Facebook remove and ban Britain First Facebook pages – a look back
Facebook has announced it has banned the Facebook pages belonging to Britain First and its leaders. Those pages have now been removed.
In a statement posted Wednesday, Facebook claimed that the far-right UK based group had ignored a final warning and once again broken Facebook’s community standards regarding hate speech. The move comes shortly after Britain First had also been banned on Twitter.
Irrespective of their politics, there was never any shortage of hoaxes or urban legends that their prolific Facebook page was responsible for either starting or fuelling.
Only the day before their Facebook page was removed, we fact-checked the claim that before their leaders were arrested, they had “exposed” Muslim paedophiles; something that was patently false.
In 2015, they shared an obviously digitally altered image claiming to show a Muslim holding a sign saying “kill all non-Muslims”.
Perhaps one of their favourite pastimes was misquoting Winston Churchill…
Then there was the time in 2017 when they accidentally plagiarised an article they failed to work out was actually poking fun at them…
Also in 2017, they falsely blamed a TfL officer for preventing a poppy seller from selling poppies outside a train station.
Shortly after, they also falsely reported that English cricketer Moeen Ali had refused to wear a poppy because it didn’t appear in one of the team photos…
They’ve also been responsible for continually reposting the aged legend that illegal refugees get more benefits that old age pensioners, that has spread in one form or another in most Western countries.
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And then there was that time that leader Paul Golding posted a video showing “Muslims celebrating the Paris terror attacks” that really showed a group of Muslim men celebrating Pakistan’s 20/20 cricket victory.
And of course, there were the ceaseless attempts at Facebook exploitative like-farming…
We don’t cover much politics on this website, and it’s clear that we have never really needed to in respect to Britain First. Most of their claims fall squarely into the realm of Internet hoaxes, and the fact that their Facebook influence and reach has now been so robustly taken away, we’re sure social media – in the context of hoaxes and urban legends – will be that little bit better off because of it.
Facebook’s full statement can be seen below (or via this link.)
Taking Action Against Britain First
People come to Facebook to express themselves freely and share openly with friends and family, sometimes this can include their political views. Some political opinions might be controversial, but it is important that different views can be shared and we are very careful not to remove posts or Pages just because some people don’t like them.We are an open platform for all ideas and political speech goes to the heart of free expression. But political views can and should be expressed without hate. People can express robust and controversial opinions without needing to denigrate others on the basis of who they are.
There are times though when legitimate political speech crosses the line and becomes hate speech designed to stir up hatred against groups in our society. This is an important issue which we take very seriously and we have written about how we define hate speech and take action against it in our Hard Questions series. We have Community Standards that clearly state this sort of speech is not acceptable on Facebook and, when we become aware of it, we remove it as quickly as we can. Political parties, like individuals and all other organisations on Facebook, must abide by these standards and where a Page or person repeatedly breaks our Community Standards we remove them.
Content posted on the Britain First Facebook Page and the Pages of party leaders Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen has repeatedly broken our Community Standards. We recently gave the administrators of the Pages a written final warning, and they have continued to post content that violates our Community Standards. As a result, in accordance with our policies, we have now removed the official Britain First Facebook Page and the Pages of the two leaders with immediate effect. We do not do this lightly, but they have repeatedly posted content designed to incite animosity and hatred against minority groups, which disqualifies the Pages from our service.
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