Facebook's 'Dangerous Individuals' List Leaks, Lists Right-Wing Activists Alongside Islamic Terrorists

I obtained Facebook's secret list of banned dangerous individuals and organizations, which can't be freely discussed on the company's platforms, and today we're publishing it in full. https://t.co/WHBj513Fc5

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) October 12, 2021

Instagram is now removing FBI crime statistic graphs

Posted with the necessary citations

As “hate speech”

We are getting to the point where narratives are more important than truth

And the truth when inconvenient makes you a hateful person

This is 1984 pic.twitter.com/ECP2wikj5E

— ELIJAH (@ElijahSchaffer) June 6, 2020

A Facebook spokesperson categorically denied that Facebook gives extremist right-wing groups in the U.S. special treatment due to their association with mainstream conservative politics. They added that the company tiers groups based on their behavior, stating, "Where American groups satisfy our definition of a terrorist group, they are designated as terrorist organizations (E.g. The Base, Atomwaffen Division, National Socialist Order). [Note: The evidence suggests at least two out of three of those groups were run by the feds and their well-paid informants.] Where they satisfy our definition of hate groups, they are designated as hate organizations (For example, Proud Boys, Rise Above Movement, Patriot Front)."

The spokesperson framed the company's treatment of militias as one of aggressive regulation rather than looseness, saying Facebook's list of 900 such groups "is among the the most robust" in the world: "The Militarized Social Movement category was developed in 2020 explicitly to expand the range of organizations subject to our DOI policies precisely because of the changing threat environment. Our policy regarding militias is the strongest in the industry."

On the issue of how Facebook's tiers often seem to sort along racial and religious lines, the spokesperson cited the presence of the white supremacists and hate groups in Tier 1 and said "focusing solely on" terrorist groups in Tier 1 "is misleading." They added: "It's worth noting that our approach to white supremacist hate groups and terrorist organization is far more aggressive than any government's. All told, the United Nations, European Union, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and France only designate thirteen distinct white supremacist organizations. Our definition of terrorism is public, detailed and was developed with significant input from outside experts and academics. Unlike some other definitions of terrorism, our definition is agnostic to religion, region, political outlook, or ideology. We have designated many organizations based outside the Middle Eastern and South Asian markets as terrorism, including orgs based in North America and Western Europe (including the National Socialist Order, the Feurerkrieg Division, the Irish Republican Army, and the National Action Group)."

[...] In May, Facebook deleted a variety of posts by Palestinians attempting to document Israeli state violence at Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, because company staff mistook it for an unrelated organization on the DIO list with "Al-Aqsa" in its name (of which there are several), judging from an internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed News. Last month, Facebook censored an Egyptian user who posted an Al Jazeera article about the Al-Qassam Brigades, a group active in neighboring Palestine, along with a caption that read simply "Ooh" in Arabic. Al-Qassam does not appear on the DIO list, and Facebook's Oversight Board wrote that "Facebook was unable to explain why two human reviewers originally judged the content to violate this policy."