Facebook to ban two white nationalist groups after Guardian report
Facebook will no longer allow Red Ice TV and Affirmative Right to use its platform, following a Guardian report on the continued presence of prominent white nationalist organizations on the site eight months after a promised ban.
A Facebook spokesperson said on Tuesday that the company has now determined that Red Ice TV and Affirmative Right violate its policy against “organized hate”. The ban will include the pages of the Red Ice TV hosts Lana Lokteff and Henrik Palmgren, as well as their internet radio show, Radio3Fourteen.
Red Ice TV gained popularity on YouTube in recent years as a mouthpiece for the growing movement of white nationalists and white supremacists around the world. It has hosted white nationalists such as the CounterCurrents publisher Greg Johnson and the publisher of Daily Stormer website.
YouTube banned Red Ice in October for repeated violations of its ban on hate speech. The group had until today maintained a Facebook presence with more than 90,000 fans.
The Affirmative Right Facebook page was originally named Alternative Right. It hostedthe blog founded by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who gained prominence in 2016 in the US as a key figure in the “alt-right” movement. The site rebranded as the Affirmative Right following a falling out with Spencer.
The Facebook page for VDare, a prominent white nationalist, antiimmigrant website, remains online. The spokesperson said it was still under review. VDare was one of the sources whose material the White House adviser Stephen Miller emailed to a Breitbart writer with the aim of shaping her coverage of immigration, emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed in recent weeks.
Facebook has for years failed to proactively police its site for hate groups and white supremacists, despite a longstanding ban on “hate”. As white nationalist terrorist attacks rose around the world, the company maintained a policy distinction between white supremacism and white nationalism until March of this year, when it finally agreed to ban white nationalist content. The company still allows Holocaust denial content, though it says that it works to prevent such content from spreading through its algorithms.
The actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen excoriated the company for its failure to adequately police hate in a speech at the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday. Cohen criticized Facebook’s controversial decision to allow politicians to promote lies in advertisements, saying: “If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’.” He also criticized the CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stance on Holocaust denial, saying, “Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one.”
White nationalist attacks have taken a heavy toll in recent years. The rhetoric of the suspected mass shooters in Christchurch, New Zealand, and
Campaigners for US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders have been lending their support to the Labour party, running phone-banking sessions from New York ahead of the general election.
The city’s branch of Labour International has been working with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have been calling British campaigners with tips on how to encourage people to register to vote and cast a ballot for Labour at the December poll.
The DSA endorses and campaigns for Sanders, who is running to be the Democratic presidential candidate for a second time after losing out to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
A spokesperson for Momentum, the grassroots Labour campaign group, said: “This is part of a growing relationship between Bernie, DSA activists and Momentum and Labour members abroad that has included exchanges between the nurses’ unions of the US and the UK to campaign on public health in the US.
“Many Labour International and Momentum members have been volunteers on Sanders’ campaign and so the favour’s being returned.”
Canvassing sessions run by the US volunteers for Momentum campaigners in the UK on Saturdays are an attempt to support grassroots activism and turn out the vote for Labour.
Campaigners from Sanders’ team have previously run election training sessions for activists working on Corbyn’s 2017 election run to try to help direct the huge volume of volunteers the organisation attracts to the right constituencies. They have also shared digital campaigning methods.
The DSA volunteers have also been running phone-banking sessions from Chicago, Toronto, Louisville and San Francisco.
Momentum says in Europe Labour is also being supported by the Party of European Socialists, which has also helped to source office space for canvassing sessions.
In Germany, where there are 16,000 British people registered to vote in the capital, Berlin, volunteers have been canvassing for Labour in bars and cafes as well as speaking to Britons at English-language events and talking to university students.
Momentum supporters in Paris have been leafleting Eurostar’s British customers ahead of voter registration closing. New Labour International groups have set up in southern France for the first time this election, with campaigners meeting in cities such as Lyon to try and turn out the expat vote.
The international campaigning effort for Labour comes as Momentum claims its work could swing the election. It has encouraged more than 100,000 people to register to vote since the beginning of the campaign through Facebook adverts, including at least 87,000 in marginal constituencies.
Of the 101,422 so far who may have registered via Momentum’s voter registration adverts, it claims the majority were younger voters – below the age of 35 – in key marginal constituencies.
Momentum has been targeting young people in marginals with viral videos such as “We Don’t Want Your Vote” – viewed 1.1m times on Facebook – and “Please Don’t Vote”.
Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator, said: “All the polls are based on the assumption that young people and those who haven’t voted before won’t bother turning out. But this election we are seeing record numbers register to vote – including nearly 100,000 whom we have encouraged to register in marginal constituencies, which could swing the election.”