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Facebook eliminating hate groups

Last week, Facebook started cracking down on hate groups by removing people and organizations under their new policy.
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Nouvelle Viewpoint

Last week, Facebook started cracking down on hate groups by removing people and organizations under their new policy.

Faith Goldy, a Canadian political commentator whose views have been described as white nationalist, and the Soldiers of Odin Canada, an anti-immigrant group that was originally founded in Finland, were among those who had their pages banned as part of Facebook enforcing its new regulations on extremist content.

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A spokesperson for the social media platform said, “Individuals or organizations who spread hate, attack, or call for the exclusion of others on the basis of who they have no place (on) our services.”

The ban came as a response to the New Zealand mosque attack after users began to pressure Facebook to remove pages that promote hate.

The extensive process put into place when considering who to ban takes into account a “number of different signals,” including if the groups have been called out for violence based on race, religion, nationally, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

When I read in March that the company was going to eliminate these kinds of organizations, I was happy, but skeptical.

I don’t believe anything promoting hate should have a public platform, but I wasn’t sure how exactly Facebook was going to find all of the hate groups.

These organizations can lead to bad events, and it’s a place for anger and hatred toward different groups to run rampant.

Issues like this stand on a very thin line, because the argument of freedom of speech often gets brought into the conversation.

I really do think freedom of speech doesn’t cover extremist and hate groups, and don’t think they should be allowed to have social media pages.All they do is promote ideologies that can be very damaging, and shouldn’t be allowed. They encourage violence toward these people, and have led to a number of massacres that shouldn’t have happened. There’s a difference between stating your beliefs and encouraging the harm of someone based on their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or race.

After facing the push back that they did, I’m glad Facebook came down on the associations that are doing just that. They’re proving that hate has no place on social media, and they won’t stand for the content to be shared to their users.

Will this eliminate these kinds of groups from existing altogether and prevent them from popping back up or more associations taking their place?

Probably not, but it does eliminate some of the bad messages that are present on the Internet. With all of the negative aspects online, I’m glad social media pages are doing what they can to stop giving them a platform to spread their message of hate. 




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