Most but not all of the individuals whose accounts are being removed are popular figures on the right side of politics, including commentators Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and Paul Joseph Watson.
Facebook also said it is banning Paul Nehlen, an avowed white supremacist who ran for Congress in 2018, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has preached black separatism and referred to Jews as “termites.”
The company will remove any accounts, pages, groups and events associated with the banned individuals, both on its core social network and its photo-sharing app Instagram. It says it bans any users who it deems are promoting “violence” or “hate.”
However, Facebook stopped short of prohibiting other users from praising or supporting the banned individuals on its platforms, as it has done for extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in the past.
Hours after his account disappeared, videos of Louis Farrakhan were still visible on Instagram among the 17,000 posts with the hashtag #louisfarrakhan, including a video where he defends his descriptions of Jews.
Facebook announced the ban before removing the affected accounts, which gave the account owners time to redirect their thousands of followers to other channels before the accounts disappeared, as captured in screen shots by BuzzFeed journalist Ryan Mac.
Haphazard Enforcement
Facebook’s enforcement of content bans has been haphazard; pages associated with Jones and his Infowars website started being banned last year, but his personal profile was left up, for example.Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Twitter also banned Infowars last year.
The social media companies continue to express uneasy with voices on the far right, after struggling for years to decide how to handle extremist and far right content.
But the companies have faced backlash over their suspensions of accounts from conservatives, who accuse them of censorship and bias. Civil rights groups say social media giants have failed to confront extremism.
Facebook says it enforces its rules without prejudice. It tightened those policies further last month with a decision to ban praise, support, and representation of white nationalism and white separatism.
“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today,” the company said in a statement.
Liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America praised the move, saying it inspired “some optimism that [Facebook] might be capable of taking responsibility for the ways its platforms have empowered extremists.”
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