Separatism too? As a Spaniard I couldn't be happier about that.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I'm not saying it should be banned, but "American pride" being an important part of people's identity is really part of the problem.
So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool.
Guess the same about the two halves of Italy.
I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.
I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".
I'm reminded of the Sargon v Richard Spencer debate here. Sargon's line of attack was essentially this: You advocate for an ethnostate, people will not react well to the non-violent policies you publicly advocate to bring this about, thus there will be violence, therefore your rhetoric is violent. Even if you approve this line of reasoning, you have to admit that it can be applied to any separatist movement anywhere in the world.
Nor should they. I helped run a large, active web forum for years. We found general rules and moderator discretion were far more valuable than a list of 800 different "you can't do foo" specific rules, because the bad actors tie up all your time lawyering about the specifics.
e: But it's not an arbitrary exercise of power when I do it!
And in your rush to snark you skipped the part that calls out "American pride and Basque separatism" as important things to leave alone.
Except you can't, which is why for example "Islamophobia" is a thing. Things that should be ideologically separate are inevitably tied back to race/ethnicity, because nobody seems to know how to separate race/ethnicity from ideology in debate. Just listen to how much flak Sam Harris gets on the subject.