Facebook today banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan from both its flagship site and Instagram after finding they had violated the company's rules against hate speech.
The ban follows a review of the accounts, fan pages and groups affiliated with these individuals that they had previously posted, along with their activities outside Facebook. It includes Jones’ show Infowars, which gained notoriety and drew lawsuits for falsely claiming, among other things, that the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School never happened.
Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter in 2016 for a campaign of racial harassment against Saturday Night Live star Leslie Jones, has been accused of being an apologist for white supremacists and pedophiles. He has repeatedly denied the accusations.
Farrakhan has been dogged for decades over accusations that he’s anti-semitic. In this year alone, the Nation of Islam leader called Jews "termites" and "liars, cheaters and thieves" and called the religion "dirty."
White supremacist leader Paul Nehlen, right-wing British YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson and Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist, were also banned by Facebook, the largest social network. The company won't restrict others provided they abide by the site's rules, it said.
“We've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” the company said in a statement. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive, and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”
The bans are a long time coming.
Besides his odious views about Sandy Hook, Jones hosted Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent far-right group The Proud Boys, whom Facebook has designated as a hate figure. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Proud Boys to be a hate group. McInnes, who has said he has quit the Proud Boys, has sued the SPLC for defamation.
McInness also has ties with Yiannopoulos and Loomer. Yiannopoulos publicly praised him this year, along with Tommy Robinson, a U.K. far-right activist, whom Facebook considers to be a hate figure. Loomer appeared with Robinson and Canadian Faith Gooly, who has been banned from Facebook, last year.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Facebook as a private company has the right to remove offensive speech from its sites. Indeed, threats and incitements to violence aren’t protected by the First Amendment. Even so, the civil rights group is worried about the long-term ramifications of the social network's decision.
“In its attempts to police the speech of over two billion people, Facebook runs the risk of censoring those that attack white nationalism, too," Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in an interview with NPR. "Further, every time Facebook makes the choice to remove content, a single company is exercising an unchecked power to silence individuals and remove them from what has become an indispensable platform."
Unfortunately, Facebook and other platforms also have the power to censor content on controversial topics like climate change and abortion rights.
"For the same reason that the Constitution prevents the government from exercising such power, we should be wary of encouraging its exercise by corporations that are answerable to their private shareholders rather than the broader public interest," Eidelman said.
