Facebook hates Black people
Listen, they just do.
Facebook’s Headquarters putting up a “Black Lives Matter” sign while Son of Baldwin and so many other Black & Brown anti-racist activist accounts & pages on FB get trolled, flagged and shut down for breaking community standards is so damn hypocritical and yet, telling.
It’s an internet microcosm of what we mean when we say systems are inherently violence and give us racist, violent, hypocritical, nonsensical, unjust, inequitable and incongruent results, or, better said, not removed from that culture of inherent white bias.
Much like the state, the power at Facebook is inherently white supremacist and white-biased. The algorithm & employees at Facebook are inherently racist and bigoted and give us racist and bigoted results. This is a long-understood fact and organizers on Facebook have always worked through the medium knowing they’d have to have a back up plan in case they get shut down.
Facebook does not have a problem with live streaming Black pain, ignoring certain trending topics and assisting in creating biased media, memes and pages and comments filled with images and calls to lynching, homophobia, transmisogynoir, misogynoir, rape culture, the objectification of Black and Brown women’s bodies, actually racist memes and people and movement on accounts & through pages. Facebook ignores targeted abuse, racism and anti-Blackness, saying it “doesn’t break out community standards”.
And yet they definitely believe in “reverse racism,” and their algorithm/employees do not weed out or distinguish blatant trolling, and so we bear the brunt of that.
Once, a racist guy trolled and reported my comments in a thread which I weathered his abuse while discussing the fact that “cracker” is not a slur, especially not one comparable to the N word. I didn’t use the word (though if I had, I’d stand behind it because it isn’t a slur), I merely discussed usage, and still I had my account flagged and shut down for a whole day. His actions, meanwhile, did not break the standards. I couldn’t get a hold of Facebook to explain what had happen and to get an understanding of why I had been banned and to state my case. I was left alone and looking (and feeling) like I had done something wrong when I hadn’t.
If Black Lives really mattered to Facebook, they’d fix that shit. They’d challenge the inherently biased ways the platform and its employees are built to work. They’d work to have a less blatantly biased platform that stifles dissent and the work of anti-racists, leftists, community organizers and social justice advocates. They’d hire in people who are versed and aware in justice and inequitable outcomes on social media platforms and work to ameliorate that issue. They’d train or oust those employees who believe in “all lives matter” & moderate the community in anti-Black, xenophobic, bigoted, anti-progress ways. They’d actually commit to the idea of Black lives being of worth by supporting them and defending them while they use and build on their platform. Until then, these moves of claiming to be about Black Lives but effectively policing how we organizing is just a cheap and superficial way to look current and cool in the media while not actually committing to the labor or the work.
Update: Facebook has lifted the ban on On of Baldwin.
