It's affecting FB's bottom line.
White nationalism is in the news and on the rise in the US/Europe and therefore spooking advertisers who only really care what the pundits in US/Europe are talking about.
This soothes them over = money for FB.
My hope is that the algorithms and models developed for slowing the spread of White Nationalism will also work (down the road) for things like Hindu Nationalism, Chinese, etc.
Yes it undoubtedly is, but they only seem to care about it now.
I would love to see a more proactive approach, but unfortunately proactive approaches don't often generate profit.
They're not. Why is white nationalism specifically targeted? Because there's a lot of it in the US and the anglosphere in general which is Facebook's home and primary market.
I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and [...]
Well, that's something they should be addressing too and I agree it has significant negative effects. At least now you know who to address at Facebook about it. I know other people have been making that exact complaint to Facebook, such as members of the Dalit caste who have been on the receiving end of violence from Hindu extremists with very reactionary views on caste.
Facebook has 1 billion + users, which means the majority are necessarily not American. Now I don't know where those other users are from, but white nationalism is not the largest source of terrorism related killings worldwide, even if it is a problem in america. The fact is that white nationalism is -- for whatever reason -- seen as something worse than all the other forms of racism, and that perception is itself racist. There are two forms of such racism, either straight up dislike of white people or an infantilization of the racism of other cultures that absolves them of their own racism (well they didn't know better...)
Hope this helps.
You aren't likely to find much media coverage of this question from sources within Myanmar for reasons that I hope will be obvious.
What they say is changing is that in the specific case of white nationalism and separatism the overlap with white supremacy is nearly total to the point that they cannot be meaningfully separated.
Maybe Facebook should ban Hindutva organizing on their platform. That seems a perfectly reasonable position.
Rather, it is a business that bans speech based on whether or not such speech hurts its profit margins. Those advocates of free speech should realize that Facebook is not currently a platform for speech, but rather a mass publishing company whose sole purpose is to sell adspace to marketers.
We should not expect a private company to serve the public interest out of benevolence. Moreover, it is worrisome that Facebook feels okay to ban speech -- again not based on some internal moral compass -- but rather on the whims of advertisers. It's fine to cheer when those advertisers agree with you and speech you dislike is banned, but the market is fickle, so all the people cheering this action shouldn't be shocked when Facebook bans speech you think should be there because some business doesn't like it.
> If you think profit motive is inherently bad regardless of any outcome, then fine, but that should be the focus of the argument.
That is not at all what I claimed. All I suggested was that we shouldn't be cheering the banning of speech based off the profit incentive since there is no clear alignment in the general case between profit and ethics.
That can be true. But any other concept that influences decision-making can also be fickle, e.g. "what the company thinks is moral." In fact, I would be more concerned if I saw a company doing something that seemed bad for their bottom line but was motivated by what the company's supposed moral values, because I know that the bottom line is always by definition an existential concern of the company, whereas its supposed moral values are not.
It sounds like you have legitimate concerns about further content that should be banned and I fully support this and further efforts to draw Facebook's attention to the issue.
There was plenty of videos of the NewZealand shooter still up on Brazilian facebook
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/12/study-shows-t...
(obvious sarcasm, apparently not)