South Africa: Facebook is Still Censoring Black Activists

It’s no surprise that Facebook, a company where the top-level executives are cisgender white men and only 2% of its staff is black, would allow hate speech against black children before white men. The real dilemma, however, is that the victims of Facebook’s racist policies use it as an outlet to express themselves, organize and build movements for social and political justice. The growing power of social media is undeniable, so Facebook’s rules are not only harmful to freedom of speech, a basic human right, they also exclude marginalized people from using the power of social media to affect meaningful change through social activism.

“Facebook’s rules exclude marginalized people from using the power of social media.”

South Africa’s Black First Land First movement’s (BLF) president, Andile Mngxitama, is among the many black activists, globally, who have consistently been discriminated against, racially profiled and silenced by virtue of Facebook’s racist community standards guidelines. The BLF president practically has a Facebook jail cell with his name on it by now and it takes just a few drops of white tears for him to land back in jail every other week after he’s released back to Facebook society.

Just recently, the BLF president was silenced for three days after posting a statement discouraging the unlawful evictions of black people by the neo-liberal party, the DA and its coalition partners, the Economic Freedom Fighters, in the Gauteng Province. Facebook relies on users to report content for their moderators to review. So, keeping in mind the type of training these moderators received, they may have gotten the job because Facebook’s racist conduct resonates with them. They probably “correctly” answered that they would protect white men and not black children or women (from hate speech) during their training.

“The BLF president practically has a Facebook jail cell with his name on it.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *