Facebook has failed to remove hate groups from its platform, investigation reveals

Meta-owned Facebook has failed to take down white supremacist hate groups from its platform despite assuring users that it would ban them, an investigation revealed last week. In response to a civil rights audit that criticised Facebook’s approach to racial justice issues, the platform said last November that it had taken steps to ban “organized hate groups, including white supremacist organizations, from the platform.” However, TPP found that more than 80 white supremacist groups have a presence on Facebook, including some that Facebook itself has labelled as “dangerous organizations.” The team searched Facebook for 226 organisations in their datasets to check if the searches were monetised with ads. Searches for some white supremacist groups, including those with “Ku Klux Klan” in their names, showed The U.S. has seen a string of racially motivated mass shootings in recent years. The investigation also found that despite years of warnings that Facebook’s algorithmic tools are pushing users toward extremism, the platform continues to auto-generate Pages for white supremacist organisations and direct users who visit white supremacist Pages to other extremist content.