
Facebook should take the next step and delete pages that spread the messages to begin with. If you delete the source then you get rid of the problem. These southern nationalist pages will not learn until they’re platform is gone for good.
According to reports, Facebook acknowledged that these messages can be linked to the tragic shooting in New Zealand, and other events. The company does not want to be held responsible for contributing to a world of hatred when there are things that can be done to stop it.
It’s not going to be easy avoiding the first amendment lawyers, however I truly think that this is necessary for the greater good. They’re going to argue that this ban is unconstitutional because it prevents groups of people from speaking on their political thoughts and ideas.
This is true, but social media is known to have profound effects on people’s self-esteem, and is often a root of many major issues. I think this alone should show why the content on the platform needs to be more heavily regulated.
