"Shut up, Richard"
Richard Spencer, the mild-mannered leader of the Alt-Right, who occasionally says fashy things but is not at all like Mike Enoch or Andrew Anglin, both of whom constantly drop N-bombs and K-bombs, has been deplatformed from Facebook for "promoting hate":
Two Facebook pages associated with white nationalist Richard Spencer have been kicked off the platform. The outspoken white nationalist who coined the term “alt-right” and runs the National Policy Institute, had been operating in the open on Facebook. The National Policy Institute, which advocates for a white “ethnostate,” had a page with 4,000 followers. Spencer’s online magazine “Altright.com” also had a Facebook page with more than 10,000 followers. Both were removed Friday after an inquiry from VICE News about those pages and those of several other prominent hate groups.
The decision comes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quizzed by Congressional committees earlier in the week.
One of the criticisms raised against Zuckerberg is that his company suppresses non-liberal opinion in various ways:
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee got their turn Wednesday to grill Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as several asked about charges that the social media site suppresses conservative voices. But Zuckerberg’s testimony did nothing to convince conservatives or anyone interested in fairness that he was sincere in his desire to root out anti-conservative bias.
Censorship questions focused on the outspoken, pro-Trump duo, Diamond and Silk, who Facebook recently labeled “unsafe to the community.” With 1.4 million followers on their Facebook page, it’s more likely that Facebook finds the outspoken activists to be a threat to liberals than unsafe to the “community.”
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, pressed Zuckerberg about why holding conservative views is unsafe. Zuckerberg continued his grandstanding from his Tuesday testimony before two Senate committees about the importance of free speech and said: “In that specific case, our team made an enforcement error. And we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it.”
The decision to ban Spencer from the platform does not appear to be an error, merely an unjustified decision to shut down free speech.
But, at least part of the blame, must lie with Spencer himself, at least in tactical terms.
Although he generally avoids anything that could be considered "hate speech," he has allowed his Alt-Right brand to become associated with people like Mike Enoch of the Daily Shoah and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, both of whom continue to use extreme racial slurs and language that presents the Holocaust in a positive light.
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| Enoch helping Spencer define the Alt-Right brand for normies and corporate tech. |
Spencer has regularly shared platforms with Enoch, and has also done podcasts with Anglin. Also, his own use of "Nazi-esque" rhetoric and imagery at the conference of his National Policy Institute in November 2016, not only made him into a media celebrity, but also stigmatised the "Alt-Right" as a term equivalent in the public's mind to "Nazi" or "KKK."
It could be said that Spencer's tactical naivety is catching up with him.
But this is also very convenient for Zuckerburg. Just when politicians are about to censure him for violating Facebook users' private information and suppressing conservative or pro-Trump pages, he can pretend to be the "good guy" simply by deplatforming an "evil Nazi" like Spencer.
If any more proof were needed that the Alt-Right is a broken brand, here it is.
If any more proof were needed that the Alt-Right is a broken brand, here it is.
