(CN) – Facebook will ban white nationalism and white separatism from its main platform and Instagram, the company announced Wednesday.
Facing mounting backlash in the wake of shooting at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the biggest social media platform in the world will begin implementing the ban on white nationalistic speech beginning next week.
“It’s clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services,” the company said in a Wednesday blog post.
In a clear signal of the company’s shifting policies, Facebook will move away from distinguishing between white supremacy – which has long been prohibited on the platform – and white nationalism and separatism.
“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 said.
But civil rights groups and historians pushed back on the notion that there is a clear delineation between the three ideologies and demanded Facebook remove all related content. After the policy is implemented, users who search for terms like “white pride” or “white supremacy” will be redirected to the page of a nonprofit dedicated to helping people leave white supremacist groups.
The backlash against the previous policy was particularly sharp in the aftermath of the shootings at mosques in Christchurch, as the perpetrator of the crime delivered a shambolic manifesto filled with white supremacist messages to the media immediately prior to the attack.
A Muslim advocacy group in Washington praised the move by Facebook.
“After an avowed white nationalist used Facebook to broadcast the murder of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand just over a week ago, today’s announcement that white nationalist and separatist content will be banned from both Facebook and Instagram is a welcome development,” said Madihha Ahussain, counsel for the Muslim Advocates.
It’s not Facebook’s first foray into shutting down content it deems hateful.
It banned a neo-Nazi group in the wake of the attack at Charlottesville, Virginia, and took down the page used to organize the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
Twitter, YouTube and Amazon have yet to comment on whether they will take similar steps to restrict white nationalist speech on their platforms.
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