Why are white people specifically targeted. As someone of an Indian background, I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and -- despite it actually affecting my Christian family who are still in India -- there is no ban on that content. Such nationalism has led to more violence and death than any of the white nationalism stories.
White nationalism is in the news and on the rise in the US/Europe and therefore spooking advertisers who only really care what the pundits in US/Europe are talking about.
This soothes them over = money for FB.
My hope is that the algorithms and models developed for slowing the spread of White Nationalism will also work (down the road) for things like Hindu Nationalism, Chinese, etc.
Sure, doing it earlier would be good, but at any point in time the only choices are to do something now or do it further in the future. So I'm glad they chose now.
They're not. Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market.
I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and [...]
Well, that's something they should be addressing too and I agree it has significant negative effects. At least now you know who to address at Facebook about it. I know other people have been making that exact complaint to Facebook, such as members of the Dalit caste who have been on the receiving end of violence from Hindu extremists with very reactionary views on caste.
> Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market.
Facebook has 1 billion + users, which means the majority are necessarily not American. Now I don't know where those other users are from, but white nationalism is not the largest source of terrorism related killings worldwide, even if it is a problem in america. The fact is that white nationalism is -- for whatever reason -- seen as something worse than all the other forms of racism, and that perception is itself racist. There are two forms of such racism, either straight up dislike of white people or an infantilization of the racism of other cultures that absolves them of their own racism (well they didn't know better...)
You're consuming American news media about an American company with PR problem in America concerning white nationalist extremist content hitting American eyes.
Sure, but, if that were the case, I would expect to be able to search for and find articles about similar handling of racism in other countries in media outlets from those countries. I have not, so I cannot attribute the single mindedness of facebook's decision to the news media I consume.
According to their statement, they have long banned for "hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion", and white supremacy has long fallen under that. They also say that nationalism does not usually fall under this, with things like "American pride" or "Basque separatism" being an important part of people's identities.
What they say is changing is that in the specific case of white nationalism and separatism the overlap with white supremacy is nearly total to the point that they cannot be meaningfully separated.
This comment confuses me unless the claim is that Hinduism forms a nation within India, and the existence of such a nation justifies the violence committed in its name.
My point in posting this was to point out that Facebook is not a benevolent organization policing speech that disagrees with its internal morals.
Rather, it is a business that bans speech based on whether or not such speech hurts its profit margins. Those advocates of free speech should realize that Facebook is not currently a platform for speech, but rather a mass publishing company whose sole purpose is to sell adspace to marketers.
We should not expect a private company to serve the public interest out of benevolence. Moreover, it is worrisome that Facebook feels okay to ban speech -- again not based on some internal moral compass -- but rather on the whims of advertisers. It's fine to cheer when those advertisers agree with you and speech you dislike is banned, but the market is fickle, so all the people cheering this action shouldn't be shocked when Facebook bans speech you think should be there because some business doesn't like it.
Shouldn’t we be glad when incentives align like this? It seems bizarre to disapprove of a company doing something bad because of profit motive and disapprove of a company doing something good because of profit motive. If you think profit motive is inherently bad regardless of any outcome, then fine, but that should be the focus of the argument.
The alignment of incentives is as fickle as the alignment of the stars. There's no telling when the incentives will line against you; that is why it's worrisome in the general case.
> If you think profit motive is inherently bad regardless of any outcome, then fine, but that should be the focus of the argument.
That is not at all what I claimed. All I suggested was that we shouldn't be cheering the banning of speech based off the profit incentive since there is no clear alignment in the general case between profit and ethics.
> The alignment of incentives is as fickle as the alignment of the stars. There's no telling when the incentives will line against you; that is why it's worrisome in the general case.
That can be true. But any other concept that influences decision-making can also be fickle, e.g. "what the company thinks is moral." In fact, I would be more concerned if I saw a company doing something that seemed bad for their bottom line but was motivated by what the company's supposed moral values, because I know that the bottom line is always by definition an existential concern of the company, whereas its supposed moral values are not.
It sounds like you have legitimate concerns about further content that should be banned and I fully support this and further efforts to draw Facebook's attention to the issue.
Your assumption is that this targets white people generally. White supremacist content is spread by a tiny minority of violent extremists in hopes of recruiting others to their cause.
How is that an assumption? The post is very clear that this is targeting white nationalism/separatism/supremacist. Black nationalism, Jewish nationalism (ie, Zionism), etc, are all perfectly okay.
In light of the evidence, it's a measure to target the groups that are disproportionately responsible for the majority of violent ideology-driven attacks in this country.
I think the benchmark here is the use of Facebook to help spread genocide in Myanmar. I'm hoping the company learned something there about how dangerous hate indeology is on their platform, including white nationalism. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
