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Facebook makes exception to hate speech policy to ‘ALLOW posts calling for Putin’s death and violence against Russian soldiers’

March 11, 2022 | | Print Article

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Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is facing intense scrutiny and backlash for completely retooling its “hate speech” policy amid Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia.

“Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails,” Reuters exclusively reported Thursday afternoon.

“The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to internal emails to its content moderators.”

The “hate speech” allowance will be permitted specifically in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, according to Reuter’s sources.

The calls for the death of Putin or Lukashenko will meanwhile “be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method.”

Following the publication of Reuters’ initial report, Meta issued a statement confirming that it has indeed adjusted its “hate speech” policy to make room for calls for violence against Russian soldiers, as well as the leaders of Russia and Belarus.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a spokesperson said.

The announcement provoked a widespread backlash, with critics accusing the company of green-lighting the exact sort of “dehumanization” that its dubious, widely panned “hate speech” policy is purportedly designed to temper.

Some also noted that this same “hate speech” policy was used to boot former U.S. President Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram:

Critics also zeroed in on the clear-cut bias.

They noted that during the violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, Meta censored calls to self-defense.

Meta even has a history of censoring content that isn’t actually hateful but that simply belies the orthodoxy of the left.

In 2019, for instance, Facebook temporarily suspended conservative commentator and radio show host Candace Owens for talking about the demonstrable threat that liberalism — or “liberal supremacy,” as she called it — poses to black communities.

Yet now, all of a sudden Meta has completely retooled its policy to allow certain “hate speech?”

Michael Tracey, a left-wing journalist, suspects it’s no coincidence that this move align with the United States’ current geopolitical objectives:

Indeed, the U.S. is currently in somewhat of a proxy war against Russia, with numerous elites clamoring for the country to involve itself even more — preferably militarily, according to them — in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia.

Never mind that getting militarily involved would risk triggering World War III.

FYI, these are the same elites who green-lighted the violent BLM/Antifa riots two years ago …

Vivek Saxena
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